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#17 – Dr Dodd,
#13 MS
Where do you get this stuff?
You and Mr. Fusion must have taken the same class – How to rewrite history 101.
Nope. We just read. Did you actually go to any of the many links in my blog post? Of course not. You just want to believe Nukes are a magic bullet. Wrong. Flat dead wrong.
And, I do back up what I say for anyone who cares enough to read the links. And, yes, I can see from my blog that no one today has clicked through the links. At least two people read the post. Perhaps you are one, but I’m not betting on it.
#19 Don’t worry, Scott has no engineering background. He’s just a nuc chicken little. He only favours high kw/hr priced, non-base power generation technologies.
#35–QB==interesting. So, an organization with bias in favor of nuke power says France is facing a catastrophe:
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:VMhOoq-3R5sJ:www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/nuclear-waste-crisis-france.pdf+france+nuclear+waste+disposal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us&client=firefox-a
good to know.
#19 – Specul8,
You are indeed correct in your statement that reprocessing reduces the amount of waste. The French have been doing this for many years.
However, even France has not yet properly and permanently disposed of a single gram of the waste that they do indeed still produce.
Here’s the link to the article supporting that claim.
http://www.physorg.com/news119978134.html
#38 Sorry, I was a little too subtle. MANY Greenpeacers, NOT ALL Greenpeacers. Patrick Moore, James Lovelock, and the other old timers.
#37 – Paddy-O-Furniture,
#19 Don’t worry, Scott has no engineering background. He’s just a nuc chicken little. He only favours high kw/hr priced, non-base power generation technologies.
I am indeed not a nuclear engineer. However, if you had actually clicked through to some of the links, you would have seen that there is no power source more expensive than nuclear power. Remember to calculate the full cost of the plant, the full cost of decommissioning the plant at its end of useful life, and the cost of the fissionable material, and the cost of waste disposal.
Two of these costs are still only building and can only be estimated as we have not yet disposed of any nuclear waste nor decommissioned any power plants.
As for costs in human health from mining uranium, they can and should be calculated as well. As for costs to maintain security at the plants and disposal sites, who knows? Our current security is not up to the task. Neither is France’s.
Guess I’m just Chicken Little saying we have cheaper, safer, cleaner energy sources we can focus on.
#30–UD==thanks for revealing the code. – – – No==still too far removed for me. I think you are tripping.
I don’t think our selling nuke technology to Iran in the 70’s has ANYTHING to do with their current nuke plans. Do you?
More like sloppy word association in a drug induced miasma of faulty links than any cogent linking of cause and effect. So you think history is direct and lineal rather than chaotic and impossibly complex huh? Good to know.
#40–QB==you were so rhapsotic on that other thread, I’ll give you a pass on this one. Feel good to let it rip every once in a while==although I don’t think Rousseau dealt much with the dialectic process. Being more a social critic, his forte was being didactic.
And no nuclear power plants opened in the US since then. Of course they thought the oil was running out. The dollar collapse then led prices higher, causing various doomsday folks to say the world is ending. Since then oil reserves have increased.
Yeah a technology that constitutes 20% of US power generation is a waste and not worth pursuing. Better we should switch to various technologies that constitute 1% of usage.
#44 I truly stand corrected. I acknowledge the buddha within.
Even if Iran had a nuke, do you George Bush fan boys really think they are crazy enough to commit suicide by attacking Israel or the US. Only one US Sub sitting off the coast of Iran would be needed to wipe them off the map. The Iranians are fully aware of this. All this despite the fact that Iran has never attacked of threatened any country in more then 200 years. By contrast, it’s the US and Israel that have committed unlawful acts of aggression. It’s the US and Israel that have the nukes and are ready and willing use them against Iran on very speculative grounds that they think Iran has a “nuclear weapons program”. This is the same Bush thinking that got you bogged down in Iraq. With all the lies the Bush regime has told you in the last eight years, you’d think you’d of wised up. I guess not.
#47 Jim – “Iran has never attacked of threatened any country in more then 200 years”
Guess you forgot about the Iran/Iraq war just a few short decades ago?
#45–Mike==where are your “values?” Nuke power might be 20% of power source but if we build more of them, then their usage will go up!! Why not spend the same amount of money on renewables that don’t create 100% of the non-disposable 100K year poison known as nuclear waste?
Why give terrorists a big huge target? Decentralized power production and storage makes so much more sense==I’m surprised at your anti-American willingness to expose ourselves to the enemy.
#47 – I agree with most of what you say but Iran is no friend of the international community. Sicne the overthrow of the Shah it has shown a total disregard for all other governments in the world. As far as never invading a country: Invading a countries embassy is the same as invading that country. Kidnapping diplomats and foreign workers from an embassy is an act of terrorism and against civilized law. Holding the hostages blindfolded for over a year is torture.
It’s ironic that the majority of Iran’s citizens would be comfortable with closer ties to the West. The radical form of Islam promoted by the government runs counter to Shia/Persian style of thinking in most of the country.
That’s where the opening is.
I wonder where we will be getting all that power for the boatloads of electric cars that will replace the gas guzzlers in the coming years.
#42: Damn right, embiggen. It’s cromulent!
#52–UD==I think Paris Hilton summarized a good approach in her most recent ad for her Presidential run. I hope no one dashes her dreams. She’s Hot.
#49 – bobbo,
I agree. Let’s not expose ourselves to the enemy. We might get arrested for indecent exposure. (_!_)
Seriously though, well-said!
#48 The hostage crisis was aggressive.
On the war, Iraq tried to take advantage of a disbanded military following the Islamic revolution. In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran at Khuzestan to start the war.
The Iranians tried to push radical Shia Islam into Iraq during the war once they had driven the Iraqi army out. During the conflict Iran lost between 1/2 a million and 1 million including ~100,000 to chemical weapons. The US was supplying weapons to Iraq at the time or else they would have lost. Also the US was still pissed about hostage crisis.
It’s ironic that Iran hated Carter nearly as much as Repulicans. The wouldn’t release the hostages until Reagan was sworn in.
#48 I guess you have spongey brain from watching too much Fox news.
It was Iraq with US backing that attacked Iran.
#50 I don’t blame them for Invading your embassy. The CIA (the USA along with Briton) overthrew a true Iranian democracy in 1953 and put in its place a cruel puppet dictator. That caused decades of sadistic suffering on the Iranians. All because a democratically elected Iranian government wanted their oil revenues to pay for improving their country and not going into the hands of a few greedy western oil companies. It wasn’t an act of war. It was the Iranians taking back their country.
#57 Dead on. Which goes back to Mr Dvorak’s original point of the post.
If the US, and France, and Russia, and China, and England can all get their acts together and quit meddling in this stupid region then things will eventually sort themselves out.
Over 50 years of social engineering hasn’t worked yet and it’s not going to now. It’s like teenagers – you gotta treat them like adults with respect and give them real responsibility, eventually it works but you gotta be patient.
Jim, they’ve said that an attack will wipe out Israel while a counterattack would only wipe out a small part of the Islamic world. When you have people like that in charge who don’t mind annihilation, then Israel’s deterrent isn’t too helpful.
#57: John didn’t post this, I did.
Bobbo, so what if Iran is building nuclear weapons? Don’t they have a right to their own defense?
Of course more nuke power means more nuke power. The 20% usage, and even higher usage in other countries, for decades, suggests to me that more nuke power isn’t a serious problem. The issues raised will also be there for the existing plants so having more will just be a slightly bigger problem but nothing drastic. The high price is an issue though.
Renewables are at about 1%, and may not even be scalable. Sure let them develop, and we’ll see what happens, but counting on them isn’t a reason to block nukes.
They also have the same higher price problem.
Also, I think if the renewables had a breakthrough to where they were viable, environmentalists would object to them as well since their real goal is shutting down the economy.
#60–Mike==what color is the sky in your world?
#57 My humblest apologies. It is a smart post.
#58 They? who’s they? Bush and friends? and what people are you referring too? Iranians or Muslims in general?
Israel and the US have the most technically advanced arsenal at there disposal. It would be suicide for any third world country do take them on. Do you really think the Iranians are that crazy.
What’s crazy is starting a war with Iran on a “suspicion” of a weapons program and sending the whole world(U.S. included) into decades of misery.
#63 Christ , another victim of the US education system.
Again, It was Iraq with U.S. backing that attacked Iran.
Anyone who thinks that Iran would build a nuke and then launch one against another country is kinda dense. If they want to build one it is to have it be delivered “anonymously” via a terrorist group.
Unless it could be ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, be proven that they were the source, Iran would be safe from retaliation. The nut job religious types who actually hold power may think they could pull that off.
#60 – MikeN,
[Renewables] also have the same higher price problem.
Actually, wind is about on par with coal now, even without a carbon tax. Solar water heat and storage of said water in large underground tanks as the source of water for conventional or nuclear power plants would reduce the amount of other fuel used in the plant dramatically and would be very cheap. But, even concentrated solar and photovoltaics are now a bit cheaper than nuclear power and much faster and cheaper to build.
Further, solar does not carry the same externalized costs as nuclear in terms of health of the uranium miners, decommissioning of plants and other costs that I’ve mentioned above that are rarely considered.
Geothermal, tidal, and wave power are also far cheaper than nuclear, though the last is not yet a proven technology as wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal are.
#66 “But, even concentrated solar and photovoltaics are now a bit cheaper than nuclear power and much faster and cheaper to build.”
Umm, no. Especially if you get rid of the needless bureaucracy that adds cost.
There is no large scale solar plant supplying base
energy that is cheaper or as cheap as a modern nuc facility.