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Will The Global Warming Hysterics Never Tire Of Being Wrong?

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  • Originally posted by seer View Post
    Leonhard I gave you a link showing the rapid rate of renewables being created in the US, the free market taking advantage of tax credits.
    Thanks, seer, I am aware that the US is getting into the gear of things.

    Comment


    • Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
      Thanks, seer, I am aware that the US is getting into the gear of things.
      And I predict that it will have precisely zero impact on global temperatures.
      Some may call me foolish, and some may call me odd
      But I'd rather be a fool in the eyes of man
      Than a fool in the eyes of God


      From "Fools Gold" by Petra

      Comment


      • Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
        Coal mines have strip mined entire mountains, and stockpiled oceans of toxic slurry from the burned mineral coal. There is absolutely no comparison between wind and coal here. Wind could scale up more than a dozen times and not be significant compared to coal in comparison to environmental effects.

        And yes renewables enjoy some subsidies. Its what helped accelerate the development of the technology from its infancy in the seventies to today where its shaping up to be a viable technology.
        Yep - and they aren't allowed to do that without reclamation any more. Excepting places like China that won't be buying any carbon credits anyway.



        Its viable, but its more expensive. You will have to create a lot of grid storage to soak up the energy production variability. But its not so much a matter of whether its cheaper. Its a matter of whether we have any viable alternative if we forego nuclear power.
        No, expense is a part of viability - unlike Germany, most nations cannot force feed this to their populations.



        The danger of radiation is massively overblown. Already within a period of fourty eight hours the radiation of the spent fuel has dropped to a fraction of what it was after being freshly removed from the reactor. After a few weeks its down to less than a tenth. That's from the burning off of the short-lived and intensely radioactive elements. That's when the spent fuel will cause water to glow blue from the cherenkov effect. After that you get longer lived elements that are still fairly radioactive, Cesium-137 and Strontium-140, and they have half-lives measured in 30 years or so. However that means that after 300 years the radiation is down to a thousanth.
        Two words: Marie Curie. You're misunderstanding which risk I was bringing up.

        The really long lived stuff like Plutonium-239 is of course really long. However its an alpha emitter. A person picking out a rod of spent nuclear fuel thousands of years from now could hold it in his hands and not feel a thing. The alpha particles would be stopped by the dead layer of skin. Or even his clothes.
        And if he decides to make a shag rug out of it?

        We don't need to invent a new signage, or figure out how to build impenetrable fortresses in mountains. We need to store it on the surface in big solid concrete drums. That's it. Its cheap, and the foot print of those storage sites will be nothing in comparison to the places where they store the toxic sludge from coal power plants.
        Okay, here you are flat out mistaken - this project is underway and is government sponsored. There are areas of containment and contamination that are not going to be safe to play with for a very long time to come. This wasn't speculation on my part - they are actually doing this.



        Its true. Chernobyl was scary (and the HBO series gives a good dramatic presentation of it). However if you count lives and damage to health its still orders of magnitude less than the effects of coal power.
        Really wanna see that show sometime. But the issue with Chernobyl is we can't clean it up and are stuck trying to contain it. Granted, you can walk up to the elephant's foot - but you danged well better know what you are doing and get out before the exposure turns deadly.



        Three Mile Island is perfectly safe today. As is the Windscale facility, except for the reactor core.
        No, it isn't. There are still protected sites as I recall - and Windscale clearly isn't 'perfectly safe' if the word 'except' is in the sentence.

        The partially melted reactor was safely extracted. There was a miniscule leak of radioactive elements in to the air, less than at Fukushima. And its no where near the leak of Chernobyl or Kyshtym. Those represent the only two cases we have of catastrophic nuclear contamination. The exclusion zone near Pribyat which is a twenty hour drive from where I'm sitting is rather heavily contaminated, especially near the city where little sand grain sized bits of spent nuclear material from the core of Reactor 4 can still be found. But even then, you can walk around there unprotected for a couple of days and get no more of an exposure to radiation than a flight attendant does on an airplane.
        Yeah - you are under the misapprehension that I'm talking about instant death at the slightest exposure - sure, you can approach radioactive sites for varying lengths of time -this isn't the big problem right now. The problem is that over time, sites get lost or forgotten. So maybe it takes a month to reach dangerous levels - but the guy 500 years from now building his house on top of the thing doesn't know that.

        It will take a couple of centuries for the Cessium-137 and Strontium-140 to decay away. After that it will effectively just be a 1000 square miles natural park.
        Assuming no one mistakes it for a good place to site a school because there was a war and things got scrambled.

        I won't downplay the significance of this disaster, but it was a comedy of errors: The RBMK reactor had no containment facility, it was notoriously unstable, and the day it exploded it was run in a mind boggingly stupid way. It remains the only non-military nuclear reactor to ever undergo a prompt criticality event and explode.
        And I'm not playing up the fact that it isn't impossible to have something like that happen again. For me, the radioactive trash is a bigger concern than that another nuclear facility will hire Larry, Curly and Moe.



        There is no way to run coal power plants in a way that doesn't send out a truck load of noxious particles, or leaves behind train loads of sludge.
        That we know of - if I have to grant that technology can defeat the other problems associated with other forms of energy, so do you. Not a one way street.



        The US, Europe, China and India all have nuclear power, and all those places have nuclear weapons. They're the ones producing the most power and the most CO2, so its not a hurdle for them to build more nuclear power stations. They already have nukes. But then again nukes aren't *that* difficult to make. There's no secret any longer in their design, or how they function, and the technical means to making them is within even rather small nation states.
        Er, yeah - so? I already said this wasn't an overriding issue - but it IS an issue.

        Even Israel managed to make some nukes using their lone nuclear power station.
        And that argues against nuclear energy proliferation.

        Terrorists getting access to nuclear material is a legitimate concern, but its only a concern if its highly enriched fuel (95+%), and most reactor fuel is only enriched to 5-20%. Its considered unrealistic for terrorists to possess the technical facilities capable of further enriching nuclear fuel. And the prospects of dirty bombs have turned out to be no more frightening than ordinary chemical attacks. The good thing about dust is that it tends to settle unless its flung up sufficiently high and in large enough quantities.
        You're doing this on purpose.



        I'd rather we get going now, not in thirty years.
        I think the India facility is due to be online in 2020 or maybe 2021. it's not like we're in preliminary stages - it's scale that's mostly in question, not functionality.



        It is, but its also environmentally destructive and we've tapped most of the places available.
        Like I said - explore. There are some interesting possibilities at small scale which are comparable to wind/solar in reliability.



        Verification wouldn't be a bear. You can't beat the laws of physics. If a power plant consumes so much coal, it will emit so much CO2. There is no way around it unless the CO2 is funnelled somewhere (though attempts at CO2 sequestering to produce Clean Coal have largely failed). All that will have to be monitored is how much coal, oil, or natural gas is being consumed, but since that's a known quantity, what problem would there be?
        These things called sovereign governments.



        Call me an idealist but I don't believe in being in a race to the bottom. Even if they're not doing anything now, we should still be doing our bit now. I don't believe doing that will cause the destruction of the US, that's hyperbole.
        And I think self destruction is far worse than caution.

        You would be wrong. The US' advantage is its tremendous economic strength. Energy is a huge part of that equation. Significant hampering of the US' energy production - and/or significant raising of energy cost - cuts that advantage and can do so critically. Only a fool thinks he's invincible - the US can lose to China but only if it let's itself be hamstrung.

        No. Maybe I am not a physical scientist - but I DO understand politics (as much as I humanly can - quantum is easier than people!). This is playing with fire. The US and Europe are mostly on board with this 'save the planet' thing - the Third World is not and won't be (and yes, it's perfectly rational from their POV). China and India are not going to cripple themselves in reality (heck, are ANY of the Kyoto signatories actually in compliance? Were they ever?) and the painful truth is most Western nations can only go so far into wrecking their economies before getting a LOT of blow back from the little guys actually paying the higher costs who want to provide decent lives for their families and aren't particularly interested in playing Captain Planet.

        Ignoring political forces is like ignoring that leak around the base of a big dam. Eventually, you (general) find out the hard way that any dam can be broken.



        How do you figure? That seems to be precisely how a lot of the technological developments for solar energy got accelerated, and how some of the successful companies like Tesla Energy has gotten ahead. At the very least renewable energy needs subsidies because coal gets subsidies. As long as coal gets subsidies the market isn't a level place.
        Those credits were in place for most of my life - literally - but we've only seen significant advancement in the last two decades. It wasn't until everyone had a phone in their pocket that battery technology started being a priority. So, how do you predict what supporting infrastructure technology will be the one that pushes renewables into large scale viability? Is it still batteries because that isn't near where it needs to be to solve the scale issue. Something else?
        "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

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        • Originally posted by Teallaura View Post
          Yep - and they aren't allowed to do that without reclamation any more.
          Even the reclamation that is being done is sometimes a bit of a joke. When the Kingston coal power plant had stored toxic fly ash sludge right next to a river bed (because it was cheaper) and had a spill-off into the river poisoning it for hundreds of miles, permanently disrupting the animal life. The cleanup costs have been estimated at billions of dollars, and will never be fully recovered in our lifetime. The power plant company was fined a mere 11 million dollars.

          No, expense is a part of viability - unlike Germany, most nations cannot force feed this to their populations.
          That's why I'm pro-nuclear. At least for the western nations that already have it.

          Two words: Marie Curie. You're misunderstanding which risk I was bringing up.
          You're talking about the danger of left-over radioactive waste.

          And if he decides to make a shag rug out of it?
          How would he get it out? We're talking about concerns for a hypothetical Conan The Barbarian situation right? These are steel-reinforced concrete drums. It would take forever to chisel through, and when they did they'd be far more interested in the steel than the glass, sand, and alloys in the middle.

          But again, let us imagine someone cracking open one of these drums. Getting out the spent fuel, which would be strange looking metals. Plated them into a carpet for his house.

          How much more cancer risk would he be in for a nominal lifetime?

          Edit: This was a fun task.

          Assumptions
          - Mox fuel
          - 1000 years of time has passed
          - Metal carpet weighs 2kg and covers 1 m2

          According to the charts I've been able to find spent Mox fuel after a 1000 years releases about 100 times as much radiation as naturally occurring uranium ore. In some places in Scotland, and in places in Nevada you can pick up rocks of uranium ore like that. So... 100 times naturally occurring rocks.

          It's much harder to estimate the cancer risk, because not all radiation is equivalent. But since that person would be exposed to 2.9 mSv/year, we can use the conservative medical estimate which assumes that all radiation causes cancer no matter in what dose and the odds of getting cancer changes linearly with the dose.

          That person would have an increased chance of cancer by around 0.5%

          Granted that is high enough to warrant protective measures, and to outlaw the selling of mats if they contained that much radiation to people knowingly, but I don't think it warrants hollowing out a mountain to protect a hypothetical person.

          Okay, here you are flat out mistaken - this project is underway and is government sponsored.
          Yucca Mountain? Yes, it is. And it is overkill. A complete waste of money if you ask me. It's done because there's a widespread and irrational fear of nuclear power. The French just store it in warehouses, guarded, on the surface. That's it. We do the same with the high active waste in Denmark from the Risø research reactor. There's literally no reason to store it anywhere else, other than a phobia of radiation. There are chemicals out there, in trucks, running on trafficked highways, that I'm far more worried about than a rod of radioactive metal sitting deep in a drum somewhere.

          Really wanna see that show sometime. But the issue with Chernobyl is we can't clean it up and are stuck trying to contain it. Granted, you can walk up to the elephant's foot - but you danged well better know what you are doing and get out before the exposure turns deadly.
          The show is very good, about the only place with a technical gaff is a scene discussing the dangers of molten nuclear fuel coming into contact with water, but beyond that scene, everything is top-notch. They move around some events, and they compress some galleries of people into a single person. Also, the effects of radiation on people show up a lot faster than they do in real life. Beyond minor stuff though, which I will always nitpick because that's who I am, it is one of the best shows I've seen in a while.

          The elephant foot is still pretty steamy at around 2000 Roentgen, so you can't be around it for more than a few minutes before you'd get radiation sickness. However, you can run up to it if you're willing to take a dose of radiation equal to several months allowance for a nuclear technician.

          One specialist did that recently. Ran up to it and took a picture of it. Wasn't there for long. That thing really is very radioactive.
          But in three hundred years you could camp next to it and never notice a thing. In a thousand years, you could live your life next to it and never notice a thing.

          No, it isn't. There are still protected sites as I recall - and Windscale clearly isn't 'perfectly safe' if the word 'except' is in the sentence.
          I don't know of any exclusion zones around the Three Mile Island facility. There isn't one around the Windscale facility either. Both contain their radiation quite well.

          Three Mile Island's partially melted reactor got extracted and has now been deposited. For various reasons the work to do the same for Windscale has waited a long time.

          The problem is that over time, sites get lost or forgotten. So maybe it takes a month to reach dangerous levels - but the guy 500 years from now building his house on top of the thing doesn't know that.
          Honestly even today you can live in the Outer Exclusion Zone without any difficulty. The radiation is really mild in most places. Higher than background radiation, but so are basements of concrete buildings, and Arizona. In five hundred years, the radiation will be negligible and even the hot spots like the inner city apartments, or the Pripyat hospital where the nurses' stores the irradiated first-responder firemen's clothing would be harmless.

          Its all about the decay of Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 (got it wrong in an earlier post). They're heavy beta and gamma emitters, and their half-lives are short enough for the radiation to be rather intense for the quantity of material and long enough to be a problem for us humans. When they're gone its basically just long-lived products that don't emit much if any gamma radiation. Where the radiation can be stopped by clothing alone or a few millimeters of soil.

          For me, the radioactive trash is a bigger concern than that another nuclear facility will hire Larry, Curly and Moe.
          Across your entire lifetime, if all the energy you consumed came entirely from nuclear power. All the highly active nuclear waste produced to provide that energy could fit into the volume of a single coke can. You could stick all the highly active nuclear waste of the entire US power production for a lifetime of output, inside the corner of a single coal power plants fly ash storage.

          Put it all inside big glass-filled, concrete steel reinforced drums. The radiation outside of each drum would be low enough that a pregnant woman could have a tour there without any significant risk to her baby. The drums are big and heavy enough that you could use heavy explosives around them. It's on the surface so we'll always have to deal with them, and be aware of them. And when a thousand years have passed whatever is inside will be far less harmful than the toxic slurry left behind by coal power.

          That we know of - if I have to grant that technology can defeat the other problems associated with other forms of energy, so do you. Not a one way street.
          I'm talking about the technology we can apply today.

          Er, yeah - so? I already said this wasn't an overriding issue - but it IS an issue.

          And that argues against nuclear energy proliferation.
          About the only thing, we can do to prevent nuclear proliferation is to ban the use of it in countries we don't like or don't trust. We'll have to use either economic incentives ("we will provide you with the power you won't be able to make for cheap"), or military force. We don't have any other option. Us stopping using nuclear power won't prevent other countries from developing it on their own. As I said Israel managed to do it.

          I think the India facility is due to be online in 2020 or maybe 2021. it's not like we're in preliminary stages - it's scale that's mostly in question, not functionality.
          It's not like I'm against Thorium Teal. Its a good avenue of research. As for western countries, I don't think we have to wait around until we have it.

          Like I said - explore. There are some interesting possibilities at small scale which are comparable to wind/solar in reliability.
          I support a mix of solutions.

          These things called sovereign governments.
          I still don't see the problem. If you have a coal power plant its an objective fact how many megawatt-hours they're charging for. You can use that to precisely calculate their CO2 emissions.

          You would be wrong. The US' advantage is its tremendous economic strength. Energy is a huge part of that equation. Significant hampering of the US' energy production - and/or significant raising of energy cost - cuts that advantage and can do so critically. Only a fool thinks he's invincible - the US can lose to China but only if it let's itself be hamstrung.
          That would be an argument in favor of nuclear power, but I'm not at all convinced by this argument.

          No. Maybe I am not a physical scientist - but I DO understand politics (as much as I humanly can - quantum is easier than people!). This is playing with fire. The US and Europe are mostly on board with this 'save the planet' thing - the Third World is not and won't be (and yes, it's perfectly rational from their POV).
          Neither the US nor Europe is really on the 'save the planet' thing. Both are doing the bare minimum to even qualify as doing anything. I predict it won't be until we start seeing more severe problems with climate change that people will react in the way that's appropriate. Meanwhile, I'm simply advocating for energy sources that I believe are possible, and support the political candidates who at least won't put up roadblocks for scientists.

          Is it still batteries because that isn't near where it needs to be to solve the scale issue. Something else?
          Actually, you might need to update your numbers on the cost and lifespan of batteries used for grid storage. They can last more than fifteen years now and cost less than a third of what they did at the start of the millennium. Also, you're mistaken when it comes to the development of the batteries. Technology isn't magic. It doesn't improve simply because the market is interested in a particular application. The types of batteries used in cars or grid storage are not the same as the ones in your smartphone. Your smartphone's battery is optimized for weight and lifespan is sacrificed keeping it within the cycle of the smartphones themselves.

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          • Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
            You know I made a thread about that, where I asked conservatives on this forum what a conservative response to Global Warming would be. Aside from cap-and-trade and nuclear power, it was pretty much crickets.

            I'm still curious to know what response would be consistent with a conservative ideology.
            See demi's post

            Originally posted by demi-conservative View Post
            Now Ice Age is actually catastrophe, will actually destroy most of life on earth.

            So it is duty of humans to prevent it. Burn more coal!!!
            Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

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            • Originally posted by seer View Post
              Yet we are still building wind mills and solar farms at a rapid rate.
              Certainly, because there are many US States that recognize the insanity of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and are committed to upholding it.

              https://www.businessinsider.com/us-s...reement-2017-6
              “He felt that his whole life was a kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” - Douglas Adams.

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              • Originally posted by Leonhard View Post

                I have a hard time believing that Conservatives can't propose solutions to climate change.
                Newsflash, sky not falling. Have good day.
                Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

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                • Originally posted by Tassman View Post
                  Certainly, because there are many US States that recognize the insanity of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and are committed to upholding it.

                  https://www.businessinsider.com/us-s...reement-2017-6
                  You mean like conservative Texas that has the largest wind farms in the US? No, the costs of wind and solar are going down making them more competitive. And remember your country is not even on track to meet the Paris accords. So get off your high horse...
                  Last edited by seer; 08-07-2019, 05:10 AM.
                  Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

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                  • Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
                    Coal mines have strip mined entire mountains, and stockpiled oceans of toxic slurry from the burned mineral coal. There is absolutely no comparison between wind and coal here. Wind could scale up more than a dozen times and not be significant compared to coal in comparison to environmental effects.
                    Back in the 1970s, maybe strip-mines destroyed entire ecosystems, but for the last 40 or so years they have been regulated to restore what they tear down. They strip-mined the mountain behind my Grandpa's house in the 1980s and looking at it today you can't tell the difference before they started. They replaced all of the soil and replanted the trees. And also most mines in Appalachia are underground mines.

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                      Back in the 1970s, maybe strip-mines destroyed entire ecosystems, but for the last 40 or so years they have been regulated to restore what they tear down. They strip-mined the mountain behind my Grandpa's house in the 1980s and looking at it today you can't tell the difference before they started. They replaced all of the soil and replanted the trees. And also most mines in Appalachia are underground mines.
                      The irony, of course, is that a lot of "green" technologies such as electric car batteries and solar panels depend on large quantities of rare earth metals that are often strip mined in countries like India and China that have loose -- or even non-existent-- environmental regulations.
                      Some may call me foolish, and some may call me odd
                      But I'd rather be a fool in the eyes of man
                      Than a fool in the eyes of God


                      From "Fools Gold" by Petra

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                      • Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                        Back in the 1970s, maybe strip-mines destroyed entire ecosystems, but for the last 40 or so years they have been regulated to restore what they tear down. They strip-mined the mountain behind my Grandpa's house in the 1980s and looking at it today you can't tell the difference before they started. They replaced all of the soil and replanted the trees. And also most mines in Appalachia are underground mines.
                        We have a number of strip-mined areas around Texas that you'd never know were ever strip-mined. They even have environmentalists on staff to oversee the removal and storage of the top soil, with a complete plan for restoration, and when the mining is done, it's put back in such a way that it becomes a park or a golf course or something beautiful.
                        The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

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                        • Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
                          The irony, of course, is that a lot of "green" technologies such as electric car batteries and solar panels depend on large quantities of rare earth metals that are often strip mined in countries like India and China that have loose -- or even non-existent-- environmental regulations.
                          And when they are used up, they end up in land fills, poisoning the environment even more.

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                          • Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                            We have a number of strip-mined areas around Texas that you'd never know were ever strip-mined. They even have environmentalists on staff to oversee the removal and storage of the top soil, with a complete plan for restoration, and when the mining is done, it's put back in such a way that it becomes a park or a golf course or something beautiful.
                            Yeah, They make a bigger mess of mountains just putting in roads back in Appalachia. They will cut right through mountains and hills with dynamite and cut switchbacks into mountains too large to blow up.

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by Mountain Man View Post
                              The irony, of course, is that a lot of "green" technologies such as electric car batteries and solar panels depend on large quantities of rare earth metals that are often strip mined in countries like India and China that have loose -- or even non-existent-- environmental regulations.
                              From what I recall, even the manufacturing process for such produces an inordinate amount of hazardous waste.
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                              • Originally posted by One Bad Pig View Post
                                From what I recall, even the manufacturing process for such produces an inordinate amount of hazardous waste.
                                Interesting. Do you have a link or anything?
                                "Yes. President Trump is a huge embarrassment. And it’s an embarrassment to evangelical Christianity that there appear to be so many who will celebrate precisely the aspects that I see Biblically as most lamentable and embarrassing." Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler Jr.

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