Le 15/04/2011 11:21, Invisible a écrit :
> This is the thing. I've heard a lot of environmental activists say "we
> should stop doing X" or "we should stop doing Y". I haven't heard much
> about "we should do Z instead".
> 
> Burning fossil fuels is obviously stupid for a number of reasons. And
> the alternative is...? What exactly?
> 
> Nuclear power works in theory. In practise, if you make even the tiniest
> mistake, just once, everything is ruined forever. (Or at least, for
> several centuries.) And there's nothing you can do to fix it.
> 
> Wind power is great. But... do you really want the whole country to go
> black every time the wind stops blowing? Similarly, solar power. You
> realise that the sun is below the horizon for hours at a time, right?
> And some days, it's just not very sunny. For either of these things to
> work, you seriously need high-efficiency power storage, so you can
> collect power when it's there, and store it for when it's not.

All these should raise a question: why would you need a perfect and
continuous source of energy ?
Because you were raised in such environment where performance is
expected and requested all the time... time to change that way of thinking!

It's like email: they are not an INSTANT delivery system.

Back to middle-age, working from dawn to dusk but never past dusk.
Working enough to survive the year, yet the year after is still unknown,
not expecting interest-rate to provide wealth. Working about every day,
in theory, but having great collective break to prepare and celebrate
many holidays. one penny a day, 240 pences a year, such were the
unqualified wages. It also means that there was about 60 days of work
per season, not 90! (ratio of day off was not 1/7, rather 1/3. So you
think that todays week-end is a progress... well 2/7 < 1/3 !).

Also, local production should be sufficient to sustain all. You might
spent ten years without going further than 10 km from your home.


-- 
Software is like dirt - it costs time and money to change it and move it
around.

Just because you can't see it, it doesn't weigh anything,
and you can't drill a hole in it and stick a rivet into it doesn't mean
it's free.

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On 15/04/2011 12:24, Le_Forgeron wrote:

> All these should raise a question: why would you need a perfect and
> continuous source of energy ?
> Because you were raised in such environment where performance is
> expected and requested all the time... time to change that way of thinking!

A world without continuous energy is a world without computers - i.e., a 
world without *me*. ;-)

Besides, the sun *is* a perfect source of energy. It's not quite 
continuous across the whole planet, but every other lifeform manages to 
cope with that.

> Back to middle-age, working from dawn to dusk but never past dusk.

Nobody is going back there.

> Also, local production should be sufficient to sustain all. You might
> spent ten years without going further than 10 km from your home.

I agree that living in one place and commuting to another place to do 
your day's work is a pretty stupid idea. As is importing toothbrushes 
from China rather than making them in the UK.

On the other hand, for any given town or city, only a finite amount of 
land is available. Can you really manufacture absolutely everything 
needed within that space? Probably not. You ought to be able to manage 
quite a bit of it, though.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Nuclear power works in theory. In practise, if you make even the tiniest
> mistake, just once, everything is ruined forever. (Or at least, for
> several centuries.) And there's nothing you can do to fix it.

That's not really true. Chernobyl was caused by a very long chain of mistakes,
all committed with a reactor design which was already itself a long chain of
mistakes. It should be noted that most other countries have never built a
reactor that could fail as catastrophically as this, even through wilful
sabotage.

TMI was also long chain of mistakes, which resulted in only the reactor being
ruined, and they did fix it.

I suppose you could say that Fukushima was really only one very big mistake,
i.e. how big a tsunami was ever likely to be. However, they show every sign of
being able to fix it eventually.

I long ago ceased to get any information on the nuclear industry from the
mainstream media. None of them understand it, and they all profit from making it
look bad.

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On 15/04/2011 13:26, Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> Nuclear power works in theory. In practise, if you make even the tiniest
>> mistake, just once, everything is ruined forever. (Or at least, for
>> several centuries.) And there's nothing you can do to fix it.
>
> That's not really true. Chernobyl was caused by a very long chain of mistakes,
> all committed with a reactor design which was already itself a long chain of
> mistakes. It should be noted that most other countries have never built a
> reactor that could fail as catastrophically as this, even through wilful
> sabotage.
>
> TMI was also long chain of mistakes, which resulted in only the reactor being
> ruined, and they did fix it.
>
> I suppose you could say that Fukushima was really only one very big mistake,
> i.e. how big a tsunami was ever likely to be. However, they show every sign of
> being able to fix it eventually.

That's kind of my point. You only need to be slightly wrong about one 
tiny thing, and it's game over.

Fires can be put out, even oil spills can be mopped up [eventually]. But 
radiation is forever. [Or rather, "for such a huge time period that it 
might as well be forever".]

> I long ago ceased to get any information on the nuclear industry from the
> mainstream media. None of them understand it, and they all profit from making it
> look bad.

I tend to take anything they say with a large pinch of salt.

Take, for example, the London airport "disaster". I forget the exact 
details, but a plane had to crash land due to some kind of mechanical 
failure. "So, how could such a serious safety failure have happened?" 
they ask. Um, excuse me? The plane CRASH LANDED, and not only did every 
single man, women and child on board walk off completely unharmed, THEY 
DIDN'T EVEN REALISE IT WAS A CRASH LANDING! That's not a safety failure. 
That's an epic SUCCESS! WTF, people?!

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > I suppose you could say that Fukushima was really only one very big mistake,
> > i.e. how big a tsunami was ever likely to be. However, they show every sign of
> > being able to fix it eventually.
>
> That's kind of my point. You only need to be slightly wrong about one
> tiny thing, and it's game over.

But they weren't slightly wrong about one tiny thing. They were completely wrong
about a very important thing. And yet, serious as the problems have been, they
will never be as bad as chernobyl, and it seems that it may ultimately be very
difficult to measure any health effects.

> Fires can be put out, even oil spills can be mopped up [eventually]. But
> radiation is forever. [Or rather, "for such a huge time period that it
> might as well be forever".]

The I-131 release, which is the most serious short-term health hazard as I
understand it, will be all but undetectable in a few months. Some of the fission
products retained in the spent fuel in the cores are pretty nasty, but this is
dealt with safely. Release of this type of high-level waste is unlikely in the
extreme.

The BP drilling accident last year was far, far more serious than any nuclear
accident.

> Take, for example, the London airport "disaster". I forget the exact
> details, but a plane had to crash land due to some kind of mechanical
> failure. "So, how could such a serious safety failure have happened?"
> they ask. Um, excuse me? The plane CRASH LANDED, and not only did every
> single man, women and child on board walk off completely unharmed, THEY
> DIDN'T EVEN REALISE IT WAS A CRASH LANDING! That's not a safety failure.
> That's an epic SUCCESS! WTF, people?!

Quite :)

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On 4/15/2011 2:21, Invisible wrote:
> Nuclear power works in theory. In practise, if you make even the tiniest
> mistake, just once, everything is ruined forever.

It's possible (in theory) to build a plant where such isn't the case. It's 
just that afaik nobody is doing that, because nobody has already done it.

The problem with nuclear is it looked like you could make it safe, so people 
built plants, and then the plants were either built shoddily, wore out, 
weren't managed according to design, etc, and had a problem. Now even tho we 
have much better designs, nobody is willing to try out something that may 
have unexpected problems, having already been burned once.

 > Harnessing the [...] sun [...]. This stuff doesn't grow on trees.

Well, technically...

> People have tried to make cars that run on electricity rather than fossil
> fuels. But that just means that you burn the fuel at the power plant rather
> than in the car.

The advantage is it's far more efficient to generate the power centrally and 
distribute it than it is to generate it locally. You'll get 1/10th the cost 
of running an electric car as running a petroleum car. (I.e., filling up the 
tank on a pure electric car costs about the same as a gallon of gas.)

> when they do. Yes, they're more efficient, but this really looks to me like
> people passing a law before the technology is ready.

I think the idea is more to drive up the demand in order to get people to 
invest in the research for making them better.

> My personal theory is that mankind will actually do nothing, and come to an
> abrupt end. Either we will poison ourselves to death, or there will be a
> global thermonuclear war as people fight over the last few drops of precious
> oil. Either way, everybody dies.
>
> The only comfort is that I probably won't be alive to see it...


-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 4/15/2011 4:24, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Back to middle-age, working from dawn to dusk but never past dusk.

Well, sure. Let's kill off 2/3rds of the population. That'll work too.

> Also, local production should be sufficient to sustain all. You might
> spent ten years without going further than 10 km from your home.

Yep. That sure works as long as you don't mind killing almost everyone in 
NYC, LA, Tokyo, Beijing, etc.

That's the problem. The middle ages doesn't support a population of six 
billion. Neither does hunter-gatherer.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 4/15/2011 5:57, Invisible wrote:
> That's kind of my point. You only need to be slightly wrong about one tiny
> thing, and it's game over.

Not really. Look up thorium salt reactors. They don't go critical, the 
wastes are not very radioactive, you can't blow them up, etc etc. They're 
much safer.

> Fires can be put out, even oil spills can be mopped up [eventually]. But
> radiation is forever. [Or rather, "for such a huge time period that it might
> as well be forever".]

Depending on the radiation, oil spills probably last longer than lots of 
kinds of radiation problems.

> I tend to take anything they say with a large pinch of salt.

The other thing to realize about the nuclear industry is that the 
regulations are far stricter than anywhere else. For example, you can't 
build a nuclear reactor out of granite (the same stuff you might have in 
your kitchen) because the granite is too radioactive. I think bananas emit 
more radiation than nuclear reactors are allowed to leak.

Sort of like complaining about the exhaust from a Prius when you are driving 
through downtown LA and the air coming out of the exhaust is cleaner than 
the air going in.

> That's not a safety failure. That's an epic SUCCESS! WTF, people?!

Only because God did it! ;-)


-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 15/04/2011 16:35, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/15/2011 5:57, Invisible wrote:
>> That's kind of my point. You only need to be slightly wrong about one
>> tiny thing, and it's game over.
>
> Not really. Look up thorium salt reactors. They don't go critical, the
> wastes are not very radioactive, you can't blow them up, etc etc.
> They're much safer.

As I understand it, normal nuclear reactors are incapable of a *nuclear* 
explosion. That doesn't mean that the cooling system can't overload and 
explode. Or freak weather conditions level the building. Or somebody 
flies a passenger jet into it. Or...

>> Fires can be put out, even oil spills can be mopped up [eventually]. But
>> radiation is forever. [Or rather, "for such a huge time period that it
>> might
>> as well be forever".]
>
> Depending on the radiation, oil spills probably last longer than lots of
> kinds of radiation problems.

Uranium-235 has a halflife is 700 million years. That's /halflife/, not 
the time it takes to degrade completely, just the time for *half* of it 
to go away. 700 million years is longer than that oil has been in the 
ground. ;-)

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On 15/04/2011 16:28, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/15/2011 2:21, Invisible wrote:
>> Nuclear power works in theory. In practise, if you make even the tiniest
>> mistake, just once, everything is ruined forever.
>
> It's possible (in theory) to build a plant where such isn't the case.
> It's just that afaik nobody is doing that, because nobody has already
> done it.

I'd be rather surprised if you can build a system powered by radiation 
such that it doesn't use much radiation.

>> Harnessing the [...] sun [...]. This stuff doesn't grow on trees.
>
> Well, technically...

I said /land area/ doesn't grow on trees! :-P

>> People have tried to make cars that run on electricity rather than fossil
>> fuels. But that just means that you burn the fuel at the power plant
>> rather than in the car.
>
> The advantage is it's far more efficient to generate the power centrally
> and distribute it than it is to generate it locally.

Is it?

I mean, I'm sure a generator that runs at optimal speed 24/7 can be way 
more efficient than the clapped out old engine in your car. But doesn't 
the inherent inefficiency of distributing the power more than negate the 
advantage?

>> when they do. Yes, they're more efficient, but this really looks to me
>> like people passing a law before the technology is ready.
>
> I think the idea is more to drive up the demand in order to get people
> to invest in the research for making them better.

In that case, just ban *all* forms of lighting! That should create a 
market demand alright...

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