Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
If you want noise reduction, there are plenty of solutions for that, like mass-loaded vinyl and highway-style sound barriers. Assuming the proper countermeasures are taken, noise is not a good argument against progressive technology.
If you want noise reduction, there are plenty of solutions for that, like mass-loaded vinyl and highway-style sound barriers. Assuming the proper countermeasures are taken, noise is not a good argument against progressive technology.
Have you seen any such solutions for wind farms yet?
Again, it's not an argument against progressive technology. It's an inherent trait of a high-power wind turbine. Besides, the technology itself is rather old and has only seen incremental progress throughout its history. An argument against wind power would be, "it's not enough": a single advanced NPP could produce 2 to 20 times the amount of sustained electric power of an average wind farm, will serve at least twice longer due to lesser wear-and-tear, will have less potentially dangerous accidents on average, and will provide electricity to a larger amount of households while itself occupying a lesser area.
Though to disclaim, I'm not even against wind power. It's a cool and trustworthy technology, but I maintain that it has been and will always be nothing but an auxiliary power source. In any case, when sustained fusion is successfully achieved, it will make any other power source obsolete in terms of both safety and productivity. There will just be no contest.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
How do wind turbines "mutilate the landscape"? Don't they just make the landscape look super cool? I don't understand you here. To me, a wind farm looks awe-inspiring.
I personally don't mind them either, but as of what I heard, most people think otherwise. They don't want to see them when they look outside the window.
The look of a wind farm is based on people's likings, personally I don't think that they mutilate the landscape but I can understand that someone could think that...
I think that the being against or pro nuclear depends on where you are. If you are in a country where there are already working nuclear plants which are somewhat safe and there's little or no risk of natural catastrophes, it would be not that smart to close them in a day or two after that accident, revise the nuclear plans for the future may be a good thing.
To speak for me: I live in Italy and personally I'm against it... Why?
Well, we Italians have already had a referendum in 1987, right after the Chernobyl accident, through which we voted against it. That can certainly be considered a "fear-driven" vote but because of it we haven't invested in nuclear plants as of today.
Starting from that, the main fear is our enterprises who are often Mafia-infested and they would probably do a sloppy job on those plants and they would be dangerous and not ready for a natural calamity (Italy is a pretty sismic zone, especially the center-south).
About it, I'm not saying this because I'm a stereotypical, anti-government guy but because of recent examples of it:
We've had a terrible Earthquake in L'Aquila on April 2009, and as of today, after the Berlusconi's government proudly announced that he rebuilt the city and gave houses to the earthquake victims (and as a matter of fact, he gave them to some families but there are ones who are still homeless), the historical centre of the city is still destroyed and I don't know when and if it will be rebuilt.
Another thing that bugs me is that we're having another referendum in June, always on the same topic and in a meeting in France with Sarkozy, Berlusconi said that he delayed the nuclear plans for one year, in order to cancel the referendum and then do as they please. (Note that the signatures for holding a referendum need to be collected a year before holding it, so they were collected before the accident)
With these behaviours it's easy to think the worst about the government and to distrust them, not to mention the issue of the nuclear waste, we still have pre-Chernobyl waste stored in some sort of warehouse which seems to begin leaking liquid waste...
<Neclea>Gavin Ward <Sprint>WHAT? WHERE?
<oldskoolgamer101>What a stupid name!
oldskoolgamer101 was kicked from # soniccenter by Sprint [ says you , kimpy ]
Thorium was getting quite a lot of attention some years ago and showed really promising results (including lower decay periods) until everything just went silent in 2007...
Hey, not so silent! The number of thorium advocates increases quickly as time passes and hopefully liquid fluoride thorium reactors will be a reality in the near future. Check the media coverage section of this blog and this article to see what I mean. This other article on the subject of thorium is pretty informative.
Neclea, did you hang around on #soniccenter in the past?
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Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
Zeupar wrote:
Warepire wrote:
Thorium was getting quite a lot of attention some years ago and showed really promising results (including lower decay periods) until everything just went silent in 2007...
Hey, not so silent! The number of thorium advocates increases quickly as time passes and hopefully liquid fluoride thorium reactors will be a reality in the near future. Check the media coverage section of this blog and this article to see what I mean. This other article on the subject of thorium is pretty informative.
Thanks for those articles, here in Sweden all updates on Thorium nuclear reactors and technology just went silent in 2007... I hope China succeeds in their mission as it would aid the whole world and provide us with better energy until we figure out cold fusion.
Joined: 6/11/2006
Posts: 818
Location: Arboga, Sweden
No. There's no reason to be against it. As previously stated, there are more reason to be against cars. Because they kill people each day. That being said, nuclear powered cars... hm... we might be onto something here!
No but seriously. I think it's fucking hilarious that environmental crusaders are on against everything that works, and wants us to use everything that really doesn't. Nuclear does what windoesn't. HAH. I'm on fire. Not literally. That'd be horrible.
Warp wrote:
omg lol this is so fake!!!1 the nes cant produce music like this!
They thought about making a nuclear-powered car back in the 50's, called the Nucleon. Unfortunately contemporary reactors were too big.
It was also at one point assumed that each house would have its own private nuclear reactor, providing energy too cheap to bother metering.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
As I'm pretty much the only one against nuclear power in this thread and I've seen the car argument repeatedly iterated, yea, I'm against cars too. There should only be public transportation and bikes. I feel like using cars as our primary means of transportation is just a big waste of resources and pretty irresponsible of our generation. But in the real world, as it is, it's pretty hard to live without using a car for "most people". Current circumstances almost force us to act irresponsibly.
I have difficulty blaming "our generation" (keeping in mind that TASVideos is a multi-generational community) for the failings in city planning, infrastructure investment, and so on that keep public transit and bikes from being viable methods of transportation. Lots of people prefer to live in relatively low-density areas, without having to give up access to all of the opportunities (jobwise, entertainmentwise, foodwise, etc) that cities provide. Obviously when high-speed personal transportation becomes cheap, people are going to take advantage of it, resulting in an exodus to the suburbs. And in the USA, there's plenty of room for suburbs.
Japan, and many European countries, don't have as much room to expand, so suburbification could only go so far; combine that with lesser gas subsidies and non-car-based transport options become more competitive. I suspect they also don't have anywhere near as much of a cultural attachment to the concept of automobiles, which means there's less objection to major rail buildouts or reworking cities to encourage bicycling.
In any event, the USA will catch up eventually. It has to; we're gradually bringing the price of car-based transportation back into line with reality (as gas prices go up, carbon emissions get taxed, and so on). The alternative of course is to come up with a cheap renewable gas substitute, at which point, who cares if we use cars for transport? They'd no longer be anywhere near as wasteful at that point.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The blame for our current style of living can only be on us.
Cars should have been forbidden out of principle. Obviously without cars, we'd have to give up lots of the benefits we are now used to, but we shouldn't have had those benefits in the first place. Later generations could have made many times more efficient use of the resources we are wasting today and many times more happiness could have been generated out of them. It seems we are a pretty dumb species when it comes to long-term planning.
As I'm pretty much the only one against nuclear power in this thread
It's not a question of being pro nuclear plants. It's a question of pragmatism. Exactly what would be the better alternative? Unfortunately simply shutting down the plants without coming up with anything that would replace them is not really a practical option. Modern economy, industry, technological progress (including quite important things like medical technology) and the welfare system depend on power production. Significantly reducing power production is going to hurt the well-being of many people. Probably many would die who otherwise wouldn't need to.
You would probably not be reading this if nuclear power was banned decades ago.
and I've seen the car argument repeatedly iterated, yea, I'm against cars too. There should only be public transportation and bikes.
You can't use public transportation and bikes to transport stuff from one place to another. Many of the important activities of individual people would be seriously hindered by the inability of independent vehicular driving. The usage of cars could certainly be significantly reduced (especially in the cities of certain countries), but banning it completely would be counter-productive.
(Well, we are going to run out of gas in a few decades anyways, so there's really no need to ban it. It will come naturally. I'm not really looking forward to it, though.)
Temporarily lower our standard of living.
Warp wrote:
Modern economy, industry, technological progress (including quite important things like medical technology) and the welfare system depend on power production. Significantly reducing power production is going to hurt the well-being of many people.
Give up on some of those things. Well yea, actually I'm not really against nuclear power as a whole, but I feel like we've completely unnecessarily rushed to get it (We should have gone with the HTGR model at the very least). Our current plants are too risky in the long term. If we manage to replace them with something else soon, before a low chance disaster beyond all expectations occurs, then mankind would have managed to dodge the bullet. That's most definitely what's going to happen. I don't think taking such risks, no matter how unthinkably low, is a smart move anyhow though.
Let's say mankind will potentially live for millions of years, but every 100 years it does something that poses a very low risk of total extinction to it for short term benefits. Will it eventually become extinct? The only solution is to not take any of these risks at all, or we will take many of them. I don't think it's a smart move, but in the case of nuclear power, I guess it's still somewhat up to debate. At least we should have hesitated to make use of it at such a relatively large scale. We'll be able to generate energy much more safely pretty soon. So why are we taking the risk, no matter how small? I simply see no need to.
Warp wrote:
Probably many would die who otherwise wouldn't need to.
Don't shut them off just like that, slowly reduce our dependancy on them first. I realize that's practically impossible without a one world government though.
Warp wrote:
You would probably not be reading this if nuclear power was banned decades ago.
I think we should have only temporarily banned it. Nobody was there who could have realistically done that though.
You can't use public transportation and bikes to transport stuff from one place to another. Many of the important activities of individual people would be seriously hindered by the inability of independent vehicular driving. The usage of cars could certainly be significantly reduced (especially in the cities of certain countries), but banning it completely would be counter-productive.
Of course it would be counter-productive. Of course it would hurt us tremendous amounts in the short term. We'd simply have to abandon all those benefits. Who knows what smart kinds of uses for oil future generations would be able to come up with? Is it really that necessary to get a 200% increase in productivity (still speaking primarily about cars*, exaggerating their benefits) to waste pretty much all the oil we will ever have on this planet?
*) reducing our reliance on cars would need to be the first step if we don't want to use up all the oil we have. then reduce consumption of the industry. or maybe both should go hand in hand. i'm not implying that banning cars alone would completely solve the problem. again, none of this is currently realistically possible, but that's our own fault
Warp wrote:
(Well, we are going to run out of gas in a few decades anyways, so there's really no need to ban it. It will come naturally. I'm not really looking forward to it, though.)
Well, if we ban it now (I'm not for totally banning it btw) the little difference would be that we still have it at our disposal in case we find out we can make better use of it for something else, f.e. to colonise new planets more efficiently. (bad example, but that's the general idea)
Our current plants are too risky in the long term. If we manage to replace them with something else soon, before a low chance disaster beyond all expectations occurs, then mankind would have managed to dodge the bullet.
I really think your concern is badly misaimed. Nuclear power is certainly not the greatest danger that humanity has. It's probably not even in the top-10 list.
One of the top dangers is pollution (and the subsequent global warming). That should be much higher in our list of priorities than nuclear power. In fact, rather ironically, nuclear power actually helps reducing pollution because it's a clear source of energy. (Yes, I know that mining for the radioactive material is somewhat polluting, and handling the nuclear waste is a big problem. However, when compared to other alternatives which produce the same amount of energy, the amount of total pollution is quite small. And approximately nothing else in this world is handled with more care than nuclear waste. It's a potential problem, but it's not a big one. There certainly are much bigger ones.)
Nuclear power is certainly not the greatest danger that humanity has. It's probably not even in the top-10 list.
I totally agree.
Warp wrote:
One of the top dangers is pollution (and the subsequent global warming).
I kind of disagree with the global warming part. It is a big danger right now. But at least theoretically it's probably easily reversible by stopping the pollution and just planting more plants.
Warp wrote:
That should be much higher in our list of priorities than nuclear power.
It is in mine. I'm only talking about the issue of nuclear power because the question arose. I don't go around protesting against it. But the fact that it's so low on my list doesn't mean I can't be against it (and again, I'm not totally against it as a whole, but against the way we currently make use of it).
Warp wrote:
In fact, rather ironically, nuclear power actually helps reducing pollution because it's a clear source of energy.
I disagree. It only reduces pollution per time span. As it looks right now, we are going to burn absolutely all of the oil we have at our disposal, no matter what. Mildly reducing our output of carbon dioxide makes us feel like heroes, but the level of proposed reduction is nowhere near where it should be - because as it looks, we're going to burn all of it anyway eventually. There's little difference.
Warp wrote:
And approximately nothing else in this world is handled with more care than nuclear waste.
Well, officially. Fukushima would have been less of an issue if they hadn't decided to store their used fuel rods so close to the reactor, for reasons of economical efficiency. Safety doesn't come first with that either.
At least we should have hesitated to make use of it at such a relatively large scale. We'll be able to generate energy much more safely pretty soon. So why are we taking the risk, no matter how small? I simply see no need to.
Let me help with this one. We simply won't be able to arrive at a safer, more efficient energy extraction technologies without having taken the risk of diving into existing technologies. In order, say, to achieve sustained nuclear fusion power generation, we had to have decades of thoroughly explored nuclear fission as a stepping stone. Just skipping over a step is not how things work unfortunately, cause I'd sure love to go from blimps and steam engines straight to antigrav vehicles. :)
That being said, the death toll of nuclear power (at least 90% of which is attributed to Chernobyl alone)—even in the dubious state we have now—is quite comparable to how many people coal mining industry is killing annually around the world. If anything, we should have banned that.
Now, lowering the living standards sounds like a very cute idea coming from an Austria resident. :) Sarcastic as it may sound, around 6 billion people worldwide are living by way lower welfare standards than you do. You could just move away from large cities and see those standards drop with every kilometer. You may have this kind of headroom to give up, but for many of them lowering the standards further would entail, directly or otherwise, exactly what Warp describes: death. Fukushima accident's (a result of a natural disaster expected to kill people and do massive damage, mind you!) effects have been less adverse, and, assuming things will evolve as they do now, will be less adverse than a decision to just abandon nuclear power altogether without instating an alternative source of energy first. The problem is that there's no such source of energy that is neither nuclear nor fossil fuel, that will serve as an adequate substitute without creating even larger problems, yet.
Taking 20-25% off the electricity grid is also really not as easy as not using an electric kettle, turning the lights off an hour earlier, or not browsing the favorite site. It will mean entirely changing the way of life. Hell, 20 years ago, when we had neither mobiles nor the Internet, already seem like dark ages of mankind by those who are not yet in their forties. And that's but a small, if perhaps the most strikingly obvious, facet of how technological progress is shaping humanity. But the party who will suffer the most from this lack of energy will be the industries, as most enterprises will not be able to do as much in the same time frame, thus instantly inflating prices and suffering bankruptcies, and some will just not be able to go on (think desalination plants, so many people will have to do without fresh water). All but the most backwater economies will instantly collapse or be in chaos. Some of the EU countries (like Greece) already tend to suffer that even without such drastic measures, and the only thing that helps them is that weakening is non-uniform.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
You can always make the argument that we ought to refuse to benefit now from some limited resource, so that people in the future could benefit more. You can make that argument. Yep. It's hilariously unrealistic, because humans in aggregate are generally greedy and don't look forward more than five-ten years or so at best, but you can make it.
It sounds to me like Kuwaga's basically saying "Man, this planet's going to Hell in a teakettle, what can we do to stop it?" And yeah, drastically reducing dirty energy consumption and/or moving to some as-yet-unrealized massive-output clean energy source are basic requirements to achieve that goal. But you can't just declare by fiat that everyone's going to use less energy. Maybe if you're incredibly evocative and persuasive, you could cut consumption by 10%...and then the people and organizations using the remaining 90% says "Sweet, more for me then." Organizations, especially corporations, are largely sociopathic, remember. Even governments don't look out more than a few years (until the next election).
If you want to get humanity as a whole to actually plan for the future, then you're gonna need a lot of brain surgeons or a lot of guns.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
So there was talk about deaths per energy unit produced for different energy production methods. Here are some numbers:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/lowering-deaths-per-terawatt-hour-for.html
As you can see nuclear power is at the very bottom.
If I should try to say any reason to be against it, it would be:
1) Possible proliferation of nuclear weapon technology to states that really should not have it, for example Iran.
2) Long-term storage problems. Humans seem to forget the locations of thing very rapidly in history. One example is sunken ships, I am sure there are others. (Perhaps this is alleviated by modern technology.) Also, there is a risk of leakage. It's hard to realistically test containers that are supposed to hold for 100,000 years. A lot of things can happen geologically during this time.
I would also like to say that the Italian cold fusion experiment mentioned earlier is almost certain to be a fraud, so don't get your hopes up. All warning lights are blinking: no external tests allowed, no patent, no peer reviewed articles, no funding, etc.
The storage issue can be mitigated by using a reactor that reprocesses its outputs as inputs, ideally in a breeder reactor. You end up with more highly-radioactive outputs, but their half-lives are drastically reduced -- down from thousands of years to decades. The main problem is that this produces weapons-grade radioactives, thus there's a proliferation concern.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
One note, the higher the power output, the greater the danger if something goes wrong. All that people that are saying that nuclear fission power is dangerous so we should move soon to fusion aren't thinking logically AT ALL. Let me explain what fusion power is. Fusion power is a GIANT BALL OF PLASMA as hot as the sun (and might be even hotter) that has to be contained on a giant magnetic field because IT MELTS EVERYTHING on the planet that it touches.
Unlike Fukushima, where people are terrified that the containment might have had a small fissure due to the earthquake, in a fusion reactor there's simply nothing that can contain the giant ball of plasma, and the best hope would be that it went straight to the center of the Earth creating the biggest hole ever.
I'm perfectly okay with nuclear power, and fusion reactors will be more powerful, cheaper, better and cleaner. But not safer. NOT. SAFER.
Er, wait, that giant ball of plasma you're talking about isn't self-sustainable without external power supplement, it cools down very rapidly if the power supply is interrupted.
Also, going through to the center of the Earth isn't really a good idea. :D
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
One note, the higher the power output, the greater the danger if something goes wrong. All that people that are saying that nuclear fission power is dangerous so we should move soon to fusion aren't thinking logically AT ALL. Let me explain what fusion power is. Fusion power is a GIANT BALL OF PLASMA as hot as the sun (and might be even hotter) that has to be contained on a giant magnetic field because IT MELTS EVERYTHING on the planet that it touches.
Unlike Fukushima, where people are terrified that the containment might have had a small fissure due to the earthquake, in a fusion reactor there's simply nothing that can contain the giant ball of plasma, and the best hope would be that it went straight to the center of the Earth creating the biggest hole ever.
I'm perfectly okay with nuclear power, and fusion reactors will be more powerful, cheaper, better and cleaner. But not safer. NOT. SAFER.
What? Where did you get that from? I hope your argument doesn't rely on the 'fusion reactor' featured in Spiderman 2.
1. The ball if FAR from giant. In fact, it is so small that you can't even see it.
2. As soon as the ball touches anything, it would cool down immediately.
3. As moozooh said, the moment the energy supply is interrupted, the fusion process is also interrupted, and well... nothing happens. At all. There is no critical reaction or something like it's the case for fission power.
I think one of the biggest problems with Nuclear Power here in the United States, would be the unpredictable weather conditions.
They could build a Nuclear Plant in Oklahoma, Kansas or Arkansas, just to have a massive EF5 Tornado come along and destroy it.
If we do build Nuclear Plants here, they need to be fortified to withstand massive Tornadoes and Hurricanes.
Personally, I think Nuclear Power would solve the country's energy needs for quite some time until fusion is a bit more stable to use.
What we need is for all of the politicians to stop being pansies and start using their heads.
But, as we all know, all politicians are brainless.
1. The ball if FAR from giant. In fact, it is so small that you can't even see it.
2. As soon as the ball touches anything, it would cool down immediately.
3. As moozooh said, the moment the energy supply is interrupted, the fusion process is also interrupted, and well... nothing happens. At all. There is no critical reaction or something like it's the case for fission power.
Also, the problem with nuclear reactors isn't the amount of energy they produce. The problem is radioactivity.
Even if a nuclear reactor were to explode like a hydrogen bomb (which they don't, because they aren't built to be bombs), it would cause some damage to its surroundings, and the pressure wave would certainly kill some people within a certain radius. However, if there wasn't any radiation involved, that would be all. It would be a catastrophe alright, but it wouldn't be very significant.
The real problem is the radioactivity. When a nuclear powerplant accident happens, the danger is in it spreading the radioactivity to its surroundings, which can be really nasty.
Nuclear fusion is a completely different mechanism than nuclear fission. For one, there are no radioactive materials involved. (Now, I'm no physicist so I can't tell for sure if the fusion reaction itself produces ionizing radiation. However, the danger is not any ionizing radiation produced by the reaction itself, but by the radioactive material spreading. There is no radioactive material in a fusion reaction.)
If a fusion reactor were to explode it would cause some immediate damage and possibly a few people nearby will die. However, other than that it would produce no long-lasting consequences.
Fusion does involve mildly radioactive materials (namely tritium, an unstable hydrogen isotope, and deuterium, which is stable but slightly toxic), but their amount required to sustain a reaction is too small for radioactivity to be a concern even in the case of an accident. Magnets exploding with a very strong blast wave is more of a concern.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
