A real energy future....

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

Underground natural reactors in West Africa!

oh you rock!!!!!

The Oklo Fossil Reactors in Gabon

Nature beat us by 2 billion years.

So much for the theory that Plutonium is artificially created by man. Sorry Dr. Seaborg.

[Skybird]

Let me first say that I am not happy that this discussion about the critical sides of nuclear energy in gen-eral has tuned out be a discussion about Chernobyl almost exclusively. This not only ignores the many other reasons than just worst case scenarios that speak against it, but also gives the – wrong - impression that if Chernobyl only could be seen as harmless enough, all other problems with nuclear energy had been neutralised as well. I have tried to point at many different things, and even kept pointing at the popular debate on security issues short. The economical and political as well as the –time-related prob-lems remain, no matter Chernobyl being more or less bad.

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

Semantics aside I posted the relevant aspects of the U.N. report and they sound remarkably similar. Are they a decent source or would you prefer another? If so, what kind of source? Government sources? Private investigations? Whatever you please.

A party having interests to turn things into a certain direction, does not have the credibility to be seen as “objective” und unbiased. That is why I warn to blindly trust into such sources. Usually this forum sees extreme UN bashing and making ridicule on every report it releases and that is not in conformity with one’s own political views. The IPCC report for example was made mockery of in various threads. But the same organization should suddenly be all unsuspicious when it is about Chernobyl because this time it falls into political line?

I meanwhile gave a link to the extreme at the other end of the spectrum, the report linked by Green-peace. Additionally, somebody linked the videos about Chernobyl health consequences. Both should help to relativism any attempt of trying to minimize the damage by Chernobyl in the long run. While the early reports in the late 80s of hundreds of thousands gotten killed in the first two years (yes, there were such reports at the end of the 80s) meanwhile have been proven wrong, I must say that I consider at-tempts of rejecting that hundreds of thousands nevertheless got extremely effected in their health condi-tion and that cancer and deformation rates have seen a steep rise, as being falsified as well.

The only real regulation comes from an empowered and informed populace.

Which is a happy and thankful object of massive manipulation. The bigger the crowd, the less intelli-gence. The less stupidity on display, the more lonely the individual. For me, stupidity is a sociological phenomenon, with mob size and intelligence being naturally antagonistic . I see no true democracy in the West, not in Germany, and not in America, nowhere. Freedom is no right, it is an ability that must be learned. But people get systematically hindered and prevented from learning that, and get trained to use it only in such ways that the outcome serves the interests of interest groups, while the crowd sings hap-pily for having practiced it’s precious, valuable freedom. Oligarchies and plutocracies is what I see – like Aristoteles said that every democracy sooner or later necessarily must degenerate into. Since the western democracies are in such a poor condition, it is no wonder that they no longer seem to hold seri-ous attractiveness to the rest of the world:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...558832,00.html

THis argument is a distortion of the available supply of fissile uranium when one considers the nature of breeder reactors.

Sure, let's go with 3 million tons of fissile uranium.

U-238, the most naturally abundant uranium isotope, is, like I said, 3 times as common as silver. It is not fissile, but breeder reactors make it so by bombarding it with neutrons.

Previously I posited that it has been claimed there is enough u-238 to supply power for 5 billion years. That, I have discovered, is only if we consume it at the rate we did in 2003.

That is an absurd claim – as if the difference in energy consummation between 2003 and 2008 would allow us to calculate differences in the longevity of current uranium resources with the precision needed to see changes in – as you claim – the “5 billion years span” that you claim. BTW, the earth is said to have been formed – how many billion years ago…? (hint-hint… ).

I do not know where you get your numbers here, but they cannot be the numbers that drive the markets. I just stick to what I have kept in memory in a summarized form: that current natural uranium resources, no matter how they get processed, will be enough to support the current system and it’s current demands for around 60 more years. Uranium gets more and more expensive at stock-markets, and got a trading good of decreasing availability recently. Why that if our needs regarding nuclear energy as already taken care of for the next 5 billion years, as you claim?

If nuclear energy were the world's only energy source, and we take into account current trends in population growth and resultant energy consumption, we have 3,000 to 10,000 years supply. There are 5 million tons (known) of U-238 that is considered "economical" to exploit in the U.S. alone.

We need to disagree on our numbers here. You claim that the US alone has almost twice as much known uranium that can be won under economical, profitable conditions than all continents hold altogether, and holds six times as much as Canada and Australia hold together, according to my numbers. Well, we dis-agree here beyond compromise, it seems. But I see the market behaviour of the past years supporting my position.

[Skybird]

On your first point, government hasn't given us much for the billions spent thus far in new energy research. They didn't develop solar or wind power, they have yet to produce fusion. Ironically, the only real energy source the government ever "developed" was nuclear energy, and that stemmed from trying to produce weapons-grade fissile materials. Don't let it cross your mind that that is an argument for gov-ernment energy research. Private nuclear research was underway before the U.S. government ever got involved and also produced the commercial reactor.

Private markets fund new energy research as well. Why not leave it to them where it costs us nothing. If they succeed, great! If they fail, too bad for their investors. Government research costs all of us (or all of us that actually pay taxes) whether they succeed or fail.

You essentially say: leave it to an economy world and a business model that prefers to stick heads into the sand and stick with oil. You say: let’s ignore that OPEC’s information on how much oil they have, is politically motivated, for the quotas allowed for each member to produce per year depends on it’s re-sources. The more the have, the more they are allowed to produce, the higher their income. That is the reason why you can see OPEC members sometime reporting higher and sometimes smaller reserves. Kuwait was needed to admit three or four years ago that in the nineties they reported a rise in resources because they wanted to produce more oil, but in fact at that time already knew they had smaller re-sources than before and after that rise reported. You also say that we should not learn a lesson from the oil crisis in the 70s, which should had been understood as a warning shot regarding our suicidal depend-ence on oil – but nobody reacted, nothing was done to reduce that, for profits from the status quo still shone too bright.

The current economical system is extremely short-eyed and does not look any farther than to the next Euro. And plenty of companies, like energy producers, have no interest in changing our course at all. On the other hand, the Arabs are spending stellar sums of money into investments in western business, getting shares and control over them for the time they have run out of the source of their wealth: oil. And I confess I belong to the camp being sure that we already are beyond peak oil since three or four years. This does not mean that we run out of oil in the next twenty years. It only means that the available oil will not cover all demand, that the gap will grow, and that prices beside weekly or even monthly fluctuations in micro-cycles will generally climb to the heavens over the next 50-60 years. Ironically, American economists argue that the recent fall in gas price in the US – was created by enough American car drivers having decided to leave their cars at home and use other tools of transportation, or not to travel at all. Since this means that with lower prices more drivers will return to cars, the current fall will be temporary only and thus gas prices will start to rise soon again.

Well, like I said, all our state research hasn't given us anything palpable thus far. We can argue that point forever but the fact remains that we have state-funded research and we have an energy crisis simultaneously.

the state can and should use taxes not to build, invent and create by himself, but it should influence the social environment in which economy is to unfold,. By laws, setting goals in education, taxes, etc. If you create an environment that extremely favours old structures and oil-dependant technology, that will be what you get. Bush is a prime example for that. If your create an environment by designing taxes and prices such that new energy technology and it’s invention gets rewarded and is profitable, and oil de-pendant economy gets penalised and discouraged, you get something different. If you do nothing and leave it all to a liberal market, you get monopole, predatory economy running amok in brutal search for just it’s own maximum interests no matter the costs, and consumers and private households helplessly exposed to this savaging of unscrupulous privateers. There are two extremes, and both do not work, and cause terribly costs for the community: the myth of 5-year-plans and state controlled economy like in the USSR, and the myth of the liberal market creating communal good effects by adjusting itself unregu-lated and not interfering with market processes: a view that is extremely popular with Americans, of course. But it is illusive. The American economy is one of the most protected in the world (followed the latest round of WTO talks and how they failed again, yes? ), and when it comes to agriculture and high technology, the US is as protective as is the EU or China or Russia. Additionally, if there is one thing to know about pure, unregulated capitalism, than this: it leads to monopolism, and that is not in the interest of the national community, but takes the community prisoner. Monopoles do not lead but pre-vent free markets. The idea of a free market effectively destroys itself.

You need an authority that sets limits and defines rules that are beyond the conception of capitalism. Some regulation you need, to give the economy a vision of the direction at which to develop, and to make sure there is a fair balancing of private, economic interests, and communal interests. I say: as much regulation as needed, but as little as possible. Originally, this has been the idea behind the Euro-pean conception of “social market economy”, as I understand it. But for various reasons, this concept as well as the utopia of liberal markets has ruined itself. Our excessive living beyond our standards has something to do with it, as well as the creeping turning of democratic structures into oligarchic and un-regulated capitalistic structures (that no longer fall under the description of “social market economy”). Ironically, the so-called globalization has been the most prominent nail in the coffin of social market economy and protectionism as well. With very bad and costly consequences BOTH for Europe AND America. Maybe that is why the enthusiasm of many forethinkers of globalization has sharply decreased in the past couple of years - it did not work for us as intended, but has turned against us.

If America could combine the economic freedom that led to our becoming a superpower and combine it with the personal freedom that we have sort of embraced at some points, at least for some people, and gave that to all people in our nation, I would be proud to sit amongst an audience of jeering delegates and say "We'll remember this when your country is being invaded or you want money."

But you are no longer a superpower, and in fact are financially and economically extremely vulnerable and dependant, and currently deeply hurt by the mortgage crisis, a stellar deficit, stellar debts, consumer having accumulated suicidal debt credits. I do not take it as granted that my generation will see yours recovering from this - if it ever does. Your nation is running on tick, namely Chinese good will. If they would have stopped to buy your worthless treasury bonds, even Bush would not have been able to come up with the even greater deficits to finance the Iraq war. Mostly unnoticed, China and several Arab na-tions have slowly started to transform their dollar into euro reserves, and slowly more and more voices at OPEC dare to imagine that one could start doing oil sales not in Dollar, but in Euro. Could you imag-ine what that would mean for the US if it no longer makes a win from every barrel oil sold anywhere in the world (it effectively is a license to print money)? Just today Greenspan has warned of more major US banks collapsing. I do not know if the past two years already were the start of the big market earth-quake, but I know that this big one is coming and that it will leave the US stripped of major shares of it’s basis of former wealth. The US simply is extremely bad prepared for that event – and some prominent voices still warn to take that serious! That borders to maliciousness, or psychotic refusal of reality.

Luckily for the rest of the world we trudge inexorably towards financial collapse as we maintain a "benign" and unsustainable amount of federal spending and inflation.

At least YOU seem to have seen the danger ahead. But the world is not lucky because the world is that pays for the failures of the American financial system and the flaws in it’s economical design. As I said, you live on tick. On Arab tick. On Chinese tick. On European tick. Additionally, you have sold away several key parts of your economy, and jobs in huge quantity anyway. And sooner or later all three of these will conclude that they are no longer willing to afford the losses of such immense investments just to keep the patient alive so that they have still an American harbour where to unload their goods. China will soon hit a limit of growth, naturally, and will face growing problems from environmental sins it has committed, decreasing financial power due to raising demands of Chinese consumer to raise their living standard. They will be in need to consider twice and three times the pro and cons of continuing their current investment habits into the US financial system. Currently they only do it to keep the American market open for their exports. – and if they decide they do no longer wish or need these export to the US, and compensate for that in less costly ways than sticking to US treasury bonds? They are almost worthless these days, and are more a deal of buying a quantum of limited additional market stability for a limited additional period of time. Stop buying them and the show stops running. A banker my parents know called them a “last line of desperate final defence”, and a “great illusion”.

Energy policy is just a small symptom of the economy-destroying nature of big government. Per-haps in Germany, a country known for its' remarkable efficiency and ability to bounce back from crisis, this may not be a concern but in the U.S. it is. Social and education issues have been exacerbated by government policy on several occasion. The energy crisis in the U.S. is no exception.

I think you have exaggerated views of the Germany of today. The shining past is over.

German Focus-Magazine this week has a story about American needs to catch up with required invest-ments (German news are very much interested in American affairs, far more than American medias re-port about German issues.). They wrote that investments are desperately needed to repair 1/3 of the road-grid (costs 126 billion $), ¼ of all bridges (140 billion), 1/3 of the railway grid (195 billion), ½ of waterways, channels and rivers with economic traffic, dams and flooding protection (125 billion), and 1/5 of greater and intenratio0nal airports (15 billion). Investments into the power-grid would cost addi-tional 40 billion. Wowh – I would not wish to walk in your shoes! According to calculations done by the ASCE, in the next 5 years alone 1.6 trillion dollars would be needed to save the current infrastruc-ture, plus 130 billion per each year used on transportation exclusively. Compare that to the record defi-cit for 2008 of 482 billion and the state debts of 9.5 trillion. All that together sounds like a ticking time bomb to me. – The title of this article, and the subtitle for a book about the Iraq war, is “Koloß auf tönernen Füßen”. That means something like “giant standing on feet of clay” or “a giant with a shaky stand”. I think that fits well.

Personally, I think the causes may stem from administrating such a large country from a central location and the fact that we are not Germans.

Americans tend to regulate to little. Germans tend to regulate too much. Really, Germany is going crazy as well. Just in different ways than America. Or England. Or any other country.

Perhaps the solutions for our different nations may be different, but for a large, diverse nation with the vast economic potential of the U.S., my answer is the meter-shattering power of nuclear en-ergy.

Not that this thread was hijacked meanwhile, no…

*****

I must say that I enjoy such a discussion, although we disagree on many things, and agree only on some. What makes talking with you different to my experiences with several others is that it is easy for you and me of not becoming personal and offensive. I appreciate that, for it is a change to much of what has happened in the GT forum in the past.

Neal must rub his eyes, unbelieving. several years ago I told him that I think such talks are possible, in principle. He did not believe me.

On the nuclear issue we probably cannot close any more ground between us, so maybe it is a good idea to leave that one behind now, else we start running in circles.

[Zachstar]

This topic has completely derailed...

Can it be closed please? I will start another with a request not to turn this into a fission debate..

Edit: Can somebody report this post so the mods can see it? I can't seem to report my own posts.

[Skybird]

Consider it to be just one of these days at the office!

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Zachstar

This topic has completely derailed...

Can it be closed please? I will start another with a request not to turn this into a fission debate..

Edit: Can somebody report this post so the mods can see it? I can't seem to report my own posts.

I'm sorry Zachstar, this is my fault. I guess I misinterpreted your meaning of a real energy future. I'm sure you've been hit over the head enough with my idea that nukes are my idea of a real energy future, so I won't try to debate their relevance to your post.


I have a few points to reconcile with sky, but I will do it via PM. If you make a new thread I will try very hard to respond within your desired parameters. Now that I look at it, I think this thread was meant to entice discussion about exciting and plausible solution in the field of alternative energy that can be reasonably expected in the near future. I may not have much to contribute in that area, but one way or the other, I will try not to derail your thread again.

[Skybird]

That threads' content are shifting during the debate is a common thing in GT forum, and as long as the shifting does not include shifting towards personal hostilities, I think it is no serious issue at all. This is no academical forum. we come here to meet, to talk, and have some fun, like you go into your pub to meet your buddies and have a drink together. Part of the fun is how talkings develope, and threads can change. It is like this since I joined 8 years ago. and something tells me that it probably will not change.

It was a good debate anyway. So better relax everybody, enjoy, and not taking it too serious. No hard feelings, Zachstar!