First and foremost, I'm not denying climate change here

and even though it will ultimately take a political solution at the end of the day to save the planet, we strictly follow the new dakka policy on no political discussion.

This discussion is merely on the technical side e.g are wind turbines any good in combatting climate change?

I ask this question, because the more I hear about what goes in combatting climate change, the more concerned I get.

For example:

1. People in Britain were meticulously recycling paper, plastic, glass etc in special bins which every household has...and then later on you find out this stuff ended up in a landfill in Africa or China!

2. Electric cars. Sounds excellent in theory, and charging a dynamo up as you go down hill is common sense...and then you read about how much damage, pollution and CO2 is used to get the rare Earth metals out of the ground to make these batteries.

3. Wind turbines siting idle when there's no wind. And problems reported from those who live near them. One collapsed during a storm near where I live I'm beginning to think that wind turbines were a giant ponzi scheme.

4. There was a report in the BBC a few months back that engineering efficiency I.e. making electronic goods more energy efficient was doing more for reducing CO2 levels than most of the wind and tidal renewables put together.

5. The other day, it was reported that new, so called biodegradable bags, we're taking longer to break down than expected. 5 years in some cases It was supposed to be 3 years max.

A few of many examples.

So, what does dakka think? Are current green measures effective, or are we spitting in the wind, here?

If you give Rodney the wiener dog jelly beans, he will recycle all over the yard...

Any and all measures have to be considered in a rational manner, and re-evaluated as new data comes in. What may seem like a great solution on proposal may be unworkable, economically unfeasible, or just plain not work in practice.

The trick is getting people to consider things in a rational manner. Most people tend to 'think' with their emotions, and everyone is prone to manipulation by people with money at stake in any given solution or lack thereof.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
First and foremost, I'm not denying climate change here

and even though it will ultimately take a political solution at the end of the day to save the planet, we strictly follow the new dakka policy on no political discussion.

This discussion is merely on the technical side e.g are wind turbines any good in combatting climate change?

I ask this question, because the more I hear about what goes in combatting climate change, the more concerned I get.

For example:

1. People in Britain were meticulously recycling paper, plastic, glass etc in special bins which every household has...and then later on you find out this stuff ended up in a landfill in Africa or China!

2. Electric cars. Sounds excellent in theory, and charging a dynamo up as you go down hill is common sense...and then you read about how much damage, pollution and CO2 is used to get the rare Earth metals out of the ground to make these batteries.

3. Wind turbines siting idle when there's no wind. And problems reported from those who live near them. One collapsed during a storm near where I live I'm beginning to think that wind turbines were a giant ponzi scheme.

4. There was a report in the BBC a few months back that engineering efficiency I.e. making electronic goods more energy efficient was doing more for reducing CO2 levels than most of the wind and tidal renewables put together.

5. The other day, it was reported that new, so called biodegradable bags, we're taking longer to break down than expected. 5 years in some cases It was supposed to be 3 years max.

A few of many examples.

So, what does dakka think? Are current green measures effective, or are we spitting in the wind, here?

I do kind of feel like we are doing a half-ass job with them, and a lot of the green initiatives are more of a fad/marketing tool rather than a genuine attempt to help the environment. A lot of the times, it has to do with the fact that we aren't really holding the people supposedly doing the initiatives/jobs responsible past a certain point since the average person's interest basically peters out once they think "they've done their part" which is drop the bottle in the blue bin or buy something with the "green-sigil of approval". This means that even if there is a real foundation behind a lot of these initiatives and projects, once money and other issues kick in, people start taking shortcuts and keep up the initial front of it being efficient and great, even if it may not be true, meaning that any follow-ups tend to be far too late.

I do also think it doesn't help that a lot of the older generation seem pretty apathetic towards global warming and the impact of damaging the environment, mainly because they haven't been hammered with it as much as my generation was and thus many take the stance of "that's the next generation's problem not mine, I'll be dead by then".

I feel guilt for my contribution to plastic rubbish, exhaust emissions etc, and do my best to recycle, reuse etc. But then if you look at the big picture, our contribution to overall pollution compared to places like Africa, SE Asia, China, India etc is minuscule. I know its fashionable to point to those places when this issue comes up, but our green efforts are basically a mouse trying to eff an elephant.

Until we can persuade China and Eastern European countries from building yet more coal-fired power stations or convince India to abandon ICE vehicles, for eaxample, diligently making sure your bottles are sorted into the correct bin is more like pissing into the wind.

That's not to say that it is a waste of time and we should all just say 'hang it, I can't be bothered' but rather that we have got to the stage where we need a concerted global effort instead of trying to do it at a national level. It needs to be a UN thing, I think. Sadly, it's very difficult and hypocritical for us in the West to point at 3rd world countries and say 'we got our shiny cars, electricity and new iPhones but you can't have yours because it might harm the planet'. They very rightly see the modern, Western way of life and want it as well and why not? As I have said before in these threads, it needs a massive, global upheaval to effect any meaningful change. Until that time, we will carry on recycling our plastic and building wind farms, assuaging our guilt and convincing ourselves that it is going to make a difference.

 Vulcan wrote:
Any and all measures have to be considered in a rational manner, and re-evaluated as new data comes in. What may seem like a great solution on proposal may be unworkable, economically unfeasible, or just plain not work in practice.

The trick is getting people to consider things in a rational manner. Most people tend to 'think' with their emotions, and everyone is prone to manipulation by people with money at stake in any given solution or lack thereof.

Sensible words.

And I agree with your emotional manipulation point. I cringe every time I see TV ads where big corporations and the usual suspects are trying to jump on the green bandwagon. Kids running around in fields of flowers, soft, sentimental music humming away softly in the background.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 filbert wrote:
Until we can persuade China and Eastern European countries from building yet more coal-fired power stations or convince India to abandon ICE vehicles, for eaxample, diligently making sure your bottles are sorted into the correct bin is more like pissing into the wind.

That's not to say that it is a waste of time and we should all just say 'hang it, I can't be bothered' but rather that we have got to the stage where we need a concerted global effort instead of trying to do it at a national level. It needs to be a UN thing, I think. Sadly, it's very difficult and hypocritical for us in the West to point at 3rd world countries and say 'we got our shiny cars, electricity and new iPhones but you can't have yours because it might harm the planet'. They very rightly see the modern, Western way of life and want it as well and why not? As I have said before in these threads, it needs a massive, global upheaval to effect any meaningful change. Until that time, we will carry on recycling our plastic and building wind farms, assuaging our guilt and convincing ourselves that it is going to make a difference.

Another great comment.

What gets my goat is the way we jump from bandwagons to bandwagons. A few years ago, it was cans, now, because of Richard Attenborough's great documentary on plastic in the oceans, plastic is public enemy number one. We never seem to settle on a coherent strategy, and yesterday's fashions are forgotten.

Let me give everybody an example. Last year, in the Sunday Post (a Scottish newspaper) a landfill expert wrote an alarming story on our old landlfills, the one's from 50-60 years ago. And they are leaking, and old stuff is getting out, and any old landfill near the coast is in danger od coastal erosion

And this was just Scotland, so the rest of the UK must be in a similar position.

and the response from the authorities was silence!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I feel guilt for my contribution to plastic rubbish, exhaust emissions etc, and do my best to recycle, reuse etc. But then if you look at the big picture, our contribution to overall pollution compared to places like Africa, SE Asia, China, India etc is minuscule. I know its fashionable to point to those places when this issue comes up, but our green efforts are basically a mouse trying to eff an elephant.

Totally agree. We in the UK are being encouraged to cut down on milk and dairy, and I've no argument for that, and then you read about the demand for milk and red meat from the Chinese middle-classes going through the roof.

I'm not bashing China here

and they have a point when they say you got to industrialise, why not us,

but feck me if this whole thing feels like a road to nowhere.

Writing only in terms of "The West" I think one of the big problems is scale. Its already been mentioned here that I can buy consumer electronics or a personal vehicle, etc. etc. And my operation of my personal vehicles puts out X emissions which does some kind of harm to the environment.

IMHO, the problem is that we're all too often focused on what we little guy can do. The real problem that western countries have (again, looking only internally) is that our industry still puts out a ton of emissions and aren't really trying to "clean up". I think this will always be a problem until we further incentivize the industrial side of things to "go green." Until they come up with ways of producing the goods that are consumed without the harmful side effects, we're always going to be about where we are. I know there are some policies in certain realms, particularly stuff like "carbon offsets", but those have major problems all on their own to begin with. Ultimately, it will come down to the P-word, and whether the People actually get their say, and get policies shifted in a direction that is good for all.

I'd just like for us to stop dumping our rubbish in the ocean and perhaps try and take more measures to clean it up.

The UK is pretty good but I honestly don't believe education is the full answer. The amount of times I need to clean up the back court of the flats I live at is beyond a joke. Even with all this infrastructure people can't even put their stuff in bins properly.



There's a particular kind of busy body that's attracted to these causes that often seek to clean a beach for a photo op or is aggressively interested in world affairs but can't keep their own backyards clean.

Like a NIMBY but reversed.

 filbert wrote:
Until we can persuade China and Eastern European countries from building yet more coal-fired power stations or convince India to abandon ICE vehicles, for eaxample, diligently making sure your bottles are sorted into the correct bin is more like pissing into the wind.

That's not to say that it is a waste of time and we should all just say 'hang it, I can't be bothered' but rather that we have got to the stage where we need a concerted global effort instead of trying to do it at a national level. It needs to be a UN thing, I think. Sadly, it's very difficult and hypocritical for us in the West to point at 3rd world countries and say 'we got our shiny cars, electricity and new iPhones but you can't have yours because it might harm the planet'. They very rightly see the modern, Western way of life and want it as well and why not? As I have said before in these threads, it needs a massive, global upheaval to effect any meaningful change. Until that time, we will carry on recycling our plastic and building wind farms, assuaging our guilt and convincing ourselves that it is going to make a difference.

Didn't you forget the US states aswell as brazil and co KG?

Well designed solutions work.

Poorly designed solutions don't.

Failure of some ideas means doing better with designing the next solution, not giving up on long-term survival by saying "green doesn't work."

/thread

As all countries haven't developed at the same rate and at the same time, a concerted effort will be very hard to pull off, as has already been mentioned.

The problem is that a lot of climate action groups aren't really for the climate and more for profit and the same goes for governments as they're all wrangling with the energy triad without thinking of the bigger picture. I won't talk about politics any further than that!

Coming from an O&G background, the industry is far cleaner today than it was in the 20th century as much of the West is on on the decline in terms of coal usage and switching to cleaner fuels like gas as well as renewables (with the exception of Germany, who for some reason are decommissioning their nuclear plants and returning to mining brown coal which is low quality and one of the worst for pollutants). Nuclear fusion needs to hurry up but for the time being fission is still an excellent alternative.

China are still catching up but they've made a massive onshore oil and gas discovery in this past week so that will potentially cause a decline in the amount of coal usage but it's doubtful in the short term until that field comes online.

I don't think that any measures we can take to combat climate change are going to make any difference. The world as a whole lacks the political will to do what needs to be done to effect the needed change. Filbert already summed it up pretty well.

In the West the green and eco-movement is embraced more out of a sales-technique (i.e. guilt laden purchases etc.) than genuine interest in the future of the planet. That's why I'm dismissive of so many products I see being thrown at concerned Westerners.

I think we're not addressing the actual real major contributors in a meaningful way - and more importantly even if we doubled up what we're doing now, is it enough as the population increases? I would imagine population increase will outstrip the relatively minimal forward progress we're making.

It's easy to criticize middle-class Western citizens and to guilt them into buying "green" products...but that doesn't fly in the developing world where money is scarce and environmentalism is a distant second behind managing to find enough food to feed the family tonight, etc.

I don't run around wringing my hands over the environment, but I do live my life as waste-minimal as I can from a simple and reasonable perspective. I recycle, bring my own bags for grocery shopping, drive a normal car that suits my needs as is reasonably economical, etc. I don't waste food or water when I can avoid it etc...but I'm not an activist.

I would like to see more environmentally friendly initiatives moving forward, but the reality is they have to be legitimate and logical replacements to encourage companies and businesses and industries to invest in them. Electric cars are a good example of a bad product, being sold more for identity politics and "look how green we are...buy our stuff!" vs. "this is legitimately having a positive impact on the environment" etc. Electric cars are not a worldwide solution or a feasible one. It's a tiny market for people who can afford to run them and for people who feel better about themselves when they buy one, etc. It's not being done out of the goodness of manufacturers' hearts. It's just a sales tool.

If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, we could eliminate coal completely and have a very clean energy source that doesn't foul up the atmosphere. Storing all that nuclear waste could get to be a problem, but perhaps ultimately it'll become economically feasible to just launch that stuff into space or into the sun or something.

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, we could eliminate coal completely and have a very clean energy source that doesn't foul up the atmosphere. Storing all that nuclear waste could get to be a problem, but perhaps ultimately it'll become economically feasible to just launch that stuff into space or into the sun or something.

There are a lot of reasons this doesn't work, but let's pick the one biggest, most obvious one.

Imagine what a launch accident would like like - spraying 20 tons of nuclear waste over potentially populated areas.

There have been 135 shuttle missions. Out of those, 6 had serious accidents (2 killed the entire crew and lost the vehicle).

There are 60 nuclear power plants in the US, producing 1200 tons of nuclear waste a year. Assuming the worst case 1 horrible accident per 70 flights, that works out to about one hideous, unprecedented nuclear waste disaster every single year, more or less (and that's if you only start shipping out the new waste).

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
First and foremost, I'm not denying climate change here

and even though it will ultimately take a political solution at the end of the day to save the planet, we strictly follow the new dakka policy on no political discussion.

This discussion is merely on the technical side e.g are wind turbines any good in combatting climate change?

I ask this question, because the more I hear about what goes in combatting climate change, the more concerned I get.

For example:

1. People in Britain were meticulously recycling paper, plastic, glass etc in special bins which every household has...and then later on you find out this stuff ended up in a landfill in Africa or China!

Personal recycling was always a boondoggle, but "it's your fault for being so wasteful, just recycle" is, without getting into the politics of why, a much easier sell for politicians than "we have to make fundamental changes to large parts of our societies' underlying structures, in ways that will likely result in lower profits for big corporations".

2. Electric cars. Sounds excellent in theory, and charging a dynamo up as you go down hill is common sense...and then you read about how much damage, pollution and CO2 is used to get the rare Earth metals out of the ground to make these batteries.

Largely a red herring, since extracting and burning fossil fuels still causes much more damage and pollution. Batteries are also something that can be recycled fairly efficiently, and when done large-scale by big companies like car manufacturers is actually feasible.

3. Wind turbines siting idle when there's no wind. And problems reported from those who live near them. One collapsed during a storm near where I live I'm beginning to think that wind turbines were a giant ponzi scheme.

I dunno why them not being active 100% of the time is an issue, the point is that when they are active they can generate a huge amount of clean power, and with proper facilities(pumped hydro storage) that energy can even be "saved" for peak times at a fairly high level of efficiency. As for living near them, I'd rather live next to a wind farm than a coal fired or nuclear plant.

4. There was a report in the BBC a few months back that engineering efficiency I.e. making electronic goods more energy efficient was doing more for reducing CO2 levels than most of the wind and tidal renewables put together.

What makes you think we don't need to be doing both and a whole lot more? Spoiler; we do need to be doing both and a whole lot more.

5. The other day, it was reported that new, so called biodegradable bags, we're taking longer to break down than expected. 5 years in some cases It was supposed to be 3 years max.

This is a classic example of the press reporting something in a way that implies one thing, when the actual facts are something different. The study they were talking about was studying whether these bags were better, worse, or equivalent in terms of environmental impact than regular plastic bags when disposed of improperly. People hear "biodegradable" and think "so I can just chuck 'em then" when the reality is they're designed to break down rapidly under specific conditions like composting or landfill, if you just chuck them in the ocean, as the study shows, they're not much better than regular plastic bags.

That's an argument for not chucking bags in the ocean, not against biodegradable plastics.

A few of many examples.

So, what does dakka think? Are current green measures effective, or are we spitting in the wind, here?

No, current green measures aren't effective, because of what I said in response to point 1 - most of this stuff is good an necessary, but it's not enough. We can't solve this problem by pawing through our own individual trash like raccoons or sticking a 5p charge on plastic bags at the supermarket, it needs big, structural, systemic alterations to a lot of things that the forum rules prevent us from discussing. That doesn't mean that recycling or bag charges are bad, they're just not good enough.

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, ...

That's not going to happen. Not while we have examples like Chernobyl and Fukishima showing what happens when something goes wrong.


And not when you have safer options becoming more widely available all the time.

I think I am cool as far as the planet goes, but the grandkids are royally gakked. As much as I'd like to help, naw gak it, they're fethed. Too bad really, it was a pretty good planet for a while. (Taking the really long view, humans are a blip, intelligence is fleeting, etc.--the only way you can really stay sane and still consume mass, well everything).

 Ouze wrote:

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, we could eliminate coal completely and have a very clean energy source that doesn't foul up the atmosphere. Storing all that nuclear waste could get to be a problem, but perhaps ultimately it'll become economically feasible to just launch that stuff into space or into the sun or something.

There are a lot of reasons this doesn't work, but let's pick the one biggest, most obvious one.

Imagine what a launch accident would like like - spraying 20 tons of nuclear waste over potentially populated areas.

There have been 135 shuttle missions. Out of those, 6 had serious accidents (2 killed the entire crew and lost the vehicle).

There are 60 nuclear power plants in the US, producing 1200 tons of nuclear waste a year. Assuming the worst case 1 horrible accident per 70 flights, that works out to about one hideous, unprecedented nuclear waste disaster every single year, more or less (and that's if you only start shipping out the new waste).

Yeah. Launching nuclear waste into space is dumb.

But storing it under a mountain somewhere is perfectly viable. Dealing with nuclear waste is hardly a monumental challenge.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, we could eliminate coal completely and have a very clean energy source that doesn't foul up the atmosphere. Storing all that nuclear waste could get to be a problem, but perhaps ultimately it'll become economically feasible to just launch that stuff into space or into the sun or something.

There are a lot of reasons this doesn't work, but let's pick the one biggest, most obvious one.

Imagine what a launch accident would like like - spraying 20 tons of nuclear waste over potentially populated areas.

There have been 135 shuttle missions. Out of those, 6 had serious accidents (2 killed the entire crew and lost the vehicle).

There are 60 nuclear power plants in the US, producing 1200 tons of nuclear waste a year. Assuming the worst case 1 horrible accident per 70 flights, that works out to about one hideous, unprecedented nuclear waste disaster every single year, more or less (and that's if you only start shipping out the new waste).

Yeah. Launching nuclear waste into space is dumb.

But storing it under a mountain somewhere is perfectly viable. Dealing with nuclear waste is hardly a monumental challenge.

Well, by definition, it is sort of a monumental challenge. As in we would need to have some number of people ...., and it would probably end up being some sort of monument someday. How bout we just burn it? Like really hot. All we would need is the biggest vent fan. A vent fan doesn't seem as dangerous as all the other stuff. Actually, if a space elevator isn't outside the realm...

 insaniak wrote:

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, ...

That's not going to happen. Not while we have examples like Chernobyl and Fukishima showing what happens when something goes wrong.


And not when you have safer options becoming more widely available all the time.

Which just proves that people are stupid and don't understand what actually caused those events, things which won't exist in power plants.

Chernobyl can hardly actually even be called an accident. It would be better to describe it as willful negligence rather than an accident. A test that was carried out because of political pressure under conditions which everybody involved knew were completely unsafe, and yet they did it anyway. Given the example that Chernobyl set, nobody would ever pull a stunt like it again. Furthermore, modern nuclear power plants literally cannot have the same type of disaster occur even if someone tried.

Fukishima is a sort of similar thing. A nuclear power plant with built without proper countermeasures in place to deal with a tsunami, in a tsunami prone area. Which again an issue with nuclear power, its an issue with people being dumb.

Furthermore, the environmental damage caused by both of these events is wildly exaggerated. Chernobyl, the worst nuclear disaster in history, has not left a nuclear wasteland. The area around is a thriving ecosystem that just happens to have a higher rate of minor mutation in the plants and animals. Fukishima is even more insignificant.

Given the massive benefits of nuclear power, the relatively minor risk of a radiation leak is worth it in the long run.

The sad thing is that governments are unlikely to invest in long term solutions to anything. I've often felt that most politicians don't care about much that does not affect them during their term of office. At least that's the feel I get with Australian politics, they love to make promises about this and that but only have a roughly 20 or 25% rate of actually going through with their promises.

And that's the issue isn't it? To increase the longevity and stability of our ecosystem we would have to invest a large amount of resources and likely make changes to how we live as individuals and as a species. Unless things are literally burning down that's sadly unlikely to happen in the next couple of generations.

Upon saying that you do often see small groups of people banding together to make positive short term changes, like the stories of people planting trees to restore an area of land. Or the trend recently for a group to go into a beach or other place where people just randomly dump their garbage then clean that gak up like the legends they are. But how long till the lazy and destructive people return said fixed areas to their prior state for profit or by simply not giving a damn?

I dunno, maybe there's no possible way to stop us destroying the world. People just seem to be destructive as a whole.

I am a Green party voter, and one of the things that frustrates me the most about them is that they have unrealistic policies about nuclear energy.

I would say that we should all be like France and have the majority of our energy coming from Nuclear fission while we work hard on getting fusion to work. While those two problems are being solved then we need to make large cultural changes with regard to diet, cuttting down on meat consumption hugely (not forcing everyone to go vegan but getting them to eat a lot less meat). The problem of habitat destruction due to land clearance for agriculture is absolutely staggering and people do not realise how bad it is. The push for organic food will make this worse, because organic farms require more square metres to produce the same amount of calories of food. Intensive farming may be unpleasant and have other environmental costs, but it uses less land, meaning more wild land can be left untouched.

Obviously, any amount of renewables that make logical sense should be used. That is a no brainer. But it needs to be looked at carefully to make sure that renewables make sense in each context. The big push for wind for example is in my view partially just because it lets you create jobs in heavy industries that are hurting at the moment, not because wind is a panacea.

I am very pessimistic about our chances. The dramatic drop in biodiversity we are experiencing will likely not stop any time soon.

I think one of the greatest problems is that it does require changes to our lifestyles and people absolutely do not want to accept that. I teach kids and they are all pro SOMEONE doing something about the environment, but whenever I suggest specific actions they themselves can take it is always a hard no.

Until we tackle the unbridled growth of our species' population nothing will ever be more than a stop-gap measure.

If we can't harness our sun to do our work (heeeyahh), we aren't selling it right.

Bran Dawri wrote:
Until we tackle the unbridled growth of our species' population nothing will ever be more than a stop-gap measure.

The best answer to that is to increase the development of developing nations and give women greater rights and reproductive autonomy. If all societies had birth rates like Japan and Germany that problem would be definitively solved. Whenever I discuss this with my students they always suggest horrible stuff, mostly restrictions on people from developing nations. When I point out it is Europeans and Americans that have the highest environmental impact per person, and that the wealthy have a greater impact on average than the poor even within those societies they get uncomfortable and go quiet. Then I point out there is a way to reduce birth rates by being nice to people and treating them better and they never really believe me. It is like we are hard wired to think things have to have horrible solutions (and to dehumanise the poor, but that is a different topic).

 Grey Templar wrote:

Which just proves that people are stupid and don't understand what actually caused those events, things which won't exist in power plants.

Chernobyl can hardly actually even be called an accident. It would be better to describe it as willful negligence rather than an accident. A test that was carried out because of political pressure under conditions which everybody involved knew were completely unsafe, and yet they did it anyway. Given the example that Chernobyl set, nobody would ever pull a stunt like it again. Furthermore, modern nuclear power plants literally cannot have the same type of disaster occur even if someone tried.

Fukishima is a sort of similar thing. A nuclear power plant with built without proper countermeasures in place to deal with a tsunami, in a tsunami prone area. Which again an issue with nuclear power, its an issue with people being dumb.

Furthermore, the environmental damage caused by both of these events is wildly exaggerated. Chernobyl, the worst nuclear disaster in history, has not left a nuclear wasteland. The area around is a thriving ecosystem that just happens to have a higher rate of minor mutation in the plants and animals. Fukishima is even more insignificant.

Given the massive benefits of nuclear power, the relatively minor risk of a radiation leak is worth it in the long run.

You can describe those incidents however you like, it won't change the fact that they happened. And that's the problem. The fact that things were changed to prevent a specific incident from occurring again doesn't fix the underlying issue, which is that there is always some other potential issue. Someone finds a new and creative way to do something stupid that wasn't foreseen by the system designer. Some critical part that shouldn't be able to fail, fails. An earthquake or a tornado happens that's just big enough to exceed the tolerances that everyone thought would be more than sufficient.

Until someone can design a nuclear reactor that is absolutely, 100% risk free, it's not going to sell to those who are worried about what happens when something goes wrong. And the one thing that we all should have learnt from the last hundred years or so of technological advancement is that mankind simply isn't capable of designing anything that is 100% reliable and safe. And that makes the risks of nuclear power far outweigh the benefits, when there are increasingly-improving alternatives that don't carry those same risks.

I think the risks only outweigh the benefits if you do not compare them to fossil fuels, where the risks (and deaths) are actually much greater but spread out and not focused in dramatic incidents and so are much harder to comprehend.

 insaniak wrote:
And that makes the risks of nuclear power far outweigh the benefits, when there are increasingly-improving alternatives that don't carry those same risks.

All of those alternatives unequivocally suck in terms of power generation and/or ecological damage compared to nuclear power.

Wind power is limited to very specific areas, is extremely unreliable, and kills birds.
Solar is woefully space inefficient, uses rare materials, and only works during the daylight.
Tidal power is a joke.

None of the above can be built anywhere you might need power either. Nuclear energy just needs some water access, which is massively abundant on this planet and is always near where we humans might need power.

There is no alternative to Nuclear energy, other than all the fossil fuels we're trying to get away from. The probability of even minor contamination with modern power plants is extremely tiny. The chance of another chernobyl is 0%. Combine that with being able to meet all our power needs for at minimum several thousand years and we have the ideal energy solution. Its only been ruined by bad faith scaremongers who actually have zero interest in 'saving the planet'.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Wind power is limited to very specific areas, is extremely unreliable, and kills birds.
Solar is woefully space inefficient, uses rare materials, and only works during the daylight.
Tidal power is a joke.

Nuclear power generation proportionately kills just as many birds as wind turbines do. And wind power once networked is no more unreliable than any other power generation method.

Solar being space inefficient really depends on the application. It's become possible to completely power your house with a decent solar array on your roof... Which is otherwise just unused space... And the fact that it 'doesn' t work' at night is irrelevant if it's generating enough for demand.

Sure, both of those systems are currently not as efficient as they ideally could be. That will happen when a technology is largely ignored for 30 years. The sharp and sudden advancement over the last few years since people started taking solar power seriously us just the start.

 insaniak wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:


Wind power is limited to very specific areas, is extremely unreliable, and kills birds.
Solar is woefully space inefficient, uses rare materials, and only works during the daylight.
Tidal power is a joke.

Nuclear power generation proportionately kills just as many birds as wind turbines do. And wind power once networked is no more unreliable than any other power generation method.

Solar being space inefficient really depends on the application. It's become possible to completely power your house with a decent solar array on your roof... Which is otherwise just unused space... And the fact that it 'doesn' t work' at night is irrelevant if it's generating enough for demand.

Sure, both of those systems are currently not as efficient as they ideally could be. That will happen when a technology is largely ignored for 30 years. The sharp and sudden advancement over the last few years since people started taking solar power seriously us just the start.

Case in point, if the germans would really work out their supply and the italians, we could theorethically store the power per pumps into lakes in switzerland. god knows we have enough places to build dams.

One line of thinking is that whilst many home grown green measures might not change the world on their own, they do start to train new generations growing up to be more environmentally aware. So part of it might be a generation game whereby you change the attitudes of younger people and as they rise up into positions of power in the future they carry some of that attitude with them.

So whilst sorting your home rubbish doesn't help the fact that companies shovel the packaging rubbish on you to start with, it might well lead to changing attitudes somewhere at the top end of companies in the future to consider less harmful packaging.


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Not Online!!! wrote:

Case in point, if the germans would really work out their supply and the italians, we could theorethically store the power per pumps into lakes in switzerland. god knows we have enough places to build dams.

Dams appear to be on the out somewhat. The problem is they are high costs to maintain and if you don't dredge them regularly they silt up and die on their own. Also they can have vast changes to the river systems below them, just look at how the Nile delta is slowly falling apart because dams built further up (and other flood control measures) means that it doesn't get the huge floods and deposits of silt being moved down to rebuild the delta every year. That's the core farming regions of Egypt under threat from dams built mostly for power generation.

And that's before you consider the huge ecological changes to the regions behind the dam which are flooded.

 Overread wrote:

So whilst sorting your home rubbish doesn't help the fact that companies shovel the packaging rubbish on you to start with, it might well lead to changing attitudes somewhere at the top end of companies in the future to consider less harmful packaging.

Some of that is already kicking in, down here. There's been a lot of pushback over unnecessary packaging (shops packaging bananas in shrink-wrapped, polystyrene trays was apparently the last straw for a lot of people), and a big push in the last couple of years to get everyone using reusable shopping bags and the like. My daughter's school has a big focus on promoting 'nude' lunches, encouraging people to eliminate any unnecessary packaging in their kids' lunchboxes. And our last round of particularly bad drought seems to have gone a long way towards changing many peoples' attitudes towards appropriate water use...


It's a gradual process, but doing what you can, when you can, and encouraging the next generation to do better does have an effect.

Aye, we keep getting bannanas in plastic wrapping and can't work out what the benefit is (esp since all they do is sweat in the bag....).

There's a lot of things that come in plastic and its hard to work out the reason why it needs to be. Another avenue is that a lot of products we buy today used to just get sold loose. Eg screws and nails you'd use to just get a weight out of the stores hopper and carry it home in a thick paper bag rather than a pre allocated weight in a tiny plastic packet.

Part of this is the shift to self service in shops. In the past the store owner would fetch the items you wanted so they knew you couldn't steal them. Today a lot of plastic is used to prevent theft or at least reduce it (though if you were stealing you'd just take the whole packet so I'm not sure how effective it really is).


Another big issue is delivery services. UK is certianly heading the way that soon we won't have much if any highstreet and many things will arrive by 5 vans each day from 5 different delivery services. Whilst I love amazon for their speed of delivery one wonders if it couldn't be FAR more organised (a shame that Royal Mail somewhat dropped the ball and is now just a regular competing company not doing it all as at least then it all went through 1 van per day).

 Overread wrote:
Aye, we keep getting bannanas in plastic wrapping and can't work out what the benefit is (esp since all they do is sweat in the bag....).

There's a lot of things that come in plastic and its hard to work out the reason why it needs to be. Another avenue is that a lot of products we buy today used to just get sold loose. Eg screws and nails you'd use to just get a weight out of the stores hopper and carry it home in a thick paper bag rather than a pre allocated weight in a tiny plastic packet.

Part of this is the shift to self service in shops. In the past the store owner would fetch the items you wanted so they knew you couldn't steal them. Today a lot of plastic is used to prevent theft or at least reduce it (though if you were stealing you'd just take the whole packet so I'm not sure how effective it really is).


Another big issue is delivery services. UK is certianly heading the way that soon we won't have much if any highstreet and many things will arrive by 5 vans each day from 5 different delivery services. Whilst I love amazon for their speed of delivery one wonders if it couldn't be FAR more organised (a shame that Royal Mail somewhat dropped the ball and is now just a regular competing company not doing it all as at least then it all went through 1 van per day).

One of the worst exemples here is Cookies: Basically the cookie packet is wrapped in plastic, then there is the cardboard packet itself, within there is a plastic holder for them and that is wrapped with plastic again.
It's like a bloody babushka made out of plastic and cardboard

 insaniak wrote:

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, ...

That's not going to happen. Not while we have examples like Chernobyl and Fukishima showing what happens when something goes wrong.


And not when you have safer options becoming more widely available all the time.

We...don't actually. Tidal is a potential, but its hideously expensive when you factor in maintenance costs.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, we could eliminate coal completely and have a very clean energy source that doesn't foul up the atmosphere. Storing all that nuclear waste could get to be a problem, but perhaps ultimately it'll become economically feasible to just launch that stuff into space or into the sun or something.

There are a lot of reasons this doesn't work, but let's pick the one biggest, most obvious one.

Imagine what a launch accident would like like - spraying 20 tons of nuclear waste over potentially populated areas.

There have been 135 shuttle missions. Out of those, 6 had serious accidents (2 killed the entire crew and lost the vehicle).

There are 60 nuclear power plants in the US, producing 1200 tons of nuclear waste a year. Assuming the worst case 1 horrible accident per 70 flights, that works out to about one hideous, unprecedented nuclear waste disaster every single year, more or less (and that's if you only start shipping out the new waste).

Yeah. Launching nuclear waste into space is dumb.

But storing it under a mountain somewhere is perfectly viable. Dealing with nuclear waste is hardly a monumental challenge.

It is a monumental challenge because of the timescale in question.

Even if you have a single minimum-wage caretsker (and it will take substantially more than that) you're looking at thousands of years.

We're still learning new things about how some compounds degrade.

Nuclear needs a place in the energy mix for many good reasons, but waste disposal is the biggest challenge.

There is also geothermal, for the areas which can make use of it.

Best power generation method we have at the moment but is very limited by the conditions required to make use of it.

The main risk with nuclear long term storage is that when you look at history the longest running empire was only around 500 years old (give or take) and through that period it went through vast changes in its size and organisation.


500 years is a drop in the ocean when it comes to radioactive breakdown so ideas like throwing it at the sun or storing it on the moon or other off-world storage ideas are not all that daft. Granted they have an insane short term cost, but the long term saving is even greater. Furthermore nuclear waste is dangerous and in a breakdown of society it would become a major potential threat that could be exploited.

Of course its not the only such material and there are things being developed that would make a nuclear detonation seem almost trivial (virus warfare for example).



That said I think nuclear is the future unless we discover something "new". The real boon would be increased global interconnectivity and stability thus allowing development of nuclear power plants within safe regions and then efficent transportation of power to more riskier areas. Japan and most of the countries and regions on the Ring of Fire is not a safe place and is at risk from major geological instabilities.

The problem with trying to get nuclear waste off world is we just don't have reliable enough launch vehicles, one thing you really, really don't want is a lot of highly dangerous radioactive waste being spread about high in the atmosphere because a rocket went bang


Another thing to keep in mind about stuff like recycling is even if the waste isn't dealt with well now is it takes an age for the population to change their habits even though they know they should

(just look at drink driving, it took about 30 years for most people to come round to the idea that it's bad and there are still significant numbers of folk who disagree or just don't think)

so getting the population used to collecting, sorting and segregating their rubbish is worth doing, and the more people that do it, and the better they do it the easier it is to get a viable industy set up to do something useful with the waste (and that would be so much easier with national standards rather than every council doing their own thing meaning all the recyclers have to be small as if they get bigger they end up with different sorts of waste streams mking it harder to process)

and at the end of the day we may have to decide recycling some stuff will never be commercially viable so it will have to be paid for either by the state, or the manufacturer or the consumer, again it will be far easier if those parts of the waste stream are already being collected rather than waiting for another age for folk to get used to doing so

Nuclear power plants aren't much of a solution. They are very costly to buid and maintain. Their fuel is rather hard to extract and refine and in limited quantity. Waste management is also a big problem as it's very expensive.

A combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric, tidal, current, geothermal, biomass and fuel efficency remains by far the best option, but development and investments in these technologies was too low for far too long. We missed two of our best window to prevent major climate changes in the late 70's and in the early 2000's. Now, we will need to make some fairly uncomfortable compromises.

When I mentioned launching nuclear waste into space, I wasn't talking about immediately. We do need to improve our spaceflight technology first. Otherwise we will end up with exploding rockets turning into the world's biggest "dirty bombs".

Another thing that they really need to keep working on is fusion power. I know it's probably a long way off, but they need to not give up. Like any technology, we can get there if we just keep looking at the problems with it and finding way to solve said problems.

The problem with launching waste into space isn't safety. We have developed incredibly safe launch vehicles, such as the Saturn V and Soyuz.

The issue is payload. For this to be viable you need a system capable of carrying a very large payload with the delta-v required to send it on a trajectory out of earth orbit. And yes, we are just getting this out of earth orbit and not sending it into the sun. It's not going to reach the sun. Install the demo of Kerbal Space Program and try to launch a kerbal into the sun. It is actually very hard due to the massive delta-v required to counter the velocity of the earth. To send it into the sun would require a gravity slingshot around Jupiter at the very least.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
The problem with launching waste into space isn't safety. We have developed incredibly safe launch vehicles, such as the Saturn V and Soyuz.

The issue is payload. For this to be viable you need a system capable of carrying a very large payload with the delta-v required to send it on a trajectory out of earth orbit. And yes, we are just getting this out of earth orbit and not sending it into the sun. It's not going to reach the sun. Install the demo of Kerbal Space Program and try to launch a kerbal into the sun. It is actually very hard due to the massive delta-v required to counter the velocity of the earth.

Just reaching the Mun is hard enough! I dread to think how many Kerbles I've left floating in space!

 Overread wrote:


Just reaching the Mun is hard enough! I dread to think how many Kerbles I've left floating in space!

Hairiest moments for me was a rescue mission of a kerbal in a rocket in Kerbin orbit and a Mun rescue mission.

The Kerbin orbit rescue involved the stranded Kerbal having to eva out of his ship, and fly blindly out to to be in position to grab the rescue ship as it came past. Sweaty palms on that one.

The Mun rescue was to save the pilot of Mun 2, who had fethed up his landing and so did not have enough fuel to get home. So Mun 3 was repurposed to have a second command pod left empty for him to sit in. It managed to land around 1km from Mun 2's landing zone and, after a long walk, the lost Kerbal was on board and swiftly brought home.

 insaniak wrote:

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, ...

That's not going to happen. Not while we have examples like Chernobyl and Fukishima showing what happens when something goes wrong.


And not when you have safer options becoming more widely available all the time.

Indeed

 Overread wrote:

That said I think nuclear is the future unless we discover something "new".

The future is likely to be fusion, once they figure out how to get the process started without using more power than it gives back out again.

In the meantime, though, I expect that over the next 20 years the bulk of our suburban residential electricity generation at least will go solar, with it becoming standard for new houses. Likewise for any businesses with enough roof space and low enough energy demands for it to be practical.

 Overread wrote:
I dread to think how many Kerbles I've left floating in space!

I had a Kerbal that I tried to land on the Mun with, and I somehow messed it up, and used the Mun as a slingshot. He's still out there somewhere, going faster and faster and faster, and since Kerbals don't age or need food or water, I guess he's never, ever going to die.

Not going to lie, I think about that now and then even though I have not played the game in a long time. I feel like a monster for what i did, even though it was an accident (and that he doesn't really exist).

 Ouze wrote:

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If more people would stop being afraid of nuclear power plants, we could eliminate coal completely and have a very clean energy source that doesn't foul up the atmosphere. Storing all that nuclear waste could get to be a problem, but perhaps ultimately it'll become economically feasible to just launch that stuff into space or into the sun or something.

There are a lot of reasons this doesn't work, but let's pick the one biggest, most obvious one.

Imagine what a launch accident would like like - spraying 20 tons of nuclear waste over potentially populated areas.

There have been 135 shuttle missions. Out of those, 6 had serious accidents (2 killed the entire crew and lost the vehicle).

There are 60 nuclear power plants in the US, producing 1200 tons of nuclear waste a year. Assuming the worst case 1 horrible accident per 70 flights, that works out to about one hideous, unprecedented nuclear waste disaster every single year, more or less (and that's if you only start shipping out the new waste).

There's a further issue, the Earth's orbital velocity. It would actually take more energy (usually derived from rocket fuel) to decelerate the waste to drop it into the sun than it would take to accelerate it clear out of the solar system.

Rocket exhaust isn't exactly environmentally friendly either.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Yeah. Launching nuclear waste into space is dumb.

But storing it under a mountain somewhere is perfectly viable. Dealing with nuclear waste is hardly a monumental challenge.

Maybe using the current method of launching into space, but space elevators or using magnetic rail catapults might end up being safer. Perhaps moot if we have fusion by that point but maybe we won't

There are ways in which greening habits can have a tangible benefit in the extremely local sense; Closing down a coal plant has a both short and long term impact on just the local area, reducing pollution and improving the respiratory health of the population. Replacing home electronics reduces energy use and thus energy bills. Solar panels on the roof do the same in an overall sense.

I say we focus on those until people decide to give enough dams for a global initiative.

So a good friend of mine has been taking serious strides at becoming a fire fighter in his post-military life, and he shared a VERY interesting (at least to me) article about home fires and burn time. . .

See, most fire services still calculate where their stations need to be, and how quickly they need to be going from receiving the call, to suiting up, to driving off in response on data gathered in the 1970s. In that time, it was largely found that a normal/accidental house fire (ie, arson involving something used to intentionally speed up the fire) would go at a rate of about 8 minutes per room. Today, in 2017 tests are showing that a house fire under the same circumstances goes at a rate of about 2 minutes per room.


Now, how does this relate to this thread??? Well, the investigations into what has changed and all that has found one thing above all others: most of our homes are now furnished largely with synthetic materials that, despite many labels to the contrary, burn much, much quicker than the older, solid and natural material furniture of our parents/grandparents. I mean, just looking at the room I am sitting in currently, the bookcases, desk, coffee table, "entertainment center" are all some variation of plywood material. The couches may have a solid wood frame, but the leather isn't genuine animal leather, and the cushions are whatever foam they use today is.

Many furniture makers are using these materials out of cost cutting, or they are making the absolute most out of a given raw material in order to be "good stewards" of the environment. But in the end, there's potential for further environmental damage later on, given the right circumstances.

Nuclear power is a bad idea, because the ongoing climate apocalypse is already severe enough, and worsening rapidly enough, that we can expect at least some societal breakdown over the next few years, even in countries where that would be unexpected (Europe/USA etc.). Who is going to operate, and later, decommission the nuclear plants, if say the USA is partly on fire, partly flooded, partly turned to desert, and mostly starving?

All feels a bit far-fetched, I know, till you consider that both the Californian wildfires and the flooding in the Midwest are climate change-related. Those kinds of incidents will become more common and more severe; it is not going to take very many of them in quick succession, to have a major impact on food supply. And that means world food supply, given how interconnected modern economies are. I don't think it will take many weeks of starvation to see societal breakdown -- particularly when you consider the cascading effects of both climate change, and societal breakdown. Starvation in one area affects the people who would usually be doing all the infrastructure jobs, too. Won't be long before the lights start going out, the petrol pumps stop being filled, etc.

We do need to find solutions, but mostly they need to involve voluntarily reducing the standard of living in richer countries, particularly when it comes to fossil fuel use, which we need to get to as close to zero as we can, as soon as possible. That means giving up on air travel, and probably on private car ownership for most, too.

The real problem with Nuclear is the waste. A lot of it has substantial half-lifes ranging from 100,000's to millions of years. That means the material will be radioactive for a very long time.

The question is how do we protect people not only now but in the future. There are languages that are a mere 5000 years old that we don't understand. How do you design warnings not only for now but in 20,000 years when there is a possibility no one would understand our language/customs/symbols and so forth. For these people the markings would be akin to superstitions surrounding Egyptian Mummies and Tombs.

 Whirlwind wrote:
The real problem with Nuclear is the waste. A lot of it has substantial half-lifes ranging from 100,000's to millions of years. That means the material will be radioactive for a very long time.

The question is how do we protect people not only now but in the future. There are languages that are a mere 5000 years old that we don't understand. How do you design warnings not only for now but in 20,000 years when there is a possibility no one would understand our language/customs/symbols and so forth. For these people the markings would be akin to superstitions surrounding Egyptian Mummies and Tombs.

There's really two sides to this

1) The evolution of language. All languages evolve with use (even latin today evolves and changes) so any nations that lasts a long long time will have evolution of its language over time. Really old English is still English, but it is quite different to the English of today. Furthermore there are key events such as when we were invaded by the Normans, which caused bigger shifts in language structure. So if societies that store nuclear material remain stable enough to be functional then the old warning signs will just get updated every so often. Though it might also be some remain in use, they would just shift from common parlance into work specific phrases.

2) The fall of nations. This is the big risk really, when one nation falls. A massive collapse can trigger a situation where storage facilities could be lost, information on them lost and, if enough time went by, even understanding of them would dwindle. Of course this gets a bit trickier to envision because we'd require a world wide collapse in order to get to a point where unclear material was unintelligible. A massive collapse alongside a solar flare that wipes out digital data could probably do it; provided there was no preparation beforehand.

 Overread wrote:

 Whirlwind wrote:
The real problem with Nuclear is the waste. A lot of it has substantial half-lifes ranging from 100,000's to millions of years. That means the material will be radioactive for a very long time.

The question is how do we protect people not only now but in the future. There are languages that are a mere 5000 years old that we don't understand. How do you design warnings not only for now but in 20,000 years when there is a possibility no one would understand our language/customs/symbols and so forth. For these people the markings would be akin to superstitions surrounding Egyptian Mummies and Tombs.

There's really two sides to this

1) The evolution of language. All languages evolve with use (even latin today evolves and changes) so any nations that lasts a long long time will have evolution of its language over time. Really old English is still English, but it is quite different to the English of today. Furthermore there are key events such as when we were invaded by the Normans, which caused bigger shifts in language structure. So if societies that store nuclear material remain stable enough to be functional then the old warning signs will just get updated every so often. Though it might also be some remain in use, they would just shift from common parlance into work specific phrases.

2) The fall of nations. This is the big risk really, when one nation falls. A massive collapse can trigger a situation where storage facilities could be lost, information on them lost and, if enough time went by, even understanding of them would dwindle. Of course this gets a bit trickier to envision because we'd require a world wide collapse in order to get to a point where unclear material was unintelligible. A massive collapse alongside a solar flare that wipes out digital data could probably do it; provided there was no preparation beforehand.

More important to me is the economic case. You're saddling thousands of generations with the results of a few decades of localised energy generation.

If you try to annualise that the cost of nuclear energy is basically infinite.

Did you know coal ash waste is also radioactive? When coal gets burned (such as in power plants), the trace amounts of radioactive material, as well as other nasty things like mercury and arsenic, concentrates into fly ash and bottom ash. Where as Nuclear Waste is highly regulated and talked about as the last few post has shown, coal ash is generally dumped into large basins open to the air near to the coal plant itself. Which is always near a body of water, and it's a matter of when than if there's going to be a spill.

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
Did you know coal ash waste is also radioactive? When coal gets burned (such as in power plants), the trace amounts of radioactive material, as well as other nasty things like mercury and arsenic, concentrates into fly ash and bottom ash. Where as Nuclear Waste is highly regulated and talked about as the last few post has shown, coal ash is generally dumped into large basins open to the air near to the coal plant itself. Which is always near a body of water, and it's a matter of when than if there's going to be a spill.

I'm not sure anyone is suggesting we return to coal. There are plenty of existing clean energy sources already. A combination of wind, solar and geothermal energy if located and stored correctly could provide sufficient of our energy needs. It needs an integrated grid but if you took Europe as an example you could have solar in the southern EU countries, wind in the northern EU countries and geothermal where there is significant residual heat (Scotland, Iceland, parts of France, Italy and so forth). Combined this with a huge increase in local energy generation on houses (i.e. solar panels on every roof) then you shouldn't need coal or nuclear. Of course this side of the pond it would require some form of union of European countries with equivalent networks and rules...ahem...

Geothermal is probably the most sustainable and consistent, but its limited by its location.

Wind and solar are also very limited and unreliable. no wind or too much wind and bad things happen. also not good if the sun aint shining for solar. (also iirc solar is most efficient in cold climates not super hot sunny ones.)

Dams also have massive ecological impact so probably shouldn't pull a China.

It would be nice to put solar on literally every roof top possible. though what kinda carbon foot print does it generate to make those panels in that sort of quantity.

recently i saw a youtube vid on the possibility to power the entire US with solar. it actually would be possible to fit it in death valley but would also cost an absolutely insane amount (though i think it was almost reached through the us highway program(?))

Yes, "Green" measures help. Mostly in keeping things from getting even worse.

* Recycling absolutely works for aluminum, less so for other materials; China is refusing to take waste because *they* are very serious about going green.
* Electric cars, taxis, busses, and trucks actually do pollute less. The air quality is clearly better.
* Wind and hydro aren't perfect, but they're better than running coal
* Energy efficiency on consumption is indeed necessary, but it's just part of the overall solution
* 5 years vs 3 years is still better than NEVER.

That it's not immediately perfect is not a reason to claim that it's not working. You need to compare against the alternative, which is obviously worse.


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 Overread wrote:
The main risk with nuclear long term storage is that when you look at history the longest running empire was only around 500 years old (give or take) and through that period it went through vast changes in its size and organisation.

China could do it.

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
Did you know coal ash waste is also radioactive? When coal gets burned (such as in power plants), the trace amounts of radioactive material, as well as other nasty things like mercury and arsenic, concentrates into fly ash and bottom ash. Where as Nuclear Waste is highly regulated and talked about as the last few post has shown, coal ash is generally dumped into large basins open to the air near to the coal plant itself. Which is always near a body of water, and it's a matter of when than if there's going to be a spill.

I'm not sure anyone is suggesting we return to coal. There are plenty of existing clean energy sources already. A combination of wind, solar and geothermal energy if located and stored correctly could provide sufficient of our energy needs. It needs an integrated grid but if you took Europe as an example you could have solar in the southern EU countries, wind in the northern EU countries and geothermal where there is significant residual heat (Scotland, Iceland, parts of France, Italy and so forth). Combined this with a huge increase in local energy generation on houses (i.e. solar panels on every roof) then you shouldn't need coal or nuclear. Of course this side of the pond it would require some form of union of European countries with equivalent networks and rules...ahem...

Maybe no one in Europe is suggesting going back to coal, but there is a very large and entrenched coal industry here in the US. Some states economies and job market that have coal as a, if not the, major contributor and as a whole we exported 15% of our production of coal in 2018. Which is a rise from 12% in 2012. So clearly, there is at least some people pushing for coal.

jouso wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 Whirlwind wrote:
The real problem with Nuclear is the waste. A lot of it has substantial half-lifes ranging from 100,000's to millions of years. That means the material will be radioactive for a very long time.

The question is how do we protect people not only now but in the future. There are languages that are a mere 5000 years old that we don't understand. How do you design warnings not only for now but in 20,000 years when there is a possibility no one would understand our language/customs/symbols and so forth. For these people the markings would be akin to superstitions surrounding Egyptian Mummies and Tombs.

There's really two sides to this

1) The evolution of language. All languages evolve with use (even latin today evolves and changes) so any nations that lasts a long long time will have evolution of its language over time. Really old English is still English, but it is quite different to the English of today. Furthermore there are key events such as when we were invaded by the Normans, which caused bigger shifts in language structure. So if societies that store nuclear material remain stable enough to be functional then the old warning signs will just get updated every so often. Though it might also be some remain in use, they would just shift from common parlance into work specific phrases.

2) The fall of nations. This is the big risk really, when one nation falls. A massive collapse can trigger a situation where storage facilities could be lost, information on them lost and, if enough time went by, even understanding of them would dwindle. Of course this gets a bit trickier to envision because we'd require a world wide collapse in order to get to a point where unclear material was unintelligible. A massive collapse alongside a solar flare that wipes out digital data could probably do it; provided there was no preparation beforehand.

More important to me is the economic case. You're saddling thousands of generations with the results of a few decades of localised energy generation.

If you try to annualise that the cost of nuclear energy is basically infinite.

Clearly you know very little about Nuclear power other than what some hippy nutjobs have told you.

The US supply of Uranium and Thorium would be enough to theoretically last for 100,000 years.

http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-will-our-supplies-of-uranium-and-thorium-last/

Add in the rest of the world and we have a very very very large amount of nuclear fuel on this planet. More than enough to last until we have FTL travel, which would give us access to the rest of the universe's fuel supply. But even before we get FTL, we'll be able to mine the rest of our solar system.

Plus its only Uranium based power plants that give off the nasty byproducts. Thorium plants have practically zero dangerous waste in comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

Furthermore, it is actually quite easy to safely store nuclear waste. We're already doing it. Burying it under a mountain in the desert only has risks when you start thinking about it thousands of years down the line, by which time technology will enable us to fix any possible problems that might arise from plate tectonics braking up a nuclear waste dump.

Worrying about stuff that long term is quite silly. You might as well worry about the sun itself running out of fuel so you can't run your precious solar panels anymore.

Nuclear power is the only choice we have for long term high volume power generation. We know for a fact we have thousands and thousands of years worth of these fuel types, why not use them? The risks are negligible.

 Overread wrote:
The main risk with nuclear long term storage is that when you look at history the longest running empire was only around 500 years old (give or take) and through that period it went through vast changes in its size and organisation.

Even if a country that has a nuclear waste stockpile collapses, that doesn't mean the waste suddenly gets dumped into the environment. It just means the bunker it was being stored in doesn't have guards. The nuclear waste isn't going to waltz out if left unattended. Its just going to keep sitting there, which is safe.

It only becomes unsafe if some terrorist wants to deliberately sabotage the environment. Which isn't a problem with nuclear power, thats a problem with people. A problem whose solution has nothing to do with banning nuclear power.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Even if a country that has a nuclear waste stockpile collapses, that doesn't mean the waste suddenly gets dumped into the environment. It just means the bunker it was being stored in doesn't have guards. The nuclear waste isn't going to waltz out if left unattended. Its just going to keep sitting there, which is safe.

It only becomes unsafe if some terrorist wants to deliberately sabotage the environment. Which isn't a problem with nuclear power, thats a problem with people. A problem whose solution has nothing to do with banning nuclear power.

If people aren't going to change (and it doesn't look like they will), then long term nuclear waste storage is going to require a centuries-long solution that factors terrorists as a potential problem.

Which is something that is easily accomplished. You can build the bunkers in such a way that the waste cannot be taken out, at least not without fatally irradiating yourself and that would require complex equipment a mere terrorist wouldn’t have.

And it’s not like our existing storage doesn’t put severe obstacles in between the outside and the stored waste. Even with nobody to stop you, it would be a very difficult thing to get in.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Which is something that is easily accomplished. You can build the bunkers in such a way that the waste cannot be taken out, at least not without fatally irradiating yourself and that would require complex equipment a mere terrorist wouldn’t have.

And it’s not like our existing storage doesn’t put severe obstacles in between the outside and the stored waste. Even with nobody to stop you, it would be a very difficult thing to get in.

Great so if there ever is a need to change location/ do extensive repairs, you just made it way harder.
The big problem with building a save storage facility is that it has to be save for a long time and erosion will find a way inside given enough time. So even if there is no unexpected problems (and given enough time there always are), one would have to constantly monitor and renovate the facility in order to keep it save. All that while storing tons of radioactive waste in it, which seeing as there is always some idiot that doesn't follow safety protocols, means that at some point something will go wrong. Even if it is just a minor thing with basically no impact, the public reaction would most likely be negative.

A problem with our current nuclear plants that hasn't been mentioned is the impact of climate change on them. To keep the cooling running, they require fast amounts of water which is typically taken from a nearby river. With the change in climate droughts are more likely, which bring the risk of nothaving enough water for that. Another often overlooked fact here is that the cooling system of the plants is designed with a specific water temperature in mind. So if the water temperature rises over a certain point, the cooling system will no longer work as intended.

 Whirlwind wrote:
The real problem with Nuclear is the waste. A lot of it has substantial half-lifes ranging from 100,000's to millions of years. That means the material will be radioactive for a very long time.

That's a double edged sword though. Uranium-235 has a half life of 700 million years. That sounds scary, it's a long time. But what that actually indicates is that the actual activity of the element is low, if you had two atoms of U-235 it would take around 700 million years before one of them sent out an alpha particle (obviously this only really holds true for large numbers of atoms, since radioactive decay is a random process so you need a large sample). Elements with high activity (i.e. they are emitting a lot of radiation) have short half lives. Most of the actual heat (i.e. radioactive decay) created by spent nuclear fuel is from isotopes with much shorter half lives, such as Strontium-90 or Caesium-137 which have half lives of around 30 years.

 Luke_Prowler wrote:

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
Did you know coal ash waste is also radioactive? When coal gets burned (such as in power plants), the trace amounts of radioactive material, as well as other nasty things like mercury and arsenic, concentrates into fly ash and bottom ash. Where as Nuclear Waste is highly regulated and talked about as the last few post has shown, coal ash is generally dumped into large basins open to the air near to the coal plant itself. Which is always near a body of water, and it's a matter of when than if there's going to be a spill.

I'm not sure anyone is suggesting we return to coal. There are plenty of existing clean energy sources already. A combination of wind, solar and geothermal energy if located and stored correctly could provide sufficient of our energy needs. It needs an integrated grid but if you took Europe as an example you could have solar in the southern EU countries, wind in the northern EU countries and geothermal where there is significant residual heat (Scotland, Iceland, parts of France, Italy and so forth). Combined this with a huge increase in local energy generation on houses (i.e. solar panels on every roof) then you shouldn't need coal or nuclear. Of course this side of the pond it would require some form of union of European countries with equivalent networks and rules...ahem...

Maybe no one in Europe is suggesting going back to coal, but there is a very large and entrenched coal industry here in the US. Some states economies and job market that have coal as a, if not the, major contributor and as a whole we exported 15% of our production of coal in 2018. Which is a rise from 12% in 2012. So clearly, there is at least some people pushing for coal.

The Poles are keen on coal.

China is building dozens of new coal power stations as part of its Belt and Road project.

Britain already gets 30% of its energy from wind and solar and has had a number of days when no coal was burnt.

 Kilkrazy wrote:


China is building dozens of new coal power stations as part of its Belt and Road project.

IMHO, China is a bit of a special case. Yes, they are building dozens of new coal power stations, but they are also leading the world in new purchases of wind farms. Currently, they are the world leader (in GW production) of wind power, with many of the top ten wind companies having active projects underway in China right now.

This is because they are seeing an economic growth and modernizing of astounding levels. . . Basically, they are crunching the economic growth and exploding middle class of the US 20th century, into a couple decades. I mean, if you watch the Grand Tour, you probably saw the China Special, and even if you don't believe 100% of what the boys were saying about the road construction projects, you can visibly see that it is largely true (I am referring to how many miles of motorway they had in 1985 compared to the number of miles today, which is one stat they mentioned)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, any green measures that do not include a departure from the economic and population model of "all growth, all the time" is at best a stop-gap measure (not necessarily needless or without effect, mind you), at worst a distraction from the actual problem - overpopulation and our economic system's subservience to profit and greed at the top.

 Desubot wrote:
Geothermal is probably the most sustainable and consistent, but its limited by its location.

Wind and solar are also very limited and unreliable. no wind or too much wind and bad things happen. also not good if the sun aint shining for solar. (also iirc solar is most efficient in cold climates not super hot sunny ones.)

Dams also have massive ecological impact so probably shouldn't pull a China.

It would be nice to put solar on literally every roof top possible. though what kinda carbon foot print does it generate to make those panels in that sort of quantity.

recently i saw a youtube vid on the possibility to power the entire US with solar. it actually would be possible to fit it in death valley but would also cost an absolutely insane amount (though i think it was almost reached through the us highway program(?))

Geothermal is more viable than most think because of the assumption that it has to be built near active volcanism. But this isn't correct because rock takes an awful long time to lose heat. There are areas in Scotland where geothermal should be viable because of the heat locked in granite even though it is 10's millions of years since it formed. Not all geothermal needs to be in places like Iceland (though it is easier to get at). That places like Japan use nuclear instead of geothermal is rather strange. The US has options all down the Rocky Mountains, France the Massif Central.

It's not about providing only one option but a connected grid of renewables that can support each other at different times. Yes the carbon cost is higher but that is simply because we are already a high carbon usage society anyway and as we move away from this then the carbon costs of new renewables sources becomes much less. Yes it is expensive, no one has ever refuted that - but the argument is that it will cost society much more in the future if we don't spend the money now to reign in the carbon greed.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Whirlwind wrote:
The real problem with Nuclear is the waste. A lot of it has substantial half-lifes ranging from 100,000's to millions of years. That means the material will be radioactive for a very long time.

That's a double edged sword though. Uranium-235 has a half life of 700 million years. That sounds scary, it's a long time. But what that actually indicates is that the actual activity of the element is low, if you had two atoms of U-235 it would take around 700 million years before one of them sent out an alpha particle (obviously this only really holds true for large numbers of atoms, since radioactive decay is a random process so you need a large sample). Elements with high activity (i.e. they are emitting a lot of radiation) have short half lives. Most of the actual heat (i.e. radioactive decay) created by spent nuclear fuel is from isotopes with much shorter half lives, such as Strontium-90 or Caesium-137 which have half lives of around 30 years.

Although correct in some cases there is still nuclear waste that is considered both long lived and high level. It assumes that once decayed the material becomes non-radioactive which isn't correct. You can get chains of decay that can last thousands to millions of years that produce levels of radiation harmful to humans and the environment. You then have to consider that material around the decayed atom can absorb the emitted particles (alpha, beta) that the atoms absorbing them radioactive as well. If we consider one small non-interacting lump of material in isolation with a long half life then yes the risks are lower (though the energy levels of the decay can also impact this). However, it is rarely as simplistic as the decay chains and interactions keep things 'hotter' than single chain assumptions. We also have to consider that the material is concentrated in one location so although in small quantities a single decay might be low risk, you then have to multiply this by the concentration of the material.

Realistically if we wanted to save the planet then we should look to Bender Bending Rodríguez in that we need to "kill all humans"

Jorim wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Which is something that is easily accomplished. You can build the bunkers in such a way that the waste cannot be taken out, at least not without fatally irradiating yourself and that would require complex equipment a mere terrorist wouldn’t have.

And it’s not like our existing storage doesn’t put severe obstacles in between the outside and the stored waste. Even with nobody to stop you, it would be a very difficult thing to get in.

Great so if there ever is a need to change location/ do extensive repairs, you just made it way harder.
The big problem with building a save storage facility is that it has to be save for a long time and erosion will find a way inside given enough time. So even if there is no unexpected problems (and given enough time there always are), one would have to constantly monitor and renovate the facility in order to keep it save. All that while storing tons of radioactive waste in it, which seeing as there is always some idiot that doesn't follow safety protocols, means that at some point something will go wrong. Even if it is just a minor thing with basically no impact, the public reaction would most likely be negative.

A problem with our current nuclear plants that hasn't been mentioned is the impact of climate change on them. To keep the cooling running, they require fast amounts of water which is typically taken from a nearby river. With the change in climate droughts are more likely, which bring the risk of nothaving enough water for that. Another often overlooked fact here is that the cooling system of the plants is designed with a specific water temperature in mind. So if the water temperature rises over a certain point, the cooling system will no longer work as intended.

None of those concerns apply to the way the US stores our waste. Buried under a mountain in the desert. You'd literally be looking at millions of years of plate tectonic shifts before that area became unstable enough to destroy those bunkers.

If you bury something a half mile deep under a mountain, in an area that is about as far from impacting the food chain as you can possibly get on this planet, its not going anywhere even if you do nothing more than lock the doors. We're not storing nuclear waste at ground level in a warehouse. Its going down a mineshaft.

Oh, and its not like if we stopped using nuclear power that all this radioactive matter isn't on earth anymore. Much of Earth's known uranium deposits are found pretty dang close to human civilization. Canada has one of the biggest sources and its rather uncomfortably close to the great lakes. If you're so concerned about contaminating the environment, then its actually better that we mine all of that Uranium, use it for fuel, and when we are done go bury it in Nevada where it can cause less damage than if its left to sit in its natural deposits, where it will eventually get into the environement in a much worse place for it.

 Grey Templar wrote:
None of those concerns apply to the way the US stores our waste. Buried under a mountain in the desert.

If we actually did that, maybe.

However, the reality is that ZERO waste is buried there. NONE.

The waste at the decommissioned SONGS plant is still sitting there right by the ocean. And it's like that at every other US plant - just sitting in piles next to the reactor.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Jorim wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Which is something that is easily accomplished. You can build the bunkers in such a way that the waste cannot be taken out, at least not without fatally irradiating yourself and that would require complex equipment a mere terrorist wouldn’t have.

And it’s not like our existing storage doesn’t put severe obstacles in between the outside and the stored waste. Even with nobody to stop you, it would be a very difficult thing to get in.

Great so if there ever is a need to change location/ do extensive repairs, you just made it way harder.
The big problem with building a save storage facility is that it has to be save for a long time and erosion will find a way inside given enough time. So even if there is no unexpected problems (and given enough time there always are), one would have to constantly monitor and renovate the facility in order to keep it save. All that while storing tons of radioactive waste in it, which seeing as there is always some idiot that doesn't follow safety protocols, means that at some point something will go wrong. Even if it is just a minor thing with basically no impact, the public reaction would most likely be negative.

A problem with our current nuclear plants that hasn't been mentioned is the impact of climate change on them. To keep the cooling running, they require fast amounts of water which is typically taken from a nearby river. With the change in climate droughts are more likely, which bring the risk of nothaving enough water for that. Another often overlooked fact here is that the cooling system of the plants is designed with a specific water temperature in mind. So if the water temperature rises over a certain point, the cooling system will no longer work as intended.

None of those concerns apply to the way the US stores our waste. Buried under a mountain in the desert. You'd literally be looking at millions of years of plate tectonic shifts before that area became unstable enough to destroy those bunkers.

If you bury something a half mile deep under a mountain, in an area that is about as far from impacting the food chain as you can possibly get on this planet, its not going anywhere even if you do nothing more than lock the doors. We're not storing nuclear waste at ground level in a warehouse. Its going down a mineshaft.

How do you stop bad guys from getting access to it then?

The fact that it's highly radioactive is a deterrent, surely.

But the reason why the US waste wasn't buried under the mountain as planned is that geologists found that water was moving through the rock much, much faster than had been thought possible. This raised the propsect of waterborne contamination within decades rather than thousands of years.

The best place to keep high level waste is in specially built containment ponds where you can keep an eye an it and do maintenance.

Fracking has also shown how there's a lot of deep interaction at the mineral and water layers. Basically yes you can bury things deep, but it just delays when it comes back to bite you.

And as noted there's the issue of monitoring storage, a major earthquake could crack storage containers even buried deep underground and cause all kinds of issues for a huge span of time before it would be detected and even once it was access would be a huge issue.

Genuine question- what are the issue of dropping nuclear waste into the deepest parts of the ocean? I know it would likely have an impact on the ecosystems buried down there, but are there any significant risks of the stuff affecting the surface?

 Haighus wrote:
Genuine question- what are the issue of dropping nuclear waste into the deepest parts of the ocean? I know it would likely have an impact on the ecosystems buried down there, but are there any significant risks of the stuff affecting the surface?

I would assume the biggest issues are the cost of making a container capable of surviving the pressure and temperature extremes without rupturing halfway down and dumping all that waste directly into our food supply, and the danger that deep ocean volcanism would rupture any containers we did get all the way down hence dumping all that waste directly into our food system.

If burying it inside a geologically stable, room temperature, sea level pressure mountain is a bad idea, dropping it into a potentially geologically unstable pressure cooker seems...even moreso.

No-one has mentioned Gen IV reactors that cannot meltdown and consume nuclear waste as fuel.

http://theconversation.com/nuclear-power-is-set-to-get-a-lot-safer-and-cheaper-heres-why-62207 Gen IV reactors will also allow more efficient use of nuclear fuel. The fuel in current reactor designs is used only once and then disposed of, which produces radioactive waste that will take hundreds of millennia to decay to a safe level. But this waste contains valuable resources of fissile material that can be reprocessed into new fuel. Burning this fuel in specialised “fast” reactors provides would be much more efficient and generate waste that decays safely within just a hundred years or so. It would also move us towards a closed fuel-cycle that would greatly extend the lifetime of the Earth’s uranium reserves.

The reactors can be small, modular designs rather than big 'Springfield' powerplants, for more reliable and efficient power transmission. The molten salt reactors are considered 'walk away safe'. Should they reach a critical temperature, they will drain and shut down without any human input.

Effectively, Gen IV is the safest, greenest fuel we have- actually cleaning up after previous nuclear programs by eating dangerous waste.

 Haighus wrote:
Genuine question- what are the issue of dropping nuclear waste into the deepest parts of the ocean? I know it would likely have an impact on the ecosystems buried down there, but are there any significant risks of the stuff affecting the surface?

Water moves around all the time and there are multiple layers of interaction in the seas which happen all the time. So any leak at deepsea would eventually have an impact on the rest of the sea ecosystem and thus humanity.

We already have massive problems with plastics and heavy metals in the sea (to name but two of many problems) and adding nuclear waste would just be utter madness to the mix.


Even in the ground there is lots of stuff moving around; nutrients and minerals being broken down at the bedrock layer move up to provide food for plants; whilst water moves down and sideways providing groundwater tables, groundwater flows and interactions.

That is all fair enough, I just wasn't sure if there was significant movement up from the bottom of sea trenches.

There's massive currents of oceanic sea water that run around the world. Moving from upper to lower regions all over. In fact its one of these that warms the UK and is the reason it and many other countries in western europe are warm rather than Siberian in climate.

That deep sea current shutting down/moving is basically what is part of the onset of a glacial period where we end up growing glaciers and the UK becomes Siberian.

Interestingly they think its linked to salt density in the ocean; a reduction in salt is one of the proposed triggers, and as such melting icecaps and land ice (eg greenland and glaciers) is, of course, a good way to increase water and reduce density!

 Overread wrote:
There's massive currents of oceanic sea water that run around the world. Moving from upper to lower regions all over. In fact its one of these that warms the UK and is the reason it and many other countries in western europe are warm rather than Siberian in climate.

That deep sea current shutting down/moving is basically what is part of the onset of a glacial period where we end up growing glaciers and the UK becomes Siberian.

Interestingly they think its linked to salt density in the ocean; a reduction in salt is one of the proposed triggers, and as such melting icecaps and land ice (eg greenland and glaciers) is, of course, a good way to increase water and reduce density!

I am aware of ocean currents in general, and the gulf stream, it was more in relation to deep sea trenches and their unusual depths and geography that I was thinking about.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
None of those concerns apply to the way the US stores our waste. Buried under a mountain in the desert.

If we actually did that, maybe.

However, the reality is that ZERO waste is buried there. NONE.

The waste at the decommissioned SONGS plant is still sitting there right by the ocean. And it's like that at every other US plant - just sitting in piles next to the reactor.

There are reasons for this. The very high radioactive material can still generate more energy than it consumes. So some radioactive waste needs to be actively cooled until it degrades enough that it won't heat up to the point and melt everything in the near vicinity (which you don't want in an underground storage vault that is difficult to access and full of other radioactive material.

 Whirlwind wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
None of those concerns apply to the way the US stores our waste. Buried under a mountain in the desert.

If we actually did that, maybe.

However, the reality is that ZERO waste is buried there. NONE.

The waste at the decommissioned SONGS plant is still sitting there right by the ocean. And it's like that at every other US plant - just sitting in piles next to the reactor.

There are reasons for this.

The main reason is NIMBY

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The fact that it's highly radioactive is a deterrent, surely.

Which is precisely why would-be terrorists would want to get their hands on those waste in the first place.

jouso wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The fact that it's highly radioactive is a deterrent, surely.

Which is precisely why would-be terrorists would want to get their hands on those waste in the first place.

Exactly. That's why it shouldn't be sitting out in a zillion places "guarded" by rent-a-cops when it would be far better to have it properly managed on a military base. No, the military isn't perfect, but at least they aren't financially incented to do nothing and then roll the dice that there aren't consequences.

jouso wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The fact that it's highly radioactive is a deterrent, surely.

Which is precisely why would-be terrorists would want to get their hands on those waste in the first place.

Yeah, if terrorist groups can find enough vulnerable people to generate the various suicide attackers we have seen, they can find someone willing to irradiate themselves for whatever cause they are preaching.

Recycling in some areas doesn't make any sense whatsoever. For instance, in Idaho all your recycling gets shipped to Arizona, as Idaho doesn't have a single recycling plant. Also, as for paper in general, don't recycle it. the average recycling center in the US gets too much paper and can't handle it. They end up sending something like 75% of it to the landfill. All you are doing is having more trucks driving more miles to dump it. Not to mention the labor costs.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

jouso wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The fact that it's highly radioactive is a deterrent, surely.

Which is precisely why would-be terrorists would want to get their hands on those waste in the first place.

Exactly. That's why it shouldn't be sitting out in a zillion places "guarded" by rent-a-cops when it would be far better to have it properly managed on a military base. No, the military isn't perfect, but at least they aren't financially incented to do nothing and then roll the dice that there aren't consequences.

And seeing what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union with all kinds of military hardware the risk of guarding stuff that will be active and dangerous for millennia is pretty evident.

 Haighus wrote:

 Overread wrote:
There's massive currents of oceanic sea water that run around the world. Moving from upper to lower regions all over. In fact its one of these that warms the UK and is the reason it and many other countries in western europe are warm rather than Siberian in climate.

That deep sea current shutting down/moving is basically what is part of the onset of a glacial period where we end up growing glaciers and the UK becomes Siberian.

Interestingly they think its linked to salt density in the ocean; a reduction in salt is one of the proposed triggers, and as such melting icecaps and land ice (eg greenland and glaciers) is, of course, a good way to increase water and reduce density!

I am aware of ocean currents in general, and the gulf stream, it was more in relation to deep sea trenches and their unusual depths and geography that I was thinking about.

Surface currents are pretty well know. Lesser known are the cold, deep-sea counter-currents running under or near all the major surface currents.

Which, when you think about it, just makes sense. You can't have the Gulf Stream carrying billions (or more) gallons of warm water north and not expect it to cool and flow back south somehow...

 cuda1179 wrote:
Recycling in some areas doesn't make any sense whatsoever. For instance, in Idaho all your recycling gets shipped to Arizona, as Idaho doesn't have a single recycling plant. Also, as for paper in general, don't recycle it. the average recycling center in the US gets too much paper and can't handle it. They end up sending something like 75% of it to the landfill. All you are doing is having more trucks driving more miles to dump it. Not to mention the labor costs.

That's not an argument against recycling so much as a horrible failure of your local and/or state-level government to actually do what they're supposed to.

Bran Dawri wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
Recycling in some areas doesn't make any sense whatsoever. For instance, in Idaho all your recycling gets shipped to Arizona, as Idaho doesn't have a single recycling plant. Also, as for paper in general, don't recycle it. the average recycling center in the US gets too much paper and can't handle it. They end up sending something like 75% of it to the landfill. All you are doing is having more trucks driving more miles to dump it. Not to mention the labor costs.

That's not an argument against recycling so much as a horrible failure of your local and/or state-level government to actually do what they're supposed to.

It actually isn't, in some regards. The reason a lot of places "can't handle" recycling paper is because we're basically already using as much recycled paper product as we can. If we can make it from recycled paper, by and large we do. In cases where we can't, stuff is often made of a mix of virgin product and as much recycled as can be added while still achieving the desired result. There's no point wasting energy and transportation on recycling paper if it won't actually be used for anything, especially given it actually is biodegradable.

Recycling other materials often isn't profitable enough for private corporations to get involved without hefty subsidies, and both those and the more direct method of simply having a state-owned recycling facility can struggle to gain traction due to all manner of political reasons, not to mention good old NIMBY-ism.

Even if the facility can't take it and is just dumping it as normal waste; the practice for the public is good to keep up with. It also means that its a lot easier to then later poll for more recycling support because people are more outraged at recycling material not being recycled and thus more likely to vote and fundraise to increase recycling facilities.

So you're still changing minds and opinions even if the scheme is visibly only going half way through things at this stage.

 Overread wrote:
Even if the facility can't take it and is just dumping it as normal waste; the practice for the public is good to keep up with. It also means that its a lot easier to then later poll for more recycling support because people are more outraged at recycling material not being recycled and thus more likely to vote and fundraise to increase recycling facilities.

So you're still changing minds and opinions even if the scheme is visibly only going half way through things at this stage.

I'm not sure that giving people practice at recycling is sufficient justification for the additional carbon expenditure required to transport it twice separately from the regular rubbish. Also, I'd wager that for people who're already predisposed to think recycling is pointless, telling them that the recycling you've been having them do has actually been pointless will probably reinforce rather than challenge that view.

Also of note is that no paper product available in the US has been made from a deforested tree since 1986. Not newspaper, not paper towels, not cardboard. It all comes from tree farms, which have some net positive effects.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Even if the facility can't take it and is just dumping it as normal waste; the practice for the public is good to keep up with. It also means that its a lot easier to then later poll for more recycling support because people are more outraged at recycling material not being recycled and thus more likely to vote and fundraise to increase recycling facilities.

So you're still changing minds and opinions even if the scheme is visibly only going half way through things at this stage.

I'm not sure that giving people practice at recycling is sufficient justification for the additional carbon expenditure required to transport it twice separately from the regular rubbish. Also, I'd wager that for people who're already predisposed to think recycling is pointless, telling them that the recycling you've been having them do has actually been pointless will probably reinforce rather than challenge that view.

It's a lot easier to upscale the recycling back end to meet demand than it is to increase the number of people willing to take extra free unpaid time to sort their rubbish at home. Yes at present its offset by the inefficient system, but when it comes to transport we've a lot of that already. Heck look at all the internet buying which has exploded into a million small delivery firms. The countryside is now full of men in white fans driving around delivering parcels all day rather than a dedicated postman doing two rounds over a region every day. You can easily spot (even in the countryside) days where several vans will zoom past going this way and that and the postman is still also doing their one round a day.

Granted in the UK part of this was opening up mail to a commercial competitive system of business rather than it being a government run system (ergo no competition)

 Overread wrote:


It's a lot easier to upscale the recycling back end to meet demand than it is to increase the number of people willing to take extra free unpaid time to sort their rubbish at home. Yes at present its offset by the inefficient system, but when it comes to transport we've a lot of that already. Heck look at all the internet buying which has exploded into a million small delivery firms. The countryside is now full of men in white fans driving around delivering parcels all day rather than a dedicated postman doing two rounds over a region every day. You can easily spot (even in the countryside) days where several vans will zoom past going this way and that and the postman is still also doing their one round a day.

Granted in the UK part of this was opening up mail to a commercial competitive system of business rather than it being a government run system (ergo no competition)

Not sure I understand. Are you suggesting centralised control over all recycling, so as to minimise the extra recycling trucks? Or are you arguing the extra recycling trucks don't add much pollution compared to delivery trucks?

 =Angel= wrote:

Not sure I understand. Are you suggesting centralised control over all recycling, so as to minimise the extra recycling trucks? Or are you arguing the extra recycling trucks don't add much pollution compared to delivery trucks?

When I read the comment, I see them talking about scaling up the actual recycling facilities. They are saying that in general, we have plenty of trucks collecting the recycling, its the "business end" of the stick that is still short, so we need more capacity or more facilities to break down the papers and plastics and whatnot.

Why send paper excess to landfill when we could burn it for extra energy? Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!

nareik wrote:
Why send paper excess to landfill when we could burn it for extra energy? Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!

It's been tried, but domestic paper pellets aren't really that good burners.

Make a lot of ash compared to wood and other recycled stuff but it's still better than just dumping it.

Paper in landfill is like buried trees.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Paper in landfill is like buried trees.

I didn't know white paper was unmodified for beeing white......

There are a lot of interesting things I've heard about which could help with the planet.

Firstly, apparently it will make a huge difference to the rate of climate change if everyone were to simply paint their roof white. The increased white surface would mimic that of the ice caps, and reflect the suns energy in the same way, which would slow climate change a bit. it'd be an easy one to put government grants in place for, too.

Secondly, it's worth remembering that the only people with enough money to make a difference are the ones who will not make a difference if it doesn't make them money. Selling solar panels, wind turbines and the like are money-making plans which fit in the guise of planet saving. Beach cleans to remove plastic waste from our oceans should be a priority, but instead people sell other people solar panels which have a life expectancy of 8 years. They sell poorly engineered wind turbines which have all the weight on one side, leading to terrible bearing wear, meaning they have to sell repairs.

To save the planet, you hve 2 options - either we change how everyone thinks and get out of the infinite-growth capitalism, or we exploit it. The first option is impossible, unfortunately. As long as 2 people have something, one person will want both. So the solution is to find a way of monetising the planet. To convince companies to clean up the oceans, you need to find a value in the plastic they remove. To make companies stop selling single-use plastic, you need to stop buying it. To make companies invest in long-lasting energy solutions, you need to make it worth more to them than disposable ones.


To my mind, the best options are Solar Panels (Not cells or batteries; solar panels heat water!) and hydroelectric. Rivers keep flowing, so use them. the ecosystem lost by a carefully thought out dam is cancelled by both the ecosystem created and the reduced carbon emissions of the energy creation.

I wonder if you could create a dam where the water spills out onto a flat, black plain, where the sun evaporates it, it condenses on the glass roof and rolls down back into the dam? essentially a mini-water-cycle.

Another key thing is to find ways around peoples objections. People in the UK are against wind turbines because they are ugly and noisy. Electricity pylons already exist, and are ugly and noisy. So, put a vertical wind turbine inside the pylon, and hook it straight into the grid.

 some bloke wrote:
There are a lot of interesting things I've heard about which could help with the planet.

Firstly, apparently it will make a huge difference to the rate of climate change if everyone were to simply paint their roof white.

Sure, although down here in SoCal black roof (solar panels) would be better, but green room (plants) are the gold standard.

Living up in Blighty, I can understand why the concept of solar power doesn't exist for you.