Laughing Man wrote:
Not quite. They're just isolating what boils down to gasoline from sea water. It's not even close to energy neutral, and still needs a pretty hefty power source to create the fuel.

Not to say it doesn't have some pretty awesome uses. For one, it DOES create a potentially unlimited (and carbon neutral) source of petrol for civilian use given enough power thrown at it (ideally from green sources like nuclear, solar, and wind). Not to mention the fact that all those nuclear powered super carriers could make jet fuel for their aircraft.

 Medium of Death wrote:
You and I have very different definitions of the word "Green" when it comes to energy generation.

You're seriously saying that nuclear energy is an environmental equivalent to real green energy sources such as as solar, wind or wave?

 Medium of Death wrote:
Not really sure why you quoted "movements"...

It would be odd for an environmentalist to promote nuclear energy just on the waste and potential impact for future generations.

Notice how I've never said I don't want or like nuclear. I just don't want people green washing it. It's quite clear that nuclear isn't a green resource when it has the potential for catastrophic damage to ecosystems and life in general. You can support something even if it's not "green" and say it's a good stop gap.

 Medium of Death wrote:
Not really sure why you quoted "movements"...

It would be odd for an environmentalist to promote nuclear energy just on the waste and potential impact for future generations.

Notice how I've never said I don't want or like nuclear. I just don't want people green washing it. It's quite clear that nuclear isn't a green resource when it has the potential for catastrophic damage to ecosystems and life in general. You can support something even if it's not "green" and say it's a good stop gap.

 easysauce wrote:
well... considering that had we switched to nuclear from coal back in the 50's, that would have reduced emissions by at least 80% if not more....

but apparently its a bad thing to reduce emissions while we work on getting solar/wind/cold fusion up and running, so lets just flood the earth with radioactive coal smoke for a century or so.

why on earth would solar/wind/fusion tech be done away with just because we reduced our emissions with nuclear...


thats like saying "hmmm, lets NOT bandage up this gaping wound in your side, because we might develop some super duper better bandages some time in the future."

environmental "movements" have done far more to preserve the mass use of coal as fuel then anyone else since they are largely responsible for the overwhelming lack of support and smearing of nuclear tech.

 easysauce wrote:
These groups should have been stopping the far less green process of burning coal (again, adding more radiation then nuclear, let alone the CO2) and welcoming the greener nuke tech, but instead they fought tooth and nail to keep it from being accepted/used. Preventing a viable alternative, is defacto supporting the coal plants.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 easysauce wrote:
well... considering that had we switched to nuclear from coal back in the 50's, that would have reduced emissions by at least 80% if not more....

but apparently its a bad thing to reduce emissions while we work on getting solar/wind/cold fusion up and running, so lets just flood the earth with radioactive coal smoke for a century or so.

why on earth would solar/wind/fusion tech be done away with just because we reduced our emissions with nuclear...


thats like saying "hmmm, lets NOT bandage up this gaping wound in your side, because we might develop some super duper better bandages some time in the future."

environmental "movements" have done far more to preserve the mass use of coal as fuel then anyone else since they are largely responsible for the overwhelming lack of support and smearing of nuclear tech.

Windscale, Dounreay, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima did a pretty good job of making nuclear smearable

Anyway, the major growing users of coal are the Chinese, not noted for their environmental credentials.

 Minx wrote:

 easysauce wrote:
These groups should have been stopping the far less green process of burning coal (again, adding more radiation then nuclear, let alone the CO2) and welcoming the greener nuke tech, but instead they fought tooth and nail to keep it from being accepted/used. Preventing a viable alternative, is defacto supporting the coal plants.

Why are you suddenly worrying about CO_2 emissions? You don't believe in man-made climate change anyway, so why would it matter if we released more carbon dioxide?

As for the supposed green nuclear fission plants, they do produce non-trivial amounts of highly radioactive waste (plus some more low- and intermediate level waste). And even though some laymen might proclaim the safe storage of aforementioned waste is rather simple, it's apparently not, as there's only one(!) high-level radioactive waste storage in use worldwide (in Finland) while a few more are still in evaluation phases after decades of nuclear power usage (the US storage might be a bit further than evaluation though). Furthermore, there are currently no sub-critical spallation driven reactors in use that might be able to transmute the worst elements in our radioactive waste. They are not even in serious development at the moment.

And then there's the slight risk of releasing nuclear inventory due to an accident, war or terrorism. I would rather experience less than more of these occurrences.

Therefore, we should rather concentrate on wind, solar, and water power and continue research on nuclear fusion. The stellarator experiments seem promising.

 easysauce wrote:
maybe instead of frothing at the mouth over how awful a person I am, and how much I hate the environment, take a step back and listen.