Slashdot Mirror

Worse Than Chernobyl: When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater

by Tom Burnett

Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl.The Japanese government has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won’t admit it.

The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl, which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will probably get some of it.

If reactor 3 is in meltdown, the concrete under the containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won’t simply cool down. It will explode – not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.

Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense – it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter. The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different – a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That’s probably a bad solution.

A nuclear meltdown is a self-sustaining reaction. Nothing can stop it except stopping the reaction. And that would require a nuclear weapon. In fact, it would require one in each containment vessel to merely stop what is going on now. But it will be messy.

Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did – although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster.Every containment in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese chose to ignore the fact thata similar earthquake had hit that same general area in 1896.

Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn’t seem to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.

Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is the street name for ‘mixed oxide fuel‘ which uses ~9% plutonium along with a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used.

The problem is that you don’t want to play with this stuff. A nuclear reactor means bring fissile material to a point at which it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or aChernobyl incident). You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can’t stop it.

The Japanese are still talking about days or weeks to clean this up. That’s not true. They cannot clean it up. And no one will live in that area again for dozens or maybe hundreds of years.

© 2011 Hawaii News Daily

Dr. Tom Burnett is a frequent contributor to the Hawaii News Daily.

LCDs are slightly more efficient at white; in an LCD, the backlight is typically white and the pixels determine which colour is let through, so for black the pixels need to block the light coming through. The difference is only just passing statistical significance at 6%.

Note however that this isn't true of AMOLED screens.

You do realize that drilling for geothermal power is one of the few human interventions which are actually believed to possibly trigger earthquakes, right? (If this wasn't the specific type of geothermal you meant, you should be more specific.)

No? You missed this in your false-dichotomy-fantasy-world? Try to see things in shades of gray, it's much more entertaining. You can then see that nuclear power has both advantages and disadvantages, just like everything else (like geothermal), and pretty soon you might even hit the eureka that there's even more than one way to generate nuclear power and each specific reactor design has its own specific advantages and disadvantages!

Excuse me while I'm off to investigate whether there's been new advances in geothermal power which I missed. And whether geothermal power, which is based on long underground tunnels, would be as devastated as I think it would by a nearby major seismic event.

If we're going to start making decisions on what kind of energy plant we build based on hos much radiation it throws off, doesn't that mean we'll stop building coal burning plants?

Right you are:

Scientific American: Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

Yes, you're correct. Metered internet is the present for everywhere but the USA. And no one is really sure when USA broadband is going to catch up to the rest of the world ...

It's not present elsewhere. In my country metered internet service was last seen about 10 years ago. As far as I'm aware of none of the neighboring countries has metered internet too. As for the price&speed you will get iptv + phone + 12/1 Mbit/s internet for 30€. In the apartment buildings at the larger cities you will get 100/20 Mbit/s connection for the same money.

Metered internet is not the future.

As described, it doesn't even make any sense either the reasons why or the implementation.

Yes, you're correct. Metered internet is the present for everywhere but the USA. And no one is really sure when USA broadband is going to catch up to the rest of the world ...

We should be putting solar power in by default, and using other sources if solar fails, period.

Sure, but why stop there? Obviously it would make WAY more sense to have them grow their own food, too. Two floors out of every three should be farms! And, of course, they should process their own sewage by default. ....

Actually that wouldn't be a bad thing - when the building is the size of a small town or city one could certainly have a number of specialists doing all of those things. I think slashdot had an article about farms in scyscrapers a while ago but I can't be bothered to find it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-rise-of-vertical-farms

Yes, let's move to safe, clean, non-radioactive coal... wait a second...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

"Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.

At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels."

Sad to see more and more comments about greed and problems in Japan, too. :-( Like this one:
    "Reports: Lax oversight, 'greed' preceded Japan nuclear crisis"
    http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/0316/Reports-Lax-oversight-greed-preceded-Japan-nuclear-crisis

Or this:
    "As Japan nuclear crisis unfolds, a small town questions government reassurances"
    http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/0316/As-Japan-nuclear-crisis-unfolds-a-small-town-questions-government-reassurances

Now workers are having to abandon a plant, although return:
    http://www.adn.com/2011/03/16/1756438/radiation-level-soars-after-japan.html

And the plant design was said to be unsafe:
    "JAPAN DISASTER: GE engineer says he quit over unsafe reactor design"
    http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2011/03/17/2003498413

Basically, it would seem like any reactor design that requires active cooling is unsafe and should be mothballed? Passive cooling ones like Hyperion or stuff like TRIGA is better.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA
    http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html

In the robot capital of the globe as Japan is, where are the robots for nuclear cleanup? I helped a tiny bit with the Workhorse project for TMI (helping make a model mockup that helped get the contract):
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=three-mile-island-robots

Do they have stuff like Workhorse for nuclear disasters in Japan? If not, that is indeed lack of planning.

Other comments by me and someone else related to this thread are here:
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2036928&cid=35486070

So, it seems like Japan is struggling with issues about corruption and incomplete planning too? Even if so far, overall, they still seem to be doing better than the USA after Katrina under Bush... Or even now? Especially as the USA now is seemingly expanding its torture policies to torturing US soldiers going down a slippery slope as is suggested here (in response to someone probably concerned about wrongdoing by his country):
    http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/2011310153040668605.html

Pictures of the Japan devastation:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/powerful-quake-aftershocks-rattle-tokyo/2011/03/11/ABX65lQ_gallery.html

Very sad to see so much disaster. I can hope for the best for everyone there. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls..."

Sigh.

The ash from coal plants is radioactive. Coal has low concentrations of radioactive elements in it. When you burn the coal the radioactive elements are among the ash and are at a higher concentration of the ash than they are of the source coal.

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/tenorm/coalandcoalash.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html

A lot of the commentary about radioactivity and coal plants come from this Scientific American article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Many people read the headline of that article and didn't really bother to read the article. The argument that Scientific American makes is that a coal plant puts more radiation into the surrounding environment than a nuclear plant. The nuclear waste is still obviously more radioactive than the ash. However, the nuclear plant carefully controls their waste and materials.

In both cases the radiation released is low and not a health risk.

No but the uranium and thorium found in the coal and which gets sent up into the air with the smoke from burning coal is...

I hear this a lot, googled it and...
Excerpt: McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors. Dana Christensen, associate lab director for energy and engineering at ORNL, says that health risks from radiation in coal by-products are low. "Other risks like being hit by lightning," he adds, "are three or four times greater than radiation-induced health effects from coal plants." And McBride and his co-authors emphasize that other products of coal power, like emissions of acid rain–producing sulfur dioxide and smog-forming nitrous oxide, pose greater health risks than radiation.

The biggest issues with coal fired imo are acid rain, greenhouse gases (not sold on "scrubbers), quantity required to generate the power we need. Preference is definitely to be far away from both - but further from a nuke one.

"Again, I'm all for more nuke plants. It's cleaner' than coal, and going heavily into solar + wind is a pipe dream."

Citation needed on solar and wind?

Counterpoints:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
    http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/press_room/C68/2010_datarelease9
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
    http://www.google.com/#q=no+furnace
    http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog/beck-energy-and-nanosolar-complete-solar-power-plant
    http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/blog/?p=1037
    http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

At current levels of exponential growth, renewable energy will supply all our power in twenty years. Why should this exponetial growth stop before then? Short of something way better?

So, citation needed for your point.

However, sure, small modern nukes may be safer, but how risky will the centralized reprocessing plants be in an earthquake?

This should help a little:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=beware-the-fear-of-nuclearfear-2011-03-12

The problem with you "alternative" energy types is that you have no sense of proportion. You could entirely cover the Sahara (according to a British study) in photovoltaic cells and still not cover Europe's energy needs.

Citation requested.

Here's my own: A Solar Grand Plan. Another one, Hooked on Subsidies. Yet, another one, The elusive negawatt. Still another: Renewable Energy Maps of Nevada. Also Renewable Energy for America.

That isn't to say we shouldn't move to more alternative fuels (we should), but to naively think that will be sufficient is just blind.

To say alternative energy can't be sufficient is just blind. Requiring people to pay the full cost of the energy they use, including but not only eliminating subsidies and paying for pollution, then people won't be as wasteful.

Falcon

Geothermal, solar, and wind

I look outside and while it's sunny, it's not windy - if my power supply isn't consistent it's worthless, so scratch wind and solar.

Many of those off the grid do great with solar and wind. A national smart grid can be supplied nationwide, solar can provide electricity 8+ hours a day, it's always windy somewhere, and geothermal always works. Ignoring this shows a bias, or ignorance.

Falcon

Fill the Great Lakes and every coast, the Gulf, and all of the Alaskan Coast with towers?

Not needed in the USA. The Rockies contain enough potential wind energy to power the 48 contiguous states. Of course the West Coast from BC to southern CA contains a lot too. Turn eastward in SCal going through AZ and NM to west Texas and there's more. On the East Coast hike up the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine to find more prime wind energy. Of course you can find more offshore but plenty can be found on land.

And that's just considering wind. A Solar Grand Plan goes into how solar power can supply "69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050". Not only does Nevada have a lot of solar potential but it also has a lot of potential geothermal and wind energy.

Of course the pseudo-environmentalists NIMBYs will oppose these.

Falcon

You may think the risk is manageable, but a chernobyl event in the ranch land would destroy cattle ranches (and some of the best beef in the world) for 30yrs. That risk is too high.

Congrats on missing the entire "Gen1" part of the GP's argument.

Modern reactor designs CANNOT have a Chernobyl-type event.

But hey, it's not like coal-fired plants generate more radiation and spread it over a larger area than all the nuclear disasters combined.

Based on the predicted combustion of 2516 million tons of coal in the United States and 12,580 million tons worldwide during the year 2040, cumulative releases for the 100 years of coal combustion following 1937 are predicted to be:

U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons):
Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 357,491 tons

Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons):
Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 2,039,709 tons

- source

Hm, no. The main problem with Iter is that it does not work. That is in fact the main problem with fusion. Right now nobody knows how to make it work in any reasonable way. Here's a recent article in Scientific American detailing the situation:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fusions-false-dawn

You know, you can pour as much money as you want in research - if something isn't possible, no bright scientist in the world is going to make it happen.

Joda says: "If the impossible you attempt, fail you will!"

Well said!

See also:

Plans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Cars:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

Agriculture:
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

But, with all that said, the same sorts of reasons solar energy is getting better (better materials, better designs, better discussions, better insights into physics) is the same reason small scale nuclear is getting better (even as I would agree solar is safer and more decentralized than conventional nuclear). And example of small nuclear:
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

Related case for nuclear power:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/

Let's say, in a moderate worse case in Japan that 100,000 people die from some nuclear radiation accident and the clean up cost a couple trillion dollars. Nuclear power still might have been cheaper in Japan, all things considered, than coal which causes a lot of pollution and related illness.

Would it have been cheaper in that sense than solar and wind? Probably not...

Still, given this is the worst quake to have hit Japan in a century, and the nuclear plants are not being talked about as having total meltdowns, this event itself might prove how safe they can be in some situations.

Of course, dealing with direct terrorism intended to cause them to malfunction may be a different issue, but many major industrial facilities, like at Bhopal, have that risk. And ideas like Hyperion help reduce that risk. Ultimately, if we try harder to make our global economy work for everyone, we might have less fears that people will commit terrorism because the hate us because we support their oppressors for various reasons...

On economic transformation, see:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation

BTW, an example of perhaps cold fusion (still needs more confirmation):
http://pesn.com/2011/03/07/9501782_Cold_Fusion_Steams_Ahead_at_Worlds_Oldest_University/

Personally, I want to be able to print solar panels in a solar-powered 3D printer. :-)

I read an article in a magazine about using centrifuges to "[concentrate] the flavor molecules in a powerfully aromatic liquid layer that is ideal for cooking." I also love Sub Zero ice cream.

Despite the coolness and interesting factor, I doubt I will be going out and buying a centrifuge or a bottle of liquid nitrogen for my next meal.

Suspicions surrounds seismic activity generated by geothermal drilling is not new. There was a pilot plant shut down in Switzerland after the number of localized earthquakes sky-rocketed. This is potentially scary stuff for the people that live there. This might be long term. More here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=geothermal-drilling-earthquakes

Any manipulation beyond that is a deliberate attempt to derail the other person's rationality and force them into making a decision that might not be in properly alignment with their loyalties and interests, and hence is potentially harmful to the person and hence morally wrong.

Depends on your definition of morality. I like Sam Harris' definition of morality, which I will summarize as that which leads to increased well-being of the most people, while at the same time increasing cooperation between them. By that measure, you can start to have nuanced and rational debates about philosophy that don't get all fucking weird and supernatural.

http://remineralize.org/

And such fertilizer produces healthier plants that need less pesticides.

"Biodegradable plastic made from plants, not oil, is emerging"
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2008-12-25-biodegradable-plastic_N.htm

"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

"More energy goes into making gasoline from electricity and natural gas than it would take to make electric cars go the same distance"
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm

See also:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"

Other approaches to all renewables:
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

Given the exponetial growth of renewable energy, and how PV solar panels are about to reach grid parity and the prices will continue to drop, I think we will be all renewables by about 2030 from market forces alone at this point. (Unless cold fusion pans out, or if small scale nuclear like Hyperion gets popular.)

Three quarters of US agricultural production also just goes to produce livestock, and the health consequences of too much animal products are harming people's health, too, so we really don't need most of the fertilizer we produce.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html

How to deal with the economic consequences of all this increased efficiency:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/more-on-the-future-implications-ibm-watson-technology/#comment-534

And legalizing everything and handing out heroin to addicts actually reduces drug addicts.

Don't expect Americans to actually take notice. They'll start imprisoning file sharers along with the drug users and promise it'll reduce piracy.

I wonder what it is that makes so many of us susceptible to such blatant scientific fraud.

Patternicity.

The farmers turning part of the Sahara green again would disagree with you:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=farmers-in-sahel-beat-back-drought-and-climate-change-with-trees

So would Roth Capital Partners, who estimate 18 GW of photovoltaic power installations this year:

http://international.pv-tech.org/news/roth_capital_partners_forecast_pv_demand_of_18gw_in_2011_bankable_products

We are learning how to live on Earth, but it will take a generation or two to clean up all the non-sustainable crap we have at the moment.

You might find this interesting.

Scientific American had an article about the the E-Readers; The Trouble with E-Readers, by David Pogue, where they essentially says that they are a hype.

I think Pogue is full of it.

I was in that camp - I thought ereaders were pointless, and holding a physical book was the only way I'd ever want to read. But, having to fill six post-shoulder-surgery weeks in the dead of winter (and being effectively one-armed for the duration), I bought a Kindle - figuring I'd sell it after I got my arm back. But you know what? For reading novels, I really like the thing - the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. For example: I thought I'd hate the buttons... but, when you're holding it and reading, the navigation buttons are actually easier than a physical - or multitouch - page flip. I'm quite happy, sitting there under a reading lamp, a snifter of brandy in one hand and a Kindle in the other.

I do think ereaders have room for improvement - especially that the DRM needs to go (I'd rather not have to strip all my books manually). And I'll probably miss having a wall full of books... but that's just the part of me that doesn't like change. That's the same part of me that still misses those old giant magtape reels from 70s and 80s server rooms.

Hacking the ebook readers may be the only way to make them really useful.

Scientific American had an article about the the E-Readers; The Trouble with E-Readers, by David Pogue, where they essentially says that they are a hype.

However I see a problem with the ebook, and that is that if you break your reader or run out of battery (either will happen eventually) then the books you have will be unreadable. Breaking a paper book doesn't make it unreadable, and at worst you have to re-glue the pages but usually a piece of tape is sufficient.

And if you buy a paper book then your kids can read it too, but will the ebook reader and the books it contains survive that long?

I don't confuse the two - social behavior obviously can move much faster. Traditional cultures that were dominant within current lifetimes have been supplanted by imported or imposed Western culture nearly overnight. But it's fairly rare for that to be an unqualified success - even countries that have been "Westernized" for a few hundred years but previously had little or no urbanization have not done well adapting to our "foreign" culture. I'm not even saying they should - I happen to like Western culture, but that's because I'm completely adapted to it. I'm pretty sure if I were Maori or San I'd be much less happy living the life I live.

But allele diffusion is much more rapid than most people believe. It really only takes a handful of generations for an especially useful allele to spread throughout a population. This assumes that there is an allele to spread - but if there are certain alleles that select for certain behaviors, and those behaviors are being selected for, they can spread very rapidly. Even plain old mutation-based evolution is faster than expected.

What a ******* load of bunk !

The gene VMAT2 is likely what they are talking about. VMAT2 is a physiological arrangement that produces the sensations associated, by some, with mystic experiences, including the presence of God or others.
Carl Zimmer claimed that, given the low explanatory power of VMAT2, it would have been more accurate for Hamer to call his book A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene

It's worth noting that one of the other research pioneers of this so called God Gene, Dean H. Hamer pretty much disproves the whole God Gene theory in his own book by the same title.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faith-boosting-genes

Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]

“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.” [RealClimate]

Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.

Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]

Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:

Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan

That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got

Generators cause drag so you loose some energy but this type of system would add friction into the mix which would waste more energy. Seems more like an energy shell game with looses from friction along the way.

Why is it that this system would necessarily waste more energy than a electrical system? You say that this system would add friction, which is just another word for the "drag" that the generator adds in an electrical system. Why is this more of an energy shell game than an electric hybrid? It's just replacing the generator/battery combo with a compressor/accumulator combo.

Assuming that it's mostly a short-term compress/decompress cycles, as long as the accumulator is well insulated to prevent heat loss, it should be fairly efficient. Perhaps more efficient than a battery.

This article suggests that a hydraulic/compressed gas system can have 75% energy recovery for start/stop conditions as compared with 15 - 20% for a gasoline-electric hybrid:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hydraulic-hybrid-vehicle

You mean these Lunatics from the IPCC?

Research by Mary-Claire King in 1973 found 99% identical DNA between human beings and chimpanzees,[4] although research since has modified that finding to about 94%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#Evolutionary_relationship

Wikipedia's source is:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-chimp-gene-gap-wide

Well... Not exactly UNDERGROUND, but we did find a cyanobacteria under hardened layers of stuff only IR could penetrate, and they had a new type of chlorophyll that could perform photosynthesis with IR light.

Here's one story about it. Not the one I read, however.

Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter. And yet glass's liquidlike properties are not enough to explain the thicker-bottomed windows, because glass atoms move too slowly for changes to be visible.

Solids are highly organized structures. They include crystals, like sugar and salt, with their millions of atoms lined up in a row, explains Mark Ediger, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "Liquids and glasses don't have that order," he notes. Glasses, though more organized than liquids, do not attain the rigid order of crystals. "Amorphous means it doesn't have that long-range order," Ediger says. With a "solid—if you grab it, it holds its shape," he adds.

When glass is made, the material (often containing silica) is quickly cooled from its liquid state but does not solidify when its temperature drops below its melting point. At this stage, the material is a supercooled liquid, an intermediate state between liquid and glass. To become an amorphous solid, the material is cooled further, below the glass-transition temperature. Past this point, the molecular movement of the material's atoms has slowed to nearly a stop and the material is now a glass. This new structure is not as organized as a crystal, because it did not freeze, but it is more organized than a liquid. For practical purposes, such as holding a drink, glass is like a solid, Ediger says, although a disorganized one.

Like liquids, these disorganized solids can flow, albeit very slowly. Over long periods of time, the molecules making up the glass shift themselves to settle into a more stable, crystallike formation, explains Ediger. The closer the glass is to its glass-transition temperature, the more it shifts; the further away from that changeover point, the slower its molecules move and the more solid it seems.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-fiction-glass-liquid

I seem to recall when modems with lights were still in use, that a video tape of the flashing lights on the modem could be slowed down enough to read the stream of bits. Granted 3mb/s is a great deal faster than 56kb/s, but video technology is faster now, too. I would presume there is encryption on both ends, but I see a small IR led "bug" left on top of a computer, cube wall, file cabinet, etc. serving as a middle man pickup of the stream while it is decoded on the other end.

Doesn't have to be modems. You can recreate network traffic from reflected flashes from a network switch, although this report claims that it is, probably, restricted to 56kbps modems, not 10/100mbps ethernet cards.

Looks like you're right about Portugal, and it seems successful

If possession of illicit drugs was decriminalized then there would be far less crime in the US and South America. Maybe the US should decriminalize it and regulate it like cigarettes or alcohol, I'm sure the government could find great uses for all those new tax dollars.

When an animal kills another for food (even more so if it is for living space), implicit in this action is an assessment (correct or not) that the killer is more important than the prey (because the killer should live and the prey should not).
Animals understand this (in my opinion) and nature has given us (all animals) a capacity to derive pleasure from the misfortune of others (see my Schadenfreude link elsewhere on this topic - satisfaction is comparable to a good meal. This strikes me as a useful trait for ensuring that prey is brought back to the entire pack and not consumed on the spot by hunters).
The idea that we achieved our current position (top) in the food chain due to our intelligence alone deliberately obscures the fact that it was our brutality that achieved it. Our earnest attempts to train ourselves to curb such brutality unfortunately leave us open to exploitation by entities who choose not to accept such constraints.

Will an article about Schadenfreude do?

Is it possible that there has always been error, but it is just more noticeable now given that reporting is more accurate?

Precisely. As mentioned in a Scientific American blog:

"The difficulties Lehrer describes do not signal a failing of the scientific method, but a triumph: our knowledge is so good that new discoveries are increasingly hard to make, indicating that scientists really are converging on some objective truth."

Light dose not = heat.
not all light heats equal well. Longer waves heat things much better then shorter waves.. You do not want to stand in front of a long wave transmitter!

You need to look at the spectrum of the light and the efficiency of it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-exactly-does-light-tr

Or for a lamp in a box expermint

"We placed a 60 watt external ballasted mercury vapor lamp and a 60 watt halogen lamp in two separate insulated boxes with a thermometer inside. If both lamps put out roughly the same amount of heat, these two lamps should have effectively raised the temperature in both boxes to the same degree. After 30 minutes, the thermometer in the container with the halogen lamp gave a reading 20F higher than the other box, (135F vs 115 F) and the heat from the halogen lamp had actually warped the plastic!"

http://www.reptileuvinfo.com/html/watts-heat-lights-lamp-heat-output.html

I would think that any person pushing to eliminate our need for foreign oil or oil in general and actually expecting some level of success would have done a tiny bit of research.

Oil billionaire T Boone Pickens did the research for his Pickens Plan. Of course some accuse him of using the plan to hide his plan to steal water.

We could reduce our need on oil by a massive amount with nuclear power

Yea, and create more problems. Nuclear power is not profitable, it is hooked on subsidies.

On the other hand, there's A Solar Grand Plan: "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions". There's also Wind: "The United States has enough wind resources to generate electricity for every home and business in the nation."

To tell the truth there is not one energy source operating on large enough scale to power the US that does not get subsidies. Even oil gets subsidies.

Falcon

I think you are missing a step. If you just put atmospheric air through such a reactor, you might split the CO2 to CO but it will be in a gas stream with 99.96% other gasses (N2 and O2).. then you must separate the CO. Might as well separate the CO2 up front and avoid wasting all that energy heating up so much excess gasses. One can capture CO2 from the air and supply it in a concentrated form to the solar reactor.

No, I'm talking about the pollution required to make rare earth magnets.

I have no idea how much supply there is, but that will take care of it itself. I just don't want power producers to be able to shift their cost to poisoning the commons.

My apologies, I assumed /.ers would be relatively familiar with this idea. Sources should have been provided and I'll also retract 'studies' for articles. Also note that knock-off is different than counterfeit; I'm not saying the latter is helpful, just the former.

http://www.techdirt.com/ for general stuff on this topic.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0909/p09s01-coop.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/business/05scene.html?ex=1333425600&en=bfb7593c76d8b819&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faking-it This one is interesting as it provides a guilty conscience aspect that eventually would have people buying the brand names to feel better about themselves.

I think the basic point is that people who knowingly buy knock-offs were never going to be initial purchasers of the brand name goods. But they would buy them once the price became palatable to them. No sale was 'lost' by

And the uterine environment is also not as "identical" as you assume.

Want to try again?