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If you want to think the sky is falling to play into some global scarcity tactic that's cool, but I'm going to keep driving my truck to work.

Okay, just please don't vote for coal or for keeping gas prices artificially low and you can drive whatever you want wherever you feel like as far as I'm concerned. About a third of our carbon comes from coal fired power plants, and that's idiotic. Gas subsidies for personal transport is also idiotic. We don't need to be forcing people to give up their beloved trucks, we just shouldn't be paying part of the bill.

Couple other factors:

Diesel has about 14% higher energy density per unit volume. It weighs more and there are physically more molecules in it per gallon. So 35 mpg diesel is actually closer to 31 mpg in a direct comparison with gasoline mpg. The Union of Concerned Scientists recommends adjusting diesel mpg down by 20% when comparing to gasoline to mpg. And for emissions they recommend adjusting it down 25% when comparing to gasoline.

Fuel consumption is actually the inverse of mpg. mpg is miles per gallon; fuel consumption is gallons per mile. This is why the rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to measure fuel efficiency. Since mpg is the inverse of what we're really interested in, the high end of mpg actually represents the smallest fuel savings. For a given commute, switching from a 15 mpg vehicle to a 25 mpg vehicle saves more fuel than switching from a 25 mpg vehicle to a 50 mpg vehicle. This is despite the first switch being an improvement of "only" 10 mpg, while the second switch is an improvement of 25 mpg. If you measure it in gallons per 100 miles, it becomes obvious:

15 mpg = 6.67 gal per 100 mi
25 mpg = 4 gal per 100 mi (improvement of 2.67 gal per 100 mi)

25 mpg = 4 gal per 100 mi
50 mpg = 2 gal per 100 mi (improvement of 2 gal per 100 mi)

So sky-high mpg figures like 50 mpg or 100 mpg actually aren't that impressive in terms of fuel savings, the use of mpg exaggerates their benefit. Our research into more fuel-efficient vehicles really should be concentrating on improving the mileage of gas guzzlers like trucks and SUVs, not on developing super-efficient vehicles like the Prius.

Hmmmmmmmm...who to trust?

On one hand I see that cpu6502 suspects that our current warming spike is entirely natural.

On the other hand I see that the U.S. National Academies and the science academies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russian, the UK, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, NASA, the American Physical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Chemical Society, the American Meteorological Society, the Geological Society of America, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Australian Institute of Physics and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics think cpu6502 is wrong.

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=05192010
http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8+5energy-climate09.pdf
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100728_stateoftheclimate.html
http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_200702/aaas_climate_statement.pdf
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/ssi/american-physical-society.pdf
http://www.agu.org/sci_pol/positions/climate_change2008.shtml
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_SUPERARTICLE&node_id=1907&use_sec=false&sec_url_var=region1
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.pdf
http://www.geosociety.org/positions/position10.htm
http://www.euro-acad.eu/downloads/memorandas/lets_be_honest_-_festplenum_03.03.07_-_final2.pdf
http://www.aip.org.au/scipolicy/Science%20Policy.pdf
http://www.iugg.org/resolutions/perugia07.pdf
http://planet3.org/2012/03/11/a-brief-guide-to-the-scientific-consensus-on-climate-change/

I'm with you; I'd rather see hydrocarbons used as lubricants/raw materials for manufacture than burned as energy. Which makes my job at Halliburton somewhat ironic, but life's funny that way.

The good news is that energy companies (and energy service companies) are eying the alternative energy market as an exit strategy from oil-as-energy. Halliburton does geothermal well cementing, and is trying to advance the art so the wells and plants can be more productive. Challenges include seismic instability, high permeability of the rock layers (you pick places where there are lots of natural fractures), and balancing the need for insulation/strength/durability of the cement. None of these problems are insurmountable, but making geothermal cost competitive with oil is challenging.

I'm personally surprised that we don't see closed-loop geothermal power systems. It seems like they're all farcture-and-collect style systems. Admittedly, fracture-and-collect exposes the water to more surface area of rock, and the wells are cheaper to drill. On the other hand, the operator wouldn't have to deal with produced sand/salt/corrosives that will invariably result from mingling water with rocks downhole, and there wouldn't be any issue with water losses.* If I had to take a guess, though, no-one does it for the same reason that oil/gas operators in the Rockies don't buy downhole sand control solutions - it's an upfront cost that they have to justify to a beancounter rather than an operating cost they can balance against ongoing profits (cost of doing business and all that...).

*Seriously, who approves these lossy geothermal systems in deserts? When there are crops to irrigate and drinking water needed for houses (not to mention sensitive ecosystems) I have trouble seeing how the water use of (big pdf warning!) nearly a gallon per kWh is practical.

I'd post a link to a paper saying otherwise, but I've read so many I wouldn't know where to start. Tthink about it, how in the world is a beneficial gene supposed to make a plant yield less? Yield is a complex feature which is a function of soil nutrition, insect & pathogen attack, climate, water, ect. It would be quite interesting if you could explain how reducing insect attack or improving nutrient acquisition actually decreased yield. You might be thinking of the report Failure to Yield. You should read it. It is probably the most famous of the papers used by anti-GE proponents to argue that point. Too bad it was based on data showing an increase in yield.

Please see:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/01/two_incontrovertible_things_an.php?utm_source=combinedfeed&utm_medium=rss
and
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/27/remarkable-editorial-bias-on-climate-science-at-the-wall-street-journal/
and
http://blog.ucsusa.org/dismal-science-at-the-wall-street-journal

I'm sure the inferior primates who do not comprehend physics, mathematics, statistics, climatology, oceanography, geology, chemistry, or any of the other topics known to those of us who qualify as homo sapiens will once again display their profound ignorance by declaring that anthropocentric global warming is false. These are the same gibbering baboons that support "creation science" and "holistic medicine" and other idiocy. It's a sad testament to the aggregate stupidity of our society that any of these are given more attention than summary dismissal.

There's lots of independent testing confirming the safety of genetic engineering. Anyone who says otherwise either doesn't know much about the area, or is lying. Considering that Gurian-Sherman works for the Union of Concerned Scientists as an 'expert' in this field and wrote the report Failure to Yield, which claimed that GE crops yielded less than non-GE crops, while conveniently ignoring the fact that 1) those GE crops were not designed to be intrinsically higher yielding but to have other benefits, 2) there is no real reason why GE crops would have a lower yield than non-GE crops (beyond a minor fitness penalty), and 3) their data showed an increase in yield (a gain especially large in developing countries where they did not have access to pesticides to raise their yield as developed countries do), I'm going to have to assume he's just lying.

Everyone with a soft sport for some unscientific notion says the same thing. 'I'm not anti-science, its just that every scientists is either an ideologue or part of a conspiracy.' Sounds just like the anti-vaxxers or evolution denialists. Fact is, the vast majority of scientists in relevant fields support GE crops, and they make that decision based on the scientific literature out there. Accepting that is not gullibility, and ignoring that is not critical thinking. It is indeed anti-science.

if Kenya wants cheap electricity, then nuclear is the worst option. It only appears cheap because of massive government subsidies.

According to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists:
"Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away"
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html

Removing antibiotics from livestock wouldn't create a food disaster. At worst it would raise the quality of meat offered to Americans along with the price, but not in a catastrophic way.' It's already been done in europe - we're lagging behind, and so is the quality of our product as a result. http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/wise_antibiotics/european-union-bans.html

Not only were they cleared of any malfeasance by the numerous investigations, but those of us who read complaints about the emails were amused at the conclusions of the accusers.

And also dismayed, since this represents nothing more than people like yourself whose previously existing knowledge about how science gets done, about the behaviour of scientists and especially the subject matter of this science was essentially "none" nevertheless imposing yourself and your opinion into the business of how science should be conducted and how results should be interpreted and what should qualify as a valid scientific study.

So to make sure it's perfectly clear, the same people who decry the imposition of regulation for the public good upon industry by governmental experts fully qualified in the intricacies of those industries they regulate now declare themselves to be subject matter experts in climate change and seek to impose themselves, Stalin-over-genetics-like, over a field of science the price of earning legitimate authority to which is decades of hard work, none of which you've done.

The rebuttal to the purely stupid assertions of dishonesty lies with a fundamental misunderstanding of the idiosyncratic ways scientists use terms like "hide" and "trick" amongst themselves and is well documented here for anyone seriously interested in the truth of the matter:

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html#University_of_East_Anglia_Climatic_Resea

The point I want to make here and now is that someone needs to tell you to your face, and to you individually and specifically, that you're an idiot.

In fact, you're the worst kind of idiot history has to offer- the idiot who gets himself worked up into a froth and goes torch in hand, door to door, looking for the "the enemy" .

This gets you high. It fills you with a level of excitement and meaning and purpose which is otherwise absent from your dreary little life of Hannity watching and beers.

You need this the way a meth addict needs his next score. It lights up what passes for your brain in a way that nothing else does - getting ginned up against scientists and the left and the global warming conspiracy.

You're exactly the 21st century counterpart to the average, broke, angry, stupid, manipulated German going to a Hitler rally and letting himself become apoplectic over the conspiracies of the Jews and how the Jews are lying to Germany and how they're destroying Germany and how they're plotting to take over the world.

Or as your kind is wont to refer to it these days, it, Agenda 21. http://www.freedomadvocates.org/

This is the role you've chosen for yourself on this earth- that of a buffoon, one of the millions who get behind some misbegotten idea and bring only ruin to themselves, their nation, their families and everyone forced into action to counter them.

That is your historical context; that is what you actually are.

I am bothered by one part of this article, the idea that Science Debate 2008 was only moderately successful. True, they were unable to get the candidates to debate science topics live on television, but the organization DID succeed in getting the candidates to debate science. The organization gave the candidates a list of questions and then posted their answers online side by side for comparison (I wrote up a score card on who I thought gave the best answer to each question).

This was more than the Federation of American Scientists or Union of Concerned Scientists have accomplished in their decades of activism. This was HUGE for an organization that had just come into existence. This success is why I abandoned my memberships to these other organizations and committed my donations to Science Debate.

(Side Note: Newt Gingrich is a scumbag, but if he gets the nomination I can't wait to see him and Obama throw-down on Science... I've seen Newt destroy John Kerry on how to tackle Climate Change and I believe his nomination would bring scientific issues into the spotlight since Obama is something of a science geek himself.)

No one is quite so confident in their beliefs as someone who argues from ignorance.

A few minutes with Google would have turned up this PDF list of transgenic test permits, including...

• Emlay & Associated spliced carp, cow, & mustard genes in to sunflowers to create pharmaceutical proteins & industrial enzymes. They withheld what the cow gene was for, but the carp gene was for growth hormone, and the mustard genes were to make extraction easier.
• Washington State and Venture Biosciences both engineered barley to produce lactoferrin, an antimicrobial protein, from human genes.
• Limagrain engineered corn with human genes for alpha & beta hemoglobin. (Heh. Corn for the Blood God!)
• On that note, Applied Phytogenics spliced human genes for an anti-clotting agent and a major plasma protein.
• ProdiGene engineered corn with genes from pigs, a pig stomach virus, human hepatitus, SIV (monkey AIDS), and something they wouldn't list for trade secrets purposes.
• Planet Biotech mixed tobacco with unknown genes from rabbits and mice to get antibodies against tooth decay germs.

It's rare, but animal genes in food crops is not unprecedented. No such products have gotten past the test stages into the general market, AFAIK, and unlike you, I've actually read through the list of all GM crops APHIS has granted nonregulated status to under the Plant Protection Act and its predecessor acts.

You can download the climate data from the NOAA. If there isn't a 100 year cycle, we are (or were, around the turn of the century) in a global cooling phase, and global warming is completely false. Just as global temperatures dropped worldwide around the year 1900, they also dropped around 2000. I actually did a limited amount of statistics with the datasets available a few years ago when the climategate emails broke.

And the 2 year figure is from a global warming pundit I happen to run into. But it demonstrates the broader point: that even the pundits got it wrong, and the politicization of the issue by Al Gore, etc... did not help the cause. And reports like this are hardly convincing - its long on accusations and very short on specifics. It seems as if they expect the reader to conclude that guilt by association is a convincing argument, or that an organization lobbying in its own interests is a cause for suspicion. What the report manages to convey, rather convincingly, is that the union of concerned scientists feels it is on the losing end of a propaganda war with big oil. Which may be true, but is hardly relevant when someone is trying to determine if global warming is happening in the first place. The fact that the UCS downplays the significance of the climategate emails doesn't help, either, but rather illustrates they have a double standard - one for Big Oil, and another for scientists.

From the mouths of babes comes this little gem:

The growing empirical evidence of climate change that is consistent with model projections, and other recent advances in the understanding of climate science have led to increased confidence in the use of global circulation models to project future climate change, but predicting the future remains inherently risky.

Such a disclaimer does not inspire confidence. Yes, I understand you have a computer model which predicts temperature, but with such a disclaimer, it's practically useless. An engineer who issued such a disclaimer for bridges he designed or appliances ("Well, we can't guarantee it won't burst into flames...") would be lucky to be employed at all.

And it only goes downhill from there. Every single climate change prediction following the disclaimer is qualified with words like "possible" or "could". They can't even say what will happen, only what "could". Real science starts with a falsifiable hypothesis, and they're doing their best to avoid any predictions which could later be shown false.

I don't like fossil fuels for a whole host of reasons having nothing to do with global warming (polllution, economic security, etc...), but it seems as if scientists don't fully grasp the gravity of their statements - or perhaps want to distance themselves from any liability that reliance on such statements might bring about. They seem oblivious to the challenges faced by those genuinely wanting to bring about change, or the cost of doing so. You can't simply flush 339 billion dollars of revenue (Exxon Mobil) down the toilet without causing massive disruptions in the ability of people today to feed themselves. It seems as if they live in some fairy land where one can produce their own electricity and fuel their cars from carbon-neutral sources. Even though I have the technical know-how to do something of this nature, I have neither the time, nor the money, to do so. Worse, it's illegal in the US for individuals to make their own fuel, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are interested in the sort of regulatory change that could bring this about - that is, if we had the money in the first place.

You can download the climate data from the NOAA. If there isn't a 100 year cycle, we are (or were, around the turn of the century) in a global cooling phase, and global warming is completely false. Just as global temperatures dropped worldwide around the year 1900, they also dropped around 2000. I actually did a limited amount of statistics with the datasets available a few years ago when the climategate emails broke.

And the 2 year figure is from a global warming pundit I happen to run into. But it demonstrates the broader point: that even the pundits got it wrong, and the politicization of the issue by Al Gore, etc... did not help the cause. And reports like this are hardly convincing - its long on accusations and very short on specifics. It seems as if they expect the reader to conclude that guilt by association is a convincing argument, or that an organization lobbying in its own interests is a cause for suspicion. What the report manages to convey, rather convincingly, is that the union of concerned scientists feels it is on the losing end of a propaganda war with big oil. Which may be true, but is hardly relevant when someone is trying to determine if global warming is happening in the first place. The fact that the UCS downplays the significance of the climategate emails doesn't help, either, but rather illustrates they have a double standard - one for Big Oil, and another for scientists.

From the mouths of babes comes this little gem:

The growing empirical evidence of climate change that is consistent with model projections, and other recent advances in the understanding of climate science have led to increased confidence in the use of global circulation models to project future climate change, but predicting the future remains inherently risky.

Such a disclaimer does not inspire confidence. Yes, I understand you have a computer model which predicts temperature, but with such a disclaimer, it's practically useless. An engineer who issued such a disclaimer for bridges he designed or appliances ("Well, we can't guarantee it won't burst into flames...") would be lucky to be employed at all.

And it only goes downhill from there. Every single climate change prediction following the disclaimer is qualified with words like "possible" or "could". They can't even say what will happen, only what "could". Real science starts with a falsifiable hypothesis, and they're doing their best to avoid any predictions which could later be shown false.

I don't like fossil fuels for a whole host of reasons having nothing to do with global warming (polllution, economic security, etc...), but it seems as if scientists don't fully grasp the gravity of their statements - or perhaps want to distance themselves from any liability that reliance on such statements might bring about. They seem oblivious to the challenges faced by those genuinely wanting to bring about change, or the cost of doing so. You can't simply flush 339 billion dollars of revenue (Exxon Mobil) down the toilet without causing massive disruptions in the ability of people today to feed themselves. It seems as if they live in some fairy land where one can produce their own electricity and fuel their cars from carbon-neutral sources. Even though I have the technical know-how to do something of this nature, I have neither the time, nor the money, to do so. Worse, it's illegal in the US for individuals to make their own fuel, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are interested in the sort of regulatory change that could bring this about - that is, if we had the money in the first place.

US beats everyone even in emissions per dollar of economic activity.

Not quite.
CO2(million metric tons 2008)/GDP (millions $ 2008):

USA 5833/14.4 = 405
China 6534/4.3 = 1520
Russia 1729/1.68 = 1029
Australia 437/1.01 = 433
Canada 574/1.5 = 382
South Korea 542/0.93 = 583
Japan 1214/4.91 = 247
Germany 829/3.67 = 226
Brazil 428/1.57 = 273
France 415/2.87 = 145
UK 572/2.68 = 213

Sources: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/each-countrys-share-of-co2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)&oldid=324440846

You can also get the sense that countries with smaller pop density and larger inter-city distances face greater challenges to per-capita emissions reduction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions

What have you been smoking? The only reason nuclear power exists is because of massive government subsidies - http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html

Thierry Legault has done some wonderful captures of satellites as they've gone overhead. It's interesting to see the slow tumble of this particular satellite, which confirms that it's pretty much out of action (even though we already know that). Apparently the satellite had a possible minor collision with debris in 2007 (see page 15 of 52 of http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nwgs/securing-the-skies-full-report-1.pdf ) which is the likely reason that this satellite is tumbling.

Yes they are, because higher yield is a myth

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong I could dig up more from my bookmarks, but it's late here and you get the point. You might be thinking of the study titled 'Failure to Yield' a study claiming that GMOs actually had lesser yield (although it was based on data showing an increase). Actually, yield gains in developed countries are relatively low, only like 3-5%. But that is because pesticides already pushed yields to the limit. If you replace pesticides with resistant GMOs, it isn't that much difference (but make no mistake there still is a difference). Where Bt GMOs really shine is in developing countries where they might not always have access to pesticides. There, the difference can be dramatic. And of course in the case of viral resistant GMOs or fungal resistant GMOs they can make the difference between an industry continuing to exist or disappearing (without GMOs there would be no Hawaiian papaya industry and I've read some very promising information about GMOs with anti-fungal proteins).

the plants are killing insects indiscriminately (see honeybees)

The cry proteins used in the Bt GMOs are actually very specific, much more so than the pesticides they replaced. Do you have any evidence (besides some anti-GMO nutter's rantings) that Bt plants are in any way responsible for CCD, which need I remind you occures even in countries where GM crops are banned?

Also, familiarize yourself with terminator gene

I've done genetic engineering before, so I'm already pretty familiar with that thanks. Terminator technology was developed to prevent unwanted gene transfer. You know, that thing the anti-GMO groups are always complaining about. ISo, a safeguard to prevent that would make them happy, right? Ha! These people are harder to please than anti-vaxxers. They just put a nasty spin on it and freaked out even more! In other words, damned if you do and damned if you don't.I know what you (the agricultural layman) must be thinking: how horrible to keep farmers from saving seed. But you miss something very important: no one really does that anyway (besides those growing heirloom crops, the smae people the terminator gene would protect). Back in the early 1900's pretty much every farmer realized that if you use hybrids, superior crops but whose seeds do not possess genetic uniformity (making them unsuitable for seed saving), you could get higher yields. The gain was so much that it justified the cost of buying new seed every year. So, ever since then, farmers bought their seed from seed companies. Almost a hundred years later, GMOs get the blame. Makes no sense, but that's the anti-GMO movement for you. As an aside, some people are working on GMOs with apomixis traits, meaning the seeds are basically clones and as such the hybrid vigor would be preserved thus eliminating the need for seed vendors. But anyway, the terminator trait, despite the ill will directed toward it, is more misunderstood than dangerous. Course you could say the same thing of every other GM crop.

It does not matter. nuclear power does not make economic sense. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html

http://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2011/06/17/rumors-and-the-rising-river/

Here is some more supporting information from the Union of Concerned scientists.

List of reactors by percent of decade on NRC watch list, Fort Calhoun Reactor data

http://public-blog.nrc-gateway.gov/2011/06/17/rumors-and-the-rising-river/

Here is some more supporting information from the Union of Concerned scientists.

List of reactors by percent of decade on NRC watch list, Fort Calhoun Reactor data

They could have flown one of the planes into a nuclear plant. Some people think that would have killed a lot more people.

Europe is way ahead of the US. Banned since 2006.

Unfortunatley, nuclear power is only really becomes economical when you run the reactors way beyond their designed lifespan.
According to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, "subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away"
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html

The US owns nearly half of the total orbiting satellites.

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_weapons_and_global_security/space_weapons/technical_issues/ucs-satellite-database.html

Total - 957
US - 436 - 10 Civil, 193 Commercial, 118 Government, 115 Military
Russia - 100
China - 69

49% of those are in LEO

Hmmmm, so some of that valuable waste can be recycled into kitchen countertops.... sounds like more WSJ junk science to me. The author of a recent WSJ piece that was story here (possibly the same guy?) was on the BBC explaining that boric acid was used to clean debris from the water jets used for cooling in reactors. Wrong. Boron and boron compounds are used because they absorb neutrons which helps to stop fission in a quantity of nuclear material that would otherwise go critical (resulting in much more heat and radiation than that see from decay).

Recycling is a good way to come up with additional fuel, but even the French (the word leaders in the field) only recycle about 1% of their fuel rods. (that figure was reported March 18th 2011 on German Deutch Welle television) And even then, there is still considerable amount of highly dangerous material left afterwards to store. Even recycling involved expensive and energy intensive enhancement. The French are doing a great deal of research, but even for them, the breeder reactors which would more efficiently convert spent material into useful fuel are not yet commercially viable. (I have not seen any news reports saying one way or the other if the earthquake led to any issues at Japans' experimental breeder reactor which is in one of the hard-hit prefects)

Unit 4 at the troubled plant in Japan had an explosion blowing the concrete from the upper walls and roof, exposing the fire in the fuel pond to the environment. There is considerable concern now that the weight of added cooling water in the pond may be too much for the damaged building to support. With far more fuel in the pond than a reactor normally holds there is danger that fuel piling up on the bottom from damaged rods could reach criticality, greatly increasing the release of dangerous materials and complicating an already difficult clean up. All that from a unit that didn't even have fuel in the reactor.

Unit 3 contains MOX (mixed oxide) fuel apparently provided by the French. If I understand correctly, with the plutonium component it is more neutron sensitive (releases more neutrons when hit by a given number). That makes it a little harder to control. Some older reactors can only use a smaller portion of the MOX type, or need additional control rods added. It may also be harder to prevent criticality in fuel that piles up from damaged rods. With the very long half-life of plutonium it's also a very nasty thing to have in the environment. Recent NHK reports indicated testing was being done to measure levels, but no word of the results.

I think it is more than a bit twisted to be describing spent fuel as valuable when there is so much that it is a great liability for nearly all. But PR folks would rather talk about the stored material as a vaulted treasure instead of the nuclear graveyard many see it as.

Union of Concerned Scientists report on 14 nuclear near-missing in the U.S. (PDF, includes Diablo Canyon back up water system being non functional for 18 months, doesn't mention the recent defective motor with rotor slipping on shaft that also affected another plant)

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nrc-2010-full-report.pdf

PDF NRC report of failed motor at Diablo Canyon (I believe this moves a valve)

http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1105/ML110590892.pdf

The report does not say if the motor slippage could have been triggered by excessive stress from it still running at the end of travel due to improper calibration of limit switches or some other control system malfunction (Stuxnet etc). The report only treats it as a manufacturing defect. There are a number of the motors at other plants and one other has previous been observed with the same failure. If it is something that is only needed in an emergency, some may not encounter a defect beforehand and have a backup system that doesn't work.

The Union of Concerned Scientists did a detailed report of US subsidies to the nuclear power industry:
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html
They concluded that "Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away"

Our country is as unlikely to support Nuclear Power as "Capital Punishment"

Nuclear power as capital punishment? That's a pretty harsh form of criminal justic - oh, "as unlikely". Oops.

In short, what the hell is going on?

In short: leaky reactor is leaking. In full: nobody seems sure just how much damage or how long term it'll be. Worst case scenario is probably permanent uninhabitability of the current 20-30km exclusion zone, potentially damage to Japanese and/or international fisheries as well (radioiodine readings in the seawater are high, though so far spot checks of fish are more reassuring).

But I've been pretty stunned by how epic bad the mass media coverage has been. Not just "blowing out of proportion" bad, but "getting basic radiation units confused, and reporting news from two days ago as if it's breaking now" bad. At the moment the best repository of technical information I think is the Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/

No, this is quite untrue. Nuclear power has very high subsidies so you are actually viewing a market distortion: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear_subsidies_summary.pdf

If was thinking total loss of water recirculation in the ponds. Let's say "total loss of water in the ponds", whatever the cause.

You can't say what you mean, and I am an asshole for not understanding you? I had thought you might wish to actually understand what is going on. I stand corrected.

It does not have a containment dome because it is a boiling water reactor (BWR), not because of its age. Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) have containment domes. Dresden and Quad Cities in Illinois are very similar plants to Fukushima 1. In a BWR the steam is radioactive and the turbines and piping act as primary containment.

Well that's a lot of bunk. Here is a US GE BWR with a containment dome. Mark III containment used with GE BWRs is a concrete dome similar to PWR reactors and for the same reason; containing blow-down from a rupture. Fact is GE used to give operators the choice of the form of containment for BWRs. All new BWR designs use containment domes exclusively, so to say that a BWR lacks a dome because the design is old is entirely correct; new reactors have a containment dome whereas old BWRs often do not. Here is a description of the evolution if the various forms a BWR containment.

Considering subsidies for nuclear power, it would have been cheaper to not build nuclear power plants and just give electricity away to industry for free. http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear_subsidies_summary.pdf

Yeah, right. Only CO2, H2O, and heat...and SO2. and NOx. and particulate matter. hydrocarbons. Mercury.

Not trying to defend China's abysmal environmental record, but on a per capita basis, those in the US send far more CO2 into the air than those in China. (Similarly for other developed vs developing nations.)
On a per country basis, the US is second to China's lead.

Today while I was filling up my 2003 Corolla with gas, a guy drove up to the next pump in his 1952 MG convertible. Which gets 30MPG. My Corolla gets 27MPG.

I was at a car show today, marveling over the newest crop of hybrids that get up to 41mpg. Wow! My 2001 Jetta TDI (diesel) just delivered 46mpg on a road trip a few weeks ago, and my car is in _rough_ shape.

Yes thats about right a diesel engine is really fuel efficient which is why trucks use it.
I think I read somewhere diesel fuel gives about 30% more energy compared to the same amount of petrol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency

Hybrids real reason for development was to meet California's emissions laws the that fact you get similar fuel economy to a diesel is a bonus.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/solutions/advanced_vehicles_and_fuels/ca-zev.html
http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/zevprog/background.htm

There is a comparable web site by US scientists started during the Bush Jr. administration. http://www.ucsusa.org/

No, I am saying you are engaging in straw man arguments by generating a conspiracy against the truth where there is no conspiracy.

If 18 people out of 20 in a classroom love Green Day and 2 hate them. Were the 2 "ejected" or simply chose not to be part of the consensus?

Your argument is: "OH, why should I believe people who eject non-believers!!"

Except this is science. You either agree with an interpretation of the facts or you don't. There's no political committee to eject you. In fact, they've found tremendous support.

Going back to my example, to say the 2 people who didn't like Green Day were conspired against and excluded is... retarded.

That's last line would be considered ad hominum since you think I'm being pedantic as opposed to demanding rigor and consistency. :-)

Actually, if I recall correctly from my bad old days at an Engineering society, there is a nuclear time bomb. This isn't the article from the Environmental Engineering Journal, but I don't feel like paying for that. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_risk/sabotage_and_attacks_on_reactors/impacts-of-a-terrorist-attack.html

Spacecraft without human pilots aren't good PR.

    "Look what we did, we sent these guys to ...." is a much bigger sensation than "Look at the chunk of metal we sent up."

    From the PR standpoint, the ISS is a big deal, because there are people on it. There's little interest in the almost 1,000 operational satellites floating around above us.

    No one would care if Glonass 712 fell out of orbit. It would make a blurb on the news, and that would be the end of it. Now, if the ISS were to suddenly and uncontrollably deorbit, that would be international news for months or years.

Secondly, this is just an announcement to the world of the administration's view of nuclear weapons. Which is unchanged in reality from our stance since the Russians got the bomb. We aren't going to start a nuclear war because someone could retaliate, and noone would win that fight. Not to mention the morality of indisciminately slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent non-combatants.

Yes, it matches U.S. policy going back to the 1950s... with the exception of an 8-year gap from 2002 to 2010.

The Bush administration's version of this document specifically declared that the U.S. should be prepared to use nuclear weapons on a first-strike basis, and even against non-nuclear states.

You're right, a pronouncement that "we're not gonna nuke ya" isn't worth the paper that it's printed on. But it's a big concrete improvement over a previous pronouncement that "we might nuke ya."

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nwgs/npr_review.pdf

Hm. I think the two examples you gave mostly substantiate my understanding of the problem with the anti-nuclear mentality.

You say of them 'No proof is possible that it is safe' whereas your approach is 'No proof is necessary that it is safe'. It appears you both are afflicted with that mentality yourselves.

"...even after they were informed of the right answer, they still didn't change their opinions..."

Ok lets test the theory on you.

This is the crux. Despite revised knowledge, there's some kind of emotional resistance to nuclear.

This article describes the state of Nuclear waste around the world. This situation is unresolved and this technology will do nothing to resolve it. Did you know this or does this "revised knowledge" you now poses allow you to continue to justify your presumptions?

You may be tempted to refer to "Yucca Mountain" so please refer to studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology that revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less than 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain and that the DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is "inappropriate to contain nuclear waste". Given the scientific and Governmental sources of information I've refered to do you categorised them as "emotional resistance to nuclear", because they look a lot like real reasons to me.

The emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe which was not undone by learning different. The fear remained regardless of knowledge change.

A "Licencee Event Report" (LER) is submitted for issues above a safety significance threshold. For example at Davis-Besse, the frequency of the replacement water filters was out of spec. It should have signaled that something is going wrong in the reactor. This is the type of event that should be signaled as a LER even if it seems insignificant. At the Davis Besse plant I believe that it led to criminal charges as management allowed the plant to operate outside of it's "Basis Design" which is a known operational characteristic of the plant. Filter replacement intervals had been defined and were known about and thus should have characterised the plant as "not operating safely". I'm not sure if the criminal charges were placed because management should have reported several LERs instead of inspectors finding a hole in the reactor head when it was shutdown.

Whilst this issue was resolved, it shouldn't have even occurred. There are questions regarding the operational safety of Vermont Yankee and Palo Verde so it's a current issue.

Nothing has changed this knowledge. So now that your knowledge has changed and you know Nuclear Industry near misses are not uncommon. These facts illustrate that "emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe" can be "actual caution based on a continued analysis of operational procedure" even if most people don't have the expertise to analyse them.

Do you poses that expertise? Has your "lack of concern" been maintained now that your knowledge has changed?

Emotions don't necessarily respond to logic/information. (Which you see in every online debate.)

A Nuclear industry panel (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy,

Unfortunately, I believe they left out the most important point.

You have to ask- where are these resistant bugs coming from? Doctors tend to assume they evolve in people using antibiotics. Or they come from Nature's repository. Not likely.

But in truth, the majority are coming from a really stupid, short sighted and corrupt business practice we should abandon on economic grounds if not health grounds: CAFOs. (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations- as promoted by misguided Govt policy.) For respectable background see
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/wise_antibiotics/pamta.html

But that isn't strongly enough stated. We know H1N1 came from the neighborhood of a Cargill Pork CAFO in Mexico. We know some strains of MRSA in the UK came from pork plants in the Netherlands. We know where nasty e-Coli comes from- Beef CAFO's in the USA. Doctors are mostly ignorant of the impact of using most of our antibiotics to help keep "healthy" animals alive and happily obese in tiny factory feed lots.

If terrorists decided to create a super-bug to kill us all, they could hardly do better than build a modern CAFO.

And CAFO's are not even the cheapest way to make meat. They are the most efficient way to gather the largest amount of taxpayer subsidies (mostly for corn) together in the smallest space. Cheaper meat (for the consumer and taxpayer) would actually be safer meat! We simply cannot afford to breed superbugs to make meat 5% cheaper (for the meat packer)!

Unfortunately for your case, both papers made it in, so it's actually a disproven fact.

You're really not getting this. Cows don't eat corn, they eat grass. This is why in most of the world, cows are fed on grass or grass-like feed (hay, silage etc)

Really how do you explain this? "About 60% of the world's pasture land is covered by grazing systems.Grazing systems supply approximately 9 percent of the world's production of beef, according to Food and Agriculture Organization FAO statistics."

..with relatively small amounts of things like oats and wheat.

Well corn is the usual feed used to fatten the cows in a short time, 60% of the corn in the US is used to feed livestock.

A lot of the world's livestock is not on marginal land which can not be used for crop production, this is especially true for cattle as they do not fare well in mountainous or boggy ground.

If all the food waste which was unfit for human consumption was used to make compost it would be even more efficient that feeding it to livestock. According to this pro beef site it takes 2.6 lbs of grain for one pound of beef. So even taken propaganda from the other side crops are at least twice as efficient. This figure assumes most of the diet is from grass. Looking at land usage it says one acre can produce 9250 lbs of corn or 3661 lbs of beef. The acreage figure does not include the amount used to grow the grain to feed the cow though.

It is beyond doubt that we have such a love for milk, eggs and meat that we greatly reduce our farming efficiency. Of course the most efficient system does include animals but at a much lower intensity that we have.

It is truly pathetic how these gas-guzzlin' deniers are grasping at straws to maintain
their totally untenable position.

On the one hand: 800 Scientist contributors + 2500 scientific reviewers work went into the latest IPCC
assessment report.

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/IPCCflyer_lr.pdf

On the other hand: A few stolen personal emails by a few scientists in Britain had some ambiguously interpretable language, that could have been talking about trickery or how to format some summary
data, or how exactly to interpolate in the presence of uncertainty.

Hmmmmmm. You figure it out.

The area may be a bit larger then you are thinking.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/technology_and_impacts/energy_technologies/how-geothermal-energy-works.html

Geysers are great but they do not pull the same amount of energy out of the system as something like a geothermal power plant powering 150,000+ homes.

I would think for quite some time actually if it was aggressively pursued.

The area covered is quite massive and you could pull a lot of power from it.

No not all at once, but over time it adds up.

Like that last snow flake that causes the avalanche.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/technology_and_impacts/energy_technologies/how-geothermal-energy-works.html

Interesting the map they have there, yellow stone is smack dab in the middle of huge red area marked for possible development.

And besides if you pulled out X Megawatts a day over a 100 year period thats got to be a little bit off the destruction :) at least you could hope lol

There is no such ban. I have no idea if there was ever a ban (I would suspect not).

What there are are emissions restrictions. If diesel vehicles can meet or exceed the restrictions, then they can be sold/used. In the past, presumably they were not able to typically meet those restrictions (at prices where consumer vehicle buyers were willing to pay).

A bit of googling finds http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/clean_vehicles/carb_pm_regs.pdf, which contains this:
Adopted: September 2003, Effective: December 2004 ...
Highway and Non-highway Diesel Fuel Requires the use of ultra-low sulfur (ULSD) (15 parts per million) diesel fuel for highway and non- highway applications starting in June 2006. California's diesel fuel regulations are concurrent with US EPA highway diesel fuel regulation, but accelerate the use of ULSD in non-highway applications by three to five years. ARB regulatory information: http://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/diesel/diesel.htm

So obviously they're not banned now.

On the main topic, aren't 2 stroke engines WAY louder than 4 stroke engines? The only 2 stroke engines I remember are (I think Yamaha) dirt-bike motorcycles.. and they were always REALLY annoyingly loud with a high-pitched whine. I guess leaf blowers are 2 stroke too.

Here is a description from a reputable source of how the UN has conducted it's investigation so far.

Further, the IPCC has a budget of $5-6 million per annum and none of the roughly 2500 scientists who compile the reports recieve a single penny of it in remmuneration. A small portion goes to the 2 or 3 paid staff but I will leave it at an exercise for you to actually visit their site and inspect their finiancial accounts to find out how they spend the rest of it.

"I am not sure where you are getting the 2,500 number"

Here is the first reputable reference I found with a simple google search. Skip down to the section on peer-review (para 3). Note that not one of these scientists (including the handfull of lead aurthors) are paid to do this tedious and thankless job. The ippc has a budget of $5-6M /yr which is sourced from ~300 politically diverse nations (all hypnotised by Al Gore apparently). They have 2 or 3 permenant staff and the rest is spent on airfares and confrence facilities, etc, their budget is available on their website for the genuinely curious.

The ippc reports of which I only posted the latest summary, is widely regarded by scientists as one of the most robust reviews of any scientific question in the history of mankind. Virtually every national scientific body on the planet is represented.

And please stop cherry-picking data to suit your predetermined conclusions, it insults both of our intelligences.