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Women's Institute Consulted on Nuclear Waste
Leon Stringer writes "The Guardian is reporting that the Womens' Institute is being asked for their views on the disposal of nuclear waste while senior scientists resign in protest of being ignored. What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?"
Why do they always leave the sweeping up to the women?
We should hire the guys who hid the WMD in Iraq. They know how to make stuff completely disappear!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
"The article author should point out that this is in Great Britain (United Kingdom) and is an effort by the government (The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) to get a broad range of opinion, unlike George W. Bush's White House in the USA, which is just fine with it's own set of selective facts and could care less what polls say."
Which is 100% wrong on how our National Nuclear Waste Facility and local facilities are figured out.
Yucca Mountain is a ridge-line in Nye County, Nevada; composed of volcanic material (mostly tuff) ejected from a now-extinct caldera-forming supervolcano. The "mountain" is most notable as the site of the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository, a U.S. Department of Energy terminal storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste.
The US has been discussing and debating this since 1957 at the Local, State and National level for national sites, local sites and transportation.
Liberalism must be preserved in the forum!!
The "scientists" in question are probably Intelligent Design GOONs.
Stop Bush now! Support a Womans Right to Choose nuclear waste disposal...
Instead of exaggeration by picking out one institute which has done one unusual thing for publicity (which is really nothing worse than the Page 2 women in some newspapers) they could have simply headed it "1700 forms distributed to broad cross-section of community seeking public input", but that would probably not pique interest, would it?
Consider the source, mate.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And in the USA the public has been the roadblock to decisions on matters of this sort. You might like to see what a total mess Hanford in eastern Washington became while waiting for another site to open up to take in waste. Hanford was only intended for so much capacity for so much time.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"The last time I even saw this issue in print was while Clinton was still president."
Try a Google News for Yucca Mountain
Results 1 - 20 of about 384 for yucca mountain.
Theres tons out there in print in this issue, and there has been all through the Bush Administration.
Hasn't it occured to you that a government consultation excercise might be just be a PC way to describe giving people a description of the problem and a list of all the technically feasible solutions with their pros and cons. That way they realise that none of the options are ideal, and yet one of them must be picked. If you describe it properly, they'll usually pick the best one. It's not like the men from the ministry arrive and listen to a bunch of women describing half arsed schemes for shooting waste into space.
The fatal problem with the kind of elitist solution you're describing is that all the non engineers and scientists feel that things are being done behind their backs and start to complain about it afterwards. This is exactly what happened with GM food - their was a wide spread, and as far as I can tell completely baseless, belief that the technology was inherently unsafe. The Guardian was one of the cheer leaders for this oddly enough - look at any of the columns by George Monbiot on GM, or anything technical. Lots of other people grumbled about a lack of consultation. So after that the Labour government has realised that you need to keep non technical people in the loop for this stuff, hence this sort of thing.
Oddly enough, in consultancy jobs, this is a very good technique - before you make a big change, you need to give the people that own the company a reason for the change, and a list of options and get them to pick one. In fact, it's almost exactly the same situation, since the people that you're trying to get in loop aren't particularly technical - and you're trying to avoid a situation where something breaks because of a change to their code which they haven't agreed on, which tends to be expensive for everyone.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?"
The bastard who designed the shrink wrap on CD-Rs. You know the one, where you pull the little tape that splits the plastic coating except it snaps so you run your nail along it except it's so bloody flexible that it won't tear. Then you have to get a really sharp knife and cut it scoring the jewel case. I mean for f***s sake, if getting a CD out of a wrapper can be made such a pain in the arse by a thin bit of plastic just think the container he/she could make if given enough steel, lead and time.....
And another thing.. F***king blister packs that need a friggin scalpel to open... NNNNNNNRRRRGGGHHHHHHHH,.,..... World turning red..... can't think...... I think I'm lapsing into unconciou
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Since I live in Calgary Canada and work in the industry then I'll put it this way. If you know where to drill then why don't you make some suggestions. British oil companies certainly don't because the North Sea peaked in 1999-2000.
Mexican oil companies don't because Canatarell production is expected to go into terminal decline in 2006 and Pemex has some prospects but not much. Indoneasia doesn't seem to know where to drill because Indoneasia became an oil importer this year as did Britian. Indoneasia use to supply Australia.
Iran doesn't know where to drill. The Saudis say they can up production but they have been saying this for years and so far no real joy. The USA doesn't know where to drill because their production peaked about 1970. Two years ago the largest geophysical field operations company in the world shut down North American operations. It seems there was not enough exploration work to keep them going. They were a client of mine.
Ok. More research.
1) Saudi Ghawar field 5 MBOPD
2) Mexico Canatarell 2.1 MBOPD less 14% per year starting 2006
3) Kuwait Bergan 1 MBOPD
4) China DaQing 1 MBOPD less 7% per year starting 2004
These are the 4 largest sorted by production. Ghawar is running over 55% water cut with over 7 million barrels of water injected per day. 65% comes from North Ghawar. Original reserves were estimated to be about 65 billion barrels and 55 billion have been produced to date. Most of the flank wells on the anticline have become injector wells. With the remaining reserves clearly dropping (but no acknowledgment from the house of Saud) the arial extent of that feild is significantly smaller today than it was say in the 70's. It is about 1/4 or less in fact. The writing is on the wall and the Saudi's can lose 2 MBOPD production at the drop of a hat.
So I don't know where you get your information from. I get my information from industry sources including the Geological Survey of Canada. I do consider myself informed. Now if you want to beleive the DOE be my guest.
As for the Tar Sands. Yup - it will last a good long while because there is something like 1.8 trillion barrels in them. However with over $1 billion per year being invested in production facilities we are going to be lucky to get production up to 3.3 MBOPD by 2015.
So if you feel you are up to it I guess we can go head to head and compare each and every oil project in the world. When we do this the numbers come out to 2007 as being the most optimistic realistic estimate for the world peak.
But yes - you are correct there is lots of oil adn lots more to be found. We just cannot find it fast enough to replace our consumption.
A MASSIVE building program to tap every renewable and alternative energy source should have been underway 10 years ago. In addition we should re-engineer our homes to capture as much solar energy as possible, probably via more insulation - over R50 and passive solar designs.
There is no reason that all new housing should not be energy self sufficient in fact. It can be done. I know how to do it. I've been in houses in Calgary that demonstrate the principals - houses without a furnance.
Since North American Natural Gas production peaked in 2001 we have lost a large percentage of the North American Fertilizer industry and now we'll be losing the plastics industry. The president of DOW Chemicals has already announced possible plastics shortages. This is due more to hurricane damage - but declining production is in the picture as well.
The way I see it - North America does not have a workable energy program in place. The world does not have a workable energy program in place. The political administrations are dreaming and are proposing solutions like wars.
As I see it - the only reason the UK and USA are in Iraq right now is control over oil and a desire to liberate Iraqii oil. I would prefer to see engineering solutions instead.
If people think nuclear waste is difficult to handle then I will suggest it is a lot better to handle than 1000's of body bags filled with dead kids.
Here is how. The new energy sources have already been discovered but have not been exploited. I like technology that is decades old because we can count on it working!
1) Thermal decomposition.
Put some hydrocarbons in a bucket - put the lid on - heat it up under pressure and we get oil. There is a plant near a butterball turkey plant that is doing this. We can use thermal decomposition for any organic wastes including sewage. However we might be better off turning sewage into organic fertilizers.
2) Fischer Tropshe.
Put some carbon (or hydrocarbon) in a bucket. put on the lid - heat it up under pressure and inject water. Depending on how you do this you can get liquid fuels or gas such as methane. The Germans did this int he 2nd world war from Coal and South Africa has been doing this as well. Its tried and proven. This will be the basis for the Hydrogen plants Suncor is building at a billion a pop for their tar sands expansion. They decided to not go nuclear. Their pres doesn't want to hear the word used in fact. The next pres may feel different.
3) Passive and active Solar.
I know this will work. Photons arrive with high energy which is typically not captured. If you take a glass tube and evaccuate it and put a collector then without cooling the collector will melt. So this has a lot of potential. The energy per meter is max about 1 KWatt. That is a considerable amount of energy that can be captured. Our houses were designed to discard almost all incomming solar energy and then replace this with energy from a "cheaper" source. This IMHO is a very short sighted plan. A well designed solar house can be cheaper to build because you can leave out the furnace. If you check Fiberglass insulation - then you'll note that the R50 insulation costs about $1 buk per square foot. Wall construction labor and other materials are not changed - its just the wall thickness needs to be about a foot. A 2000 sq ft home might be 30x40 so that is about 1400 square feet of wall surface plus another 2000 for the ceiling. Upping the insulation in the building envelope to R50+ would cost only $3500 or so extra. This will _really_ cut down heating and cooling bills and has a pay back of only a couple years because you can probably subtract out the HVAC.
4) Vaccume panels.
Europe has these in testing now. They can do R40 per inch. The ones they are testing are a passive system. The factory builds the vaccume into the panel and once installed they are expected to last several decades. I figure one can use an active system. A vaccume pump can be purchased for $250 bux (maybe too small - but it only needs to top up the vaccume). Or a serviceman could come by once a year to pump down your walls. R 40 - R70 is in the range we need. Replaceable panels are also an option. IE - they can look like siding.
5) Geothermal coupling with radiant heating.
Currently quotes in Calgary are $20,000 for a contractor to install a soil coupled heat pump. Water Furnace International has systems running as well.
To couple your HVAC to an air source which has low thermal coupling and a delta-Temp that wanders all over the graph is just stupid. Soil or water coupling is far more efficient and the temperature gradients are much much smaller.
For that $20,000 an active solar system with more insulation will probably eliminate about 90% of the energy costs so I really think the Geothermal coupled heat pump is probably not the way to go.
6) Fiber Optics and the virtual office
Most people are now doing Intellectual service work which typically can be done from a home office. A virtual commute will add 2-3 hours per day of free time. Why sit in a traffic jam with 6 lane stop and go listening to the radio with the A/C on max when you can just walk across the hallway to an office which is far more comfortable than any cubical employers want to provide? I have been doing this since 1980. I made more money and had time to spend with my kids. I