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Storing Liquid CO2 in the Oceans?
Roland Piquepaille writes "One of the ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to capture carbon dioxide at its source, when it is emitted from power plants for example, and to store it in other places, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs or even the ocean after liquefaction. But, according to Youxue Zhang, a professor at the University of Michigan, there are pitfalls in this last plan. If the carbon dioxide is not injected deep enough, it can come back to the surface and return to the atmosphere, which is obviously not the desired goal. But, even worse, the liquid-to-gas conversion could happen too suddenly, which could cause a potentially dangerous eruption. So Zhang has developed a model which shows that liquid CO2 would have to be injected to a depth of between 800 and 3,000 meters to keep it from escaping from the ocean."
And this site kindly points out the following:
Not to mention the environmental effect of millions of farting & belching sea creatures. I think we should keep a close eye on this man :)
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Won't this convert the oceans into carbonated water?
What would the affect be on sea life?
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Recycle, don't trash!
Today was a great day in the history of coca-cola production.
Nice margin of error! Most people get away with 10-15% but this guy has a >300% margin!
After liquefaction? Methinks you don't understand the meaning of that word, Mr. Peekaboo....
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
OTOH I failed science.
Wouldn't it be easier, safer, and more intelligent to just protect and encourage coral growth? Coral pretty much does everything we need, if we could just give it an environment to 'do its thing' none of this would be a problem. The entire strategem is rife with deadly pitfalls and screams of huge opportunity to burn energy that produces more CO and CO2. Think about it.
kulakovich
Or you could just dump some iron into the ocean to supercharge plankton growth. Probably cheaper, easier and a tad more of a natural way to do it.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
didnt anyone tell him that carbon dioxide can dissolve in water to make carbonic acid?
does he honestly think that acidic seas would be better for the environment?
I love this kind of thinking. It's just like burying our nuclear waste and unused chemical weapons. Gee, nothing bad could EVER come of that.
Maybe... eventually... people like this will come to the realization that you can't hide everything when you only have a limited amount of space. This is just another example of short-sighted solutions that lead to future generations problems. Sweeping everything under the rug doesn't solve a damn thing except letting corporations get away with being more environmentally unsound because they can claim, "Hey, it's no problem. We took all of our waste products and stuck 'em in the ocean!"
You store the liquified CO2 into giant plastic bubbles that are held down by weights at the bottom of the ocean. That should work. Unless the Navy uses the bubbles for submarine target practice.
Sigh... Another beautiful theory ruined by an ugly fact.
So pumping liquified CO2 into the ocean, no matter at what depth, won't mean that eventually it diffuses and releases back to the surface? Call me an Anonymous Coward, but this really sounds like yet another way of spending money and effort in an attempt to be "doing something" about the problem that just makes a bigger problem down the road.
I remember reading an article a few months ago about large amounts of CO2 being trapped under lakes and being released all at once due to being disturbed by an earthquake or some such. Anyways, all of this CO2 came forth and being such a heavy gas, it lingered in the populated area and sufficated whole villages/towns.
If we just bury / submerge the CO2, this could happen all over again. Thus wiping out any life in the area it occurs.
As a side note, if someone out there could find the article I'm referencing and post it, it would be appreciated.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
When CO2 is dissolved in water, the substance is known as "Carbonic Acid" This is already measurably happening to our oceans naturaully (due to higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere), and accelerating the process could have severe impacts. Maybe we should just enact an exhaling tax. If people exhaled more conservatively, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.
Liquify/Freeze the CO2 and then put it in a Viking Rocket with its destination being the Sun.
What could possibly go wrong?
isnt carbon dioxide one of those gases that goes directly from solid to gas, with no liquid phase?
Although I haven't RTFA, this sort of thing is actually a real problem in some instances. This is one particularly scary example. Result? Nearly 2000 people dead almost instantly.
Perhaps not an issue for geeks, but it is for RealPeople(tm).
Here's some BBC coverage of one of these lakes in Cameroon. Terrifying.
Here is the Link to the story I was talking about.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
In addition to allowing CO2 to recombine with the system in a more natural way (next to the O2 in the water that makes up the C), this offers the side benefit of transforming ocean life dumb enough to swim through the layer to freezer-ready seafood.
However, it is important to note that fluidic injection of a medium density liquid between two light density liquids is neither the safest nor most effective method of obtaining a clearly-delineated stack. Anyone who has mixed a layered drink will tell you that you go from highest density to lowest density, pouring each layer of liquor against a spoon so as to prevent gravity from making an environmental disaster of your nightcap. Pumping liquid CO2 into the sea thus begs the question of what sort of sludge should go under it to replace the water (and where to find a spoon that large.)
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
What????? People drink frothy carbonated water all the time and they don't drop dead. It's slightly acidic if anything. It's not this uber chemical of doom.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
The resulting biomass could even be feed back into the energy cycle.
By the way, it was John Wyndham who first popularised this concept.
Exhaling Tax would never pass. The people who make the bills would suffer the most as they blow hot air full of CO2 all day for a living.
All this talks reminds me of the Pepsi fish!
In the future, if we are lucky, we will be able to build reactors fusion / fission and produce a large surplus of electrisity. With a large surplus of electrisity, it would be possilbe to extract hydrogen from the ocean and use this CO2 and extract the carbon and then produce Octane (gasoline) from the carbon and hydrogen. While this process would be energy intensive, it would close the carbon cycle without having to change our current infrastructure.
Sounds like a plan to me...
I mean, simply plant more vegetation or trees. The amount of deforestation in the world is amazing. In Haiti for example, it's very bad. When I was in school several decades ago, I learned that green plants use carbondioxide to make chlorophyll - that green pigment in green plants. And they in turn release oxygen. This would be a better solution. Am I wrong?
I think locking CO2 in solid carbonates or other solid forms is a much better more long term solution. I read about this recently, Discover, Popular Science, or here on Slashdot...
At the concentrations typically found in seawater, the concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide are independent of each other. A very high concentration of carbon dioxide could reduce the solubility of oxygen in the water, but at that point the drastically reduced pH would likely have caused other problems.
Poison the ocean...
Good plan guys. Keep up the good work!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Part of the reason why you failed science may be that you didn't realize that CO2 is not flammable, and you can't light it with a flare gun.
The "explosion" referred to happens when a store of deep CO2 either starts going out of liquid form and rising in bubbles, or coming out of solution in the water and rising as bubbles (like coke when you open the top). The rising flow of water is under less and less pressure as it reaches the surface, releasing more and more gas, or the resulting current can be bringing warmer water to the deep part, allowing more bubbles to form. This happens in lakes that are in volcanic craters, and saturated with CO2 from below.
One solution is to put a pipe down to the bottom, and articifially start pumping water up it, until the process starts happening in the pipe and it flows continuously, spraying out the top like a bubbly CO2 fountain. Then you can just leave it and it will stop the CO2 buildup from reaching the catastrophic stage.
All this talk of CO2 lakes may cause you to ask what portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from human activity and what portion from volcanoes, which is an interesting and politically loaded question.
Anyway, because CO2 is heavier than air, when it comes out it flows along the ground displacing oxygen, killing animals and people, and putting out fires -- not exploding. The explosion is when it comes out in the first place.
Sigh.... You picked one ugly source but it's right. http://edition.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/01/28/southern. ocean.enn/
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Once this in in place, any undersea earthquake would be like shaking a beer bottle. A tsunami will be the least of your worries when a 1000 foot thick head of foam starts spilling over your coasts.
CO2 Lake overturn basically happens when the bottom of a lake becomes so saturated with CO2 that geological disturbances can cause the trapped CO2 to erupt and rise up to the surface. All of the documentaries so far mentioned point to the lakes having natural reservoirs that pump CO2 into them, and even then they take many many dozens of years building up their CO2 contents before they get to the point where they can erupt.
Do you think there's realistically any chance that we produce CO2 in such large quantities that we can get a body of water as large as an ocean to overturn?
Wood.
Trees are like batteries. They "accumulate" the nasty stuff in the atmosphere. The problem with trees is that once they burn, whatever was accumulated is released like almost nothing ever happened.
So the solution, in my opinion, is to cut down old forests and replace them with new ones.
And use the wood that was cut to build things. Good for the environment, good for the economy. A rarity!
http://www.greenfuelonline.com/cogen.htm Neat little technology and we can use the algae for producing hyrdogen and for food ala Asimov. (No. Im not kidding. People eat algae. Yuck.)
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Roland must be paying /. even more now, since not only their posting his shit like crazy, but they let it stand as top news item for a long while.
Subscribers must be pissed...
Myself, I can only join the rest of the Roland Piquepaille Watch squad in a unison Nelson-like laugh: "HA-ha!"
And no, mods, this ain't offtopic. Look at the submitter and his submissions history to see what I mean.
Please mod this UP. CO2 *will* mess with the pH and could possibly cause plant life to grow like crazy. Read about CO2 injectors that people use in their aquariums and why they use it (and the pitfalls of using CO2 injectors with live fish)
There has been some research for a number of years concerning the
feasibility of extracting methane hydrates from the ocean floor.
While not proven, there's quite a bit of speculation in the geological
circles that all it would take is one screw-up to disrupt the stability
of the ocean floor. This could potentially cause anything from tsunami
to large bubbles of methane percolating into our atmosphere. You think
CO2 is an issue? Methane is a much more fierce 'greenhouse gas'.
So not only is there potential to for CO2 to escape if not buried properly,
but a variety of other mishaps could occur that would potentially wreck
havoc. Hrmm. Doesn't seem like the most plausible choice of action.
Build some nuke plants.
Probably much cheaper in the long run, and there isn't a possibility that all that CO2 these plants don't produce will resurface in one go, producing cubic kilometers of Perrier (with a bit more salt...).
And oh, they'll emit less radioactivity than coal plants.
Oh, and while we're at it: Please vote a president that will submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification. Ferkrissakes even China signed it!
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
take a giant vacuum, alright, and fill it up with co2, and then launch it into space, and shoot it at the sun
Instead of trying to find creative ways to store CO2, why not try breaking it down? Nature has been doing this since the dawn of time. If we try to store it, eventually we will run out of places to put it.
- Floyd
Collecting, processing and storing CO2 will cost some serious amount of money. So it will only happen if it can be used for something that earns back some of the money. The only thing I can think of is as "fill masses" in oil and gas wells to increase pressure so one can extract more oil/gas.
But the whole idea is hideously expensive so it probably only makes sense if the CO2 can easily be collected and transported to the injection site.
Yet another argument for Hydrogen though.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
You really don't know quite how large the earth is, do you? Something on the order of thousands of tons a year of micrometeorite dust accrete to it every year. (Some figures say much, much more than that.)
Now, depleting the world's store of certain rare elements, well, that might be worth kvetching about. But making earth shrink appreciably? I think not.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'd thought of this, but I know of know possible way to suggest it to sympathetic ears, much less make it happen. Glad to see it come up in other, more authoritative circles.
-- haaz.
http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/cra ven.html/
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
"biomass equivalent of 100 full-grown redwoods"
Do you know why China signed it? China is exempt from its requirements, being a "developing nation".
Sheesh.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If they genteticly engineered a plant/tree that has an ultra high CO2 to O2 cycle, combine that with a fast growing tree, and you not only have a green house gas soulution you have a way to scrub air on generational space flights as well.
Seriously implement changes in our energy infrastructure, i.e., using readily available alternative fuels like BIODIESEL (a Google search will educate you on the subject) and plant more TREES along highways and in cities. TREES love CO2, they eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! These can grow faster for providing paper for a variety of product - would even will the approval of extreme environmentalists because we could harvest the trees in the cities and along highways instead of in forests. Forget implementing "ethanol-gasoline", it requires more energy to produce the ethanol, than the gasoline alone - another stupid idea, AND, your car will get WORSE fuel mileage UNLESS it has a turbocharger and computer to know that "ethanol-gasoline" is being burned to correctly handle it.
A little related educational lesson: hemoglobin transports O2 to the tissues, CO2 is dissolved in the blood, especially in acidic environments (lactic and other acids from muscular exercise). It turns back into a liquid-dissolved CO2 gas in an alkaline environment (the lungs).
Why couldn't we release the CO2 in space? I know there's some science reason why not, but I just wanted to know what it is.
"Only Saudi Arabia and Russia export more oil than Norway. - But with a population of only 4.5 million, Norway is the largest per-capita producer of oil by far."
A portion of the oil goes into plastics, and a small amount is used for lubricating, but over 95% is burned for fuel. Does Norway take no responsibility for this?"
But under Kyoto, Norway is responsible only for what they personally burn - they are not responsible, even though they are the ones who take transfer the oil from its location below ground to a location where it is made available for burning.
This seems about as ethical as a vegetarian who raises livestock to sell to a slaughterhouse.
But, the money's good!
I heard Peter has lots of nice stuff ... and Paul needs to be payed .... hmmm
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Plant life makes a great carbon sink. That's how all that carbon ended up in fossil fuels in the first place.
I though we already learned that dumping shit into the ocean is a bad idea...
Oh yeah, what if we "reverse the polarity?" If you watch Ghostbuster's carefully you'll know that always works.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
Anyone know how much energy it would require to collect the CO2 and pump it a mile underwater?
Why does this sound so much like the futility of someone trying to trap a fart with a paper sack to keep the smell from getting out?
So Zhang thinks he can fart in the bathtub and keep it to himself, if the tub is deep enough? Who will risk it?
--
make install -not war
Does any one think that this is a bad idea. Let's trap vast amounts oxigen at the bottom of the ocean as liquid CO2 or as carbonates. This way it can't be matabolized by plants and released into the asmosphear as O2 where it will certianly contribute to the green house effect.
The green house effect has plaged our fragile Earth since before the extinction of the dinosaurs. If we want to survive we must start a zero tolerance campaign against anything that causes the green house effect. Obviously we can start by burning all the green houses. But we must not stop there. We must contunue our efforts by removing all green house chemicals from the environment not just CO2 but N2, O2, O3, CH4, and most importently the dreaded DHMO. To do this we need to remove the gutless politicians from both parties and elect a leader who will impose marsian law. Yes only the iron clad law of the red planet will allow us to take these steps and make this planet a fit place to live.
Since when did we ever stop to consider the long-term effects of our actions? It appears like the human motto has always been, "Out of sight, out of mind" when it comes to waste that needs to be disposed. For example, each week, I put all my trash in a bag and place it on the curb. Then, there's no more trash. Who's to tell me that trash I just disposed of will take thousands or tens of thousands of years to decompose? What trash? I don't see any trash.
...
We pay people to distance us from the filth we generate. It gives us peace of mind to be rid of our rubbish. And so we continue to find ways of not eliminating pollution, but rather just finding methods of distancing ourselves from it. The garbage man takes my trash. The nuclear power plant stores its waste in a concrete bunker. While we're at it, let's just suck all the CO2 we pumped into the air we breathe and pump it down 3000 feet into the ocean. Or, if that's too expensive, let's just package it and release it in Mongolia. I mean, I don't live there, so as far as I can tell, I won't have to worry about it anymore.
Ever stop to wonder for a second how our world might change if EVERYBODY was required to have their own landfill in their own backyard?
I always thought plants took CO2 and made oxygen and not the other way around. Is this not true? And whats wrong with heavily foresting? Is it really necessary to involve oceans and liquefication and tin foil caps?
If only we could find an organic process that can take disolved C02 and combine it with calcium into a hard no gaseous state. Perhaps a good biotec company could find and patent this process. Or we could just encourage more shellfish to breed and die.
Why don't we just remove the oxygen and make diamonds or at least coal out of the CO2? Oh wait I see that's ridiculous -- the energy cost to do that would be too great.
Never mind the NIMBY BANANA exploding subsurface stuff.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
I think he meant liquifying, not liquefaction (which usually means solid to liquid phase change)
Ignoring for a moment that we need the oxygen portion here on earth, how would you propose to get the CO2 into space in the first place?
You can't just build a giant smoke-stack to pump it up there, as the earths gravitational well is just going to pick it all back up again. So then what? Load a ton or two at a time into rockets, blast them beyond the moon, and then leave them there? That in and of itself is a massive waste of energy and resources just to build and launch all those rockets, and even then you're barely putting a dent into the atmospheric CO2.
Yaz.
Good idea! Then they can start a new trend in carbonated beverages: sea-salt soda! And they can make it illegal for people to burp or fart!
It's been a while since I've taken science or horticulture, but don't trees absorb CO2 and change it into ocygen? You know, that stuff we breathe.
If we are able to seperate the excess CO2 out like that, what about taking it into a forest and releasing it there? Or would the overabundance kill the trees?
Maybe capture it all and store it up, then launch it to Mars with some planting robots. Have the robots plant seeds (for plants that can withstand varying climates) in the ground, have some water to water the seeds, and slowly release the CO2 around the plants. The beginning of terraforming, maybe?
IANAScientist.
The idea of dissolving CO2 in oceans is incredibly reckless. Look at the consequences of degassing of a small lake and you can dismiss this silliness out of hand. The earth's natural mechanism for CO2 removal is limestone formation. Perhaps would be wiser to imitate that.
an ill wind that blows no good
The amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has not met any of the maximum levels reached over four distinct CO2-rich periods during the past 420,000 years. So what exactly would the purpose of this ridiculous exercise be?
You would need a VERY long smokestack.
Or lots of shuttle flights, not very practical when it costs a ridiculous amount of money for every pound taken into orbit. Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if the spaceflight itself ended up releasing more CO2 in the air than any CO2 you could disperse in such a method.
People seem to think that the Ocean is some static body of water which is thoroughly mixed and just linearly increases density as it gets deeper. Ridiculous. Even this idiot PhD has forgotten that the ocean circulates. "New water" is formed and sinks in the north Atlantic, travels the length of the basin and moves through the Indian ocean bottom to the Pacific. There it circles the nothern part of the basin and slowly surfaces somewhere around Panama. No joke. Then the water returns more or less on the surface in the reverse order.
Dump anything into the deep water and reap the rewards when it surfaces again. I guess its good for everyone except the Panamanians, oh, and maybe Nicaragua, and of course, all of the rest of the Americas; and so on and so on.
Riduculous that someone with so much education can't forcast his great plan even a few years into the future.
I guess these guys didn't see the latest NOVA. It talked about how the CO2 escaped to the top of the lake and eventually spilled over the lake. This resulted in instantly killing an entire village by suffocation.
But seriously, we solve the problem of pumping CO2 in to the air, where we didn't foresee the outcome, by pumping it into the oceans, where we also don't know the outcome?
Here's a clue: MAKE LESS CO2.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Hey, I've got an idea! How about we produce less? You know carbon neutral
energy sources, solar energy, etc. Nah! Never happen. Not as long as big
business is controlling energy.
I have to say, its a good idea. However where exactly would be the dump site. I for one would suggest a trench. What little life that exists down there would not be affected by a huge volume of CO2. Also, its not that hard to get C02 under water. The problem lies in allowing the CO2 to dissipate from the containers sent down in at a steady rate, rather than all at once. Prof
Liquid CO2 you say? Give it to us nerds. It one way to make the new Intel chips not suck... wait, nm, it would escape again, still produce rediculous heat, and they'd still suck.
lol: You see no door there!
"However the Woods Hole institute seems to think that is a problem."
There was supposed to be a link to the press realese from Woods Hole describing a paper they published in Nature.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In all fairness, nuclear power is so cheap and efficient, you could probably use it to process CO2 and convert it into oil at a cheaper price than oil is now.
my thought is since plants use carbon dioxide why not pass it through a system containing algae or some other prolific vegetation perhaps bamboo in a controlled situation you'd just need a little light a voila' reduction of emission plus you can rot it to make methane or if sufficiently pure process it as food
Wonderful. Just like Kudzu, this is sure to work perfectly, with no unintended consequences.
I'm not sure how I'd feel about swimming in the ocean if it was fizzy..
why store CO2, just change your source of power, if they wanted to store CO2 they might as well change to nulcear power as it is easyer to store and has no CO2 emmisions that need to be put into the ocean.
...that was dumped into the ocean into the 1950s on the sound ecological principle of "out of sight, out of mind."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Gonna have to just keep paying the fines and dumping directly. It's cost effective!
Why don't we just fling it at Mars? Jumpstart the greenhouse effect there, so that temperatures can get to a comfortable place. That way we can move there eventually.
The CO2 has been locked up in fossil fuels for so long, it's not like the Earth will have a need of it anytime soon, right?
Why does everyone want to dump things into the ocean? What about the fishies? What! Is the world a bunch of 3 year olds hiding their toys so that they are out of sight out of mind? The human race is a waste and therefore I am too.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
If you ask me. CO2 is another natural resource needing to be exploited. CO2 is also a renewable resource. We need to bottle it up and use it to enhance greenhouses. Eventually we will have so many people on this planet that we will require verticle farms (recycle skyscrappers). Just like scuba divers use bootled O, we should used bottle CO2 in verticle self-contained greenhouse farms. Why spend all that money to bury it like some radioactive by product? The money it takes to bury it, can be used to bottle it ... for future use.
Dumping unwanted carbon dioxide seems like a perfect application for the first space elevator. It'd probably be a much easier experiment than an elevator built to carry a load. It just needs to be a very strong and simple tube, with less hardware tied into each end than the final elevator design will use.
I don't know what kind of chemical process you'd want to use to separate out the CO2 gas before blowing it up the tube, or exactly how much energy the whole thing would take. I'll bet that it will be a lot cheaper than liquefying and then moving the equivalent amount of CO2, once the elevator exists and its development costs are taken out of the equation.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
So Zhang has developed a model which shows that liquid CO2 would have to be injected to a depth of between 800 and 3,000 meters to keep it from escaping from the ocean.
How deep would we have to inject Roland Piquepaille to keep him from escaping from the ocean?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
1. Countless drugs, enzymes and industrial compounds have been developed by studying the exotic animal and plant lifeforms that have developed in isolated environments like the Amazon.
2. Deep sea trenches and the deep ocean are the least investigated and studied environments on Earth. It's only recently that we've seen the first footage of living giant squid that give whales their battle scars. There's life down there that survives at extremes of cold, depth and pressure, low oxygen, etc, which no human has ever seen, much less studied.
3. So some staggering drooling idiot decides it'd be the perfect spot to dump a gigatonne of liquid CO2, which would almost certainly turn the whole lot into an underwater Death Valley.
4. ????
5. Profit.
Do a google search for 'thermohaline circulation and upwelling'.
Sorry eastern New Zealand, California, Peru and South Africa, there will be a minor problem boiling up at your coast several years after our little injection project...
TFA says nothing about how efficient the technology is. First, the CO2 out of a power plant isn't pure. A new unit will be needed to scrub out the toxic gases. Second, how easy is it to liquify huge amounts of CO2? Finally, large pumps will be needed to pump CO2 into the ocean. They will have to build a second power plant to generate enough energy to support this.
I didn't know what it was so I ate it.
We could just put it right over a fault. I mean after all, we don't seem to have many earthquakes lately.
There is an extremely good reason why this happens. There is a significant delay in implementing a workable solution due to the anti-nuclear crowd and politics.
The anti-nuclear crowd doesn't want a solution to be choosen, since the lack of an implemented solution is a valid complaint against nuclear power. In addition, by imposing unreasonable standards on the handling of nuclear waste, the anti-nuclear crowd wishes to increase the operating costs of nuclear reactors.
There is also political jockying on the state of Nevada's part. By objecting, not only do they please their anti-nuclear crowd, but they also increase the possibility that the federal government will throw more money at the state of Nevada to appease them.
A nuclear power plant has the disadvantage of being a target of fear. I'm not going to lie and say that nuclear power is utterly safe: No dependable, competitive power source that we have at this time is. But nuclear power is proven technology that kills less people per year than the alternatives we have.
Nuclear power also has the advantage of not contributing CO2 to the atmosphere. If the US switched all of its power plants over to nuclear, it would drasticly reduce the amount of CO2 emitted each year.
But hey, lets spend the next 10 years researching solar power some more. Perhaps the Solar Tower in NSW will be a workable design that can dependably deliver electricity at a competitive price. Perhaps we'll develop a cheap black box that can store massive amounts of electricity so that can create consistant electrical output from wind turbines. Perhaps flying fusion-powered pigs will land on powerlines and contribute electricity directly to the grid.
"It's important to the growth of industry to find new ways to responsibly bury pollutants" I'm sorry, the correct answer is, "it's important to the planetary ecosystem, Earth's inhabitants, and the industry to find new ways to PRODUCE LESS WASTE." Pollutants of some kind are realistically unavoidable, but the industry should concentrate on recyclable, non-hazardous waste. If we can't recycle it, develop the technology to break it down into harmless or useful constituents. We shouldn't be wasting time and money burying our trash and poisoning our planet.
eveyone would get fatter by not expending any extra energy, like exercising, to avoid paying higher taxes
Actually, they do. Pop is one of the greatest health hazards in common consumption, and no doubt leads fairly directly to many deaths.
Actually when I was saying frothy carbonated water I was talking about frothy carbonated water and nothing more.
They have actually discovered cavities in the brains of diet soda drinkers.
Anything you hear about artificial sweeterners being dangerous is a myth. I remember reading an article about artificial sweeterners and basically all the fears concerning them are based off of faulty experiments and science.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
If we can capture the C02, then lets liquify it, round it up with all of the trash in the landfills, all of the nuclear waste, and all of our other refuse, and launch it into space with a nuke set to go off in 100 years? Getting into orbit is cheap enough now, and ion based engine systems would provide economical acceleration for the demolition craft. Furthermore, the money we would save be eliminating current waste, refuse, and environmental protection systems would more than pay for it. The best solution is the most simplistic, but the most dangerous, complicated, and proffitable solution is always selected.
The phosphoric acid in coke is more relevant here. But actually the citric acid in orange juice etc is stronger.