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Giant Snake-Shaped Generators Could Capture Wave Power
Roland Piquepaille writes "UK researchers have developed a prototype of a future giant rubber tube which could catch energy from sea waves. The device, dubbed Anaconda, uses 'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.' So far, the experiments have been done with tubes with diameters of 0.25 and 0.5 meters. But if the experiments are successful, future full-scale Anaconda devices would be 200 meters long and 7 meters in diameter, and deployed in water depths of between 40 and 100 meters. An Anaconda would deliver an output power of 1MW (enough to power 2,000 houses). These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."
'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.'
and called the anaconda?
i don't know if this scheme will work, but hands down, that is the most sexual innuendo i've heard in an energy generation scheme in a long time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And has a fairly small footprint for a 20 Megawatt solution - might be a good fit for small to moderate coastal towns.
I just want to see the boat captain who wanders unknowingly into a field of these things at night. Snakes on a boat!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I didn't see anything in TFA, but one wonders if they've considered sediment buildup around the device. Do they have some way to keep sand/sediment from burying the machine?
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
I saw this yesterday, and using nature to generate energy is absolutely right. Think outside the paradigm, generate energy everywhere, use less of it everywhere... this is the solution, no single answer will work, it takes all efforts and answers. Anywhere the universe creates energy, we should be able to harness and use it. This is the grail, holy or not, energy for nothing.... or close to that.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
and called the anaconda?
My anaconda don't want none
Unless you've got buns, hon
motherfucking snake generators on the motherfucking grid!
here
Sounds like it's not snake oil on the surface, but I have no real knowledge of the field.
Isn't there some long-term effect of all these tiny little drains on the environment? I mean, the drag created by turbines, though small, does bear some effect over a thousand installations. Likewise with these snakes. The overall drag on currents could have some larger effect than we imagine.
The only sort of energy that we really get for free is solar.
These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."
I think this underestimates the ability of someone, somewhere being able to find a problem with anything. Hydropower dams wild rivers. Windmills smack birds out of the air. Photovoltaics pave over entire deserts. Probably Anacondas will interfere with the lifecycle of some species or other. One day we'll realize that any energy system is going to have some ill effects and say, "Intercourse the penguins, I need to microwave my popcorn."
Because, you know, 20 or more 100x7 meter tubes would have absolutely no conceivable effect on marine wildlife in the area.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
When the enviroflakes find out sea critters might get sliced and diced in the turbines, this will go the same way as wind generators because of birds. It will take an extra 5 years and countless wasted lawyer dollars to get a permit.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I got my anaconda right here, pal.
There are about 30+ companies that exist, which capture 'wave' power. Two to come to mind are Ocean Power Technologies & Blue Energy, though to me, Blue Energy's method seems more efficient since it uses predictable current, rather than waves, to generate power.
I think I went to high school with Ana Conda.
Atkins Oil is EVIL!!!
Ok now that it's said go back to your porn jokes.
...to dub this the "Giant Electric Condom" or GEC for short.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
Because MY anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns hon.
An anaconda might not want one unless it's got buns, hon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelamis_wave_energy_converter
Right now, the sky-high price for oil is useful in reminding us that there are limits to our resources. If we do not make a conscientious effort to control population growth, then nature will impose a solution on us. That solution will be poverty and likely starvation. If you doubt what I say, consider the huge amounts of energy that is needed to grow and to transport food.
Right now, I suspect that our population is unsustainably large due to the fact that we still have plentiful supplies of non-renewable sources (e.g., oil and uranium). So, our energy consumption = (1) usuable energy from non-renewable sources + (2) usuable energy from renewable sources. After #1 is depleted by roughly 2100 (?), a global world war for resources will dwarf the calamity of World War II. (By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
Will humankind wake up to the problem of overpopulation? In the USA, political correctness prevents us from dealing with the problem. The American mantra is that (1) expanding the population is always wonderful and (2) expanding the population by immigration is the best route.
Sure, CO2 from generating electricty might be a problem. But no matter how you slice it, using energy contributes to climate change in various ways.
If you believe that humans are causing the climate to change, the answer is fewer humans. Lots fewer. You can argue that before 1850 humans (all 50 million or so of them) had negligible effects on the climate. After that, well there has been an effect.
Continued growth of human population is going to be having a greater and greater effect. There is no getting away from it.
What is a bulge wave? Is it just a compression wave that can be trademarked or is it something I"m not familiar with?
It always strikes me as optimistic when I see estimated power outputs and supposedly how many homes that would power. I mean, 1 megawatt of power between two-thousand houses? That's 500 watts each. My computer alone takes up more than that, and it's on 24/7. Add a heater or two into the mix because it's winter, not to mention a fridge, hot water system and various other electronic devices, and I'm easily using up four or five of those "houses" mentioned in the estimation. Honestly, in this age, who can live on an average power draw of just 500 watts?
just go nuclear and conserve
going nuclear should give us enough time to figure out fusion. and if we don't, it's curtains
but renewables: geothermal, wind, tidal, etc... it's all tiny fractions of demand
except for solar. but that's a huge infrastructure outlay
nuclear is the best option before us to kick our hydrocarbon habit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If the captain was elsewhere working and the trawler was on autopilot, snagging a field of those things in your nets would rip the rigging off completely and probably capsize the boat from the stern before he had time to react and reverse engines. Modern fishing boats are like big tractors, huge engines and big props designed to pull hard, and they will. As soon as they reach whatever big anchor point is there for the turbines, the bow will lift severely, then either the whole rigging will go or they sink, just pulled over backwards more or less. A lot of fishing boats have had similar misfortune when they snagged submarines in unexpected places. Of course, I would expect them to have lit buoys and so on above the turbines, and have it marked on charts, but weird stuff still happens in the oceans. I remember a close one one day when we hit some unmarked coral heads on what was supposed to be pretty flat mud bottom, Yikes! Reality changed fast, luckily the chunks of coral broke off before stuff tore up bad or we flipped. Still tore the nets up bad. You just never know, there's sea laws and theory, then practice. One night I was catnapping in between drags, first mate yells out "get up, get ready to jump!" An unlit freighter had crossed our path, she didn't see us, we didn't see her, we scraped down her side, pressure wave kept us from being really damaged. Like two feet more our way we would have been smashed. Not a huge distance in the ocean.
Stuff just happens in the oceans and mass quantities of submerged and hidden anchored up things would be a menace without a lot of warnings of various kinds posted. Nowadays I guess you'd have GPS doing a lot of it, back then we had about zilch besides some ancient loran and mark 1 eyeballs.
"cheap electricity without harming our environment."
So basically, this project will not get any funding.
Ocean Power Catches a Wave
"The first commercial ocean energy project is scheduled to launch this summer off the coast of Portugal. Three snakelike wave-power generators built by Edinburgh's Pelamis Wave Power will deliver 2.25 megawatts through an undersea cable to the Portuguese coastal town of Aguçadoura. Within a year, another 28 generators should come online there, boosting the capacity to 22.5 MW. That may be a trickle of power, but the project represents a new push into wave and tidal power as governments eye the oceans as a way to meet their renewable energy targets."
One simple rule for its versus it's
Where "long run" means a thousand years, yes. Why are we looking that far forward anyway? Whaats the point about saying we have too many people while new methods of energy generation are constantly being built?
While solar power in all forms is the only thing we know has a high probability of being around in a billion years, nuclear power will last us, at the least, 300 years. Even the pessimists can agree that we'll have nuclear fusion within 200 years. So thats it! nuclear fusion until nuclear fission is sorted out. All of man's energy needs in a simple two step plan!
poverty! global war! starvation! calamity! our population is unsustainable!
will you please stop mongering fear and get realistic!? And don't event start with the "nuclear waste" blather because nuclear power can safely generate enough energy to make chemicals to launch all waste into the sun and have all the energy we'll need left over!
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Many shorelines require natural wave action and currents to remain healthy. It seems like this is yet another technological "solution" that might in the long run cause more problems. The potential issues with shoreline erosion (or whatever might happen when wave energy is dispersed prior to getting to the shore) won't happen as quickly and obviously as we have seen with wind farm bird kills (apparently those big slow moving windmills are pretty good at whacking birds), the effects could be as disastrous as some of the things we've done with the Florida Everglades and much of the gulf coast.
The point that completely escapes many environmentalists, is that you can't just discard one technology and replace it with another, and expect everything to come out all right. There are damn good reasons behind the scientific method, and they do not include stomping feet, claiming anyone with a different opinion is trying to kill the world, or jumping headlong into untested technologies that, because they aren't bad in the same way as other technologies, must be 100% good. That's an insane way to pursue large-scale technology change, but that's what Gore and his army of environmental extremists consistently propose. Anything that replaces oil must be ok, even if it results in us burning food or in this case, disrupting wave energy and water currents along a stretch of shoreline. What could possibly go wrong? Idiots.
Let's see some long-term studies in limited regional experiments before we dump too much money into this boondoggle. We already wasted far too much cutting down and burning rainforests to grow corn which we then turned around and burned... How about using tried and true scientific methods before we rush into something really harmful.
In the meantime, we already have plenty of reasonably safe and clean technologies that have been in use for decades. Every nuclear power mishap that has ever occurred caused a mere fraction of the casualties we've had in just the last decade of conventional power plant and oil refinery mishaps... How about we start using the technology that doesn't actually kill anyone on an annual basis?
Will humankind wake up to the problem of overpopulation?
No because it doesn't exist.
The American mantra is that (1) expanding the population is always wonderful and (2) expanding the population by immigration is the best route.
Hmmm, is that why the population density in the US is so much lower than in most of the rest of the world? Wait, I'm confused.
I'd say that most likely, we're best off pursuing fusion power with all the resources we have at our disposal. In the end, solar power is the same thing, hydrogen fusion. But the difference is, we can (in principle) get much more power out of fusing terrestrial hydrogen ourselves than the total incoming flux from the sun. We won't run out of terrestrial hydrogen for plenty long enough that we'll be able to build something approaching a Dyson sphere in time to keep our available power on a steady rise.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
" An Anaconda would deliver an output power of 1MW (enough to power 2,000 houses). " Me no think so.
I wonder how many joyriders would try sailing right through these things? They'd probably do quite well too, until they hit the turbine that is...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"I'm interested in having the smallest foot print that we can reasonably do on the planet. Right now nuclear is that way but fear mongering has made it all but near impossible. Of the other viable methods out there fossil fuels is still has the over all least impact for major energy production....Many, if nor most, scientists do it for the funding."
This contradictory pile of anti-science gibberish is insightfull, how?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Will you please stop with this "nuclear waste" blather? "Nuclear waste" is just "nuclear fuel that we're too lame to recycle yet".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
After #1 is depleted by roughly 2100 (?), a global world war for resources will dwarf the calamity of World War II.
Sounds more like the plot for a bad movie than a realistic expectation of future events.
Don't know if it's because I work in the power utility industry and read it in a trade rag but isn't this news a year or so old?
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Now take the remaining farmland in the US, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Don't convert an acre of forest, park, or city. No mountains, or prairies. Only the existing farmland. You can grow enough food for everyone (via a vegetarian diet).
Now take the fresh water outflow of the Columbia river - the river separating Washington from Oregon. You've got 27 gallons of fresh water per person per day.
Now put 700 nuclear plants in the deserts of Nevada. You have enough power for everyone to live at the energy consumption level of the US.
Go do the research, you'll see this all to be true. We could support every single person on the face of the earth within 40% of the North American continent. No one on any other continent, island, or waterway.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
And note that it is almost always the country that would benefit that restricts the offer of aid. Think Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Turkmenistan, North Korea. Those countries are stricken with poverty because of the G8 or the first world; they are stricken because twisted, maniacal leaders are power-drunk.
Overpopulated? Not by a long shot. Poor distribution? Sure. The solution is to encourage free and expanded trade - and in some cases like Zimbabwe and Myanmar - a few well placed bullets. Economic growth is required to free more people.
And when there's more people with freedom and no longer having to worry about their next meal, or their next drink of water, you'll find a lot more participation in solving other big problems facing the world.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
1 MW / 2000 houses = 500 w / house
Maybe they don't have fridges, ovens, ... in those houses?
Am I the only one who thinks arrays of these could be used to power trans-oceanic relay stations leading to a more robust internet backbone. The internet could be not only made of tubes, but powered by them too.
So instead, we should use LOADS more coal plants and simply allow the mercury and other poisons to dump in the oceans? Me, I will take a balanced approach and push to have a medium amount of all of the AEs. Also, add in nukes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
over-rated and incomplete..I'd mod you down. Fusion is limitless energy and it's renewable as long as we have water (i.e. clouds, rain, oceans, rivers, lakes). Biofuels are renewable but not 100% as you lose some to seed. Just use all your cropland on biofuels and people starve so you have less population! Population problem solved! PC and population growth in the USA? Abortion is legal, birth control is practiced and family size is smaller. A lot of people will disagree with expanding by immigration being the best route, and it's certainly NOT an official policy. We have more illegal immigrants than legal immigrants! Go play the old computer game where you are the Pharoh and have limited resources to keep your nation happy and growing. That will give you some insights into how hard it is to balance everything.
expanding the population generates economic activity and no one likes a stagmant economy. The other benefit of an expanding population is the supply of soldiers and settlers to take territory and then make it useful. The West has surrendered itself to political correctness and will die if it does not shake this insanity off. Let's have our population not grow or shrink and advocate getting rid of land mines, cluster bombs, and chemical/biological/nuclear weapons. What a great idea! When the hordes from Asia and Africa are rampaging through your countryside, a few old hippies singing kumbyya will stop them better than launching WMDs and having lots of soldiers take care of the ones that get through the minefields. Immigration is just a slow motion invasion.
In the long run, the only readily available sources of energy are renewable sources: solar energy and terrestrial energy (e.g., wind and waves).
Almost all of the energy we use comes from the sun, with nuclear and geothermal being (the) exceptions. The main difference is whether we're using the energy as the sun is producing it (wind, wave, solar) or we're using energy that's been stored from previous eons of sunlight (coal, oil). So I agree with what you're saying insofar as we shouldn't be using more energy than the sun is giving us right now, and we should strive to make that come from the current energy output rather than stored output.
Right now, the sky-high price for oil is useful in reminding us that there are limits to our resources.
(By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
But I'm going to have to disagree with you here. We will never actually run out of copper or iron or oil. As the amount of these resources that is naturally occurring decreases, the price will rise to the point that: (A) It becomes cost-efficent to dig through landfills and recycle previously used resources, and (B) other materials that were previously too expensive for the application will now be cost-effective.
Great post. I think it also pays to look at some of the countries like India, where the population density is really high in areas, but the resource consumption is really low. You can see ways in which in negatively impacts the standard of living, but you can also see pleasant agrarian scenarios where it isn't so bad, at least not worse than the way humans have been living for thousands of years. Our problem is with our resource consumption, the WAY we live, not the fact that we live. That people are calling to get rid of other humans before talking about trading out the SUV is kinda disturbing if you ask me.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
I wonder what kind of market penetration they'll achieve with this tool? ;)
You're suggesting that social guidelines that suggest that using racial epithets in the workplace or in political office are stopping Americans from dealing with over population?
You're not alone in your hatred for political correctness. In fact, that attitude is defining defining the dialog. You're following form in connecting it with unrelated tree-hugging dirty-hippy delusions. So:
(1) Who says that? and (2) who says that? and why does your America not contain people that adopt children and also think that a diverse workforce is a social virtue?
Each person consumes a minimum amount of energy to live
You cannot "consume" energy, you can only apply it to work, store it, or change its form. (following E=MC^2 all the while) If you're cold, it's much more convenient to light up a log than run in circles awhile. That's just withdrawing some of the stored energy. It moved to your body, and will eventually be radiated/conducted out to somewhere else, but it will never be consumed. Even if we set off an atomic bomb in the middle of the ocean, that energy was not "lost", it merely changed. It changed atomic bonds to form new structures, it released heat and radiation, it moved a lot of air and water. None of that energy was lost, it just changed form and became a lot harder for us to get our hands on and put to work.
People do use energy though, so I see where the renewable energy comment is going. The problem is people want to use readily-available energy to do their work, while investing the least amount of their own personal stored energy. That's why oil is so popular, because it's power-dense and convenient. (good margin of return) Same for burning wood.
Renewable energy doesn't necessarily fill the void. When you can expend say, 1 unit of energy to make available 10, (by say, refining oil) the return is a lot greater. If you can spent 1 unit of your energy (and resources etc) and get back 2, it still looks good on paper but nobody wants it because that means expending more of their energy to eventually get things done, and people are lazy by nature. Unfortunately, there is no renewable energy that is going to catch up with the rate of that being withdrawn from the "easy to get at" energy stored in the earth.
All that energy is being used very inefficiently. Only around 10% of the energy in many of our stored resources is actually applied to the work we want done. The rest is wasted doing things we don't need (or don't want) done. Take a brick of coal. Burn it to produce electricity. Use that electricity to run your air conditioner. All you've done is moved (heat) energy from one place to another, so you haven't done any work. What you have done is heated up the area outside your house a little from the compressor getting hot. So again the energy was not lost nor consumed, it just went somewhere you didn't need it to go, and can't make use of anymore. When you drive to the store and don't find what you want and return home, you and your car are back where they started, no net work was done, and all you've done is distribute some energy from your gas tank to other places.
So one way or another that energy the sun sends us stays here on earth. Some is radiated out into space of course, but a lot less than what lands here via sunlight. So we will never "run out of energy", in fact we will always have more than we did yesterday. The problem is we WILL run out of readily available stored energy. The farther we go down that road the harder our lives will become.
In awhile, we'll reach a point where renewable energy has a better yield than use of stored energy. We're like the bum kid living in our parents' basement. At some point we will have to move out and get a job and make a living on our own instead of relying on a free lunch. It won't be as cushy but it has to be done.
But then at some point after that we'll have what Back To The Future called a "Mr Fusion", that can extract energy from mater. (or more likely and practical, extract energy from very low margin sources, like your garbage can) Once we can do that, renewable energy will be an afterthought because it won't be useful - we will be able to make use of all the energy that we've simply stored in a different form and been thus far unable to utilize because of its relatively low margin. It'll be a different world then. Oil fields will be replaced with old landfills. I don't know if I'll live to see it, but it WILL HAPPEN. So even renewable energy isn't "the answer", it's just a good before-dinner snack that we aren't hungry enough to eat just yet.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is ridiculous. You're assuming that the only resources we have to rely on are terrestrial. By the time we start depleting our natural resources here, it will be economically feasible to pursue mining in the asteroid belt, on the Moon, Mars, etc.
Overpopulation is a freakin' joke and anyone that buys into it is an idiot. This pessimistuc view of the future is not new and was first published by Robert Malthus in the mid-1800s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthus) and has been proven wrong many times, most famously by a US Colonel who's name or reference I can't remember off of the top of my head. However, the study was done well and has been repeated many times.
All of the reasons that a Malthusian has ever come up with is either factually wrong or is simply an engineering problem that can and will be solved by fundamental laws of economics and human curiosity. It's more likely that we destroy ourselves through war in one way or another than we are to consume ourselves to death. As a physics professor of mine once said about the cosmic constant, "This is what is going to save us, as long as we don't blow ourselves up first."
That works out to 500W per house. Or about 10 lightbulbs, or one quad-core dual-GPU PC maxed out running Crysis, or air conditioning for a small room.
Captcha: dimmmest
Discovery channel have been showing those stuff in live usage out the coast of scotland for 2-2.5 years now.
Read radical news here
It is predictable that there will be waves.
Great idea...Bet our energy future on something that's succeptible to FoxDie.
Why not superconductor based energy systems eg http://overunityenergy.blogspot.com/
Why then was the global population less than a billion for 10,000 years before the advent of fossil fuels/green revolution? Without oil and gas (non-renewable resources), the carrying capacity of the planet drops substantially.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Because portable energy is a different problem than energy full stop. That's hopefully temporary, and it may make our current arrangement unsustainable, but if the other numbers check out, keep in mind that portable energy would become less necessary with everyone in one large urban area.
Not to mention that in my post I noted we could supply ALL our energy needs with nuclear. No need for crude oil for basically none of our energy requirements.
Oil was a cheap and high density power source; in the 1800s we used it because nuclear wasn't an option. Now we can use nuclear for most power needs, and use petroleum for whatever else (like plastics, high-density requirements like airplanes, etc).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Almost all of the energy we use comes from the sun, with nuclear and geothermal being (the) exceptions
:-)
In fairness, nuclear comes from *a* sun, just not ours.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
It would take a huge investment in infrastructure to be able to "use up" nuclear material to the state where it is reasonably harmless to life. By comparison, increasing renewable energy generation can be done in a fairly incremental fashion (and can be moved & removed in a fairly incremental fashion as well).
Also, "nuclear waste" doesn't just include the nuclear fuel. It also includes everything which comes in contact with that nuclear fuel & all of ways that it is processed (like the containers used to store/transport the fuel, the reactor walls, the control rod mechanisms, etc). Almost all that material can't be safely used once it has become contaminated, the stuff that it is contaminated with can't be easily extracted for use as fuel, and it is all still hazardous to life.
I'm not saying that nuclear isn't theoretically a great source of energy, but you're seriously downplaying some of its disadvantages.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. . . Poor distribution? Sure. The solution is to encourage free and expanded trade . . . Economic growth is required to free more people.
My understanding is that free trade leads to a less egalitarian distribution of resources, despite an ideological assumption to the contrary. See, for example, work by Andre Gunder Frank or Immanuel Wallerstein.
Cheers, -m
Oh I dont know, I seem to find the US population extremely dense, I mean they voted for Bush.....
Oh, I see, Mr. Malthus. The problem is that population growth is geometric, yet food and resource growth is linear?
The only solution is to eat our children, resolving both problems in one fel stroke. ~~
DATABASE WOW WOW
Sounds like a SimCity I made once...
Another Roland the Plogger low-end story.
There's not much solid info on this. They've done some experiments in a wave tank, but nothing in the open sea yet. The Checkmate Group, which does specialty flexible devices, is doing the hose design, so at least they have competent engineering support. It's certainly a more promising idea than the various mechanical nightmares of floats and levers proposed by some other wave energy proponents. It's all underwater, which is good. ("Remember that the free surface is neither ocean nor air and man cannot walk upon it nor will equipments remain stable in its presence. So design your equipments so that they tarry not long and that they need neither servicing nor repair at this unseemly interface." - John Craven, U.S. Navy ocean engineering expert.)
But it's vaporware until someone puts a reasonable-sized prototype in a real ocean and gets some power out. In particular, cost and power output estimates should be viewed with extreme skepticism at this stage.
I really don't know whether to laugh or to cry at your post. But while we're in imaginationland where we can put everyone into Texas and solve all the worlds problems, well...I'd like a pony gosh-darn-it.
Interesting/Informative my hairy ass. Shit, why didn't you throw in the fact that there's enough iron and nickel plus "trace" elements in the Earth's core to solve all our metallurgical resource problems as well? If only we could put all those happy Indian people to work digging to the center with spoons... Maybe 'cause, like the rest of your post, it's only useful if we have half a chance of ever making such a scheme work, and I don't see one proposal in your post that doesn't smack of "if wishes were horses".
Free trade? "Well placed bullets"? Grow up.
Zimbabwe's a particularly good example; they once had a fairly decent country. Grew enough food for themselves and enough to export to other starving African countries.
Let's solve that, seize all the farms, hand them to people who don't know a damned thing about farming or owning a business, let them rip up the irrigation and sell it as scrap metal and boom! you've got a few people making a lot of money, one time, rather than a good bit year by year, and instead of a fed populous exporting food you've got a starving populous begging to import food.
I'd wager that Zimbabwe ALONE is more responsible for increased demand on global food supplies than biofuels.. so stop cryin about *that*.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
I see. Political Science... isn't?
And if you think that moving everybody to Texas and getting the water from Oregon down to Texas and building 700 nukular power plants is a POLITICAL problem, you have a gross misestimation of reality.
Yes, politics plays a key role in wealth inequity, but this is also a severe issue of engineering and resource management.
Yes, in a purely mathematical world, you could move everybody to Texas, and water then with just the water from XYZ river. But how do you distribute those 26 gallons of water per day? Can you imagine how much plumbing and energy it would take to distribute that kind of water? How many millions of miles of piping to lay?
How many trees it would take to build those kinds of houses, roads to transport the trees, mills to process the trees...
That's the problem with overly simplistic models that simply divide the number of people by XYZ (usually Texas) and figure that's the problem.
The truth is that if you were born in the United States, you inherited almost a MILLION DOLLARS of wealth at current market value in public infrastructure: roads, power lines, schools, libraries, police buildings, fire equipment, telecommunications capabilities, rail lines, and so on, all of which give you the ability to do some small piece and earn (on average) about 7% on your public "net worth" as personal income.
That's how come it's so much harder to become wealthy in the 3rd world - the infrastructure needed to support the widespread creation of wealth simply doesn't exist.
I digress.
So you have a city with a population density that at least compares to most cities, the size of Texas. Can you imagine what the quality of life would be like near Killeen? (the middle)
People live where the resources are available, where distribution is cheap to free, where the quality of life is something to enjoy. I like being able to walk through a park that isn't packed every 10 feet with another person. The feeling of isolation, the curiosity at watching a water snake swim.
I agree with your general conclusion, that the problem is largely political, and that the 3rd world could become much happier with effective leadership. But I don't like that you use such overly simplistic models to support your conclusion!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'd say that most likely, we're best off pursuing fusion power...
Hear hear. I doubt if we'll get the power density we need in the long run with anything less. Nothing like good ol' Mother Nature at her best.
In the mean time, there will be a large and diverse effort to lessen the dependency on imported sweet crude, most likely depending on what you have available -- wave power for the North Sea, perhaps, broad acreage solar here in Australia, manufactured fuels from coal, nuclear-manufactured ammonia chemistry and similar sources elsewhere. Stopgap solutions until then will need to match the local geography, physical and political climate. They'll probably all be represented.
In addition we'll need to exploit any energy differential we can tap as well, such as wave motion, any sort of temperature differential such as geothermal, oceanic wells, etc. Any place that's much colder or warmer than another place nearby is a candidate for a Stirling engine to tap into it.
On top of that, we'll simply need to throw less energy away, and we're all working on that.
By the time we run out of all the energy available to us, we'll all be somewhere else and the sun will be a brown dwarf surrounded by a photo opportunity.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Somebody get these m*f*'n snakes off this m*f*'n drain...
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
The population growth has already curbed itself in most industrialized nations. However there is another problem that arises from this. All of the current economic models are really ponzi schemes which depend on always expending populations. That is because as far as recorded history goes, human populations have always expanded. We are unprepared to deal with a shrinking population as witnessed by the alarm bells of every government with a birth rate below the magical number of 2.1%. However, merely maintaining the current population won't really do us any favors int he long run.
As Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead.
But if you're looking far enough into the future that we've run out of fissile material, running a fusion reaction with terrestrial hydrogen is probably somewhere on the radar. (And, of course, you won't run out of hydrogen until you're out of salt water. Which doesn't look like it's an issue in the next billion years or so.)
i would like to subscribe to your newsletter and also to donate some bullets to the cause.
There will be effects, you can't do only one thing. "These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment." Not quite. I remember reading an article on a study that was performed in the 1980s and reported in Scientific American. The purpose of the study was to discover the effects of putting tidal power units at the entrance of the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia. This bay has enormous tides, over 40 feet difference between low and high tide levels, making it a candidate for a tidal plant power. The overall environment was definitely affected, one of the big effects was that there was a "reflection" of the tide at the Bay of Fundy that affected tides in Boston, over 400 km away. Specifically tides in Boston were stronger and somewhat later in the day. The total amount of energy on the coastline was the same, of course, but distributed somewhat differently. Also see http://www.ems.psu.edu/~elsworth/courses/cause2003/finalprojects/canutepaper.pdf Add in a rising sea level and things could get interesting in Beantown.
chemical reactions are just a matter of distribution, too. but you can't talk 6.03x10^23 randomly moving particles into redistributing energy for efficiency.
Sorry man, you missed the boat on this crap. Been there, done that.
Paul R. Ehrlich,The Population Bomb...in the 1970s and 1980s... millions...starve to death". Blah Blah Blah Blah.
Some people simply are not happy without some world ending crises to obsess over.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I see. Political Science... isn't?
Not really, no. No more than parapsychology. If it's labeled "science" it gets a free pass to Scienceville in your book?
And if you think that moving everybody to Texas and getting the water from Oregon down to Texas and building 700 nukular power plants is a POLITICAL problem, you have a gross misestimation of reality.
I don't think the OP meant we should do that literally. It was just a way to demonstrate his point. You really missed the whole point of it, and have come across a bit dim.
And why the "nukular" spelling? What's Bush got to do with this?
We don't have a resource problem. We have a distribution problem.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"It's not the advance and use of oil, it was the advance of technology which allowed the use of oil."
The two go hand-in-hand, for instance oil is used to make fertilizer and run tractors, this means that one farmer feeds 100 people instead of 10 as they did at the begininbg of the 1900's.
As a demonstration of expotential population growth, I was born in 1959 there were 3 billion people on the planet at the time and each had an average of ~12 acres, now there are more than 6 billion and we each have an average of ~5 acres. I have no idea how to curb our population growth without trampling all over human rights but if we don't do it ourselves nature will do it for us.
BTW: I have nothing against modern nuclear reactors and the pebble bed reactors look even better than what we have but alas nuclear is more like a band-aid than a silver bullet.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Consider that the US is the most open economy in the world. And that the poor in the US are much better off than the middle class or rich in most of the world. And yes, I have been to most of the world (well, 94 countries so far).
While some people will gain hugely in a free market, even the bottom end gain when the economy grows - it's not a zero-sum game. And the free market inherently rewards those who grow it the most - the gain the most. But they also provide more income.
Capitalism - the US, the EU - won. Communism - the USSR and China - lost. The USSR shattered. China is moving towards a free-market economy. Communism as practiced by men simply doesn't work.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We're not over-populated. Take every single living person on this earth. All 6.6 billion. Stick them on the land mass of Texas only (none of the lakes or rivers). You'll have lower population density than greater New York City and most of the European capitals.
This is probably true. It would be no problem to solve the overpopulation-problem if people could be easily stored. However, I think most of us agree that we would need schools, shops, infrastructure, footballfields and so on. Additionally, it's not entirely easy to store a population in a desert either - you'd have to solve major problems as water supply.
This thinking reminds me of the great idea to divide the nations of Africa with a ruler.
Bingo, you nailed the problem perfectly: continuously growing population and/or continuously growing consumption is not sustainable, but the current economic model work maily because of this continuous growth. We are unfortunately at the end of this growth, and a transition must occur: Western world is currently trying to shift the growth from material/energy to informations in general, but this is a doomed attempt, as information is not the same at all (no scarcity, free duplication). Watching the end of the growth-based capitalistic model without a backup plan is going to be fun...in fact, the fun has already started :-/
I think you completely missed the point: the GP stated we were overpopulated, when demonstrably that is false. If you can support every single person in such a small area as Texas, and with the resources of just 40% of one continent, then how are we overpopulated? I guess that sailed right over your head...
I wasn't advocating moving everyone to Texas, merely pointing out that there isn't a population problem. Provably so. Unless you want to show otherwise? Clearly we have the resources to support everyone.
And if that is the case, then the fact that millions die each month from starvation must be because of some reason other than there are too many of them.
Take a look at Zimbabwe. 25 years ago, they were a net exporter of food, and starvation within Zimbabwe was unheard of. Jobs were plentiful. Education was free and open to all, and the country was quite peaceful.
Now? Zimbabwe can't even grow 20% of its own food. It's economy has been so wrecked that inflation is running at 10 MILLION percent annually. Prices double daily. Unless your wages increase at a higher rate - which they don't - you simply cannot survive.
How to solve problems like that? Well, you can try trade. It works for most places that give it a try. Grow the pie, everyone wins. But many places don't want or care for free trade and you get Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, and Haiti, and North Korea.
You want to solve those problems? You're not going to do it by talking. The rulers of those countries don't give a shit about the people. They are simply cattle to be used; in fact, in Haiti and Zimbabwe, cattle are worth more than people. I know, I've been to both.
So how to you negotiate with those bastards? They have everything they want. They have absolute control, they have air conditioned palaces, plenty to eat, and people to shoot and flay for sport. What can we offer them other than a restriction in what they do now?
You want to be humanitarian to the suffering people in those countries? You won't do it by providing food and money - that will just go to the thug running the place, guaranteed. You can support an insurgency, but that will take time, cost thousands - if not millions - of lives, and may not work.
Or you simply send in a few teams and in the course of a day or two eliminate the thugs. Eliminate the threat. Set up a government, and work to rebuild the country. It's worked every time we've tried it: Philippines, Japan, Germany, Iraq. Yes, Iraq.
You say I should grow up? I have, and I've been to those places. Ever run the pharmacy of a medical clinic in the hills around Dessalines, Haiti? Build water pumps in Kadoma, Zimbabwe? Distribute US Constitutions while teaching English in Hamheung, North Korea? Give out copies of the Declaration of Independence while teaching English in Dawei, Myanmar?
What's your solution? Sitting down and talking? How did the talking go with Myanmar's rulers - refused to allow all US, and most foreign, aid after the typhoon which killed 500,000.
How about talking with Saddam? Twelve years and still hadn't gotten anywhere - even talked for 5 years AFTER the US made regime change the official US policy. Of course, it didn't help that "pacifists" arguing for more dialogue - the UN, the French, the Germans, and the Russians - were skimming billions of dollars off their suggested "humanitarian" actions.
Speak softly and carry a big stick only works if you actually are willing to use the stick. If you're too squeamish for that, then I suggest you move over and let the grown ups actually do what needs to happen.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
(By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
But I'm going to have to disagree with you here. We will never actually run out of copper or iron or oil. As the amount of these resources that is naturally occurring decreases, the price will rise to the point that: (A) It becomes cost-efficent to dig through landfills and recycle previously used resources, and (B) other materials that were previously too expensive for the application will now be cost-effective.
Thats a strange logic. "We will never run out because when we do we will use something else."
Although, I agree with you. Of course we will use something else if/when we run out of oil/copper/iron.
I don't have one
Typical dim free marketeer speak.
Yep, if we lived like factory farmed chickens and ate stuff we didn't like eating, and ignored the fact that we had to travel a thousand miles just to get out of the city, and turned a blind eye to the logistical impossibility of locating all the factories which produce the goods we use, inside the same 'urban' area - not to mention the unexplained way in which we would be able to mine, process and transport the resources from the hole in the ground where they were mined, to the factories where they are to be turned into goods...err, while all living in Texas. And who's going to be farming the farmland?
I like the way you try to pass off the 700 nuclear power stations in the desert as both a possibility and a workable solution. How did you plan cooling them in the desert? And what if just one of them blew... what then, would we abandon the other 699 and go build another 700 somewhere else.
If this clap trap is typical of your contribution to the debate, then I sincerely hope you keep your trap shut in future.
Absolutely. If there ever was a country that cried out for a few well-placed 700 grain bullets, it is Zimbabwe. Mugabe and his thugs have completely destroyed that country and single-handedly caused the deaths of millions of people.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This has already been banned from the (IIRC) Severn Estuary, as some environmentalists decided that it would harm the local bird population.
Maybe the birds will find a nice new home?
Bet they didn't think of that.
Population growth is slowing, last I checked the worst case was a plateau at 15 billion given current rates. It basically boils down to the fact that people in developed nations inherently have fewer kids and that the world is quickly becoming developed. Granted long term evolution would ensure a population increase (ie: genes that make people have more kids get passed on more often) baring outside factors (ie: starvation) but that's a different issue (and way too far off to care much about given technological increase). It's also likely that an immortality drug, if we found one, would throw a serious wrench into the works.
If you want to lower populations even faster than I believe there are some examples of how to do. If I remember Singpore did it so well (with incentives, propaganda, etc.) they had to reverse their stance once they found themselves heading towards a population decline.
Sure, it does. I think Sir Winston Churchill explained it best:
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Yes, because if a British conservative politician said it in the middle of the last century, it must be true today. Just because the first half of the quote is undeniably true, doesn't make the second part true as well.
To Churchill looking at Stalinism, which was about all there was to go on then, it must have seemed that socialism inevitably led to misery, but with hindsight the "socialisms" of the 20th Century were no such thing. In fact, the "equal sharing of miseries" part is demonstrably false even as applied to the USSR, because it still had its rich elite.
Capitalism - the US, the EU - won. Communism - the USSR and China - lost. The USSR shattered. China is moving towards a free-market economy. Communism as practiced by men simply doesn't work.
I would agree with you if you'd said "Communism as so far practiced under that name simply doesn't work." Western economies in the early 21st century are more socialist than the USSR ever was in terms of wealth redistribution and state support of industry.
Who knows whether Leninism could work today - probably not without some radical rethinking - but green issues are making this kind of discussion more urgent, as capitalism is inherently wasteful of resources.
The rest is not quite as funny
Reduce, reuse, cycle
that whooshing sound you hear is not me farting.
Off topic, but you missed an important part in the Iraq story. The US aren't hated do much for what they are doing now. Its what they did in the past that led to now. They put Saddam in power for their own selfish reasons. He brutally killed his own people and the US turned a blind eye. Then he stopped towing the US party line and decided he'd trade oil with those pesky Europeans instead of the USA. Next thing you know, Iraqs been invaded. Most of your point is good, but on Iraq you're missing some important details IMO.
"An Anaconda would deliver an output power of 1MW (enough to power 2,000 houses)."
Excuse me if I'm wrong, but...
1MW = 1,000,000 watts
1,000,000 watts / 2,000 houses = 500 watts per house.
How is a house gonna run off of 500 Watts? That's only 8 1/3 hours of light from a 60 watt bulb! My computer alone has a 750 watt power supply, good luck running that for any amount of time off of 500 watts.
.
As far as oil goes, the majority of Iraqi oil was controlled by BP and Shell until 1972 when Iraq nationalized oil. And then cut deals with France and Russia.
Note that BP is British Petroleum, a UK company. And Shell is Royal Dutch Shell, a Dutch company. The US had precious little stake in Iraq before 1972 or afterwards. And even the recent grants of oil rights saw US companies getting about 30% of the production leases.
The US has never been a major consumer of oil from Iraq. Nor has the US been a major consumer of oil from the Middle East; rather, most of the oil goes to Europe or Asia. The US still produces 45% of its own oil, and buys more from Canada than it does from the Middle East. We buy more from Venezuela and Mexico than we do from the Middle East.
If you want to say the war was about oil, then it was about the US ensuring a stable supply of oil for the EU, not for itself.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If we're going to go off with our tangential imaginings, why nuclear power? Why don't we power texas-town with the aforementioned ocean tube generators? In theory it would require even less manpower.
Oh, and no thanks on the food plan. Contrary to popular nutrition, you should be eating very little if any carbohydrate, and the carbohydrate that you do eat should most definitely be derived from vegetable matter and low-glycemic-load grains. I don't know that it's too feasible to feed us 6.6 billion on a vegetarian diet.
And, power plants in "the deserts of Nevada?" Why not in your texan urban sprawl? Why must the electricity travel so far?
You're a fool if you think we aren't overpopulated. I consider my home, the SF bay area, overpopulated. Do you have any idea what home prices are like here? As a result, many of the people who grow up here, live here, and work here will never own a home; do you want to guess at the personal economic implications of renting for a lifetime in said housing market? I think you need to review your position on political science.
-- arstchnca
--
I agree that the advent of the pill and better living standards in the west has brought a 1/3 of the world's growth to a screaching halt over the last 50-60yrs. China's has also curbed another 1/3 of the growth with the blunt instrument of government oppression. So yes, it could have been much worse (as predicted in the 70's). Dispite the collapse of fisheries in the N. Hemisphere and current downward trend in the global food/person ratio we are still far, far, better off in global food/person than we were in the early 70's (mainly due to China's rise from a famine infested hell-hole to a global super-power since the gang of four were booted out).
I think the root of the problem is that as individuals we instictively think that a constant steady rise in the population of the tribe(s) we belong to is a GoodThing(TM). A tribe of 6+ billion is just too big for our oversized ape-brains to handle in anything but an abstract way. We are at an evolutionary cross-road where our tecnology can both create and identify global problems that our social institutions can not handle. We do have an advantage over the apes and other mammals because we can see the problems, any other mammal (or pre-industrial humans) in such a situation would suffer a rapid population crash or even extinction.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Are you so dense as to miss the already-posted about point that DISTRIBUTION [capacity / infrastructure / technology / etc] is a resource? And that in many parts of the world, it is not this way.
You stubbornly cling to your imagined notions that the disadvantaged of the world are being ignored under the banner of "there just aren't enough resources for everyone." Do you really think anyone believes this idea that you're decrying? And do you think that we all nod our heads, mutter about how unfortunate it is, and proceed with our lives?
What can you expect from someone replying to an AC who played the "parapsychology" card (no need to mention the ad hominem) to discredit political science? Apparently you can expect that they know nothing about political science.
Frankly, you're the one who doesn't care about Earth's disadvantaged humans. Because you trap yourself in these bullshit nihilistic impressions of why the world is as it is - what if we could "handle" the entire world's population on 100% of the landmass? In your style of argumentation, this is still feasible, and distribution of resources is the problem. But even if it were true, the world would most likely be very identical to today - some people drive Mercedes, some people live in Burma.
-- arstchnca
--
I'd love to work around one of these things.
Sending the new guy out to find snake oil might be as fun as sending him to other resturaunts to borrow some ice mix when I worked fast food.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
"Do we create massive amount of sulfur in the air rapidly killing everything with large scale geothermal?"
Geo-thermal does not create massive amounts of sulphur.
"Do we sterilize the oceans with tidal generators?"
Your kidding right? - Any ideas on just how much energy is in the tides compared to say all the coal on the planet?
"Do we cause massive upheaval that likes of which the most radical Global Warming people do not even think of with massive wind farms?"
How is converting a large part of our generation to wind over 50yrs any more radical than the build up of coal plants over the last 50yrs?
"Solar isn't able to meet our energy needs so it's not an option"
Why is it "not an option", what other single method of generation "meets our needs"? Also I'm not sure what the German's would do since they are pumping a gigawatt back into the grid from the excess generated by roof-top panels.
"You can list all the problems with CO2 and I agree, but outside of nuclear it is the smallest footprint out there that can meet our energy needs."
Only for politically inspired definitions of "footprint".
"Thus simply reducing CO2 does nothing and, in fact, tends to make things worse because we move to greater polluting methods."
Please tell me you are astro-turfing and it's just your friends who think your insightfull.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
[...] the poor in the US are much better off than the middle class or rich in most of the world [...]
I'm not even going to go into the overarching falseness of that statement. But, the middle class in the rest of the world? Are you serious? Nothing better reveals your self-affirming bourgeoisie brain than this statement. You've seen all that middle class in the 94 countries you've been to? Have you been to poor parts of Philadelphia, or Chicago? What about urban centers in California? I'd be surprised. After all you don't vacation to those places, do you?
I guess it's easier to pull out the Churchill quote than go and read the above poster's cited recommendations. You make no claim against his that free trade leads to less equality.
Capitalism - the US, the EU - won. Communism - the USSR and China - lost. The USSR shattered [...]
And where did he even mention communism? What did the US win? I'm a US citizen. Show me what I won.
-- arstchnca
--
Not quite
From Wikipedia US electricity consuption per capita (2005 figures) works out to 12.8 MWh/year.
Multiply that by 6.5 billion people gives 83.2 billion MWh/year.
The US's 103 nuclear reactors' highest ever output (2004) was 788.5 million MWh.
Put the numbers together and you find you need around 10,900 nuclear reactors working at the average output for a US nuclear power stations.
Were every one of those stations to be the same design as the world's largest nuclear power station (which actually consists of 7 operating units) you'd still need 1150 of the things to match US power consumption rates.
I'm sorry, but did you just say that Haiti "doesn't care for" free trade? If I was a Haitian, I wouldn't care for free trade either.
Haiti used to grow most of the food needed by its people. This is not at all the case today, and what free trade has done to local growers is a prominent cause.
This is not to mention Haiti's problems from the Duvaliers' greed and the likes of the VSN. How functional would the society you grew up in be if you had to fear death squads?
Even post-Duvaliers, Haitian politics had been in constant turmoil as the US constantly rallied support for the least-populist Haitian leaders, the one's for the free trade. I wonder why that was.
You seem to think that the impoverished are at fault for attempting some communist scheme to avoid buying American products, a scheme that ultimately fails and leaves them the unfortunate "losers" to capitalism. You need to look at the big picture.
-- arstchnca
--
Your post is definitely an interesting way of saying:
deposing Saddam and his party is like the United States' "apology" to world politics. More like a guilty ass-covering. Do you know why we were so tight with Mr. Hussein (by we, I mean older George Bush and his political)?
It's because he ran Iraq as a secular republic. That's really the only reason. Iran was more "threatening" to certain persons and so the US became Saddam Hussein's PR machine.
I really don't think you can consider the federal government's actions over the past several years as "fixing" the problem. Inasmuch as Iraq had a problem, the United States' heavyhanded politics of containment and fear of all things Islamic led to the way things are today.
Where di the above poster say that the war was about oil? It was certainly for tenuous "political" purposes and shady economic ones. Look at those getting handed contracts for things like energy infrastructure in Iraq. When the people who cause the wars give massive business to the people payed to come and build things up, and these people were all friends to begin with, I call conflict of interest. But then, since when has that sort of thing had any bearing on US politicing?
-- arstchnca
--
Amen.
It is truly the hallmark of a simple mind to say "well, all these things around me work" and believe "if only everyone could have access to all these things, all would be good." It reveals that the author is truly unappreciative of the massive human effort that goes into allowing, let's call it, the "middle class" way of life.
-- arstchnca
--
Perhaps the population density in the US is low because, for one, its borders include in part huge tracts of land that anyone has yet to put a real use to? The fact is, it is functional population density that is important. Do you think that everyone lives around cities because they just love other people?
In the game of capitalism, money is your score. This is unfortunate. As such, it's necessary for one to come by money, a metaphor for one's own worth, by some means in order to survive. As hard as you might try, there's only one way to get this money - from other people.
Living far from other people in this country is a prerogative mostly reserved for the elite.
Anyhow, the parent's comments about population that you quoted hold true, or at least moreso than your counterclaims. Look at American communities like, say, Los Altos Hills. Is that a community that is sustainable without the constunt influx of persons that serves to fill the ranks of the "working class?" No.
-- arstchnca
--
If this device floats and interrupts shipping, then I'm supporting CETO's idea instead. The CETO concept also uses compressed high pressure water, but uses submerged Buoy's that just bob up and down and around, dragging the pump and forcing water onto land. The high pressure hoses combine from all the Buoy's and drive a turbine on the land. At night the system can be switched over to provide freshwater instead!
700 Hectares would supply Sydney Australia with all its freshwater and a good chunk of its energy requirements, 2000 hectares with all its water AND energy!
There's no interruption to shipping, no interruption visually, it improves sea-life adding an slightly 'reef' like structure below the surface, and when one considers that visual pollution is a real political problem with renewable energy, I'd be backing CETO.
Simple Flash animations of how the system works here.
http://www.ceto.com.au/ceto-technology/what-is-ceto.php
Lastly, a page I love to quote.
The best wave energy sites in the world receive consistent swell. CETO operates across a variety of wave heights making CETO a base load renewable energy option.
* Some other advantages of wave energy and CETO include:
* Wave energy is a renewable, zero-emission source of power.
* 60% of the world live within 60km (40 miles) of a coast, removing transmission issues.
* As water is approximately 800 times denser than air, the energy density of waves vastly exceeds that of wind dramatically increasing the amount of energy available for harvesting.
* Waves are predictable days in advance making it easy to match supply and demand. (Wind is predictable hours in advance at best.)
* CETO sits underwater, moored to the sea floor, resulting in no aesthetic impact.
* CETO units are designed to operate in harmony with the waves rather than attempting to resist them. This means there is no need for massive steel and concrete structures to be built.
* CETO wave farms will have no impact on popular surfing sites as breaking waves equate to areas of energy loss. CETO wave farms will operate in water deeper than 15 metres in areas where there are no breaking waves.
* CETO units attract marine life.
* CETO is the only wave energy technology that produces fresh water directly from seawater by magnifying the pressure variations in ocean waves.
* CETO contains no oils, lubricants, or offshore electrical components. CETO is built from components with a known subsea life of over 30 years.
* Wave energy can be harnessed for permanent base load power and for fresh water desalination. The ratio of electrical generation to fresh water production can be quickly varied from 100% to 0% allowing for rapid variations in power demand.
* CETO uses a great multiplicity of identical units each of which can be mass produced and containerised for shipping to anywhere in the world.
http://www.ceto.com.au/ceto-technology/advantages.php
I think where he or she wrote "political corectness," he or she could have better used "socializing forces that perpetuate the authoritarian submission to so-called American concepts and ideals."
A similar example is the stigmatization of all things communist. Over the last century, it had gotten to the point where it wasn't about wilfully ignoring the potential virtues of a communist society - you were unAmerican if you didn't use the word "Communist" in place of the word "evil."
-- arstchnca
--
When you can expend say, 1 unit of energy to make available 10, (by say, refining oil) the return is a lot greater. If you can spent 1 unit of your energy (and resources etc) and get back 2, it still looks good on paper but nobody wants it because that means expending more of their energy to eventually get things done, and people are lazy by nature.
Not to mention, try competing with the 1:10 oil guy using the 1:2 process.
Competition would hard enough on a practical basis alone. Let alone the modern world's worship of free trade.
-- arstchnca
--
I do and do not agree with you. I have seen the GP's example before but I never viewed it as a suggestion that we should all move to Texas. What I think is suggested by the example is that the earth is not over populated (as the GP stated) and that we can produce more than enough for everyone.
Having said that, yeah, the example is quite simplistic. I does not seem to take infrastructure, distribution costs, etc. into account.
Actually, the best way to power a city in Simcity 2k is an array of 3x3 raised land blocks, covered with water. These can then have hydroelectric dams installed which, whilst they don't provide massive power each, are small enough that many of them provide plenty, and they never need replacing because of exploding. :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I don't think what you are saying is possible.
First of all, if the price of a material rises too high (copper, iron, oil, you name it), it will become cost-efficient to dig through landfills and recycle previously used resources only if people buy the remaining material in these high prices. If the material is suddenly no longer demanded, the companies will have no money to invest on recycling previous resources. Demand will not actually die, and so the prices will not be lowered, it's just that it will not be bought.
Secondly, perhaps other materials can be cost-effective when compared to copper/iron/oil/whatever, but they can not be cost-effective relative to equipment required for processing those materials and the research expenses required for developing new technology for producing those materials.
The net result from depletion of copper/iron/oil will be a stalemate: there would be not enough money to continue buying the materials left, and there would be no money to invest in exploiting new alternative materials. As an example, take oil: the cost of replacing oil with another fuel is extremely high, because all the infrastructure of modern society has to be replaced: cars, heat systems of buildings, electricity producing systems, airplanes, boats, etc. We are talking about huge expenses, that no country, or even all the countries of the Earth, can bare.
Now take the fresh water outflow of the Columbia river - the river separating Washington from Oregon. You've got 27 gallons of fresh water per person per day.
I don't know about Texans, but people in NYC use an average of 133 gallons per day (2006 numbers).
Something I read about on Popular Mechanics 10 years ago actually coming to fruition? Implausible! They had pictures (unlike the linked article), but I don't think I'll have any luck searching for them :/
Actually, come to think of it, the PM version just used gravity to rotate a set of internal buckets like a partially submerged water mill... would have been a lot of sloshing around.
Let's go over a few flies in the ointment:
Physics:
Wave energy is high-pressure, low-volume, low-speed, with insane peaks a few times a year, and in a super corrosive liquid. The high pressure means you need strong materials. The low speed and volume means you have to use a very large, expensive, heavy, and inefficient turbine. The corrosion raises the initial costs and limits the useful life. The storms mean the whole thing has to be overbuilt by a factor of 50 in strength that is only used for a few hours per year.
Economics:
"1 MW", if it were true, would be about $100 an hour of electricity. Assuming that's 1MW when the waves are about average, the yearly average will be maybe 400 KW, or $40 an hour of electricity, about $300,000 a year. This thing would have to be buildable, installable, and maintainable for under $2M each and $100K/yr maintenanceand last for 10 years just to break even. Sounds very unlikely.
Wow. And some posters thought the written description invoked innuendo?
Giant Snake-Shaped Generators on a plane.
"Without curiosity and knowledge, the mind is a vast void. Without the mind, curiosity and knowledge are nonexistent."
Excuse my ignorance if there's something I'm missing, here, but both the summary and TFA mention that 1MW is enough to power roughly 2,000 households.
How is this possible? Last time I checked, 1,000,000/2,000 amounts to an average of 500W per household... which is less than the average power consumption of a microwave oven.
Of course I didn't RTFA.
You seriously put the population density of the SF Bay Area forward as demonstration the world is overpopulated? People CHOOSE to live there. It doesn't mean there's not plenty of space left in the world where you could have a pleasant life and plenty of land for a low cost. I choose to live in London, and as a result live in a tiny house compared to what I could afford somewhere rural, but I don't go around and delude myself into thinking that London is an accurate representation of whether or not the world is overcrowded. But then again I'm from Norway, where the population density is about 14 people per square kilometer and the total population is about half that of London.
I propose that any story about half-baked, pie-in-the-sky methods to generate power that will have disastrous unintended consequences be tagged "anacondas"
"Set up a government, and work to rebuild the country. It's worked every time we've tried it: Philippines, Japan, Germany, Iraq. Yes, Iraq."
Iran, Vietnam, Cuba, Columbia, Guatemala, . . .
Hey, I have any idea; instead of being a troll who attacks people who have a differing view point, how about you engage in a real discussion. "You stubbornly cling to your imaged notions...", that is what is known as an appeal to ridicule, there is no real argument here. As is, "Frankly, you're the who doesn't care about Earth's disadvantages humans"; you have no evidence for this statement from the discussion above and it only adds to discredit you more. I'm not taking a side in the debate as I am not educated in the particulars but you seem ready to completely dismiss the GP without addressing his/her position in any sort of substantive form.
Well, if the only way to save the world is for all of us to become Texan Vegetarians, I think I'd rather let the world devolve to Buy N Large and let WALL-E clean it up...
I've said it before and I'll say it again; why pick one?
Not to undercut the serious issues of good stewardship of the environment, but
there is a huge capitalist component underlying all of the alternative energy crap in circulation today.
While I'm overjoyed that the current geo-political situation has finally made it cost-effective to think beyond hydrocarbons,
I'm saddened by the credulity of some, who can't see the business models behind all the green propaganda.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
While fusion is great, it shouldn't be our only goal. This is still a non-renewable fuel. Hydrogen is an important ingredient to life, use up all the hydrogen and everything will die.
Also, fission produces some terrible byproducts with effectively infinite lifetimes. One really bad accident could destroy the entire planet. One failed rocket exploding in the atmosphere and we all die. So blasting the waste into the Sun isn't the miraculous cure-all supporters claim. Reprocessing has proven to be not "cost-effective". Hence we have these processing plants that haver been turned into storage facilities. Except, the waste has to be constantly stirred or it will explode. Unfortunately the stirring blades need to be replaced every 6 months or so due to the extremely caustic nature of the waste and the facilities have a projected lifetime of 300 years. What are we going to do with tons of waste in 250 years that have half-lifes in the millions of years?
So in conclusion nuclear isn't as great as it appears, in either form. Truly renewable energy is the only correct and really long-term solution. Leaving fission and fusion as good for limited uses such as interstellar travel, or in combination with realistic plans to obtain alternate sources of fuel and properly de-activate the waste. Neither of which is likely to ever be commercially viable.
Oh I dont know, I seem to find the US population extremely dense, I mean they voted for Bush.....
Twice...
This story has no department. Did they have to lay that staff off?
Your model lacks infrastructure and beauty.
Your statistics assume an optimal result from the farming in question, which is not likely, and a minimal diet. Even more, I question your figures: my own suggest that we would need twice that amount of land, especially given necessary crop rotation.
New York City does not manufacture its own products, its own medicines, its own computers, its own pet food, and many other things it will need.
Even more, through your "better distribution of resources," you could create a clonelike world of apartments that would drive every smart person to suicide and cause a total lack of forward momentum, as it did in Soviet Russia.
I think many people are drawn to "clean" solutions that seem numerically sound, but leave out the entire chain of events required to bring about a result. Your solution is like purchasing products at Wal-mart: "this says it can do it, so it should have a 100% successful optimal result."
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
You are aware that we (the US) supported Papa Doc Duvalier, right? We gave him the power he needed to ruin Haiti for generations.
We (the US) supported Hussein in Iraq until it was no longer convenient.
Those are perhaps the most notorious examples where we "put people in power" who were ruthless to their people, but there are others.
I agree, we have more than enough resources to take care of the population of the world, but you don't really believe anything will change if you go around shooting people do you? All that will do is put other people in power who different in name only. Their actions will continue until something much bigger causes us to stop our pettiness.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
The movie plot remark reminded me of a comment by a scientists on TV the other day, he said something like: This report reads like a horror story. For the non-Aussies, the Murry Darling Basin is Australia's bread basket, it covers a large portion of the SE quarter of the continent and according to the most respected scientific body in Australia, it is dying. We are the world's fourth largest exporter of grain but since 1998 there has been only one bumper crop, most years have been down by 40-60%.
The main problem is that the water has been over-used and mismanaged but the region is also becoming drier and they have found that a 10% drop in rainfall converts to a 30% drop in run-off (ie: 30% less water in the system). We have had some periods of good rain but mainly it has been either in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or all at once (as in record breaking floods), many places have now been in severe drought for over a decade. Looking at the news about California it seems to be having similar problems with "fire and water" but that's just the impression I get from news reports. Water rationing is the norm now in Australia's major cities.
Not that I agree with the GP's musings but all wars are resource wars.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Twice.
it is called a breeder reactor. not some huge investment compared to what it will produce and compared to a standard fission reactor.
Now take the fresh water outflow of the Columbia river - the river separating Washington from Oregon. You've got 27 gallons of fresh water per person per day.
27 gallons? that is way, way off.
An estimate for water usage in the U.S. is 408 billion gallons per day. http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/index.html. That's over 1000 gallons per person. Yes, we use too much, and waste a lot of it. But, there is a limit to how much less we can use; in particular, look at the usage for generating energy, which you propose to generate using nuclear power, which requires a lot of water.
Further, water is unevenly distributed, and does not travel in the direction you want it to easily. Already, much of the world does not have access to save drinking water, and it's going to get worse. We're depleting the ground water, and sucking the rivers dry as it is.
Yes, relative to water supplies, we have overpopulation. Spouting crap about poor distribution of people isn't going to solve it; people don't move easily and the water isn't there and doesn't move easily. Free and expanded trade won't work either.
The solution is to level off the population and then slowly reduce it. It has happened in other countries (including poor ones) and, with a little bit of effort, education (esp. of women), and contraceptive rights, can happen pretty much everywhere. And, no, it doesn't requires a China-like draconian imposition of one child policy.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
We could use these devices to replace or augment breakwaters around artificial harbors... since they will have a negative on tidal effects on the shorelines, why not minimize the additional impact by putting them where we are already doing so.
The only problem I see with it is whether they will break storms effectively enough... so possibly there would need to be a combination of earthworks and generators. Maybe some configuration that makes the generators more efficient by directing additional wave energy to them... so a series of Vs (with the tips pointing out to sea) constructed of earthworks and the generators in between at the apex of each created channel.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
launch all waste into the sun
I'm fine with that as long as the launch pad is located in Antartica. Or maybe France.
How do they plan to solve the problem of material degradation in the ever present salt water?
As far as I know, this will be the first application of generators in salt water. Will the generators have to be cleaned 2-3 times a year? Anyone who owns a boat in the ocean knows how much of a pain salt water makes maintenance.
I just don't see this competing with other forms of renewable energy on a cost basis.
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OK, so distribution is a resource. Seems that resource is ALSO fixed, since we can transport tons of food and supplies, and billions of dollars around the world in a matter of hours.
The distribution networks exist. The resources exist. The issue is that you don't understand that some people just do NOT want their country to improve. They like the shit hole, for while it is a shit hole, it is THEIR shit hole and they run it.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I thought the same thing, but then again that only counts while we are using fission.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
It's not a science when compared to the hard sciences, no. :) What he meant, though, is that the feeding-everyone issue isn't a technological problem; we can already produce enough food to give everyone on the planet 2000 kcal/day. The problem isn't even one of the technology of distribution; we have the technology and resources to do so. The problem is a political one: convincing various governments to stop playing warlord and preventing food from getting to those who need it. Or, more productively, stopping the various civil wars and kleptocracies so that the various underdeveloped regions can start building infrastructure, etc.
You completely missed his point. :) He's not suggesting that it would be feasible or a good idea to move everyone to Texas; he's just saying that North America by itself can support the entire world's population, resource-wise. (Actually, I think he's underestimating, numerically; it'll take more than he suggests in order to give all 6.6 billion people a good quality of life. 27 gallons of water per day sounds like a lot, except you have to irrigate all the crops, it takes water to run industrial processes like the production of stainless steel, etc. But I digress.)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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The point is that for most of the history of that nation, the rulers could care less if the people get food daily. In fact, they'd prefer them to get food just a couple times of week - easier to keep them under the gun. The poor will provide the reason to "shame" the Western nations into giving more money and aid, which the rulers (really the governors - they hold most of the power in Haiti) use to better their own lives.
If the government of Haiti actually cared for its people, you'd see aid not only reaching them, but the government welcoming companies and infrastructure and resources coming in to build up their economy. Offering jobs, housing, education.
But they don't. That's the last thing the ruling class wants. So they refuse to allow any economic development because that would mean a change to their own iron-fist control.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I don't know about the rest of you, but 27 gal of water/day is only about 900 gal/month. Check your water bill. I doubt yours is that low. What do you do if you have a water leak? A friend of mine lives in an rental duplex and was using 15K gallons per month. The landlord never fixed the leak, he did. So by your math, he would have consumed 15 people's water for the 2 months. Wanna take a bath this month, better factor in that 4 days worth of water your going to use for one bath.
As another example, consider Israel & Gaza. In 1999, Gaza citizens were alotted 10 gal/day. Not much. Israel on the other hand was using a 100/day. Both were urban statistics. Would you rather live like an Israeli or a Gazan? Personally, I would prefer to limit the number of people on the planet. I just don't see the point of stacking people up and giving them enough water and food to survive and nothing else. Wasn't that what basically what the matrix was about? Stick people in a pod and put them in a dream state.
Secondly, the poster assumes that the weather will be perfect for his crop production. Consider the latest bad midwestern weather. I think it took out 30% of the corn crop for the US this year. You simply cannot assume best case for such important things as food & energy. One bad hurricane shutters the gulf oil production for a week. A drought here, a hurricane there, earthquakes, tsunami's, etc. Energy and food require excess capacity.
Finally to free trade. The poster is naive to believe free trade will solve the world's problems. It is currently weakening the US and may well cause our collapse. Free trade assumes both parties are free in the free trade. S Korea recently banned US beef. Be real, it was protectionist. Maybe we could ban Kia's and Hyandai's. China controls the exchange rate and thereby encourages exports at the expense of its own people being able to afford imports. Maybe we should ban chinese goods.
This is actually the most interesting post I have read on slashdot in many years. I _will_ go do the research and the numbers!
So what's this thing made out of? Unobtanium and pixie dust?
I'm sure that no strip mining or abrasive toxic chemicals would be used at all to make these things, because they harm the environment, and Roland Piquepallappepepqpqqqpepepelle says that these won't!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Not sure if anyone has heard about this, but there is now algae and other bio-engineered bugs that are producing crude oil. Not just biodiesel, but crude oil that can be converted into gasoline. It is also carbon-neutral, because the bugs take in CO2 from the atmosphere.
I find it rather jaw-dropping myself, because it seems like it has huge potential to change the playing field of this energy problem.
Anyway, here is the article...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece
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I see. So it's better that we just wring our hands and let our mess fester? I mean, I know that's the European way, but it has such a history of not working out - see the start of all the Middle East crap back in 1922 with its formation, thanks to the Euro. I mean, if you're going to blame Saddam strictly on the US, then we should be realistic and blame the entire Middle East problem on the European nations who created the nightmare with their arbitrary and capricious national boundaries.
Where di the above poster say that the war was about oil?
Right here: Then he stopped towing the US party line and decided he'd trade oil with those pesky Europeans instead of the USA. Next thing you know, Iraqs been invaded.
Essentially saying that because Saddam stopped selling oil to the US, we went to war. And the facts just don't support that since Iraq was a minor supplier to us, we were a minor client of theirs.
Look at those getting handed contracts for things like energy infrastructure in Iraq.
Yes, let's look at them. We see countries from around the world receiving contracts. Unless Vietnam, Thailand, and Angola are US companies? Royal Dutch Shell? British Petroleum? UAE's DOME Corporation?
Guess what - drilling, transporting, and refining oil is a difficult, capital intensive business. Not many companies have a few dozen drill rigs laying around (at the cost of $20 million a rig). So it's no surprise that the biggest, best equipped and most experienced suppliers got the lion's share of the contracts.
Do you go with the brand-new start-up ISP for your mission critical installs or do you go with a well-established colo company?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The Portuguese island of Azores in the middle of the Atlantic has been using it for some years: A site describing similar technology can be found here: http://www.novaenergia.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2230 http://www.pelamiswave.com/ Other technology under experiment also in the Azores island: http://www.ceeeta.pt/RIERA/ondas_mares.htm http://www.youngreporters.org/article-imprim.php3?id_article=1596
Even if you ignore that, nothing happens in a vacuum. If we're harnessing the kinetic energy of waves to generate electricity, we're stealing wave force. While that may not have obvious repercussions like, say, strip mining, who knows what environmental effects that could have?
Wind power is the same way, but it's hard to say how much (if any) impact this leeching has. But it's naive to assume there's no impact at all.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
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You're a fool if you think we aren't overpopulated. I consider my home, the SF bay area, overpopulated. Do you have any idea what home prices are like here? As a result, many of the people who grow up here, live here, and work here will never own a home; do you want to guess at the personal economic implications of renting for a lifetime in said housing market? I think you need to review your position on political science.
Wow. Just, wow. So because you CHOOSE to live in the highest density city in California, that means the WORLD is overpopulated?
Here's a solution for you: move to Hayfork, California. You can get 1200 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 1.75 baths, and 1.77 acres for $96,000. And less than 14,000 people in the county. A population density under 5 people per square mile.
Have you ever been to the Eastern side of your State? Traveled through northern Nevada? Across Wyoming? You'll find we're not over-populated. There are literally miles and miles of miles and miles.
You CHOOSE to live in a densely populated region. If you wanted, you could live just 5 hours north by car, in Hayfork, and have all the space you need.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Sorry, guys, but I've already killed the electricity-generating aquatic snake.
{citation needed}
Nuclear waste blather? Launch it all at the sun??
Yes, let's take all these tons and tons of radioactive material, pack it on top of some of the most efficient chemical explosives known to mankind, and elevate it into the atmosphere's global air currents. Paging the what-could-possibly-go-wrong department....
Okay, even disregarding this point, you and most people in this thread seem to be operating under a very common misconception about what "nuclear waste" is and the nuclear power industry as a whole. Most people will think of spent nuclear fuel as nuclear waste, when in fact there are many more kinds. The most often overlooked, and by far the largest source of volume in nuclear waste, is so-called "low-level waste," and is a very important window of insight into what actually goes on in a nuclear plant in reality.
From wikipedia: "Low-level waste (LLW) is a term used to describe nuclear waste that does not fit into the categorical definitions for high-level waste (HLW), spent nuclear fuel (SNF), transuranic waste (TRU), or certain byproduct materials known as 11e(2) wastes, such as uranium mill tailings."
To put this into plain English, this usually consists of everything that has been exposed to radiation in the course of a nuclear plant's facilities. "Nuclear waste" isn't just spent fuel rods. It's hammers, it's protective suit coverings, it's old pipes that have had to be replaced. There is a --huge-- volume of things that get contaminated by radiation in a plant. More information than you could ever use on this subject is found here Just to launch the low level nuclear waste alone in the state of Ohio alone (generated by only two nuclear reactors mind you) in the year of 1987 alone would require launching a satellite holding 50,000 cubic feet of material into space.
The simple fact is that in a nuclear power plant, radiation is --everywhere-- and it, to some degree or another, infects --everything--.
On an anecdotal note, of my family's grandfathers worked in the Pilgrim Power plant in Massachusetts for decades. He doesn't talk about his time at the nuclear plant much, even though it comprises pretty much all if his adult life. As more and more of his friends started dying of cancer, he just stopped mentioning it at all. While this is melodramatic, it's true: it reminds me in an uncanny fashion of how several other family members do not talk about their time in Vietnam.
The few things he did say gave me an insight into the nuclear industry that is very different from anything that shows up in G.W.'s nuclear power proposals.
He told me about how whenever he was working, he had to wear what he called a "dosometer." It was shaped like a security badge, and it changed color as it was continuously exposed to radiation, which was always present in some level at the plant. After a certain threshhold of accumulated radiation deemed "dangerous" was reached, the employee was supposed to stop working. Sometimes due to fiscal and work pressures, they just got a new tag. I'm sure safety procedures might be somewhat better nowadays, but humans are humans, and corners will always be cut on some level, by both management and by the employees, especially as economic times get harder.
While he has lived to a ripe old age, literally every one of his friends from the plant died a horrible death due to every type of cancer imaginable. "Incidents" like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl grab the headlines, but the nuclear industry kills each and every day in a way that is incredibly hard to quantify.
So, please. This "magic uranium" stuff is wishful thinking at best. If nuclear power truly is the only solution until humanity hypothetically masters fusion, that is a truly depressing option.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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But the fundamental point remains; we don't have a lack of resources to support the current world's population (or even twice that number); we have a problem of distribution of those resources.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"The best solution is a combined solution in a small footprint."
No, it really isn't. Nuclear is 10 times cheaper and significantly more reliable than solar power. It is also cheaper and much more reliable than wind. We have plentiful uranium, and we have even more if we use breeder reactors (especially it we can use thorium).
Why should we expend more resources than we have to to build our energy infrastructure? Why pay more for a less reliable option. While you think of an answer to that, keep in mind that the more resources you spend, the more you tax the environment. That means that nuclear is also less of an environemtnal concern.
Many of these renewable forms of energy - wind, waves, biofuel - are ultimately solar energy. Even oil, coal, and natural gas are really eons of stored solar energy. It is the Sun that causes the wind to blow, the plants to grow, and the waves to roll (although the moon helps out here, too). Whenever energy is transferred to another medium (sun -> wind, for example), some portion of that energy is lost. Our energy sources boil down to these three: Solar (in all of its forms), Geothermal, and Nuclear
Hey, nice pivot there. Whereas the GP points out that the actual number of reactors required would be almost 11,000, you run with the "all the new reactors are the size of the world's largest" figure (which is actually seven reactor plants at one site), and then round THAT number down by more than 10% to get your "about a thousand" figure. I wish I could do nuclear math when working out my expenses!
We're not over-populated...
you're talking about rationalizing living spaces and production in order to squeeze more out of the system. oh super, let's turn the whole fucking planet into Walmart World. yeah, that'll be great
watch Soylent Green, let it soak in. when you 'optimize' everything the planet falls apart. it's already burning and you want to turn up the thermostat
nah, you might be able to prove how we can all exist Matrix-like by feeding the dead directly back into the system - i'll pass thanks. i'd rather live in a world worth living in - god help the next few generations
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
"Named after the snake of the same name"
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
What happened to the idea that you can't get free power? When we use devices like these or solar panels to capture light, wind turbines to capture wind, etc, we are converting that energy into electricity for us to use, but at what cost? What will the reduced light, wind, waves do to the earth.
Anyone have any online resources for information regarding this train of thought?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Consider that the US is the most open economy in the world. And that the poor in the US are much better off than the middle class or rich in most of the world. And yes, I have been to most of the world (well, 94 countries so far).
Then instead of spending time in the Third World, to help reinforce your (presumably libertarian) biases, you should try spending some time in countries that are similar to the US. If I had to pick somewhere in the world to be "poor", then there would be a lot of countries on the list before the US - like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most of Western Europe.
And the free market inherently rewards those who grow it the most - the gain the most.
Which explains why, say, a CEO (who is essentially irrelevant in the day-to-day operations of a company) earns tens (if not hundreds) as times as much as the average employee (who is critical to the daily functioning of a company) ?
In actual reality, there's little difference between the boy's club of high-level executives and "elites", and the Monarchies and other "Nobles" of the olden days.
A lot of the energy we've trapped in our "atmosphere" is trapped in the seas that are closely linked with the air. Huge undersea currents, vast rivers of water dwarfing anything possible on our relatively dry continents, have been driven into ever more twisty paths, coiling around in a higher energy, chaotic state. But since it's all a long chain of energetic cycles, that energy eventually rises up into the air again. The El Nino / La Nina effects are one place where water pushes energy back into the air, or takes it out, depending on the phase of the cycle. And since a given volume of water contains so much more heat than the same volume of air, and even the same amount of energy can push around a much larger volume of air than the more massive water, those energized currents can (and will) push around the more turbulent winds (that then in turn force larger storm surges, which can also pump up the currents).
So harvesting energy from these currents could do more than just give us energy that replaces burning petrofuels like oil (which slows the Greenhouse Effect that's pushing more energy into these systems). They could also dampen the increased currents that store damaging excess energy.
These cycles are all linked together. Anywhere we can have an effect, we often have at least double the effect, considered throughout the downstream cycle. These current dampers could do quite a lot of good, perhaps more than meets the eye.
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make install -not war
Money is merely a way of accounting for wealth. Anyone can create wealth without others interaction - you could grow vegetables, or make electricity with a solar panel.
On top of all the other problems with nukes (like dirty extraction that's dependent on an even tinier resource that's in even more unstable countries than oil is), we are now likely facing the rapid exhaustion of elements like indium and hafnium that are necessary for reactor control rods.
Nukes are a hugely top-heavy tech. That produce a huge problem in their waste, as well as extremely difficult security problems.
Geothermal is vastly more energy than even all the nukes we could produce. Other renewables can also vastly oversupply demand. If we'd subsidized any of them the way we've subsidized nukes for the past half-century and more, we'd already be well out of danger.
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make install -not war
Right now, I suspect that our population is unsustainably large due to the fact that we still have plentiful supplies of non-renewable sources (e.g., oil and uranium). So, our energy consumption = (1) usuable energy from non-renewable sources + (2) usuable energy from renewable sources. After #1 is depleted by roughly 2100 (?), a global world war for resources will dwarf the calamity of World War II.
Sigh, do I have to do everything for this pitiful planet?
Peak solar power: 1.334kW/m^2
US Power demands: currently 50% total peak efficiency because the system can supply direct water heating and room heating in the winter
So let's play with these numbers.
500GW / 1.334kW/m^2 == 374,812,593m^2 == 374.8km^2
At 25% pure efficiency (silicon photovoltaic), 1,499km^2.
At 50% pure efficiency (Oxidized MnTeZn photovoltaic), 750km^2.
We have about half peak for half the day, so 25% of these, so 5997km^2 and 2999km^2, respectively.
We'll say geosolar with a theoretical black body into a sterling engine will average about 40%-60%, taking advantage of heating/water heating or not depending on time of year.
Night time efficiency will probably range around 30%, if we use a thermal battery via water stored in a high pressure thermally insulated tank to power the geosolar generator. Approaching that 5997km^2 figure with this.
Obviously, we have more than that available for roof top solar by far. It's a question of economic viability; there's no sustainable business plan in the works for this, aside from what I've got-- and that takes massive start-up capital and new regulations.
Think about it for a while. This isn't a hard problem, but it's inherently a business problem and NOT a technical problem. It took me all of 15 minutes one boring day to do all the math and figure out how to work it out without stupid shit like massive solar collection farms; figuring a business case took me a good 2 hours. A practical business case is harder; I still need to charge you $200/mo, while not really providing much of a useful service. I mean, a 5 year contract might net me $12000, and the installation of solar panels might cost a wee bit more. It won't make you self sufficient. In 20 years it'll net $48000, but then the panels need replacement-- and you probably don't want to pay parts/service charge.
So much business case crap to deal with.
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Illegal due to the fact that it breeds massive amounts of weapons-grade nuclear material we're not allowed to make due to treaties.
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You need to read "Collapse", by Jared Diamond. It's a really awesome book -- in it he analyzes various civilizations that have grown and the collapsed. The core issue in all of the collapses had to do with resources: using up a limited resource, damaging the environment so that it produced less food, &c. When the resources limited the ability of the populations to produce enough food to feed themselves, the societies collapsed into anarchy and cannibalism.
So what would happen if tomorrow we suddenly ran out of oil? Farms wouldn't be able to produce as much food as before w/o tractors; the food they could produce couldn't be transported to cities where most people live; without electricity, it can't be refrigerated, so even the food that was made would have a much lower shelf life. Billions of people, especially in cities, would starve to death (and if Easter Island or Anasazi Indians are any example, billions of people will be eaten by other people starving to death). Civilization would collapse, and along with our industry and research infrastructure, preventing us from developing any new technology to replace oil for probably hundreds of years.
Now, it's true that we have a couple of decades left before this happens, so we have time to look for alternate energy sources. But the fact is that our current global way of life requires a certain amount of "energy" as input to sustain it. What happens if, by the time the oil runs out, we simply cannot find an alternate source, or can't build up the infrastructure to use such an alternate source in time? We need to start looking in earnest now, while we still have plenty of time for false starts, and reducing our consumption now, when conservation will be most effective.
It's true that "the market will adjust" to find a new equilibrium population and political organization that can be sustained with the energy we'll have, but any adjustment that involves going from 6 billion people down to 1.2 billion (the world population in 1850) within a few years is going to involve an immense amount of suffering.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
And don't event start with the "nuclear waste" blather because nuclear power can safely generate enough energy to make chemicals to launch all waste into the sun and have all the energy we'll need left over!
Or we could do something smart and bury it in an area where it'll sink into the mantle. There's spots where anything more than 10 miles down slowly sinks and in about 5 years falls below the crust of the earth; melted nuclear waste is heavy, it sinks. It's no longer a problem at that point.
Expelling high energy matter into space is a bad idea, we lose the thermal energy from this planet that way, and thus local sustainability goes down.
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"Now put 700 nuclear plants in the deserts of Nevada. You have enough power for everyone to live at the energy consumption level of the US."
sorry, but we have a problem here:
let' assume we use very modern reactors of 1500MW, so:
700 * 1500MW = 1.5 TW
now unfortunately the USA alone uses 3.3TW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States), unfortunately that's only for 300million people instead of 6.6billion. so your reactor count is a little bit off - like by a factor of 40!
++ chris
PS: there's quite a few other thinking problems with your approach, like where do you get the water needed to run 28'000 power plants in the deserts of nevada?
"27 gallons? that is way, way off."
Yep. Hell, just the decorative pond in my front yard is currently leaking about 100 gallons a day. (Before anyone gets too upset, I'm fixing it this very evening when I get home from work.)
Watering the plants and garden probably account for another 500 gallons a week.
Hell, 27 gallons/day wouldn't even cover a persons toilet flushing during a bout of the flu.
So because ONE PLANT was sloppily run, you are saying it is "depressing" to use a power source who's fuel will not run out until sometime in our great-great-great-great grandchildren's lifetime.
This is the EXACT problem with our society. Everything has gotten to the point where EVERYONE thinks they should have a say in what EVERYONE else is doing.
If we had been as pessimistic as this 60 years ago, half the country would be speaking German and the other half Japanese.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
I'll admit, as pro-nuclear as I am, I don't know where this 'blast it into space' BS came from.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
I'm sharing anecdotal knowledge regarding the one plant that I know, and clearing up an incredibly pervasive misconception about the waste stream of nuclear plants. I sourced the factual stuff, and labelled the rest as anecdotal.
My impression is that it's a much dirtier industry than its starry-eyed newfound fans want people to believe. There are very good reasons why people abruptly stopped building these things in the first place after the initial boom.
If you have countervailing evidence/experience, please feel free to share that; I'd love to hear it!
Anyone have any valid criticism that can't be boiled down to "I disagree, therefore Nazis?"
P.S.--Adding Imperial Japan to your logical fallacy doesn't make it any less fallacious. ^.^
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Very well put. How will we manage when population growth is negative? Eskimo's would commit suicide when they were no longer productive. This may in fact be the only solution unfortunately. It will be interesting if Japan's robot method is going to pay off. If not, the long term golden years may not be so golden...
"This world has enough to meet everyone's need, but not enough to meet one man's greed." - Gandhi
True enough, and the law needs to be fixed. "OMG Nuclear Bomb" is not a valid reason to ignore the most effective solution to the energy problem - especially since current generation breeder designs don't produce weapon-usable output anyway.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
That's right. I choose to work for the means to exist. I guess I could just not make any money and survive on nothing, like in your ideas.
How sustainable would it be for me to travel to and from my residence in the aforementioned areas? Not everyone has the luxury of spending that much on transportation costs. Citing the low home price in "Hayfork" is likewise silly; how am I supposed to afford that house? With all that work you can get in Hayfork?
For how vehemently you can rationalize things, you're surprisingly ignorant. A lot of us are trapped in the places we live - not everyone has your level of socioeconomic sovereignty. How can you not understand this, having been to those 94 countries?
-- arstchnca
--
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always
Especially since tits and blow jobs are great.
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if this could have a butterfly-like effect on ocean currents through the world with potentially disastrous consequences.
[...] Royal Dutch Shell? British Petroleum? [...]
The companies I'm discussing do oil and gas operations, sure, but they do much more. Right now, Dick Cheney's good ol boys at Halliburton, among others, are facing dozens of lawsuits alleging some $24 billion dollars have been misappropriated. Halliburton ESG have been getting their Iraq contract money for years now. The article you link is about "short term" contracts with a handful of foreign oil players, and the "agreement" to allow their business is only ~7 days old. Assuming that the agreement went as planned; the article doesn't say.
Look at those getting handed contracts for things like energy infrastructure in Iraq.
It seems this was a bit much for you to comprehend. Are you so dense that you don't see the disparity between foreign oil companies that will begin operations in Iraq in the future and, say, Halliburton ESG that's been raking in the [BORROWED] government funds? This isn't about barrels of oil. This is about barrels of pork.
Beyond all that, the only reason so many foreign groups have been awarded contracts is because international sanctions crippled the nation's oil and gas infrastructure - modern drilling and extraction technology was outright withheld. Now, the people of that country get to pay those that stunted its infrastructure out of pocket for past unfair competition. For how much you decry "European colonialism," you are blind to the modern manifestation.
-- arstchnca
--
You speak of the benevolent nations giving aid to these "poor" countries. Watch a film called Life and Debt. I know it's easier to blame the "upper class enslavers" but in reality the workings of international economy, specifically the West's heavyhanded wealth-backed irresponsibility, are to blame.
One time there was the notion of the "white man's burden" - at the time this was probably rhetoric, and it certainly is now. But it's sad that we've come to the point where some nations loan "aid" money and other nations enter indentured servitude.
-- arstchnca
--
I think the argument about oil concerns untapped resources, which Iraq has plenty of. This means the US gets power over a resource which is going to quickly become a major method of world control and profit for the US.
And I think the Iraqis would easily have overthrown Saddam if it weren't for them relying on him as a result of the sanctions and their resistance having been weakened from the US' support of Saddam in 1991.
Let me suggest another problem: If it all goes well, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. Heavy elements are hard to come by. Your planet only gets the set of them that it was formed with. Why in the world would we aggregate them and shoot them off into a place where we could never get them back again should the need arise?
Even if every rocket liftoff goes great and all of our "waste" gets shot into space, we'd be depleting a natural resource and shooting ourselves in the foot every time we did it.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
It's still a much larger investment than the incremental costs of solar & wind power, plus still results in hard-to-store radioactive building materials.
I thought that was pretty slick the way I connected all those together.
Anyway...
Accept for the fact that there hasn't been a SINGLE confirmed death in the United States from a CIVILIAN Nuclear Power Reactor, no I guess I'm don't.
I would like to compare that to the 72 people that DIED in Coal Mining Accidents in 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_accident#American_accidents) and the THOUSANDS that were injured in the same year.
Oh, looks like I came up with some facts after all...
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
When someone says that the invasion of Iraq was about oil, they don't mean that it was about securing those specific oil supplies for US use. Rather, the war was about having an excuse to drive up the price of oil, which benefits... all of the oil companies. Who runs the oil companies? Mostly friends of Bush and his cronies. Bush, Cheney, and the others care absolutely not one whit how well the occupation of Iraq goes; the increased instability in the region due to our invasion of Iraq has caused the price of a barrel of oil to increase about five times, which makes them happy.
Even though most of the oil that the U.S. consumes doesn't come from the Middle East, the oil market is global, and the price goes up everywhere when it goes up anywhere.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Okay, so let's get real here. I think since you're so gung ho on nuclear, you should and your family should be the ones who run the next plant . . . and let's see if, in 20 years, you still poke a stick at the anecdotal evidence of someone who right now knows more than you do about the effects on humans of working in a nuclear plant.
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
Well, I have no family at the moment.
I also haven't obtained the suitable training to operate a Nuclear Facility.
You see, IT IS DANGEROUS to allow UNTRAINED individuals to operate a Nuclear Power Plant, precisely the reason all Nuclear Power Plant employees ARE TRAINED!
However, I would be VERY pleased to have a Nuclear Power Plant built on my land, assuming I can come to an accomendation with the utility building it of course.
It would be better than discovering Oil because it would NEVER run out!
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
"Well, I have no family at the moment." And why doesn't this surprise me? Darwinism at its finest . . .
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
.
Well, you can get a house for a LOT less up here in Seattle, where we're leading the nation in high tech job creation. Houses around me (15 minutes north of Seattle) are selling for $320,000, and you get 2100 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, and a quarter of an acre of land.
Or there's the research triangle in Raleigh-Durham, tons of high tech and IT jobs, and a lot more affordable to live.
Houston and Austin are adding people - IT people - like crazy. Lots of jobs, and low cost of living.
There's also contract coding/IT management, remote. I know plenty of people who do that, live in small communities and work for Fortune 50 companies. They make $50-55K per year, but live in small towns where that buys a nice house, a nice car, and plenty of toys. Quality of life is more than just a paycheck.
What you're trapped by is your refusal to accept that you CAN'T have everything you want. That perhaps you can earn a little less - but have much more at the end of the day - by moving to another locale.
You don't have socioeconomic sovreignty because you choose not to exercise it. You are the only thing holding you back in your success, unless you believe there is some black force out there specifically keeping YOU down.
Why do I have it? Because one day I decided to not go out and seek that next full-time job; I decided I was worth more than that, and that I would work for the highest bidder. I became a contractor, a gun for hire. And I take the power I need to get the job done. If I am restricted from taking it, I leave. It's not worth the hassle. But I have yet to find a client unwilling to cede that which is taken.
I make it a point not to take full-time contracts, nor long-term contracts. It gives me the freedom to walk from any job at any time, without worry. I know it, and my clients know it. Economic freedom - not being dependent on any given entity for my paycheck - is the ultimate empowerment.
Yes, I ruffle feathers, but at the end of the day the job gets done, the client is satisfied with the work, and ultimately my "boss" - my report - is happy because I took the initiative and as a result would have taken the blame.
But no, rather that seek to improve your position in life, you prefer to be a victim and rant about overpopulation - when in fact you can go a half-day North to an entire county in your state with fewer than 5 people per square MILE.
Why stick in your job? Are there too many others doing the same thing where you live? If so, move to somewhere where your skills are unique and you command the salary and self-determination you desire. Work for yourself, not for someone else.
What is to stop you from seeking alternative income in the same field you work right NOW, but in a different location? What is the worst that happens? You fail. You have to move back to SF, and get another job like you have now. In other words, you're no worse off than you are right now.
Realistically, you'd probably succeed if you worked at it. No one is holding you back but yourself. How do you know it won't work until you try?
You choose to live with local density; so be it. But don't try to use that as justification that the world in general is overpopulated because the numbers just don't back you up.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Not to nitpick, but currently I'd call it a maximum.
Going nuclear is all well and nice, but being realistic the last thing I'd like to see is a fragile rocket with nuclear material exploding during launch.
It's never slick to Godwin.
There's an important difference between death and disease: When counting deaths, you don't count health issues which are not immediately lethal.
Without giving hard facts and numbers, uranium mining is not the nicest thing, too. Additionally, purifying uranium costs lots of energy.
It's cute to watch you keep scrambling to rationalizing ;)
I said: You stubbornly cling to your imagined notions that the disadvantaged of the world are being ignored under the banner of "there just aren't enough resources for everyone."
And because you can't understand the argument at hand, my post is an insubstantial troll? The person I wrote that in reply to was ceaselessly asserting that there are "enough" resources "for everyone." But no one is contesting that. No one believes that poor people are poor because we don't have the land to grow food or the resources for energy or materials with which to build.
However, the person I was replying to does appear to believe that certain parts of the world, such as Haiti or Zimbabwe, are as they unfortunately are because of the iron-grip of "thugocracies." I don't think I could make an argument that violent paramilitary groups are good for a nation even if I tried. But in reality, the existence of said groups is symptomatic of a state with serious economic trouble. Regardless of what I write, it seems, he or she cannot let go of the "thugocracy" hypothesis; I refer you to this post. I could link others, but it's funny, they all kind of read the same.
The replied-to's comments assert, for one, that the nation of Haiti exists in economic peril because "some places," such as "Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, and Haiti," "don't want or care for free trade." To name a few, countries like Jamaica and Haiti are basically in indentured servitude after the likes of the IMF's structural "adjustments." Free trade rapes and leaves for dead.
It irks me just a little bit that you accuse me essentially of 'lacking evidence' while all the evidence in the world won't persuade this fool. Also, that post might seem dismissive to you, but you haven't exhausted yourself trying to educate him or her.
-- arstchnca
--
how can you **assume** (and thats wat it is, an assumption) that people are at least as wealthy as you, if not more??? maybe youre one of those people that "avoids" people "below" you. in any case, feel blessed you aren't working 2 "part time" jobs. more like all the time jobs
snobbish ass.
but if you are digging holes that deep (in the 99.999999999% of the areas that need power but aren't near the hot springs) you might as well just dig up more hydrocarbon, and get more bang for your buck
as for nukes, if you use breeder reactors, the thorium and uranium in the world will last everyone centuries. furthermore, breeder reactors use 10x the amount of energy in fuel the reactors from the 60s (that you are basing your opinion on) use, they produce 10x less waste, and the waste lasts a century or two, rather than 10,000 years
and german tech like pebble bed reactors, just don't have accidents. you can walk away from them, they require no active safety effort. you need to update your opinion of nuclear from the 1960s tech you are basing it on
of course, breeders also produce plutonium, which is why they are shunned. but i think if we spent 100x less of the amount of security outlay we spend in iraq on reactor protection instead, we will still be plenty safe, certainly a lot safer than funding islamic fundamentalist wackjobs, like we do with petrodollars now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and use nuclear to generate the 80% of the other power you need, since boutique renewables just dont scale
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the usa is not a capitalist country, it is a socialist country. ever hear of medicare? welfare?
as is much of the eu, as is all of the most developed nations, including canada, japan
in other words, capitalism DOES need social safety nets. we don't live in a social darwinistic society. if a financially broke guy falls and breaks his arm, you don't look at him dying on the street and walk by. if he can't pay, you have a system of social support (and no, that's not "charity" as frequently cited as the stopgap measure by people who champion pure libertarian selfishness.... contradiction there maybe?)
the real problem is fundamentalism: from the communist or capitalist camps. you need to reward innovation and hard work, and you also need to have social safety nets funded by a central government
mankind is not 100% selfish. mankind is not also 100% altruistic. the real mistake is to think pure capitalism, or pure communism, is the answer
like most problems in life, the answer is complex, and a mixture of both views, and the people who create all the real trouble are the loud, dumb, fundamentalists from the extremes of pure capitalism or pure communismintellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
every person in the sf bayarea chooses to live there? east palo alto.
What does population density have to do with increasing population? How can you use one to guess about the other? I'd say you're pretty confused :)
Doesn't change one word I said.
Nuclear is the safest bet and I would GLADLY have one built in my backyard and feel good about myself for TRULY helping the environment, instead of just talking about it as has become popular with celebrities as late.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
is the amount of infrastructure you need to build to tap these sources. you say wind can answer all of our electricity needs. well, yeah. but who's going to build the billion turbines to do that? and say goodbye to birds, i guess
solar i actually am optimistic about, because the tech can be incorporated into housing construction, and improvements can be made on an individual household basis. as tech improves, everyone's roofs, windows, etc. should all be solar. this really will put a dent in consumption. however, it will take a long time to get to that nirvana, and the technology isn't there yet to get there. then what do you do for people who live in london or seattle (cloudy places)?
meanwhile, nuclear tech is well understood, we just need to build more reactors. and certainly, nuclear has a ton of negatives. its just that all other sources of energy has worse negatives. this includes renewables: for them, the worse negatives than nuclear is how fleeting and difficult they are to tap without massive infrastructure investment. with tech improvements, someday, decades from now, i hope this will change. but not today, its just not there yet
nulcear is NOT a great option. but nuclear is the best option, right now, with existing technology
and we need to figure out fusion. that's the holy grail
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
.
How can you **assume** that I didn't work multiple part-time jobs, worked full time and took a full load through college, and worked my way up? Maybe I just decided that if I wanted better opportunities then I was the one to take advantage of them.
What is stopping you from getting a better education, or relocating to an area where there are more jobs? What is stopping you from spending 10 years accumulating a little each month so you can have a down payment on a house? What is stopping you from learning new skills and technologies so you can expand your career options?
Because I've done the 2 and 3 jobs at a time deal. I've lived in 3 bedrooms with 7 guys. I've done the poor thing - born into poverty, raised in it. But I decided enough was enough, and after seeing that few would even grab the power and success that was available for them, and even fewer would try to stop you... I just did it.
If you're having problems, chances are it's not some invisible force trying to hold you down. It's yourself.
You don't like population density? Here's a clue - DON'T LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO. No jobs available where you live? Here's a clue - MOVE. Finding a lot of your skills being obsoleted? Here's a clue - GO BACK TO SCHOOL.
It's ultimately your responsibility to improve your own situation. No one is "trapped" in a locale or position, any more than you are "forced" to speak Greek.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Nobody voted for Bush. A bunch of confused cattle thought they were voting for Jesus.
doesn't solve the problem
we need more energy, on a personal, city, national, whatever scale you want, than renewables can provide
and as for people fighting nuclear, you are 100% correct. and so we don't build it, and so everyone will suffer with blackouts and sky high energy prices. after enough pain, they'll stop fighting the inevitable and go nuclear. simply because no other energy option out there can satisfy large scale energy efficiently and without hurting the environment needs right now
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"And yes, fusion would be great, but its military applications are probably even more destabilizing than fission is becoming, especially if it uses nonexotic feedstock and the kind of engineering that is available on the global market today. "
there are no military applications. the feedstock is hydrogen. there is no engineering for it today, it's the future
do you even know what the fuck you are talking about?
wind and solar: yeah. lots of infrastructure. LOTS OF IT. VERY EXPENSIVE. MAJOR IMPEDIMENT. HELLOOOOO???
zzz
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
for 10% of our needs
fusion reactors produce at the worst, tritium, which has a half life of about 10 yeas, and its only a beta emitter. NO. MILITARY. APPLICATIONS. MORON
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Dude, I'm not saying that the resources aren't there. I'm saying that the allocation of resources is what politics is all about. Of course it's a political problem. My issue is that you have a very reactionary view of how to solve them, and the examples you gave in your original post were laughable in their naivete (no way we can just all of a sudden decide to give everyone what they need, even if we have it theoretically available- not even communists pretend that).
If we're to shoot the people (or just the leaders) in Zimbabwe, then who decides whom to shoot and where we stop? What happens if a majority earth government decided that you were part of the problem? BTW, I never advocated foreign aid, propping up thugs, humanitarian aid, or other. You set up those straw men- knocking them down only means that you have a well developed internal argument; internal to your head, not this discussion.
I have no idea what it's like on the ground in Haiti, like you said, but if you were handing out DOIs to people in Myanmar (which they probably wiped their bottoms with), then you have little more knowledge of those people than I do the French from looking at the Mona Lisa while in Paris. Listen to the others who've posted in response to you- listen for a change, and you may find the world which you've visited suddenly open up to you. There may be a time to start shooting, but that comes after the time to listen and discuss with those who can be reasoned with. Are you reasonable, or one of the people who "has what they want"?
One last point, just because an internal revolution is costly and uncertain is no reason not to fight it. Where would we be if George Washington had said at Valley Forge that it's just not worth the cost or the risk?
Capitalism - the US, the EU - won. Communism - the USSR and China - lost.
...What did the US win? I'm a US citizen. Show me what I won.
The right to choose your own job, the right to be paid for your work, he right to own a business, the right to accumulate property, ...
Yep, if we lived like factory farmed chickens ... And who's going to be farming the farmland?
I think you missed the point. He wasn't suggesting that actually creating a giant metropolis is a good idea, just that there are quite a bit of unused land (and other resources).
If this clap trap is typical of your contribution to the debate, then I sincerely hope you keep your trap shut in future.
Same to you.
Let's consider the Texas example for half a second: how do you get the resources in and the waste products out with that size of conurbation? Just imagine the sewage outfall! It simply could not work, so it doesn't bear further scrutiny.
He isn't saying a giant metropolis is a good idea, just that there isn't a lack of land to build on yet.
It is unrealistic to imagine that within 140 years we can reduce both energy demands and population growth to more manageable levels.
And in 140 years, he might agree that the world is overpopulated, but not right now.
Citing the low home price in "Hayfork" is likewise silly; how am I supposed to afford that house? With all that work you can get in Hayfork?
Some people manage to live there, somehow. They must be using magic, because "arstchnca" can't understand how they could possible do it using normal means.
A lot of us are trapped in the places we live - not everyone has your level of socioeconomic sovereignty.
So your trapped in an "overpopulated" place, how does that make the other 99.99999% of the world overpopulated?
Who makes the most profits on Big Oil? Take ExxonMobil for example. Of the $142 billion in pre-tax profit they made, $101 billion went to the Government.
Put another way, for every $1.00 that ExxonMobil made in profit, the Government made $2.50.
And who owns ExxonMobil? Less than 1% of ExxonMobil is owned by insiders (managment). Over 99% of ExxonMobil is owned by individual investors, mutual funds, and retirement funds. That $40 billion in profit they made last year? $39.6+ billion belongs to the stockholders. And ExxonMobil pays you a dividend, and you can sell their stock to get your cash back. You probably own ExxonMobil if you're invested in a mutual fund.
I know its oh-so-progressive to attack Big Oil because of their record profits (which come from their record sales volumes); even Congress likes to do it. But the real beneficiary - at least financially - is the Government.
Just remember next time you're filling up, probably $1.00 to $1.25 of each gallon you buy is going to the Government. The oil company selling you the gas is making around 10% - Government is making 25%.
Oh, and instability in the Middle East? We invaded in 2003. By 2006 Iraq had really settled down. But the price of oil has tripled since then, and gas has doubled. As Iraq and instability is decreasing, costs are increasing. I thought the new Democrat Congress was going to lower our gas prices - that's what Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D - CA) promised, and that's what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D - NV) promised.
It's not tension over the Middle East that's causing the increase in oil - it's that worldwide production has not kept up with demand. And fundamentally it is because of our reduced production, here in the US. We now pump only 40% of our own oil.
You do know that we have approximately two TRILLION barrels of oil in the US that is currently locked up by that same Congress. That same Congress, who's leaders promised to lower the price of gas back in 2006, who have presided on a doubling of oil and gas prices, won't let us access the world's largest oil reserves.
Put those reserves in perspective. At a daily consumption rate of 20 million barrels of oil, that is (2 trillion / 20 million) 100,000 days of consumption available. That is 273 YEARS of consumption. The US would have enough oil for nearly the next three centuries - longer than the US has existed as a nation - if Congress would let us access it.
We have literally more oil in the US - available to produce for under $50 per barrel, than the entire Middle East's proven reserves. Oil costs in the US could be cut by 65% - gas would be down under $1.40 per gallon if Congress was serious about fuel and energy costs.
Who's manipulating the market to keep their profits high? Well, the Government seems to get most of the profit, and they're responsible for locking up the biggest deposits in the world. I think the real racketeers and obscene profit takers are plainly obvious. It's the ones asking the questions at those mock trials of the oil execs, not those answering.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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While fusion is great, it shouldn't be our only goal. This is still a non-renewable fuel. Hydrogen is an important ingredient to life, use up all the hydrogen and everything will die.
I'm not sure how the parent got modded insightful, given the stunning misunderstanding of physics on display.
Hydrogen fusion is non-renewable? Don't be daft, there's enough hydrogen in the ~1.3 billion cubic kilometers of Earth's oceans to generate the power output of the frickin' sun for ~750 years, roughly 8.0 x 10^34 joules.
Conveniently enough, that's approximately 1.4 x 10^7 kJ of energy per kg of earthyness, so if you're running out of hydrogen, you're likely to have run into other more substantial air-conditioning problems along the way.
Or, to put it in terms that anyone I'm arguing with is even less likely to understand, a couple orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational potential energy of... the Earth!
If that isn't enough energy for something you have in mind, it's convenient that hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe. Short of an incredible and implausible paradigm shift along the lines of exploiting zero-point energy or direct mass-energy conversion, fusion is where it's at.
For the rest of it, radioactive waste is bad, but entirely manageable, mkay? In general, the longer the half-life, the less danger you're in standing near something radioactive, and the nastiest stuff goes away the fastest, as in years and decades. If our society reaches a point where it is unable to maintain reasonable stewardship of nuclear waste, we've already got much bigger global problems. If you're going to try to scare people, at least do your research first.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Which would display a complete lack of appreciation of how population grows over time.
Which would be mirrored by your lack of appreciation of the difference between "is overpopulated" and "is almost certain to become overpopulated".
"Human overpopulation" does not mean "human saturation point" -- it means "humans placing an unreasonable burden on the environment in which humans must share with the life it depends upon for survival".
Even if we were to agree on that definition, different people's opinion of what an "unreasonable burden" is would vary so much that it's an almost useless one.
I wasn't saying it was a bad idea: I was saying it was a pointless comparison.
At the very least, can you give him credit for attempting to back up his argument with actual data?