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Earth's Period of Habitability Is Nearly Over
xp65 writes "Scientists at this year's XXVIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil agree that we do not yet know how ubiquitous or how fragile life is, but that: 'The Earth's period of habitability is nearly over on a cosmological timescale. In a half to one billion years the Sun will start to be too luminous and warm for water to exist in liquid form on Earth, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect in less than 2 billion years.' Other surprising claims from this conference: that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size."
Just when we were about to figure out free energy!
And to think, we were only 10-20 years away from Cold Fusion....
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
Yeah fuck this shit, I'm out of here!
Depending on who you believe, the Earth will be inhabitable for a billion more years or so, or a couple hundred years.
500 million years give or take a few hundred thousand to develop warp drive capability. Either we'll figure it out or we'll blow ourselves up.. I doubt it'll be the sun that kills off life on this planet.
Just think--an end to war, violence, depravity, poverty, oppression. Everyone will TRULY become equal then. Who knew the sun could be so... so... progressive?
I guess we should party til the last days then since we have so little left
I'd better start with my bucket list.
as this may lead to the devastation of the planet, we must invest in a way to protect ourselves from the sun (and you thought GLOBAL WARMING was bad, this shit here is SOLAR WARMING), so I anxiously await Al Gore's appearance on the scene since there's plenty of government spending and fear mongering to be done here!
At least it's not going to broil us out of our skulls while we are alive...Just gently chargrill us..
So Linux on the desktop will really never happen! Pity.
-- Cheers!
xx
. . . and to summarize TFA - Prof. Man Cuntz says, "Wear lots of sunscreen"
Does that mean mankind needs to start planning for this eventuality now, or do we leave it until the last minute, and pray for Bruce Willis's head-in-a-jar to save the day?
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
we've been 10 years away from cold fusion for the last 50 years :)... same with helium 3 (at a level where we actually get out more than we take in)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
- 65 Million years ago, we were mice.
- We have 500 Million years left (worse case).
Conclusion : your time is _almost_ over.
Brilliant !
Forget about millions of people dying of hunger and disease today,
let's worry about what's gonna happen five hundred _million_ years from now !
First things first !
P.S.: oh, don't let the "greenhouse efect" hint miss you... Global-warmers are up to anything these days...
Well, so much for the real-estate market bouncing back. I mean heck, who wants to buy property that doesn't have sufficient air conditioning?? :)
Bark less. Wag more.
Hmm. Anyone wanting to take bets on humans becoming extinct within the next 50000 years?
... it is too late for Duke Nukem jokes as well.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Keanu Reeves called to say: "Woah."
This is exactly the conclusion of this article of Scientific American, May 2009.
people will have enough incentive to start moving out.
first when it says " the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size"... as opposed to what other life bearing planet/ star... which produced what better life form? ... There could be life somewhere else... but how would it be better? It's like saying life conditions in a particular continent are better than on another continent, so life is more in danger/ is better off there. How do we know the dna mutations occuring (which according to the articles may have influenced life, endangered it)... didnt actually foster the right mutations for life as we know it... we dont have a recipy for life, let alone ideal life.
second when it says that life is doomed in half a billion... to a billion years... if indeed the sun's rays will make the temperature warmer, nothing's to stop us from enhancing the magnetic field or putting sunshades by then. as a matter of fact, with enough money, ressearch, it would not be impossible to put shades in orbit in a rather near future.
I'll go even further and say that supposing we had an orange dwarf which according to the article lasts 10 or 20 times more... we may never be encouraged to leave our solar system... sometimes, knowing we're doomed if we dont do anything about it is actually a motivator to save our necks by working more. So the fact that we are doomed - in a long term - will force us to find other habitable places.
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
So your saying buy tinned foods and shotguns ?
Cruise TT
This part of the article strikes me as odd :
"Planetary magnetic fields (...) also act as a shield against high energy cosmic rays"
_Magnetic fields can only deviate charged particules
_Cosmic Rays are electromagnetic radiation, they have no charge.
Then how can planetary magnetic field serve as shield against cosmic rays ?
There must be a side-effect that would explain it, does anyone care to explain please ?
"that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size."
Homo sapiens may not be the ideal kind of advanced life form either. Otherwise it wouldn't destroy its own habitat on a global scale, nor cause avoidable mass extinction of other species. The good news? We don't really need to start worrying about the sun quitting on us. We'll be long gone before that, and I don't mean on another planet. I mean gone in a dinosaurial kind of way...
If you believe your local religious nutball, it will be sooner than that. 2012 (for those confused in their religiosity, mixing Mayan and Christian myth), 2 years (if you're one of those bozos who believe the Iranian president is the new Mahadi), by the end of this year (if you believe the wingnuts who think Obama is the anti-christ and national healthcare the end of civilization), or several times in the past decade (if you're one to jump into your bunker everytime the Jehovah's Witnesses call the end of the world).
Get your Apacalypse here! Step right up! One to a customer! Step right up!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Just as people from a few thousand years ago couldn't imagine the world we have today, it's just as silly for us to write off a habitable earth. We have small communities living now in far more inhospitable places: Antarctica, ocean bottoms and LEO. Who's to say what technological capabilities we will have in thousands more years? Perhaps a satellite orbiting the Sun that eclipses enough solar radiation to keep temperatures under control. Or nanoparticles added to the atmosphere for the same effect. Or a future propulsion system that can simply change the orbit of the Earth over thousands of years to correct for increased solar emissions. Or a way to affect the nuclear reaction inside the Sun itself. In 500,000 years, that may be child's play.
troll, I'll take your bait. The IPCC doesn't advise paying more taxes, but using our resources better : more insulation, more energy-efficiency ... which leads to : you needing to buy less energy. see for example : http://www.naima.org/pages/about/releases/2001/ase.html
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
In the period life has been around, the Sun became a lot warmer, by 30 percent or so? The average temperatures have remained the same, since life works as a thermostat. So take it with a pinch of salt.
They aren't saying we've "only" got 500,000 years they are saying that we've only got 500,000,000 years. Given that mankind in its present form have only been around for 100-50,000 years and that we've only had civilisations for around 10,000 years then even 500,000 years is a mind bogglingly staggering amount of time.
Sure we could do propulsion systems, space drives, kill ourselves directly, die from a meteor strike or new virus. What these people are saying is that in 500,000,000 years or more that the earth as it currently stands won't be a great place to live. This doesn't mean panic. It doesn't mean say "who are they to say we aren't going to have technology to fix this problem" its a piece of science that helps us understand more about our planet and solar system and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe.
Half a billion years ago was the Cambrian explosion when life really got going on this planet. So the odds on humans existing in our present form is pretty much zero given the amount of evolution that has happened in the previous 500 million years.
Clever technology is one thing, but half a billion years is another. Evolution works wonders on those sorts of timescales.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Wooosh.*
*Not the sound of the atmosphere evaporating.
You go to evolution with the planet you have, not the planet you wish you had.
"that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size."
Reminds me of Lem tales; especially the Ijon Tichy series. In some stories the Earth is considered incapable of producing life by aliens that proceed to explain that life was brought by other aliens. In others they just say that, as the Earth is so different to their own worlds, it is incapable of creating life as they know it, and even when the human protagonist tells he is from Earth the aliens do not change their mind. Sort of a parody of movies and books talking only about "green men" and likewise, and lacking imagination when thinking about other lifeforms
Why can't
They talk about drawrf stars being better because of the lower amount of high energy EM coming off them (as well as they're longer life). But I wonder if they've stopped to consider that perhaps high energies were required to kick start life as we know it. If the early earth had just been an ocean of soup sitting under a benign, dull, low power star radiating mostly in the IR part of the spectrum its possible that chemically nothing very exciting would have ever happened.
Ha... I've just massively increased my life assurance as the dumb insurance company didn't know about this report so haven't upped the premiums at all.
Man in 500,000,000 years time my kids are going to be RICH!
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'd better hurry up and learn how to talk to girls....
has been watching too much Discovery Channel
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
Funny, the Sun being unsuitable for life is one of the ideas behind Passages in the Void, a series of SF short-stories about (among other things) living long-term.
In the long term, living around a star that will eventually gobble up your planet isn't a good idea. Better go make a home in the interstellar (or better, intergalactic) void where chances of stray asteroids or supernovas are much smaller.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
If true, our existence is quite incredible. Life on earth is thought to have taken between 2 and 3 billion years to evolve to the current biosphere extant today. Obviously, that means it took the process of evolution all this time to design creatures as complex as humans, as well as the other sophisticated life on this planet.
More than likely, humans will develop technology that will allow humans (or more likely, human creations) to spread beyond this star to the broader universe beyond. Yet, had evolution been a mere billion years too slow, or had random accidents meant that intelligent life was never evolved, then this would have never happened.
I am now offering a special deal to all slashdot members, send me your credit card number and in just 4,192,391,234.5 payments, you too can be a prime real estate owner in our closest neighbour Alpha Centauri.
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This is something coming up from devil's mind which keep changing every decade...I don't bother with these kind of news as one day everyone have to die.
Yep, me too. So long, and thanks for all the fish ...
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size
Since life evolved to suit the conditions, this statement is silly. The Sun and the Earth are perfect for life as it is found in the Sun/Earth system.
Lets put it this way, by that time, technology has advanced a lot. And we probably have colonized rest of the planet system.
You can put a huge mirror slightly closer to sun than lagrange point (to compensate by gravity the idea of having huge solar sail) Then target that somewhere where extra solar radiation would be useful, outside of earth. Perhaps even, targeting small portion if to its shadow on earth, so that the darkness wouldn't come to its shadow in day light, but simply day being less bright. Anyway There are thousands of different ways of doing that thing. Only thing that could prevent us surviving this would be some other catastrophe for instance a nuclear war, that takes all the options of making such things impossible. By the time its a problem IF modern human civilization is still around then we can pretty much block it, and probably with better method than could be imagine from current technology. With modern technology we COULD make a sun screen should we pool earths resources to that project so that it would be finished within 100 years.
©God
This is the same group that changed the definition of planet to exclude Pluto. A bunch of them seem unhappy with how they went about it so will they fix it?
Leave the doom and gloom predictions for the experts (bums on the sidewalk) and deal with issues that matter, please.
Well when the time comes we can still attempt landing on Europa, right?
What better excuse could there be, for us humans to do WHATEVER it is that we want to do.
Who cares about the whales... They'll be boiled and ready to eat in two billion years anyway.
Use less oil? What? Like the sun isn't going to do that greenhouse thing anyway??? Hummer XXXXXXX9^squared here I come!
Everyone start living your hedonistic bucket list. Quick!
Sheesh.
Someone remind me of this article on my 2 billionth birthday... then I'll be sure to have dug a hole, strapped on my uber thick 'Hancock' shades and living off of kitten jerky and my own urine by then.
There's probably a lot of ways to deal with this technologically.
We'll likely have the ability to gently accelerate earth into an orbit farther from the sun over hundreds of years. We might grab the moon from its orbit and stick it in the L1 Lagrange point and shade ourselves. I read of a group of physicists a couple years ago that believe that by using powerful magnetic fields, they can slip into different dimensions where the laws of physics are different and the speed of light is much faster, and thus enable the building of a warp drive. Eventually, something is going to answer this problem, if we persist, and don't blow each other up first.
Of course, if N. Korea develops the bomb and orbital capability, and manages to explode it abt. 250 miles over the center of the USA, it'll kill 90% of us in less than a year, and the US Air Force and the US Navy will in the meantime turn North Korea into a border-to-border, glass-paved, self-lighting parking lot. Will that trigger further thermonuclear activity, nuclear winter, worldwide radiation sickness, etc? As one of the probable dead, I won't care, but getting to the 500,000,000 year mark where the sun becomes a problem is problematic itself, at best.
Are these the same clowns that made the Pluto demotion fuss?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Screw you guys... I'm going home.
From TFA:
Maybe nobody has visited us because, from interstellar distances, Earth doesn't look like a place that could harbour life?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
n/t
...to evolve into a Class III civillization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
.: Max Romantschuk
Don't let your talent for ignoring facts go to waste. A bright future as a pro-IPCC climatologist must surely await?
Since we have yet to find life elsewhere we still don't know what conditions are needed for it to successfully rise on a planet. It could be argued that the sun is a better star for life as it's habitable zone around it is larger than a K class star and has a better chance at having a planet in it. Likewise the earth could be the right size as a larger planet magnetic field is stronger and doesn't allow enough cosmic rays in to generate mutations in DNA to kick off evolution.
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
...end of the world predicted for umpteenth time.
In other news Flintoff is declared fit for the Ashes.
Quick, Homer. Change it!
Now where did I put my End Of Days Bag?
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be finished by then.
'more taxes' != 'other taxes'
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Nuclear fusion is the energy source of the future. Has been for the past 50 years or so, probably will be for at least as long.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
....I'm going home.
There is no way we'll survive 500 million years the way we are now. I'd give us 500. We still fight needlessly, we still destroy our own environment, we still have people that view science as a waste of time, we still waste natural resources, etc etc.
Even if we do survive, wouldn't this change in luminosity and radiation be gradual? Who's to say life wouldn't adapt? Habitability is only known for the past. We have no idea what life will do in the future. What happens might be great for developing life forms in a half a billion years; never mind technological advancements that we might make to help us along.
-SaNo
Do you think this gives them enough time to get it out???
You can fool some of the people all of the time
We don't need free energy... we'll have enough to boil away the oceans...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I've been laughing my ass off about a friend telling me he bought a house in Italy. Italy! That idiot! In less than half a million years Africa will be all over Italy!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And to think, you just have 10^2 times the length of human civilization to figure out a solution!.
Don't rush, i'll be waiting patiently....
Um...where do you plan to go? If you have found a better place let us know!
in 500,000 years. Never let a good crisis go to waste. He will have solved this problem 300,000 years before we really need to worry about it. Like Paul Atreides, he will assume a giant wormlike body and will flop onto all who oppose them, smashing their puny flesh.
That's one big Gantt Chart. Some people just have to have a schedule for everything. Hopefully the sun is as good at keeping its deadlines as anyone... Wouldn't mind a couple extra billion years of schedule slip...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
We can't predict the weather past 10 days, so predicting it 2 billion years out is totally believable.
That's fucking hilarious!
I'm a student. I write iPhone apps.
NOSHITSHERLOCK!!
Tell me one more time: Why are we worried about global warming?
10^5, actually. The apocalypse is 500 million years in the future, not just 500,000.
that we could actually begin to care about the problems you elucidate, much as we have marginalized other seemingly intractable problems like slavery and basic sanitation. we could then voyage to the stars, with this newfound emphasis on living within our constraints. but to get to that better form of civilization, we have to surmount a lot of ingrained stupidity, not the least of which is yours, where you have
1. already declared the problems insurmountable. really? we can't solve these problems?
2. already declared us of deserving of extinction. really? who are you to make that judgment?
you're part of the problem, just as much a part of the problem as all of the people committing the sins and crimes you detest. because you've declared them the winners. they have not won. of course, in your eyes they have, but only because you are weak and spineless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The universe is less than 10 billion years old - depending of course on your personal preferences in cosmology - so half to one billion years to go in my book is not "nearly over". Also, humanity is only, what, 100k years old? What is 100k years compared to 1G years to go?
A whole other issue is that humanity will prove perfectly capable of exterminating all life on Earth well before the Sun will offer to assist in that.
no, I don't have a sig
Humanity will cease to exist whenever God decides the time is right. God created science and humanity, therefore He can extend its lifespan or choose to terminate. To be honest I'm surprised he let us go on living this long after we did the finger to him ;-)
I find these things annoying. The repetition of this theme is ritual.
Back around 1940 or so, some well-paid and honest-sounding scientists declared "Modern science has found all it will find." Then came the transistor, television, space flight, and so on. And let's not forget the IGY: The International Geophysical Year, 1976 when we all have spandex jackets, one for everyone, and New York to Paris in 20 minutes- more lesiure time for artists everywhere. (Thanks, Don)
It's really two things that bother me about this:
1-Considering man's been around about 100,000 years, doesn't measuring things in BILLIONS of years seem anything but a short time?
2-My day was already complex enough; did I need something more to think about?
See also the "planets might soon collide" story in a similar vein. Again, twofold:
1- Long, LONG time away
2- Unnecessary disturbance
Why must we be Cassandras, always ready to think it's over, and ignore ALL OUR ANCESTORS WILL BE DEAD BY THEN? I mean, considering all the national hoaxes guaranteed to kill us before 1999 (Killer Bees, Acid Rain, Ozone Hole, ManMadeGlobalWarming(TM) and others) what kind of accuracy do they have, anyway?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Just when we were about to figure out free energy!
G(T,p) = U + pV â' TS
A(T,V) = U â' TS
What else is there to figure out?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Nuclear Fission is the energy of right now. Problem is too many DIPSHITS are in the way of plentiful cheap energy.
yes every fucking one of you tree huggers that are against Nuclear power are MOTHER FUCKING DIP SHITS that are causing the world to stick to polluting sources like Coal and Natural Gas.
Fucking assholes ruin my planet because your too stupid to see the answers.
Other surprising claims from this conference: that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size.
Seems to have worked out fine so far.
I'm out of here!
Yes, long before the earthe becomes uninhabitable. I'll likley be gone before you; my life is more than half over. Half a billion years is a damned long time. Humans will be extinct long before that, evolved to become some other species. Only sixty fife million years ago the birds were dinasaurs and we were small mouselike creatures.
By the time the earth is uninhabitable, we will have terraformed Mars and Europa.
I find the speculation that "Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size" ludicrous. Life is here and we've yet to find any sign of it anywhere else. It doesn't have to be "ideal", obviously it's good enough.
By the time this happens we will have reached the other stars. So you can stop worrying about it.
Free Martian Whores!
I could - if needed - get myself a Prius. Would that slow down the sun from getting too warm?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Humans will be extinct long before that, evolved to become some other species.
Why do you say that? Species tend to evolve because the new form offers advantages/adaptions that enable them to better survive in the current environment. In the absence of this pressure there isn't much incentive to evolve. Sharks and crocodiles are two examples that come to mind -- they haven't changed much in the last hundred million years or so. You could go back to the time of the dinosaurs and they would still be recognizable.
What pressure does homo sapiens to evolve, given that our technological abilities largely shield us from the pressures of our environment?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'm with you! Just let me grab my guide and my towel.
World Ends Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit (old journalism joke)
That sounds like something right out of Stuart Slade's http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=118771Salvation War. Hopefully they will get more chapters up soon, and yah-yah will get his ass kicked just like Satan did.
You are assuming that the present state of our knowledge and technical development is so superior that the old norms cease to apply. But that's because the next game-transforming serendipitous discovery hasn't happened, and until it happens you won't know what it will be.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Like why the Vogons would not see any value in our system, thereby planning to demolish it to make way for a new hyperspace bypass,... Oh well, so long, and thanks for all the fish!
Overheard in Warp Lounge 7:
Crap, so we have to wait ANOTHER half billion years for the sun to correct this colossal mistake called "earth".
Let's give them ZPM's and watch them fumble and blow up...
And to think all the Universe exists and for a short ~ 1000 years a life form has existed that has understood, to some extent, his place in the universe. If there is no other life in the Universe, then WTF happened here? And wouldn't that make our planet and our star the IDEAL system...
It really is mind boggling to me, how small we are. How insignificant all of humanities achievements are if they won't last another 50,000 years or half a million. That tomorrow everything, perhaps the only known intelligence in all the universe could be wiped out by a rock from the outer reaches of our solar system, set loose by a passing star millions of years ago, that that rock could destroy the Universe's only self validation and knowledge of its existence.
With only 10 billion left on the clock, maybe you'll learn to take a little time. Stop and smell the roses, while yet we have noses!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
You may be a troll and have hopeless grammar, but nevertheless as a "hippy treehugger" myself, I absolutely agree with you. Being a greenie and being OPPOSED to nuclear energy has always struck me as complete madness.
Save the planet, use clean nuclear energy!
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
There's a Dinosaur Comics for that!
(Today's comic actually, and very very relevant. :)
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
being certain to include all members of the "XXVIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union." Humanity must be saved.
Such predictions of "habitability" by astronomers and astrophysicists, implicitly rely on a strong assumption that the universe, *is* and *must* remain "dead". They completely ignore such concepts as the evolution of intelligence, the development of technology, transitions from pre-KT-I level civilizations to KT-II+ level civilizations and the developments that push up against the limits of physical laws, e.g. Matrioshka Brains, Star-Lifting, etc. which can completely alter the picture of the universe -- e.g. the "Earth" is much more likely to be dismantled before it becomes "uninhabitable", Matrioshka Brains contain the "missing mass", civilization lifetimes are limited the maximum lifetimes of small stars (trillions of years), etc.
Here are some tipping point questions. When will humanity reach the point when the annual mass being launched into space exceeds the mass being absorbed from space (meteorites, space dust, etc.)? How long will it take to dismantle the asteroid belt and construct a Dyson Shell which enables the use of KT-II energy levels (presumably using nanorobotic spacecraft)? If one hasn't looked at questions like these then ones ability to offer an even semi-informed opinion on the "habitability" lifetime of planets is open to significant doubt.
Of course astronmers don't get as much press from pronouncing "Don't worry, be happy" as they do from pronouncing "The sky is falling, the sky is falling".
Milk production at a dairy farm was low so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the farmer received the write-up, and opened it to read on the first line:
"First we assume a spherical cow, in vacuum..."
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
There's no reason to believe we could find life on Earth... we shouldn't bother sending an expeditionary team there at all...
In our case it won't be pressures, but lack of them. If my ex-wife had been norn a hundred years earlier, she would not have survived childbirth, as she only weighed two pounds. My girlfriend's vagina is so tight that there's no way she could give birth naturally, but she's a mother, having given birth by C-section.
We are at the point of self-selecting, and we are evolving to be taller. There is no environmental reason for that. In just six thousand years we have evolved to take pleasure in a cat's purr. Evolution continues.
Free Martian Whores!
Why prolong the inevitable?
All good things must one day end. When that happens, a billion years, give or take, what it all worth, then? You can't run away forever!
Why not snuff it today, then?
Oh, and can I have your collection of first editions, when you've gone?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I beg to differ. Through evolution, my ancestors will have survived and continue to THRIVE off of high-fructose corn syrup foods.
Posting with out proof reading since 2001.
It is inevitable that people will do the destructive things that we do because the properties needed to survive as a small tribe are different than the properties needed to survive as a global megaspecies. The fact that we've done as well as we have is quite commendable. But if you think about it, you'll realize that no species would be 'ideal' to be a megaspecies because none would have evolved AS a megaspecies.
All would have started out as a small number of organisms and grown from there.
But yes - the challenge isn't whether or not the sun burns us up, but whether or not we can face the challenges of our own doing.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The purpose of this whole post was to tell us about your girlfriends vagina, wasn't it?
I read an article about capturing an asteroid into Earth's orbit and using it to slowly adjust the Earth's orbit so that it stays in the habitable zone of the sun.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
we've been 10 years away from cold fusion for the last 50 years :)...
Now how cool would it be if there are 10 billion years left on the clock for the next 50 billion years.
Face your daemons!
The second part of this is interesting because just the other day I was watching a program on the Discovery Channel and they claimed that the Earth was exactly the right size to support life. Their claim was that plate tectonics are an essential ingredient for recycling organic material necessary to sustain life over billions of years. They also claimed that smaller planets do not have sufficient gravity to sustain plate tectonics (e.g. Mars) and that more massive planets have too much gravity (e.g. Neptune).
*In a half to one billion years the Sun will start to be too luminous and warm*
Sticky note to self:
1-Buy sunscreen.
2-Put backup DVD's under worktable's shadow to prevent decay
I hate these last minute warning.
.
My girlfriend's vagina is so tight that there's no way she could give birth naturally
Go ahead, brag away.
>By the time the earth is uninhabitable, we will have terraformed Mars and Europa.
I don't think so somehow. I'd give us all 100 years tops:
* 2030 - Major/Vast global wars over resources
* 2035 - All the infrastructure that we take for granted today will be but a dream.... referred to as the golden years. Mad Max 1.
* 2045 - Mad Max 2 (lets not talk about Mad Max 3) lifestyle. Nomadic, barbaric and feudal fiefdoms circled around the last few remaining energy resources.
* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
* 2200 - I, for one, welcome out xyz overlords...
Its already too late as no effort is being made to find alternative resources... one days we'll just wake up with, "ZMG!!11oneone... no fuel!"
Humanity as a whole is less interesting in scientific endeavour and natural selection is no longer at work as we actively encourage our stupid/lazy/selfish behaviour via socialism and x-factor (pop star type show).
Not sure about you but in half a billion years I plan to be long since dead.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Whoosh!
With the Sun getting too hot, we won't need cold fusion. We will just need to shade the tropics with highly inefficient PV cells.
And the employment situation will be improved with all the post-hurricane repair workers required... Future Earth, you can thank me for this contribution to your survival by building a statue in my honor. It should be made of gilded marble and be large enough to be seen from space. You're welcome.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
My bet is on us blowing ourselves, or us expanding all easy resource, or most probably falling in a dark age/semi industrialized age from which we will never recover (how ? Remember, no access to fossil fuel or many ores means you are limited in the tech you can use especially energy production, and without fossil fuel (coal/oil/methane gas) the jump from wood/charcoal to nuclear or better is next to impossible). After that it is a matter of time before the environment get downright hostile to us and we get wiped out.
As for warp drive and other associated Sci-fi staple, as time and science advanced more and more limit came in, rather than remove them. Newton ? You can reach infinite speed. Einstein ? c is the limit baby. Before newton ? Universe is deterministic. Bohr , heisenberg and co ? Incertitude baby. And I pass over other limits like energy production. The vastly probably scenario is that all intelligent life, is born on planet such as earth, and *DIE* on their home planet, without really going anywhere near any other solar system. The energy requirement and time and distance involved, with the aforementioned limit bare us living being from anything really realistic except our own home turf.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Oh, I don't know, maybe that minor little detail that we aren't capable of photosynthesis, and we are also not able to extract life sustaining nutrients from raw dirt. If nothing else we need to pay attention to other species as food source, and the food chain is a lot more complex than many people think. I, for one, would seriously miss honey if bees were to suddenly disappear.
Nathan's blog
What else is there to figure out?
How to make unicode work on slashdot...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Aren't there some much more nearby potential problems that will face the Sun-Earth system by itself (i.e. without meteors from space, etc.), like the Ice Age? Currently, we have passed the interglacial optimum (which happened three to five thousand years ago) and statistically, we are heading toward a Big Winter (popref GRR Martin - "The Winter is Coming" :) ). Technically, we are currently in an Ice Age.
-- Sig down
Source: PopulationConnection.org
You can something positive about this without feeling guilty or giving up having children of your own:
Source: Wikipedia
That means if most people limit themselves to just 2 children the global population will stabilize if not slightly shrink. You can also help by telling other people these facts so when it comes time to plan their families they can make a decision that will contribute to a better world for their children.
Mars isn't that much further from the sun- I doubt the water situation would be that much better.
It would seem solar power would be the way to go...
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
You mean other than the whole the sun is going to roast us all alive pressure?
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
Turn off the lights please.
Of Code And Men
* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
Mod +5 Ironic
Humans will have to move out, should they want to survive.
I'm sure we'll get right on it...
G(T,p) = U + pV â' TS
A(T,V) = U â' TS
What else is there to figure out?
What the â' sign is.
Of Code And Men
"My girlfriend's vagina is so tight that ..."
Show off.
"There is no environmental reason for that."
Yes there is. Better diet and exercise, and the predisposition for women to want to marry men taller then they are. This is cultural, and possible evolutionary as well.
"In just six thousand years we have evolved to take pleasure in a cat's purr. "
this makes no sense. We might ahve enjoyed it right off, or maybe we got use to it as a society. It can be completly cultural. Not everything we do we evolved specifically for. we didn't evolve to drive cars and play the piano, those are things we learned to do with what we ahve evolved to so far.
"Evolution continues."
guh. Random mutations will happen, as well as developent trends based on environmental factors.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We need to invent that glowy crap on the back of every spaceship on TV and in the movies. The Millenium Falcon had no trouble landing and taking off from a planet without a fuel tank... you just turn on the glowy crap, and bam you're there. The starship Enterprise just makes the glowy crap flash really bright, and they're going faster than light itself! Even the Stargate uses glowy crap technology to bridge planets.
We just need to invent that glowy crap and everything else will fall into place.
Will
because we've been to thousands of life-bearing planetary systems, and we can safely say such a thing
(rolls eyes)
truth be told, life is on earth because we are at the right temperature/ pressure for water's triple point (solid/ gas/ liquid all close by). that makes earth ideal, as that's the most important determining factor, by far (the thermodynamics of a polar compound near its triple point is the anchor on which complex chemistries can be sustained and to eventually evolve)
so if you want to talk about ideal places for life, look for other common polar compounds near their triple point. for example: i'd look for places that bear the possibility for ammonia's triple point. but not say, methane or nirogen (too inert/ not polar)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Apparently it looks a bit like ancient Earth at the moment.
I didn't see him as trollish. Just as a person who is extremely angry at DIPSHITS! I have to say. I am not so far behind him on this one. It is so fucking stupid as to completely dumbfound me.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Can't we all just kick it with Tom Cruise and Xenu?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
'The Earth's period of habitability is nearly over on a cosmological timescale...
Last call.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The development of the human brain is already diverging among the population according to some research*. Some children are developing some area of their brains earlier at about 7 years old, while others are developing the same area later at about 12 years of old.
* Sorry, can't find the references anymore, so take the post as of no value.
>By the time the earth is uninhabitable, we will have terraformed Mars and Europa.
Sooooo, it sounds like you haven't read the memo that came out last week:
All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
You don't have them with you? You sir are not a very Frood Dude.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It's estimated that the Sun will continue fusing hydrogen for another 7 billion years or so. In it's lifetime of 4.6billion years, the sun has only completed about 20 orbits around the Milky Way galaxy, and it only has another 31 orbits it can make before it runs out of fuel.
So the sun does only ~50 rotations in ~10 billion years.
Anyway, we're all still going to be on this intergalactic roller coaster ride for a long, long time.
My girlfriend's vagina is so tight that there's no way she could give birth naturally,
That will all change after she goes through puberty.
take a flight to port au prince and its obvious a lot of places in the world are not up the standards of tokyo or new york city, nevermind the fact that genuine slavery still thrives all over the world, including underground in the west, just as you demonstrate
however, you would be an intellectually dishonest fool if you can't see that on these issues real genuine progress has been made, nevermind the fact the job is still undone. slavery used to be an accepted fact of life from the highest echelons of society to the lowest, globally. not remotely is this true anymore
my reaction to the original poster was this absurdity that our problems are insurmountable. we have tackled problems of the same scale of heaviness and compexity before, like slavery, and we'll do it again
but as soon as you stop believing in progress, or are unable to see progress across the span of history, you yourself are as much as part of the problem as those actively engaging in transgressions against the natural world, or human decency, or whatever your pet peeve. because you have accepted those crimes. no, i don't accept them. neither should you (not speaking to you specifically, but in general to anyone who would stop believing in progress)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Your girlfriend's vagina isn't especially tight, human babies just have freakishly huge heads. The reason for this is not lack of pressure to select against dangerous births, its that the evolutionary cost/benefit equation favoured intelligence over safe childbirth.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Couldn't agree more.
Nuclear fission and ultimately nuclear fusion are clearly the most enviromentally sustainable sources of energy generation for the future.
I think the only problem is that in the past, nuclear power plants haven't exactly operated as role-models of enviromental stewardship. In most western countries though this has massively improved in recent decades.
We ARE going to nuclear power sometime, like it or not. Peak oil and peak coal have already have been reached.
The American people have been pushed from single income families to two income families to make ends meet, to being a paycheck away from financial disaster. There is a lot an American can take, but having to give up electricity isn't one of them.
Nuclear reactors may have NIMBY issues now, but when people realize that they either see cooling towers in the distance from their backyard, or no lights on, any politicians standing in the way of cheap electrical power will be removed from office and replaced by those who are not fear smitten by the nutcases who want to see nothing but the destruction of our civilization.
Solar has finally gotten to a point where a solar cell might actually produce more power over its lifetime than the cost of energy making it. However, solar may take an edge off during daily peak times, but it will come nowhere near to powering a metropolitan area. Same with wind power. The only power source that doesn't take up much real estate, is usable 24 hours a day, and doesn't belch pollutants and greenhouse gases for our children to live with in upcoming generations is nuclear power.
Of course, there is nuclear fusion, but there have been -zero- advances in the field since the 1950s. We have yet to discover a way to make a containment vessel to get a reaction to sustain itself for a period of a couple femtoseconds. Scientists get a tokamak or two funded, but confinement and the ability to get more energy from a reaction they have put in on a sustained, usable basis has not changed since 50 years ago. Maybe a loon or two reports a finding, but it never gets confirmed, much less able to be peer reviewed for an academic journal. At best scientists can zap some stuff in a gold plated capsule with some terawatts of power, go "OMG, Helium", then go apply for another big grant to get another lab with bigger lasers. We are nowhere near having the ability to use fusion as anything but a scientific curiosity.
So, by process of elimination, we have nuclear fission, or we can extinguish our society and the world we hand to our children by wars over fossil fuels.
To start with, we do have to assume we don't occupy an unusual position in the Universe. However, that is just a useful assumption for us to go along with before the evidence starts coming in, as it is now.
Our knowledge of other stars, and of their planets, is coming along in leaps and bounds. Bear in mind, the first exoplanets were only confirmed in the 1990s. Give Kepler a couple of years and we are going to experience another leap in our knowledge.
The point is, we don't have to rest on such assumptions anymore. Why should we assume Earth is not an unusual planet, when there is strong evidence pointing towards a highly unlikely collisions in the early solar system giving rise to the Earth-Moon system as we see it today?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
What pressure does homo sapiens to evolve, given that our technological abilities largely shield us from the pressures of our environment?
RTFA! The earth will get hotter, water will become depleted, and all of a sudden we'll turn into CAMELOIDS or REPTILOIDS or maybe we'll just fly around drinkin' water. For fuck sake, use your imagination!
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
and we still haven't found a method to either safely store it away or make it less hazardous.
Even though it's been said 1e6 times before on /. and I'm sure someone will say it elsewhere, bullshit.
LOL blaming 'socialism'. Hows capitalism doing at developing new energy resources and a sustainable planet, eh? Your grinding of a dated ideological axe isn't going to help anyone.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I would agree with you, but a friend of mine had me at the "And exactly how clean is the mining process"?
Dude:
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
The Age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
The Age of Aquarius
...
Wouldn't that be, "kick it with Tom Cruise OR Xenu"? Xenu being the bad guy in the scientology mythology. I never understood why people keep saying things like this other than they don't actually understand the religion and just think it's cool to mock it. Please, L. Ron is their god, Xenu is their devil. L. Ron you can kick it with because he is currently astrally projecting himself around the cosmos, Xenu is buried under a mountain somewhere and would be difficult to kick it with.
Xaotik Designs
You realize that nuclear power is the opposite of clean energy? It creates highly dangerous/toxic waste that's dangerous for thousands
Please stop spreading this dangerous misinformation. Do you even know how much waste you're talking about? Imagine a cylinder 10mm in diameter. A 5mm slice of that cylinder will supply your energy needs for a year. The rest of the world stores the byproducts safely on site, and there's no reason we can't do the same. Future reactor designs will burn the fuel more completely resulting in less (and safer) remaining waste.
Burning coal (the only practical alternative to nuclear) releases far more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power ever has or will. And don't even get me started on the mercury poisoning of lakes, etc.
Since when is a fuckin' El-Aurian barkeeper qualified to judge a planet's inhabitability? Them loserboys couldn't even defend their own against some pasty-faced Borg and let themselves be shit upon without a fight.
Fuckin' space nerds.
Then what they do? They get trapped into the hippy-space Nexus and managed to turn Captain Kirk, arguably one of the Galaxy's greatest jocks, into a whiny horse-riding loserboy.
Yo, Guinan, back to your synthalcohol drinks. Leave space to the jocks.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
And when were the "many years" that that Jewish tribes dominated Europe?
Reading your post you seem to have some heavy axes to grind and keep trying to put things in that may be trolling. "(reformed) Christian civilisation?" Civil and marine engineering made plenty of progress under pre-reform Catholicism. The ancient Greek city states home of representative Government and Capitalism? Surely not. Athenian democracy was a brief experiment applied only to the prosperous citizens able to afford a hoplite panoply - it was more of an oligarchy.
I would rather go along with the idea that technological progress resulted from evolutionary pressure such as changing climate conditions, and pure luck. It is surely no coincidence that while iron making was known for many years, it did not take off until England, and then Germany, found they had plenty of coal and iron ore. The reason that geology was such a big deal in the early 19th century was the growing understanding of what kind of rock might have coal or iron ore underneath.
I think there is something in what you say, though much of it is an oversimplification of a complex history, but putting in nonsense about Jewish domination of Europe and suggesting that Protestantism was a cause, rather than a result, of technical progress can only weaken your argument.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm in the same mindset as you.
Up here in Canada, the Green Party used to have a wiki for their policy that intended to foster debate. On one of their pages, they decried fission. I posted a comment (not an edit, a comment), asking, basically that if the looming problem is global warming, and the waste products of nuclear fission are manageable, how is replacing coal plants with nuclear plants a bad thing. My comment was deleted.
Kinda stunning.
There are elements of the Green movement that are irrational, all you have to say is "we must/mustn't do X because it's good/bad for the environment", I consider myself a Green, and I find this behaviour abhorrent. While GP paints with too broad a stroke, imo, the colour is just right.
If there were universal persecution of the Christian Faith, then there would be no Christians since they would be too busy persecuting Christians to be Christians themselves.
Arbitrarily close to the cleanliness of mining coal(the other viable power source in North America)?
Yes, that's a good point that has been well known for a long time. I've been hearing that 2.33 children number for pretty much my entire life (though I'm only 31 so I guess that's not saying too much). I'd say we should aim for 2 children, so that population does shrink, instead of 2.33 children . . .
Unfortunately, some religious traditions have various beliefs that make it so that some people, at least, who follow them, think it's sinful or something to either a) use birth control, or they believe there is an active mandate to have large families.
Still, I wish people would wrap their heads around the idea of adoption. If you just wish to have a large family (or feel 'called' to be a parent to a lot of children, or whatever), it's possible to have the large family, without actually giving birth to 6 or 10 children. Just adopt children who need a family. They need parents, you need children, everyone else needs fewer births for a couple generations, so we can get the global population down to something more sustainable (like 3-4 Billion people).
Are they the same species? If they aren't, then the original species has gone extinct. The same is true for humanity. We are Homosapien, once there are no more of us, then the human race as we know it is extinct.
Xaotik Designs
She could be loose as hell, but throwing a hot dog down a hallway can still be fun if the hot dog is the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile.
Xaotik Designs
I am assuming you mean uranium mining. It's about as bad as coal mining, and the area that needs the most improvement. It's basically just a grind and sift method, separating the trace amounts of uranium from the massive amount of rock and sand. A process that should automate pretty well. It will take some doing (initial time money and energy) to get a clean mining operation designed and implemented. With that said if simply presenting a problem is enough to stop you in your tracks then you won't get very far. A problem is simply an opportunity for invention, and invention is what turns the crank of progress.
Please mod parent up...people reading propaganda should at least be able to see the comment of truth!
You may be a troll and have hopeless grammar, but nevertheless as a "hippy treehugger" myself, I absolutely agree with you. Being a greenie and being OPPOSED to nuclear energy has always struck me as complete madness.
Save the planet, use clean nuclear energy!
Hannes Alfvén, Nobel laureate in physics, described the as yet unsolved dilemma of high-level radioactive waste management: "The problem is how to keep radioactive waste in storage until it decays after hundreds of thousands of years. The geologic deposit must be absolutely reliable as the quantities of poison are tremendous. It is very difficult to satisfy these requirements for the simple reason that we have had no practical experience with such a long term project. Moreover permanently guarded storage requires a society with unprecedented stability."
Thus, Alfvén identified two fundamental prerequisites for effective management of high-level radioactive waste: (1) stable geological formations, and (2) stable human institutions over hundreds of thousands of years. As Alfvén suggests, no known human civilization has ever endured for so long, and no geologic formation of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository has yet been discovered that has been stable for so long a period.
Man, nuclear energy is bad.
With the privatization of energy companies, nuclear energy is a disaster waiting to happen.
It's a matter of how the core-values of for-profit organisations manifest themselves in the market, which is essentially to maximize profits.
All companies attempting to maximize profits will reduce costs as much as possible. The only way a company is able to reduce their costs as much as possible when dealing with nuclear waste, is to overstep the line and then adjust their cost-cutting techniques so that it borders on that line.
Government regulation won't work, since governments core values are to maximize their own survival, and this is primarily faciliated by aligning themselves with profit-maximizing legislation for for-profit organizations.
You could argue that they don't have to walk the line, and can avoid mistakes, but considering what a wonderful service I'm getting from British Gas right now, I definitely do not want nuclear energy in their "competent" hands.
yeah, well, according to physicists we only have a couple thousands years anyway:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argumen
Nuclear Fission is the energy of right now. Problem is too many DIPSHITS are in the way of plentiful cheap energy.
With a few small localized exceptions, there have been no laws preventing building nuclear plants. We stopped building nuclear power plants because they weren't cheap. Little to do with the dipshits (ok, some lawsuits); mainly to do with the bean-counters. Coal is just cheaper.
Now, maybe if we institute a carbon tax on fossil fuels and level the playing field, nuclear power might look more attractive. But then your kvetching should be aimed at those opposing said taxes, not greenies.
I'm an environmentalist who is not opposed to nuclear power, though I like some of the CANDU-derived systems better than fuel-rod systems.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
You can not recycle the fuel rods and other components. Also, Uran is as limited as oil.
Nuclear energy is not clean.
You could make the point that you need energy for making solar panels aswell, however that would be an unfair comparison (by amount and material).
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
It will be a short war, what with one side having all the guns, and the other side being too high to remember where the battles are to take place...
Xaotik Designs
So what will be the energy source you will use for moving this asteroid around? There's no free lunch. Moving an object further 'up' the gravity well it is in always requires energy, and moving something as massive as the earth requires a lot of energy. Moving the earth away from the Sun isn't so different to the classic high-school physics problem of calculating the energy required to lift a mass of m kilograms by h millimeters/meters/inches/feet/miles of height. Sure, because of the issue of orbital mechanics, it's more complicated, but in the end, it still requires energy.
For the method you propose, you would need to slowly apply energy to the asteroid to keep moving it away from the earth, pulling the earth away from the Sun. It might not require a lot of Power (that is, energy per second), but it will have to be maintained for a very, very, very long time to have the desired effect.
Whoa whoa whoa, guy.. Mars and Europa? Baby steps - lets make Alabama inhabitable first
astronomical unit!
Bugger life on earth how do we deal with a constantly changing unit of measurement!
Sigh, I find these Nuclear Energy trolls absolutely everywhere.
People argue that this-or-that feature makes planets and suns more stable and hence better suited for life. But life may need cataclysms and in order to arise and advance.
And if humans survive a few hundred million years, this will motivate us to spread out across the galaxy.
ROFL!!!!
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
HA....after reading this story, i feel myself evolving right now in preparation.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Show off.
It's nothing to brag about. Now the size of my penis, on the other hand...
Free Martian Whores!
Do you even know how much waste you're talking about? Imagine a cylinder 10mm in diameter. A 5mm slice of that cylinder will supply your energy needs for a year.
Do *you* even know how much waste *you* are talking about? The US alone has accumulated over 60,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from fission reactors. Your figure of a 5mm by 10mm cylinder per year of waste is ridiculous.
Yes, of course coal releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere. Since we have to store the nuclear waste, *none* of it ends up in the atmosphere.
Now I'm not saying coal is good, or that nuclear isn't necessarily worth it...but if you want to advocate nuclear power, then stop damaging its credibility with arguments like these.
*Not the sound of the atmosphere evaporating.
The atmosphere is already vapor, so it can't evaporate....maybe you meant escaping.
Yeah sure. Heard of Superphenix? There's a different between theory and practice, and we've yet to be able to build a working fast breeder reactor. None of those in the wikipedia article ever worked or were suited for commercial production, and there are reasons for that.
I beg to differ. Through evolution, my ancestors will have survived and continue to THRIVE off of high-fructose corn syrup foods.
Unless there is time travel involved in this theory of yours... I think the word you are looking for is "descendants", instead of "anscestors"!
and we still haven't found a method to either safely store it away or make it less hazardous.
Even though it's been said 1e6 times before on /. and I'm sure someone will say it elsewhere, bullshit.
1e6 = 1
I think your time machine is broken; IIRC that memo wasn't from last week or 2001, it's 2010's memo.
Free Martian Whores!
I don't understand why you seem to think having radioactivity released into the atmosphere is preferable to having it stored safely at a power plant.
As for waste, a large coal power plant (under full load) requires about 10,000 tons of coal per day. This doesn't include the energy needed to transport the coal to the plant (via a big ass train).
And that nuclear "waste" that we've got 60,000 metric tons of? Were it legal to actually build breeder reactors, we could use it to generate more power, and be left with hardly any radioactive waste in the end.
Single currency? Not sure, never heard of that one.
Might that have been sarcasm? Look at how many countries have already dollarized to the U.S. dollar, the euro, or a currency pegged to one of those.
In fact, in less than a billion years we could get to Alpha Centauri by walking a mere 5km/h.
What pressure does homo sapiens to evolve, given that our technological abilities largely shield us from the pressures of our environment?
Our technology itself. Hopefully. If we haven't figured out cybernetic immortality in a half a billion years, I'll be... well, dead, but disappointed.
Can't get much for a house in a solar system where the sun is about to go kaploowee!
If I start hoarding beer now, I should be fine.
I don't think anyone really cares.
err, they sky is boiling?
And the reason they weren't cheaper had little to do with technology and a whole lot to do with legislation. The government made is so difficult and expensive to build a nuclear power plant that the utilities and investors simply gave up.
Ten years ago, at SONGS, the estimate for installing conduit was $1,000 per foot. Not because there was anything special about the conduit being used, but because of the associated documentation, legal, and filing fees.
1e6 != 1^6
1e6 = 1,000,000 = 1 million
Double checked on a scientific calculator.
Were talking about hundreds of millions of years, what makes you think our current civilization will be stable on those time scales? Large scale disasters such as nuclear war or asteroid strikes that may be unlikely in the short term become very likely given enough time. Any kind of disaster or civilization collapse could lead to groups of humans becoming reproductively isolated, leading to speciation events. The idea that we will still be the same species in a hundred million years time seems pretty unlikely to me. Not impossible, but unlikely.
Why would we terraform Europe?
Wouldn't just dropping the dtuff into one of the world's active volcano's work? I mean even if it doesn't melt and sink, who's going to go near it?
--Forest C. Adcock--
Nope.
One faction was just strong enough to wipe out the others.
Also, there are plenty of people willing to claim that other Xians are
too busy doing "something else" to be proper Xians. This can be a lot of
fun to watch if you live in a "mixed" community.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yup. Recognizably human species have been around for, oh, say a million years, real like home sapiens sapiens for 0.1 million years. We should definitely worry about what will happen in 500 or 1000 million years.
As to the other point, I kind of hate to point it out, but the number of places with life that aren't really ideal for life is going to far exceed the number that are ideal. In fact, I think you can say that places actually ideal for life occur with probability 0.
My girlfriend's vagina is so tight that there's no way she could give birth naturally
That can happen when you don't have the girth to stretch it out.
Nuclear energy is not clean.
The main reason nuclear energy hasn't been clean is that the ones we have had up to now have by and large been optimized for one single primary concern: producing weapons-grade fissionable materials. Manufacturing energy has been a welcome by-product of that and the waste an accepted cost.
If we were to instead design nuclear plants optimized for green energy production we could make them almost arbitrarily clean. We would use efficient breeder reactors that burn up almost all their fuel, and we'd sequester any remaining waste for proper disposal rather than spew the radioactive waste into the air for all to enjoy like our coal plants are doing today.
sigs are hazardous to your health
The US has accumulated that much waste because it is illegal in the US to reprocess that waste into more uranium pellets. Other countries with active nuclear programs recycle their waste, drastically reducing the volume and half-life of the net waste output.
The ancient Egyptians likely enjoyed the cat's purr, so it is probably more cultural than anything else. For my own part, a cat's purr makes me want to grab them and throw them against a brick wall. But then, I'm more of a dog person.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
This kind of thing is a good reminder that , if anything is lasting , or worth doing, it would have to be something done for a god , that truely exists, because man, this planet, and all remnants of what we were will be vaporized as the sun expands.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
> the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size.
100% of the available evidence claims that the Sun *IS* the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and the Earth *IS* the ideal size for life.
Netcraft report notwithstanding.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Why should we assume Earth is not an unusual planet, when there is strong evidence pointing towards a highly unlikely collisions in the early solar system giving rise to the Earth-Moon system as we see it today?
There was an article in New Scientist last week iirc about the liklyhood of a giant satellite being necessary for life. If it proves true, Asimov was right again. In one of his last Foundation books, which had no intelligent life but humans, it had Earth's moon being the reason highly developed life here.
Free Martian Whores!
Maybe robot chicken can make another "One sided fist fights" skit.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
What is it about socialized energy generation that makes it safer? After all, the worst nuclear accident in history occurred in the Soviet Union. By contrast, the privately owned (but admittedly, well regulated) Three Mile Island 1 reactor did not release any radiation into the surrounding area and no personnel were injured.
Oh, I see. Because the thirst for power in government isn't as dangerous as the thirst for wealth in the private sector?
OK, so you DON'T think that government is the answer. I don't see any solutions in your post. Here's mine: well-regulated, privately owned nuclear plants. The USA has had these for decades with, as I mentioned, one accident 30 years ago with no injuries or environmental damage.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I find that argument unconvincing personally. If you want a stabilizing influence, then life has a decent chance on certain moons of gas giants.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Get your ass to Mars!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Actually, the reason nuclear power isn't "clean" at the moment is because all the commercial power-producing reactors have been built with the overriding purpose of -not- producing anything like weapon-grade plutonium.
The biggest objection to breeder reactors is that they produce or "breed" fissionable material under normal operating conditions. Ideally in a breeder reactor this material would then be used as fuel to produce more energy and less highly-radioactive waste, but objectors like to note that it could be extracted and used in weapons instead.
Just like being environmentally conscious and opposed to GM crops. Absolute madness. Herbicide-resistant GM crops are fantastic for the local environment - they need much less herbicide use than either conventionally- or organically-grown crops to produce a decent yield, which means more green weeds, more flowers; more bees, butterflies and birds.
I used to work on the UK GM crop split-field trials, where half the field was conventionally-treated conventional crop, and half was herbicide-resistant crop treated with less herbicide (as designed). The GM side was always green, buzzing with insects, and had noticeably more bird-life; the conventional side was bare earth until the crop came through, then stayed much less verdant. The farmers loved the GM crop, as it needed less work (fewer sprayings) and less costly herbicide.
The 'environmental' protesters would always ruin the conventional half of the field. They saw the brown, ugly side and thought 'well that must be the evil GM side'. Of course, once half the split-field trial was trashed, the whole trial was wasted. The experiment didn't provide any useful data, and we in the UK are still spraying our fields with herbicide.
Greenpeace? Wankers.
Evolution has taken off in humanity since civilization began. Larger interacting cross-breeding population enhances the spread and recombination of new genes. It was even on /.
http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/12/11/0428202.shtml
"Go forth and multiply thyself!"
It might be that evolution slows down when there's no incentive to evolve, but it will never stop. Evolution is part adaption, part 'new ideas' which may be either useful or useless.
What's more, there's no reason why humans wouldn't purposely evolve themselves through biological and technological enhancements (augmentation), first to use our current planet better (ability to digest cellulose, breathe underwater, tolerate temperature extremes and the pressure of the deepest oceans which some whales (also mammals) already can, resistance to most or all diseases) and then the easy step to move to Mars, Jupiter's moon Europe and whatever we find in our neighborhood that's livable perhaps with a bit of terraforming, then into pure space. This may take a billion years but I'm sure it'll happen in just a few hundred or a few thousand years. The benefits are just too great not to do this, especially in the long run.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
That only gets you to a deist point of view. Theism is a huge leap from "I don't understand, so a Creator did it" to "I don't understand, but out of thousands of holy books, THIS one is correct."
To be a member of an Abrahamic religion and take their books literally, you have to believe:
1. You can cure leprosy by killing a bird on an alter, and dipping another bird in it's blood. (Judaism)
2. That if a man is mentally disturbed, one way to cure him is to drive the "demons" in him into a flock of pigs who then commit suicide by running off a cliff. (Christianity)
3. That ants can talk and there are evil spirits called djinns all around us at all times. (Islam)
All of these beliefs are frankly stupid. Evidenced by the fact that every religion has been dragged kicking and screaming into the future, because where there is free thought and true free will and the scientific method, religion offers very little.
PS Any responses that don't directly admit to believing in such petty parlor tricks as a literalist are simply white noise.
For any company that I can think of I can drop all of their expenditures into three buckets: labor to produce a product, 2) material to build the product and 3) energy for the production. Given bucket 1 comes from the populous and 2 comes from Earth's resources what happens when energy is so cheap that it is no longer a limiting factor to production?
Have you ever noticed the best
A breeder reactor is a plutonium factory. Really want to sprinkle them all over the planet? The security, safety, and proliferation challenge would be insolvable.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Why, oh why, did I blow my mod points on goatse links?
Red cable positive, black cable ground.
No, the problem is that physics and geopolitics are in the way of plentiful cheap energy.
Perhaps you've noticed that people are threatening to bomb Iran over the development of fission power? Even if fission was a viable power source from an ecological perspective, the security issues would make it unworkable.
But it's not. The problem of nuclear waste remains unsolved. Reprocessing spent fuel in "breeder reactors", the nuke-think's favorite option, is not just a safety and proliferation nightmare, it still doesn't deal with the thorium, radium, radon, and lead isotopes.
Accelerator-based "energy amplifier" systems have some potential, as do fusion. But fission is a lousy solution, that would never have gotten to the point it is no on its own merits. It's pushed by governments (from the U.S. through Iran) that want to camouflage their nuclear weapons ambitions by talking up "Atoms for Peace" and "Electricity too cheap to meter"!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
For my own part, a cat's purr makes me want to grab them and throw them against a brick wall. But then, I'm more of a dog person.
Kind of like Klingons and Tribbles? I used to not like cats, having always had dogs, until I got to know a cat.
Free Martian Whores!
Do *you* know the actual physical volume of "60,000 metric tons" of nuclear waste, offhand?
Plutonium: 19816 kg/m^3 http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Plutonium.htm
Uranium: density = 19.05 grams per cubic centimetre = 19,050 kg/m^3 http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_Weight_of_1_cubic_meter_of_uranium
60000 tons / 19 tons per cubic meter = ~ 3158 cubic meters, or approximately 1 to 3 olympic swimming pools, depending on depth. http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/JeffreyGilbert.shtml
This nuclear waste stuff redefines the meaning of the term "heavy" in heavy waste.
(...) The biggest objection to breeder reactors is that they produce or "breed" fissionable material under normal operating conditions. Ideally in a breeder reactor this material would then be used as fuel to produce more energy and less highly-radioactive waste, but objectors like to note that it could be extracted and used in weapons instead.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Capitalism gave us nuclear reactors, but socialists took them away.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Quitter. I plan to live forever. My plan is going very well so far.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Yessir, the next frontier in human evolution is our own self-guided evolution. Soon (cosmologically speaking) we will have the ability and no qualms what-so-ever about tweaking the genetic makeup of our species. Also, I suspect that our purely biological parts will merely be a framework for something far more grand, something of our own design. We almost have the ability to do this sort of thing now, and in the long term, it'd be an absolute waste not to use such technology to improve our species.
Geobiologist Peter Ward claimed in his book The Medea Hypothesis . that the long term trend in CO2 is declining and there willbe too little for eukaroyote life in a few hundred million years. The early Earth probabaly had double-digit percentage C02 like its neighbors Mars and Venus. That declined to percent or two by the start of multicellular life a half billion years ago. Then It fell currently to three-hundreds of a percent until anthromophic burning looks it will double that. But the long term trend is decline. When CO2 falls below one hundredth of a percent it will be too little for photosynthesis, plant and animal life. The Earth will then revert to the bacteria planet it was for most of its history.
Where does the CO2 go? It dissolves in the ocean and turns into carbonate rock where its pretty well locked up, unless a volcano burns it back into gas. Sea creature skeletons add to this process. 99.98% of Earth's carbon is currently locked in limestone. The rest is in the biosphere and petroleum deposits.
Fair simple global environmental engineering could reverse the process. Just burn limestone to release CO2. Thats how people make lime for cement. But do this on a gloabl scale.
P.S. The Medea Hypothesis is a pun on the Gaia Hypothesis. Porfessor Ward suggests ecology is not stable and friendly to life. But it goes bserk and causes mass extinctions now and then. Read the rest of his book.
A leftie, eh?
I think that's less ironic and more "+5 Ahead of Schedule"
in 500 million years there will still be religious idiots around to tell us "I told you so!"
How about tidal power or river power? I am not saying make more dams. It is more like the wind turbine but under water. Most people will not see the turbines. Pollution is only from the creation of the turbine.
You must be new around... uh, anywhere.
I totally agree. The Greens in the US and Germany have the same sort of myopia. This is very difficult for me, because on most issues, I tend to agree with the Greens more than just about any other political party. But on this one issue, they are so obviously irrational that I understand why many of my friends can't take them seriously. I love the Greens but I just can't defend their anti-nuclear kneejerk position. Maybe when the 60's hippie wing of the party dies out, they'll rethink this.
Show off.
It's nothing to brag about. Now the size of my penis, on the other hand...
I wouldn't be bragging about the size of your penis. Crying maybe.
drastically reducing the volume and half-life of the net waste output.
That's the wrong word...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Who are they to say what the right size earth should be? Life is booming and thriving right now and it's already proven earth is the right size because it has been supporting life for countless years. These comments are the result of an individuals theory, which he or she will never be able to prove. Smells like crack pot science and a reckless slap in the face to already proven intelligent design ( Please watch " Expelled... No intelligence allowed ", by Ben Stein. ) Maybe they should worry about living the next 50 years of their life first... Aye!
you have point , however if you allot that humans live on mars or any other world without earth gravity levels that would fundamentally affect their evolution and until we develop the tech to give us that artificial gravity plating or inertial dampeners then long term space travel would also fundamentally change us as well ... theres also the probablity of caste systems developing within the species for laborers, brains , breeders , it all depends on where the species takes it .. theres those that mod their dna , or those that modify themselves with tech integration ,
Yes, we simply must reverse this policy if this country is ever going to take nuclear seriously. Much nuclear waste is still useful material, but we limit ourselves from reprocessing it to use it more completely. Another reason for inflated "nuclear waste" numbers is because, as I understand it, anything that comes out of secured areas is labeled "nuclear waste" and disposed of. So used radiation suits and other such harmless things are part of the total.
Quick link to back this up, I'm sure there are better sites...
http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/EZRA/
The US has accumulated that much waste because it is illegal in the US to reprocess that waste into more uranium pellets. Other countries with active nuclear programs recycle their waste, drastically reducing the volume and half-life of the net waste output.
Actually it's not. President Reagan rescinded President Carter's Presidential Order to forbid reprocessing.
The reason reprocessing isn't done in the United States is because, quite frankly, it isn't needed. We have plenty of raw uranium for the foreseeable future, an this lauded amount of Nuclear Waste (I'll just assume the parents declaration of 60,000 tons is correct) wouldn't even come close to filling a single football field (where it stacked in a square).
For going on 70 years of Nuclear Operations, a single football field of waste is pretty damn good compared to the tons of fly ash heaps we've got laying around.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Just to expand upon the parent's point: Native Americans most certainly knew of the wheel and applied it where they felt it was useful, however for most tribes it simply wasn't useful. To make it more useful you'd have had to construct decent paths or roads, and the benefits of improved roads would have been of little help save for facilitating wheeled-transport use. It was not that inventing uses for the wheel was beyond them... but that the wheel's continued use requires a level of "buying into" the idea across the entire culture. Frankly, their choice to use canoes and horses was probably optimal for the purposes they wanted to achieve.
What is it about socialized energy generation that makes it safer?
More chance of direct control. In a government, if things start getting too sketchy, you can throw the bums out and get newer bums that are more focused on the issue (no, it doesn't happen often, but it does happen occasionally). Government meetings and plans are much more open than those of private entities (less than they were a few years ago, but still more open).
Because the thirst for power in government isn't as dangerous as the thirst for wealth in the private sector?
No, it's just as dangerous. It's just more likely to be contained when you have a right to vote.
Here's mine: well-regulated, privately owned nuclear plants.
Here's mine: If we must have nuclear plants, either have the government own them or make them (highly) regulated monopolies so that they can't escape government control.
That is all.
I agree that one of the multitude of breeder reactor options (FBR, IFR, etc) seems to be a more effective way to go. I was attempting to point out that modern civilian reactors (light water pressurized reactors) are not the type that are run to produce weapon-grade plutonium or uranium. One of the reasons we have so much "waste" material out of them is due to that consideration, actually. The biggest issue with the waste fuel is that it would need to be reprocessed to be any use at all, either as fuel or for weapons; whereas the output from most breeders can be immediately reinserted into the reactor and "burned" to produce more energy.
* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
Mod +5 Ironic
What are you talking about? Clearly he means that humans will finally give up our monopoly on written language and allow dolphins, bears, rats, and whichever other species want the ability to have it.
It's a excellent development, as long as we keep it within the mammals. Birds are annoying enough without the ability to publish celebrity gossip tabloids.
Whatever technological solution we may have, unless we reduce breeding, nothing will help. There is limited room on this planet. Whoever says "entire world population can be accommodated in state of Texas", let him/her stay for 3 months in slums of Mumbai.
yeah, well... pity, CLEAN nuclear energy isn't available... yet.
Actually, I'm probably the only guy you'll ever hear wishing it was smaller. There's no advantage whatever to having a big dick.
Free Martian Whores!
500.000 years to go? Come on... As a race our fate is going to be sorted in the next 500 years, and I'm giving us a long time... In the next few centuries we will have found a way to make the Alcubierre's Warp Drive theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_Warp_Drive) feasible otherwise it will simply means that we are extinct.
Biggest problem is the corporations that you have to license the GM stuff from.
Patented food? No thank you.
Next arsehole please.
But only up to a limit imposed by the size of the pelvis, which is why we like wide hips^W^Wbig butts (and we cannot lie...)
If technology removes that limitation, we'll still continue to evolve. Perhaps, after 50,000 years of routine Ceasarian sections (or just growing our embryos in vats), our descendants will look like bobble-head dolls.
In 100 million years anything could happen. A superbug that causes DNA to mutate, sharks grow legs, lungs, large brains and a desire for human blood. Just because we have no reason to evolve now doesn't mean it wont happen again down the road. I'm just saying. But you're right, if the path we're on doesn't significantly change, we will have no reason to evolve.
Scientist 1: "They're poking holes in our Anthropogenic Global Warming sca...er, I mean 'theory'...stop laughing, this is serious guys! They're figuring out that we didn't really have any evidence that global warming was mankind's fault! Just like they figured out that the whole 'over-population' and 'New Ice Age' thing was all bupkus! We need a new great big scare, something that will secure the 'scientific' community the nearly unlimited funds we've been enjoying since we convinced the world we were killing each other just by driving our cars!"
Scientist 2: "Well...I've got this interstellar space flight project, but the technology is still a few centuries off from being mature enough to do any real-world tests..."
Scientist 3: "Hey, the sun's been warming the system up by a degree or two, right? People are starting to notice that..."
Scientist 1: "Wait...wait! I got it! We'll release new data that says that the SUN will kill us all after a long time frame! That will GUARANTEE that not only will WE be rolling in cash, but scientists for hundreds of years to come will be filthy rich, too!"
Scientists 2 & 3: "GENIUS!"
*beers are passed all around*
I have no tag line
Some already have pointed out that there's still "environmental" pressure (some of which is home-grown). But there's still more to this evolution thingie: Evolution is not so much a thing of the environment, but rather of how the process works, i. e., genetically.
It's not that sharks and other animals that haven't changed much during the last millions of years experience no environmental pressure--there's enormous pressure on these animals, and that's why every new generation evolves in a way as to be as efficient a shark as it can get ... "without" environmental pressure, sharks would change to be more efficient in some way, that is, start climbing trees and whatnot. But environmental pressure keeps them in their niche.
There's no such thing as "no pressure".
The same with humans. And your definition of "environment" is rather useless for dealing with environmental pressure, anyway. We do (partly) create our own environment. If culture changes too fast to lead to evolutionary change in response, be it so. But if our synthetic environment constantly exerts some specific pressure (through eating crappy, highly processed food, for example), than we'll certainly adapt.
Adaptation, for that matter, doesn't necessarily mean a benefit, it could rather be a loss of features we no longer need (teeth, for example).
Yes, you would likely be crying after he's done stuffing his penis in your cavities...
Clever signature text goes here.
You believe that the people directly responsible for managing gov't-run power plant safety change with elections? My good sir or madam, if you belive that elections have much bearing on safety at a plant, you are sorely deluded.
"Here's mine: If we must have nuclear plants, either have the government own them or make them (highly) regulated monopolies so that they can't escape government control."
Oh yeah, gov't sanctioned monopolies are the pinnacle of efficiency and responsibility.
It should be made of gilded marble and be large enough to be seen from space. You're welcome.
Ok, we did that, but it melted and crumbled under the blazing heat. We live underground now. - The Future People.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
By the time the earth is uninhabitable, we will have terraformed Mars and Europa.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE
I don't have a degree in physics, but I do know that those isotopes that remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years (or more) do so because they aren't very radioactive, and those that are highly radioactive don't last that long. Not only that, the highly radioactive isotopes emit less and less radiation as time goes by because there's less and less of it. Alfvén may be a Nobel laureate in physics, but I wonder if he's taken the above into account in this case. I'm just a layman, but I have my doubts about what he says. Checking, I see that his work was in magnetohydrodynamics, meaning that he's talking here outside of his specialty.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Republicans are for military buildup because they can survive a nuclear war!
* 2100 - humans loose ability to read/write
LOL
Either you meant 'lose', or you meant '2001' :P
Eventually fissile material will cease being fissile and yet still be dangerous. FBRs are a stop gap and it also allows us to make more out of a given sample of fissile material, but, it doesn't solve the waste problem, it just puts more stops before a given sample of material will become a problem.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
G(T,p) = U + pV â' TS
A(T,V) = U â' TS
What else is there to figure out?
What the â' sign is.
"â'pocalypse", apparently...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Not ironic, exemplary!
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Your figure of a 5mm by 10mm cylinder per year of waste is ridiculous.
This is the figure *per person*...
Moreover, 60,000 tons of waste is very little on the country scale. A round pond that's 200 meters across and 2 meters deep on the average will contain more than this weight of water. And you can put 25 such lakes in one square kilometer. By comparison, Louisiana alone has over 135,000 square kilometers of land area...
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I know the time span of two billion years sounds like a very very long time, and considering the total span that homo-sapiens have been on this earth is just a small fraction of this two billion years, but I imagine I am not the only one who feels a slight twinge of anxiety knowing that our time as a species on this planet is finite, and there may be nothing we are able to do about it. However two billion years is a long time, and alot will change before then.
The rest of the world stores the byproducts safely on site, and there's no reason we can't do the same.
In one year your typical US nuclear power plant produces about 20 metric tons of nuclear waste. They typically store this on site already, however once they run out of capacity to store the waste, they either have to shut down, or ship it out to some storage facility. Since there is currently not enough room to store all the waste that is generated, some plants have had to shut down prematurely.
There is a storage facility that in yucca mountain that has been in legal/political limbo for decades that was supposed to be used to store nuclear waste from civil power plants. Since the government entered into contracts with plant operators to store waste there, and cannot, the taxpayer is now, in addition to paying for the storage facility which is not being used, paying nuclear plant operators to hold on to their waste. Furthermore, because the facility isn't projected to be accepting waste for at least another ten years, waste will become an even bigger problem than it is now.
Individual plant operators are going to be responsible for storing and dispoing of their waste. Because of past bottom line oriented behavior demonstrated by some power companies, watchdog groups are concerned that the power companies will not honor their responsibilities to safely decommission the plants. Power companies aren't allowed to reprocess any of their nuclear waste either, for fear that byproducts might be sold to terrorists.
Don't get to thinking that the new reactor designs are going to save us either. Breeder reactor's aren't really used in the US because of problems encountered when they were initially run, and because they are viewed by nuclear power providers as being too expensive in comparision to traditional PWR reactors. If you look at the reactors that GE wants to build with stimulus funds, you'll find they are mearly improvements on existing tech.
Burning coal (the only practical alternative to nuclear)...
That's BS. There are a number of practical alternatives emerging in the marketplace, including natural gas, biofuels, and wind and solar (depending on where you live). Even burning coal doesn't have to be dirty.
Unicode minus sign, probably.
−
Tested it in "preview" and it does show up as â'.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
This is a bit of a distortion of history. We did build a Thorium breeder reactor early on at Shippingport. In this case the "we" are Naval Reactors, directed by Rickover. The concept was intended to be purely for civilian use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Reactor
There is a company who is developing similar technologies and trying to market it all over the world as proliferation resistant fuel, called "Thorium Power".
There were some difficulties with Thorium. One of them was the fact that while the activity of the fuel had a short half-life, it was much higher initial activity, making maintenance a bit more of a challenge. Other issues as well. My point is that your statement about commercial motives is a bit of a distortion of history.
Even if nuclear energy is a disaster waiting to happen, coal and oil are disasters that are already happening. For-profit organizations are responsible for the continuation of their use. Utilities, such as power, should never, under any circumstances, be allow to be operated by for-profit concerns. For-profit organizations have only a single concern: paying their investors, no matter what anyone says, that is their sole care.
Nuclear power is safe and effective, as long as no penny-pinching profit mongers are allowed anywhere near them. e.g. please look up the number of problem caused by nuclear powered plants on nuclear powered naval vessels. At least in the US the people running those plants have a vested interest in keeping them going, safely; they live in them. There is no reason a fission plant cannot be run safely and effectively in the US except the FUD that's been spread about it has poisoned the minds of the very folk that should be fighting for it. The other problem is all the folks that are making so much money off of us for power now are loathe to give up all the profit they are making and will spend a fair piece of it to prevent anyone moving in that direction.
Nothing to say here... move along
Of course one of the by-products of breeder reactors is the whole weapons grade material thing that makes other countries nervous. Making breeders illegal was part of a plan to assuage the fears of those other countries, and get them to stop building them. Of course it didn't really work out.
Nothing to say here... move along
no. I have a reduction in taxes due to installing better windows.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Unlike a lot of other liberals, my brain doesn't freeze up at the mere utterance of the word "nuclear" ("nukyuler" if you're Bush or Carter), but as of right now nuclear energy is not cost effective without a lot of subsidizing by the government. I suspect that as carbon-based energy resources get more expensive, nuclear energy (as well as other energy sources) will become more and more economically viable.
This is only really a problem because we have married ourselves to uranium and plutonium based reactor designs, again as a consequence of wanting to build nukes. The civilian offshoots of this technology are quite unpleasant as you say earlier. Had we had purely commercial motives from the start we would have developed thorium breeder reactors at an early point to largely avoid the whole nuclear proliferation issue.
This is a bit of a distortion of history. We did build a Thorium breeder reactor early on at Shippingport. In this case the "we" are Naval Reactors, directed by Rickover. The concept was intended to be purely for civilian use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Reactor
There is a company who is developing similar technologies and trying to market it all over the world as proliferation resistant fuel, called "Thorium Power".
There were some difficulties with Thorium. One of them was the fact that while the activity of the fuel had a short half-life, it was much higher initial activity, making maintenance a bit more of a challenge. Other issues as well. My point is that your statement about commercial motives is a bit of a distortion of history.
On the contrary, your own text supports my point: we put the bulk of our efforts into developing uranium/plutonium based reactor designs and marginalized potentially cleaner thorium designs. Sure, some have pursued those regardless, such as India, but they are working with very limited resources and international interest is also very modest. The truth of the matter is, if you couldn't table some Cold War military benefit for your nuclear programme you just wouldn't be seeing very big budgets back there in the industry's formative years. And to create a whole new nuclear reactor design from scratch you /need/ those big budgets because, as you say, there are considerable challenges in doing so.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Funniest post I've seen on here in a long time.
J. Willard Gibbs, is that you?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
>By the time this happens we will have reached the other stars. So you can stop worrying about it.
Unless of course a meteor, tsunami, volcano, or stupid humans don't extinct us first.
What do we do with all the nuclear waste produced from fission? The waste products have a half-life of 4.5 billion years and there is no permanent storage location.
I say blast the waste to the sun, but that's rather permanent if we find we can actually do something with the waste.
It's easier to utilize a breeder reactor (Fast or Thermal) to produce weapons grade material than most PWR or BWR designs. In fact, Plutonium for weapons is always derived from a breeder design. (You are breeding Pu-239 from U-238). That being said, you are correct about breeders being capable of utilizing almost any radioactive waste for fuel.
No, you don't!
I will give you peak oil, but peak coal is still being predicted as 2025 +- 5 years and the USA at even the most conservative estimate, still has a 100+ year supply for our own use.
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
Ah, Culture then. Banks fan?
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
That's a terrible idea. When Xenu dropped us all into the volcanoes, it gave me nightmares for years, until I got clear.
What do we do with all the nuclear waste produced from fission?
Reprocess it to extract fuel that can be re-used in other power plants (e.g. CANDU reactors can run on the waste from a light-water reactor). Extract other elements where commercially viable (e.g. rare and expensive stuff like rhodium). Vitrify the leftovers and then store them in abandoned uranium mines (which were already filled with radioactive rocks before humans came along).
So long, and thanks for all the fish ...
Did anyone else misread this as 'double-backward somersault'?
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Well let's see:
Here's Pi with a hat:
Nope, still broken.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Then what planet is best to get my O?
There are a number of practical alternatives emerging in the marketplace, including natural gas, biofuels, and wind and solar (depending on where you live). Even burning coal doesn't have to be dirty.
None of the alternatives you mention are within an order of magnitude of replacing coal or nuclear. Biofuels? Are you serious? Not even within two orders of magnitude.
It's not coal vs. natural gas. NG might scale, but even if you believe there's an adequate supply, it's several times more expensive.
It's not coal vs. wind and solar, either. Cheap baseload energy means coal and nuclear -- that's the tradeoff. I'm all for wind and solar power (we should be building out as fast as we can) but pretending they're somehow comparable to coal and nuclear is nuts.
"This doesn't include the energy needed to transport the coal to the plant (via a big ass train)".
Actually, all it takes is a conveyor belt (with low energy requirements), as in the Latrobe Valley - P.M.Lawrence.
What do we do with all the nuclear waste produced from fission?
Well, let's see. You're talking about a substance with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, so let's assume you meant that. According to a sub-entry on the page I just referenced, U-238 can be used for radiation shielding.
Yup. You heard right. You can use this horrible waste product to protect you from the more hazardous waste products.
Long half-lives mean the structure is relatively stable. Only when an atom decays and/or spits out a particle are you in any potential danger.
I asked my father (a condensed matter physicist) to name a highly dangerous radioactive substance and he said Radium. Various isotopes of Radium can have half-lives ranging from a few nanoseconds to 1600 years.
Very short half-lives mean the isotope is extremely unstable and decays very quickly. If you were standing next to a kilogram of 215m3Ra, it'd probably kill you pretty quick. On the other hand, if you were standing a mile away from it, there'd be no way to transport enough of it to you to do any damage.
Radium, due to its shorter half-life, is more dangerous than U-238. Much more dangerous.
And yet we release Radium into the atmosphere by burning coal.
This is why nobody takes environmentalists seriously on the debate over nuclear power. It's all FUD.
"because, as I understand it, anything that comes out of secured areas is labeled "nuclear waste" and disposed of.'
Well, yeah - because it's radioactive. That's why it's waste.
"So used radiation suits and other such _harmless_ things are part of the total."
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"this lauded amount of Nuclear Waste (I'll just assume the parents declaration of 60,000 tons is correct) wouldn't even come close to filling a single football field (where it stacked in a square)."
I wonder what would happen if we did.
Criticality event? Or just a dull fizzle?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"Birds are annoying enough without the ability to publish celebrity gossip tabloids."
I blame Twitter.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"What pressure does homo sapiens to evolve, given that our technological abilities largely shield us from the pressures of our environment?"
The evolutionary pressures, are for being cool in high school for men, and getting sloppy for women.
©God
The pesticides are not sprayed on, they are grown by the plant. But after you harvest your corn, the pesticides made in that corn plant are still there.
And they were now in your body, too, as you can't simply wash them off. They are IN the plant.
How do you suppose GM "foods" are chasing away insects? Magic?
My basement has about 150 cubic meters of storage space. Nuclear waste (it's not clear what material actually goes into that 60,000 tons figure, it's just byproducts, or if it includes containers, equipment, old reactor parts, etc.) tends to be heavy, but lets keep it on the light side and say it's as dense as water. So, my basement could hold 150 metric tons of radioactive waste. So 400 of my basement could hold all of the waste ever produced in the US ever. Now, let's say you can't just bulldoze it into a well lined pit (which you can for some of it, but can't for other stuff because you might end up with excessive heat and maybe a critical mass although, as others have pointed out, we shouldn't be storing that stuff, we should be using it). So, let's divide by ten and say we can fit fifteen metric tons of waste in my basement, so we need 4000 of them. A facility with a good roof, built over an aquatard and with a really good foundation, well designed to avoid seepage, and 4,000 times the size of my basement.... That just doesn't sound that hard to do. I mean, I don't have the money for it, but from a government or large scale commercial project point of view, it just doesn't seem that bad, obviously we'd have to have more and more space for it, as time goes on, but if you organize things properly, you can eventually take that waste out, when it's just a bunch of toxic heavy metals and no-one cares if you just throw it in a pit.
The thing is, management of hazardous waste is just part of industry. People screw it up frequently, and it's not great, but the point is, the amount of other hazardous waste out there dwarfs the amount of nuclear waste. Not all of it is nastier than nuclear waste, but you can bet that there's stuff out there that's much nastier than that nuclear waste, in much higher quantities than the nuclear waste. And people living near train tracks, for example, have it carted by them every day without batting an eyelash. There's plenty of stuff that isn't yet waste that's horrible. Bhopal, India, anyone? The problem with nuclear is that it's different. People don't really understand it (they don't understand chemistry either, but that's beside the point). And, of course, radiation poisoning is a horrible way to die. But radiation just seems more evil. Invisible for a start, goes right through thin materials, even if they're airtight, but it can get into the air too (well, radioactive materials can, then you breath them in, but people don't care too much about the distinction), and of course, getting exposed to radiation makes things radioactive (everyone has seen how Homer glows in the dark after radiation exposure). Radiation is bad juju. No-one wants it in their back yard, or within 50 miles of their back yard, for that matter. It's the whole problem people have with realistic threat assessment.
Also, the post you replied to said that a cylinder of nuclear fuel 10 mm in diameter and 5 mm thick would produce all the power a person needs in a year, not that that's how much nuclear waste would be produced per person. That works out to about 7.5 grams of uranium used per person, which sounds about right.
We are Homosapien, once there are no more of us, then the human race as we know it is extinct.
When trying to make an argument in a seemingly scientific manner, stick to scientific arguments, otherwise you just end up looking like the new kid on the block.
1) To start with it's Homo Sapien, not homosapien.
2) Another rather obvious point is that Homo here is the actual genus. Here is a list of the species that all fall under this one genus. 3) Now, scientific errors aside, "Humanity" as you put it aren't actually linked to the single species. Human evolution has been passed through the various species within the Homo genus. That means even if we as people change enough to be significantly different to warrant another species, we will still fall under the genus banner along with all our distant forefathers and still classify as humans.
Now, either start paying more attention to your science teachers or stop spouting this pseudo-scientific babble in a place that has lots of scientists.
And for the record, I didn't even do biology past the 9th grade (For us here in Australia that's about 13 or 14 years old).
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
nuclear power ever has or will.
Oh, just wait. Remember the Shaw of Iran and the Westinghouse fission reactors he ordered? Well, once the replacement project is attacked, the resulting dick waving will be a nice global nuke energy exchange.
And that will make coal's heavy metal release look like the good old days.
tell that to the 1250 euro's i got from it ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Should be enough time for us to move to the asteroids, and move them to whatever distance from the sun is optimal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Biggest problem is the corporations that you have to license the GM stuff from.
Agree with you there. But still, it seems a small price to pay for a much greener (literally) agriculture.
The pesticides are not sprayed on, they are grown by the plant. But after you harvest your corn, the pesticides made in that corn plant are still there.
Sorry, I was talking about herbicide-resistant crops. I don't know what you're talking about.
And they were now in your body, too, as you can't simply wash them off. They are IN the plant.
Okay... let's explore that. Why would a low level of insecticide necessarily harm you? Are you an insect?
How do you suppose GM "foods" are chasing away insects? Magic?
Who said the crops were chasing away insects? Not me - I said they were attracting them. Maybe you meant to reply to a different post?
You, sir, are a grade A fucktard for that statement.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
and don't forget the the obesity rate... evolution at its finest...
That's not really evolution, it's the opposite...
Under a natural evolutionary system, your ex wife would have been too weak to survive and your girlfriend would have been unable to reproduce (and possibly died trying)...
As a result of this interfering, it is no longer only the fittest who survive, but some of the weaker examples also survive to pass on their weaker genes to future generations, resulting in the process of evolution actually moving backwards.
Breeder reactors are the only sane way to go. Except for the ignorance of the public in general who think nuclear energy = bad. Hell, the general public is so dumnb (how dumnb are they?) they think creationism is true.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Right. And of course there's no particular reason that the governments of the world imposed all these regulations on nuclear plants. It's not like they're DANGEROUS or anything.
Much is made of the fact that the TMI accident didn't cause any particular amount of environmental damage (and I believe this view to be correct, by the way). You should realize that the REASON it didn't cause environmental damage is that nuclear plant construction is very, very heavily regulated. Can you imagine what might have happened if, instead of using the expensive, highly quality controlled parts, TMI had been built with lowest-bidder parts? Or used minimum wage operators instead of the highly trained, heavily inspected folks they actually have? A big chunk of Pennsylvania might be uninhabitable today.
The government didn't institute all these regulations because they wanted to be mean to the nuclear industry. They instituted them to protect the population from the danger of nuclear accidents. Yes, accidents are rare. They're rare BECAUSE of the heavy regulations in place. Which means nuclear power is expensive, and will remain so.
This article says nothing about wastes. It said it is currently being used in the USA. If that is true, why do we have hundreds of thousands of barrels of waste sitting around? I'm all for nuclear as well, but from what I gather off the National Geographic channel, Science channel, and other assorted channels is that it is far too wasteful for use yet. Having an armored transport car cracking open and leaking in the middle of the city would make the city uninhabitable for a quarter of a million years. You can tell me all these science channels are totally wrong, but I'd like to see some links that explain it.
Not really. The average half-life of current waste is orders of magnitude larger than the waste from an IFR reactor that burns up all of the long-lived actinides.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Incorrect. Current reactor designs are more proliferation-prone than IFR's that employ electrorefining. See this article for more information.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I wish I had that problem; I'm naturally thin. I was too thin all my life until I was on Paxil about six years agow, I gained 40 pounds on that stuff, but I've lost half of what I gained since I stopped taking them. I'm struggling to keep from losing more.
Evolution is actually behind the obesity rate. In all of human times until not long ago, food was always scarce, so we've evolved to retain food for scarce times and to be hungry. Now that food is plentiful, it's working against us.
Free Martian Whores!
A lot of the waste being referred to as "nuclear waste" isn't nuclear waste of the type you can reprocess. Most of it is going to be low grade waste from plant operations (e.g. suits that may or may not have been exposed to radiation). Pro the OMG nuclear power people, it is a lot of waste and we can't store it on site. Con the OMG nuclear power people, most of that waste isn't that dangerous and we should be fine with shoving it away in a dark corner somewhere.
Fair enough, harmless was a poor choice of words. But I think the point is that everyone tends to think glowing rods of pure plutonium when they think nuclear waste, when there are in fact different levels of waste, and the bulk of it is considered "low-risk" waste, and includes such things as radiation suits, used cooling pipes, etc, etc. These things pose a minor risk, and do not need to be stored for 20,000+ years.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard this week. Is your definition of a city 10x10 meters or something? Even so, with a city that small, you could just dig up all the polluted land and shove it in another barrel.
And why the hell would an "armored transport car" even a) transport nuclear waste and b) transport nuclear waste through a city!
And to top it off, if the American "documentaries" (with periodic action sequences, scary narrator and annoying background music) that I've accidentally been exposed to are any indicator, I'd say you're better off reading wikipedia or something. Hell, I'll even copy paste a section for you:
So in the future, please refrain from opposing/supporting something just based on what you've seen on some television show. It's called the boob tube for a reason and that reason is not because they have female breasts on it.
After re-reading my post it comes off as overly hostile. Apologies, but the points it makes should still be valid.
Most of the waste you're talking about is recyclable. It is not waste. It is fuel, waiting to be used. Very little nuclear fuel has to remain unspent. Very little is waste because most of it is useful, given proper reactor design.
Radium, due to its shorter half-life, is more dangerous than U-238. Much more dangerous.
As you noted, that depends on the half-life. Most isotopes of radium have half-lives on the lower end of that spectrum. It is statistically unlikely to be breathed in by anybody before it decays.
Actually, all it takes is a conveyor belt (with low energy requirements), as in the Latrobe Valley - P.M.Lawrence.
Yeah, and of course all coal-driven power plants meet that requirement. You forgot to mention that. If they didn't, your argument wouldn't matter much. So, good for you that they do.
Save the planet, use clean nuclear energy!
Is there anything similar to "clean nuclear energy"?
Are you sure?
How can I be sure?
Radium, due to its shorter half-life, is more dangerous than U-238. Much more dangerous.
As you noted, that depends on the half-life. Most isotopes of radium have half-lives on the lower end of that spectrum. It is statistically unlikely to be breathed in by anybody before it decays.
Sure, but Radium isn't the only radioactive isotope released by burning coal.
Look, the poster said, "The waste products have a half-life of 4.5 billion years". The intent of the statement was to indicate that [in scary voice] "4.5 billion years!!!1!!one" is so horrible that it'll outlive the sun. But that's so misleading that at best it is ignorant, at worst it is blatantly dishonest. By saying that Nuclear Power is bad completely ignores that our current alternative is WORSE.
It's enough to drive somebody batshit insane and to propose things like, I dunno, maybe burning environmentalists for fuel.
Nuclear waste isn't a trivial problem.
A nuclear reactor also happens to be the ideal target for a terrorist attack.
"this lauded amount of Nuclear Waste (I'll just assume the parents declaration of 60,000 tons is correct) wouldn't even come close to filling a single football field (where it stacked in a square)."
I wonder what would happen if we did.
Criticality event? Or just a dull fizzle?
I'm betting just a damn mess :)
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
None of the alternatives you mention are within an order of magnitude of replacing coal or nuclear. Biofuels? Are you serious?
Absolutely serious. In fact, there is a pilot plant currently operating in Brazil using bio-engineered organisms that process sugar to make biofuel that is projected to be cost competitive to existing traditional Brazilian biofuel even without govt. subsidies. Furthermore, similar organisms can be designed to convert any waste material in fuel, so they can be adapted for use in other economies.
It's not coal vs. natural gas. NG might scale, but even if you believe there's an adequate supply, it's several times more expensive.
It's not coal vs. anything, or nuclear vs anything. Today's energy economy is a mixture of many sources of energy. However, coal has costs beyond what is accounted for in you pay for in your electric bill, and nuclear is politically untenable thus far, and will continue to be so long as the waste issue remains unresolved.
It's not coal vs. natural gas. NG might scale, but even if you believe there's an adequate supply, it's several times more expensive.
Were that the case, one would expect that there would be more power generated today by nuclear than NG, but that is not the case.
I'm all for wind and solar power (we should be building out as fast as we can) but pretending they're somehow comparable to coal and nuclear is nuts.
Then you need to hurry up and inform the people in states like mine that the new wind and solar plants that they are building don't make economic sense.
None of the alternatives you mention are within an order of magnitude of replacing coal or nuclear. Biofuels? Are you serious?
Absolutely serious. In fact, there is a pilot plant currently operating in Brazil
Brazil has a 12-month growing season and a tiny, tiny fraction of our energy use. Biofuels make sense to the extent that we can use waste products from material that is grown anyway, but in the end it comes down to efficiency: Plants capture at best 1-2% of incident solar radiation, and we already have MUCH better collectors.
Today's energy economy is a mixture of many sources of energy.
Of course it is, and it is utterly dominated by coal (roughly 50% in the USA), and potentially dominated by nuclear. All of the wind+solar+biofuel sources combined do not add up to 1% of our electrical generation, and their present growth rates will not make them significant for decades. Pretending otherwise displays a lack of touch with reality.
Additionally, solar has fair correlation with daily peak loads, but neither wind nor solar are good base load candidates in any but the most theoretical deployments.
Then you need to hurry up and inform the people in states like mine that the new wind and solar plants that they are building don't make economic sense.
If you want to have a public debate with me, don't be a jackass and deliberately misinterpret what I wrote. If you do it again, I won't reply.
I wrote that we should be building wind and solar as fast as possible. Wind in particular is very cost competitive. Solar is very expensive compared to coal, but looks much better if you account for the latter's externalities. Neither wind nor solar is positioned to replace base load plants, though, and my reality beats your theory, here. If you disagree, please post a link to the number of coal and/or nuclear plants scheduled to be shut down now that you have all that wind and solar deployed.
Take a look at the 4th generation reactors. Google (googletechtalks) has some video lectures on molten-salt types. In my opinion the proliferation problem is an imaginary political problem based on irrational fear of dying and xenofobia, however.
I read recently that 2 nuclear plants were canceled in Ontario because of the cost. It was going to cost $10,800 per kilowatt to build the plants. Don't know if that's USD or CND.
You're so right - ubiquitous, clean nuclear power would be awesome!!!
It's just a shame that clean nuclear power does not exist.
You know, for kids.
but in the end it comes down to efficiency: Plants capture at best 1-2% of incident solar radiation, and we already have MUCH better collectors.
Not just efficiency, but also cost. There are about 85000 TW of total insolation on the surface of the earth. If we used only vegetation to generate all the worlds power, we would need 25% of the world's vegetation to provide enough power to meet current world demand. We also have land to use which we could grow, or un-used land with vegetation we could use for power generation here in the US. In fact, according to the US's current energy secretary, biofuels represent the future in US energy production in the next 10-20 years.
Of course it is, and it is utterly dominated by coal (roughly 50% in the USA), and potentially dominated by nuclear. All of the wind+solar+biofuel sources combined do not add up to 1% of our electrical generation, and their present growth rates will not make them significant for decades.
Roughly two decades, which is about the amount of time current nuke plants have left before they are decommissioned (some are already being decommissioned). Nuclear is not a big growth area (at least in the US); wind, solar, and biofuels are. Dr. Chu, while not opposed to nuclear, explains why we need to look elsewhere for future energy production.
Additionally, solar has fair correlation with daily peak loads, but neither wind nor solar are good base load candidates in any but the most theoretical deployments.
That's one of the reasons that the govt has allocated stimulus funds to energy infrastructure development. However, advancements in solar PV will enable more people to install PV panels where they live. Infrastructure enhancements and the electrification of the transportation sector have the potential of solving this problem as well.
If you want to have a public debate with me, don't be a jackass and deliberately misinterpret what I wrote. If you do it again, I won't reply.
Deliberately misinterpret? Isn't that being a little presumptive? My appologies if it seemed like I was patronizing you. My point is that wind and solar are currently being constructed, and in increasing rates. Solar and bio offer the most in terms of potential as well. Nuclear on the other hand, is still in limbo.
Neither wind nor solar is positioned to replace base load plants, though, and my reality beats your theory, here. If you disagree, please post a link to the number of coal and/or nuclear plants scheduled to be shut down now that you have all that wind and solar deployed.
Your reality? If the problem of GW and the solution in the form of clean energy production is left to industry (driven solely by the bottom line) to solve, then indeed, it may never happen -- we need, the political will to force change, and to force it before we reap the consequences of continuing the status quo.
Current nuclear plants will likely be replaced by new plants; however, there will not be significant growth in nuclear in the current environment. They should have worked out the waste disposal problem before they even started building nuclear plants. However, the only approved facility for storing the nation's waste is still about a decade away from accepting material.
Keep in mind that most of the nation's 110 nuclear plants were built in the sixties and seventies, and those plants were only supposed to be in operation for about 40-50 years. In fact some are already operating on extension permits. There have not been any nuclear plants that have been built in the last 20 years, and only 10 are scheduled to recieve approval for construction in the comming decade.
The valuation of incidentals not previously considered (because they didn't factor in to someone's bottom line calculations) will likely be incorporated into the cost of carbon imposed in the new carbon tax