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NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Newsweek: Researchers at NASA have discovered a huge upwelling of hot rock under Marie Byrd Land, which lies between the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea, is creating vast lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. The presence of a huge mantle plume could explain why the region is so unstable today, and why it collapsed so quickly at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago. Mantle plumes are thought to be part of the plumbing systems that brings hot material up from Earth's interior. Once it gets through the mantle, it spreads out under the crust, providing magma for volcanic eruptions. The area above a plume is known as a hotspot.
[I]n a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Seroussi and colleagues looked at one of the most well studied magma plumes on Earth -- the Yellowstone hotspot. The team developed a mantle plume model to look at how much geothermal heat would be needed to explain what is seen at Marie Byrd Land. They then used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), which shows the physics of ice sheets, to look at the natural sources of heating and heat transport. This model enabled researchers to place "powerful constraint" on how much melt rate was allowable, meaning they could test out different scenarios of how much heat was being produced deep beneath the ice. Their findings showed that generally, the energy being generated by the mantle plume is no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter -- any more would result in too much melting. The heat generated under Yellowstone National Park, on average, is 200 milliwatts per square meter.
[I]n a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Seroussi and colleagues looked at one of the most well studied magma plumes on Earth -- the Yellowstone hotspot. The team developed a mantle plume model to look at how much geothermal heat would be needed to explain what is seen at Marie Byrd Land. They then used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), which shows the physics of ice sheets, to look at the natural sources of heating and heat transport. This model enabled researchers to place "powerful constraint" on how much melt rate was allowable, meaning they could test out different scenarios of how much heat was being produced deep beneath the ice. Their findings showed that generally, the energy being generated by the mantle plume is no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter -- any more would result in too much melting. The heat generated under Yellowstone National Park, on average, is 200 milliwatts per square meter.
A "bimbo of a deal" is not a phrase a native English speaker would use.
I will bet you would also write a thousand dollars as, "1000$". Isn't that right, golubushka?
You are welcome on my lawn.
With the declining standard of news on this website, we should highlight the news which is nerd worthy.
Until a gamma-ray burst or a wandering black hole takes us ALL out. Or maybe just a stay rock or "lone-wolf" terrorist messes up your day.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
... but I’m not sure what’s going on with the idiots posting further up in this discussion.
In addition to Yellowstone, there’s the plume responsible for the Hawaiian Islands. Interestingly, as the tectonic plate shifts, the plume remains more or less in the same place below it. Currently it’s under the Big Island (obviously); you can see the direction that the plate is moving by looking at the chain of islands.
#DeleteChrome
It's a cover up, I'm sure of that. This is to cover up the discovery of an ancient powerful alien device. This device is called a "door to the heavens", it's a transportation device that uses "Rosen-Einstein bridges" through space-time to allow people to travel astronomical distances seemingly instantly. One was found buried among ancient Egyptian artifacts and the other more recently found buried in the Antarctic ice. I have little doubt the power of this device is melting the ice. Perhaps this device has also attracted some unwanted attention from alien species? If that's the case then they have much more to cover up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I miss sg1 too :(
Sure ... sadly this plume is not a global warming result but a work of nature. Thus the melting of the north pole might be from a global warming up, but the declining south pole ice caps could be very much the result of volcanic activity.
Bach says it all.
It makes little difference if Trump personally supports the Paris agreement or not, since it was an aspirational target, the states, companies and people still support it. The people who implement it, still implement it.
You mean we don't need the government to save the planet? I completely agree. People don't need the government to mandate anything to save the planet. People can do this on their own, assuming the government is not preventing this in any way.
The problem with government is that it picks winners and losers. One example are these stupid CFL lightbulbs. There's a government subsidy on them, maybe it's gone now, but they suck. I don't know anyone that buys them any more. People will get LED lighting now, or use one of those new "efficient" incandescent bulbs. Maybe the mandate sped up the adoption of LED because people wanted something better. Maybe it slowed it down because money that was dumped in CFL was not invested in bringing LEDs to market.
Another problem with government is that it is slow. The CFL subsidy is also an example of this, it became obsolete almost as soon as it became law. If someone developed cold fusion tomorrow then it'd be tied up in all kinds of outdated regulations before it could come to market. At a minimum it'd have to compete with already subsidized wind and solar. Subsidies rarely help anything, it can just as easily hurt.
Trump did the right thing on getting out of this agreement. It did nothing that we could not do on our own without it. I believe that we'd be better off if the government had a lighter hand on the environment. Sure, keep the air and water clean, but there is a thing as taking it too far. The EPA did a lot of good things in the past, but it became an agency without much to do very quickly. Instead of shrinking to fit the much smaller role it needed to fulfill, it grew and created new "problems" to solve. The US Department of Energy was created 40 years ago with the mandate to provide energy independence for the USA. They failed. I suspect that they will always fail because the people within the department will always have the suspicion that if they actually solve the problem then their jobs are at risk. Just like the DEA will never ever "win" the "war on some drugs". US DHS will never "win" the "war on terror". Has the Department of Education ever actually educated anyone? If people learned anything from them then it can't be anything good.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Stuntaz?
/Tru Pimpin
Removing millions of tonnes of ice over huge portions of land has know consequences. It caused the upthrust of central North America. At the end of the last ice age it also caused a drastic rise in sea level. If tectonic upthrust created by the loss of the Antarctic ice cap can trigger a volcanic reaction in the proported mantle plume there, then it is possible that mankind could soon see a major event that reshapes our coast lines with a very sudden rise in sea levels.
Much is not known about the mantle plum under the ice as yet, for instance how large it really is. For all we know it might be more of a zit than a pimple full of puss, However if it is as large as the pimple in Italy or the mega pimple at Yellow Stone, it could burst with enough energy to create one hell of a rough ride for much more than just the worlds penguin population. Add on top of a sudden increase in sea level the effects of global warming the price of real estate in the Ozarks and the bush will increase drastically. Just maybe the red neck survivalists already heading for the hills and stocking up on amo are on to something, having good credit means squat when the price of real estate is beyond anyone without the use of fire arms.
Indeed, new data appears every day. The debate would be over tomorrow though if people accepted the economics of anything related to CAGW.
The reason we burn coal, oil, and natural gas is because they are cheap. We can say they are abundant, reliable, and energy dense but that's just another way of calling them cheap. Solar power is expensive because it's unreliable, diffuse, and not necessarily abundant where it's needed. People tend to want energy when it's cold and/or dark where they are, and this tends to happen with then sun isn't shining. Storing, moving, and converting energy adds costs which only adds to the expense of already expensive solar power.
How do we solve this problem? Look to energy sources that have a history of being cheaper than coal, oil, and natural gas. Those are wind, hydro, and nuclear. Wind and hydro suffer from many of the same problems as solar, such as not always being available where and when it's needed, which can add to the cost. Nuclear doesn't have this problem, it can be placed most anywhere we need it. We've even put this energy source to work on ships at sea.
I guess we could say the debate is in fact over, use more nuclear power. We do that then we have cheap and clean power and we'll just have to find something else for congresscritters to prop up as a bogeyman to get us to vote them back into office again and again.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
tl;dr: PopeRatzo: Trollin' since forever.
You trolls always hate it when someone salts your game, but thankfully Slashdot has chosen to make your cowardice obvious with every comment. If you weren't a Russian sock puppet, you might be willing to log in and be counted.
Of course, you could just be a stupid dick. But we can't tell if you're just a stupid dick or if you're a paid Russian troll, since you won't log in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How do we solve this problem? Look to energy sources that have a history of being cheaper than coal, oil, and natural gas. Those are wind, hydro, and nuclear.
There is no case in which nuclear is cheaper than coal, oil, natgas, wind, or solar. It's not even in the same ballpark. Cost estimates are always blown past like they don't even exist, the commissioning costs are always multiples of the estimates, and The People have to underwrite the insurance on the plant because no corporation will do it, so we ALL pay for it. As usual, you are using lies to sell bad technology.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People don't need the government to mandate anything to save the planet. People can do this on their own, assuming the government is not preventing this in any way.
Isn't going to work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
but the declining south pole ice caps could be very much the result of volcanic activity.
No, because the plume isn't a recent development. It's been there for a long time and was part of the local equilibrium. The decline in the ice must be from additional factors.
Drill, baby, drill!
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
According to the EIA the cost of most renewable technologies is now lower then many fossil fuel based technologies. Levelized Cost and Levelized Avoided Cost of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2017
still it is going to take a while to build out, and develop the load following technologies.
The US Department of Energy was created 40 years ago with the mandate to provide energy independence for the USA.
The primary job of the Department of Energy is nuclear safety. It is in charge of the country's nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors and nuclear waste. It also does energy research and other related things but nuclear safety comes first.
The nuclear cost problem is a regulatory problem.
If BMW had to design a car from scratch every time they built one, each one would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Same goes with nuclear. We don't build enough of them, so we don't become more skilled at doing it. So we over-engineer.
We should be designing a nuclear power plant, and building hundreds of identical ones in exactly the same way.
We should also encourage smaller, rather than larger and more expensive power plants. One can build smaller reactors on a production line rather than have to build them on site. This will drive down costs.
It is so hard to build nuclear plants that we can't create a production line of them in reality, and anyone who gets permission to build one wants to build the biggest they can, because that permission is hard to get.
Then the same also applies in the other direction. Other than global temperatures warming, (which is a 50/50 shot in a random environment) I have yet to hear an accurate prediction on the consequences of climate change.
There isn't much we know about Earth's internal heat & mass flow. There's not much consensus about where magma comes from (not that I mean to suggest that it's thought that it has only one source). The Earth is not a ball composed of well differentiated layers (Crust, Mantle, Upper Core, Inner Core, etc.) in fact, it turns out, its a really BIG place with a composition that varies over time and space. Mechanics follows chemistry. Heck, we still don't know how long the Earth's dynamo will persist...speaking of extinction level events...
Maybe it was buried under the ice to prevent aliens from travelling to our world via the "Rosen-Einstein bridges" and by burning so many fossil fuels we risk invasion by melting the ice from above.
Nuclear is expensive to build initially, given our current regulatory climate, but cheap to operate, and runs for years at 90% or more of nameplate capacity. What makes wind and solar cheap to install is that they are factory-built technologies. But now try to run them at more than a small fraction of nameplate.
Standardized nuclear, regulated by type instead of by individual installation, is what will replace the fossil baseload. Imagine how much an airline ticket would cost if Boeing had to get a full set of permits from multiple jurisdictions for each plane it built?
We should be designing a nuclear power plant, and building hundreds of identical ones in exactly the same way. ...
And if they fail all in the same way, the people around them are
If solar plants fail, or wind plants, no one dies ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Nuclear power isn't exactly cheap. The systems we have now are more or less the result of countries wanting nuclear weapons and therefore developing infrastructure that can be used for civil reactors. But even so the civil nuclear industry have mostly survived on state financing.
One of the costly things about nuclear reactors are when they get too old to economically use - dismounting and storing of radioactive parts is extremely expensive and takes a long time to do. With long time I'm talking of short-time storage of a huge amount of materials before they are considered safe to move to a long time (really long time here) storage. Do some search about it if interested.
Nuclear power is inefficient and have to be placed so that the problems of that inefficiency can be handled. Cooling. Lots of it. Direct access of a large body of water is a plus and the effects on the surrounding areas due to increased temperatures have to be taken into account. If cooling towers are used the normal temperatures and humidity have to be known - high humidity areas means worse heat exchange.
For safety nuclear power plants are generally built in clusters with an external protective barrier containing plants and support buildings. This takes space and there are requirements for placement of the structures.
The reactor buildings themselves have to (if being a modern type of plant) be resistant to an external attack or an internal accident. That means a multi-layered structure of reinforced concrete.
I hope I've shown that nuclear power plants can't be placed anywhere. They are expensive to build, there are many environmental requirements.
In comparison a wind generator is easy to build, can be placed almost everywhere and there are no extra expenses. They produce much less energy though but distributed power generators have several positive effects in e.g. crisis situations, war etc.
And how would that work for the global climate ?
I gave you my answer, the market is always looking for "better" energy so all we have to do is allow the market to do this. In this case "better" is defined as being both low CO2 and low cost.
They aren't really cheaper if you would also include the cost of higher CO2 concentration and the effects it has on the global climate. A simple solution would be to calculate those costs, and add them to fossil fuel prices using a tax. At the same time, income taxes should be reduced by the same amount to keep it budget neutral.
Let me get this straight... I pay a tax because my utility chose to use dirty coal. But since this is a burden on the taxpayer the government pays me the difference on my income taxes. How is this an incentive to get off coal again? The utility doesn't give a shit, they want to sell cheap and reliable energy. If this means paying a tax then they pay a tax. So long as wind and solar are unreliable there is a cost to that, including the fuel to keep their boilers hot for when the sun sets and the wind stops.
This is not a problem that taxation can fix. We need cheap, low carbon, reliable, and safe energy. We have that, it's nuclear fission. Or rather, we'd have it if the government allowed it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The nuclear cost problem is a regulatory problem.
False. We have those regulations because of actual problems with nuclear reactors in the real world. The regulations were created to deal with problems which already existed. To the extent that those regulations are a problem for would-be nuclear operators, they are a good thing.
If BMW had to design a car from scratch every time they built one, each one would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
BMW pioneered new technology in the i3 that is going to make that claim completely false. Also, you don't have to redesign a reactor every time if you actually have one good reactor design to begin with, then you only have to change the site design. Apparently, no one has a good reactor design.
We should be designing a nuclear power plant, and building hundreds of identical ones in exactly the same way.
Why? No one has yet come up with a reasonable excuse as to why that is the best method. The former excuse was that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter", which was always a lie. Given that this is simply not the case, The People would never have accepted the risk of nuclear power if they'd been told the truth. They have to accept massive risk for no reward. They would pay less for renewables.
It is so hard to build nuclear plants that we can't create a production line of them in reality,
So wait, you are arguing that we should build a bunch of reactors all the same, but then you say that we can't actually do that even if we want to? So uh, what exactly was the point of your message? Just derailment and distraction, huh?
Nuclear is garbage. Uranium is the least concentrated ore we mine, so the secondary effects from the mining (virtually all of which is strip mining) are all out of proportion with the amount of fuel used. The fuel of course isn't actually used, and we don't actually have long-terms plan for dealing with it once it becomes waste. Breeder reactors are sufficiently complex and dangerous that nobody is even thinking about building enough of them to reprocess waste, and even that doesn't deal with all of the waste. If you build a small reactor you have most of the risk of a large reactor, and if you build a large reactor you're just concentrating large amounts of fuel. The only reactors with an allegedly flawless safety record are military PWRs. They require a sizable crew and frequent replenishment, and if the military has had a serious problem with one, they wouldn't tell us anyway — classified.
We know how to solve the problems with renewables going forward, and we don't know how to feasibly solve the problems with nuclear, so promoting nuclear is evil and/or stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can afford the moderation, but you Trumpanistas only have so many mod points to spend. If I jump on that grenade now, you can't throw it at someone else who can't take the hit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All I see are a couple dozen neckbeards who think they have all the answers with a second of thought and everyone else in the world is stupid.
It's true, Slashdot is still full of Nuclear Playboys and Hydrogen Douchebags. But at least we've chased off the Free Energy Fanboys. Now they're all on electronics experimenter groups, crapping them up.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There was nothing wrong with CFL bulbs, when they were made well and had a good electronic ballast. The subsidy made certain junky brands nearly free and people ignored the more expensive better made bulbs.
Nuclear is expensive to build initially,
And it's expensive to decommission, as well. And they never actually stack up enough funds to do that, and the taxpayer always gets left holding the bill.
given our current regulatory climate,
We have those regulations because nuclear isn't safe even with them, but certainly not without them. You shouldn't complain about regulations designed to keep the land livable, since you live on the land.
What makes wind and solar cheap to install is that they are factory-built technologies.
What makes wind and solar cheap to install is that you're not dealing with nuclear fuel. It's not some magical property of being built in a factory. It has to do with wind or solar power being easier to harness than the energy of the atom.
But now try to run them at more than a small fraction of nameplate.
It doesn't matter, because they are so very inexpensive. The money we save can be spent on building storage plants and grid expansion, which let the renewables do all the same jobs as nuclear. The whole system will be much safer and more reliable. The Grid is pathetic and needs upgrades anyway, so that's money well-spent no matter what form of generation we use.
Standardized nuclear, regulated by type instead of by individual installation, is what will replace the fossil baseload.
Absolutely not. There's not enough demand to mass-produce nuclear reactors, and every inch of every containment vessel has to be X-Ray inspected after installation no matter where you build it or how many you build. In practice, every nuclear reactor will always be a bespoke installation, at least in terms of the amount of time and effort which has to be spent on it. It's not cost-effective to build small reactors because of the engineering involved, and you can't just slap a large reactor on a truck and ship it off.
No fever dream short of fusion can make nuclear reactors a reasonable source of energy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And if they fail all in the same way, the people around them are ...
... going to shut it down and fix it. This fix will also be mass produced and therefore inexpensive to implement.
You seem to think that a nuclear power plant can only fail in only one way, a mushroom cloud of radioactive debris. That's not how they work. Most every spectacular failure we've seen in a nuclear power plant is because they are all unique, no one can ever learn where all the gremlins are, and if a problem is found the fix is almost always very expensive because no other device in the world is just like this one. Which means when problems are found they might not get fixed.
We build devices with similar complexity, cost, and potential threat to life if they fail spectacularly. We call them passenger jets. One major difference between a passenger jet and a nuclear reactor is the reactor isn't six miles in the air with no where to land for hundreds of miles.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
That's a nice rant. Here's the deal though. We can use fossil fuels or build nuclear power plants. People claim that solar power will be as cheap and reliable as coal in 5 years. Okay, so what do we do for the next five years? It's burn coal or develop nuclear power. Then what happens if these promises of cheap solar energy doesn't happen? Then we're burning coal or using nuclear power.
At least if we start with nuclear power now we have something low carbon to fall back on if solar doesn't meet it's promises of being cheap. Burning coal until solar gets cheap could mean burning coal until the sun goes out, and then for a few years after.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
We have those regulations because nuclear isn't safe even with them, but certainly not without them. You shouldn't complain about regulations designed to keep the land livable, since you live on the land.
You might live on the land but *I* live in the clouds.
Floaty floating clouds.
High up in the sky.
Just living on happy happy clouds.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
That's all great but meaningless unless compared to an alternative. Nuclear power is not cheap, but it costs less than living in the dark. We are running out of options and a lot of the complaints you've made can be addressed with more development of the technology. A big one you raised is the need for a large and complex containment structure. That's there to contain a steam explosion. We can fix that by not using water as a coolant. What else is there? Lots of things, and we won't know which one is best until we try them in real and actual nuclear reactors.
Again, nuclear is expensive. It's going to stay expensive unless we spend the time and resources to figure out how to make it cheaper. Kind of like how we make wind mills and solar collectors cheaper by building more of them.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
...and I do think that we have had a relatively small impact that could be quite harmful for our own survival.
However, the earth has far more varied climate phases than we have seen in our current icehouse.
That's a nice rant.
Thanks!
Here's the deal though.
You misspelled "lie" there, though I know that's what you do, so I can translate easily enough.
We can use fossil fuels or build nuclear power plants.
And there's the lie, your false dichotomy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You just gave an example on how CFL subsidies failed, and did so better than I had. Thanks.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The only way California might fail is if the tax burden imposed by the federal government becomes even more onerous. Even though we are one of the states that contributes most to operating the social programs used by mostly white people in the flyover states, and one of the states which gets the least back on every dollar sent to the federal government for that purpose (and for funding the blood for oil program) California still manages to operate in the black sufficiently to run its own social program providing no-fee medical service to residents with no money, sometimes including illegal immigrants who pick the majority of the food that everyone in the country eats which isn't machine-harvested.
Without California, it's the USA that would go under.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The best lamp I own (if you put aside light quality) is a CFL over my stove. It has literally held up longer than at least half a dozen incandescents I've run through the same fixture previously.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Say it with me! GROBAR WALMING!
Oh the ice caps are melting! It's humanity's fault! Yup! All you fuckin' EEEVIL humans! Fuckin' the world up for germs and lampreys and cockroaches!
What you need to do is go back to huddling in caves and dying of stuff that's preventable with modern medicine!
The subsidies applied to the more expensive bulbs too. That's why I bought them. In fact, I have several years' worth and won't need to upgrade to LED for at least 10 more years.
Fortunately China does not believe any of these arguments, and just ignores the opposition rather than letting it use its lawyers to make everything it doesn't like too expensive by holding up projects for years. It has to get out from under the world's largest pollution problem, and although it already produces and installs more wind and solar than anyone else - cheap early deployment of factory-built tech, once again - it is under no illusion that it doesn't need baseload sources to support heavy industries and large cities.
China is working on fusion too, and when you people fish for reasons to oppose it because big and industrial, they will become the major supplier.
Just curious how this may change the current thoughts on climate change impact on artic ice. TFA is pretty quiet about climate science. Perhaps theyâ(TM)re just scrambling?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
It has taken way too long to scroll down to this first on-topic post. But correcting the moderator system to limit the damage by paid trolls is another topic.
I have a serious question about the Antarctic mantle plume(s):
The Erebus plume under Ross Island has been documented ever since the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957 and probably earlier. So has a second plume been discovered in the same area? Or is this story about confirmation of what was already known? WTF?
Hopefully answers to this question will not get drowned by the paid trolls (and what I suspect may be paid troll fighters who keep the sewer floodgates open).
you'll need to time travel to about 2100 to see if the predictions pan out. Its a slow process in human terms which, a bit like evolution deniers, many can't seem to grasp.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
More people are killed fitting solar panels and installing / maintaining wind turbines than are killed by nuclear power plant failures every year.
but the declining south pole ice caps could be very much the result of volcanic activity.
No, because the plume isn't a recent development. It's been there for a long time and was part of the local equilibrium. The decline in the ice must be from additional factors.
Try telling that to the people that used to live in Pompeii.
Solar and wind energy is cheaper than coal now in quite a few parts of the world and with the emergence of decent storage, its reliable. Its a long game, it will just take a while to get all the dots joined up as you would expect with a new energy infrastructure. It took long enough for the old infrastructure to get near decent and reliable once they finally decided whether to use AC or DC.
Some places may not be able to take advantage of the renewables at this point in time so they'll just have to continue with the pollution option, but as more renewables come online and they will eventually contribute a smaller and smaller percentage of pollution so it shouldn't matter too much.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Almost every day, new scientific evidence is found that supports one side or the other. The debate is always evolving. This is very interesting!
You're operating under a false premise: the new scientific evidence is piling up much, much more one one side, that which supports man-made climate change. Evidence against it is far more rare, and much of that is of dubious or poor scientific quality and reliability. The vast majority of climate scientists agree, while those who do not are largely backed by political and fossil fuel interests.
Your statement is incredibly misleading and over simplified, if not just plain wrong, unless you clarify it by saying, "New evidence does support one side or the other, and almost all of it supports the same side." That is indeed how science works - not usually with one definitive finding to end all arguments, but a huge preponderance of evidence on one side that convinces most educated people, until consensus has been reached. In this case, that consensus has been reached, and deniers are simply that - people who will deny any legitimate evidence that does not agree with their tainted and ill-informed opinions.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Solar and Wind farms with battery storage go up a lot quicker than nuclear and coal plants and can go more or less anywhere. Some of the biggest problems with nuclear is who pays for it to be commissioned and then decommissioned when its run it course and how long before that land is safe?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Nuclear is expensive to build initially,
And it's expensive to decommission, as well. And they never actually stack up enough funds to do that, and the taxpayer always gets left holding the bill.
Well, this is a bit unfair to phrase this way. Yes, nuclear plants have certainly been expensive to decommission. But to be far, we've only truly built and decommissioned one generation of nuclear plants. Most of the safety concerns have been addressed through the decades, and everything we've learned could be applied to new plants, including accounting for future costs. No one knew what today's financial and regulatory landscape would look like when American nuke plants were built, though today we have experience with all of those concerns.
I won't deny that nuclear energy comes with a host of dangers and expensive practical and regulatory issues. In fact, we do need to regulate the hell out of nuclear power. But we have learned enough to operate nuke plants in a reasonably safe and clean fashion, with new plants potentially being more efficient over time than current solar or wind technologies. The cost of entry is high, and it absolutely should be, but I believe we should still be counting on nuclear power as a piece of the future energy puzzle. The goal should be moving away from fossil fuels (running!) as quickly as possible, and leaning a bit on nuclear while cleaner technologies scale up, and was we continue to develop cleaner technologies and fine tune our notions of what is acceptable environmental impact. If we start now, a new generation of nuclear power plants could be built which, in tandem with increased reliance on renewables, could end our reliance on fossil fuels as in as little as 10 years (at least in the USA and similarly-developed areas). Unfortunately, we don't seem to have the political will to move in that direction, or that quickly.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Federal Government moves were made before your lifetime to encourage people to move to California and its been riding that unnatural wave since.
Pretty silly, since nothing like that is necessary. Just sit back and let California be California, and people will move here. That's why this is the home of tech. When people have money, they want to live someplace that doesn't suck.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Amazon Prime Air is already operating from Hebron, KY and has been for some time - I saw one of their jets taxiing at CVG two months ago.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Why would success breed authoritarianism?
Oh, you meant secedes...
I guess thatâ(TM)s completely different. Besides the fact that many states tried secession about 150 years ago and it ended a bit rough for them.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That's a nice rant. Here's the deal though. We can use fossil fuels or build nuclear power plants. People claim that solar power will be as cheap and reliable as coal in 5 years. Okay, so what do we do for the next five years? It's burn coal or develop nuclear power. Then what happens if these promises of cheap solar energy doesn't happen? Then we're burning coal or using nuclear power.
At least if we start with nuclear power now we have something low carbon to fall back on if solar doesn't meet it's promises of being cheap. Burning coal until solar gets cheap could mean burning coal until the sun goes out, and then for a few years after.
One of the reasons no one wants to build new coal plants is that solar and wind are already so cheap the coal plants wouldn't be able to compete with them and the reason that no one built nuclear plants is that coal was cheaper than they were. It would be nice if we could get the cost of nuclear down enough to be competitive but there appears to be no prospect of that in the foreseeable future. The only thing holding solar and wind back is that it takes time to build it out just like it took 100 years to build out the existing power system. Once the price of storage gets low enough there's not much to hold wind and solar back.
Of course the cost of "fuel" for solar and wind is 0.
Holy crap. Are NONE of you familiar with thorium reactors?
Claimed disadvantages are: less development effort until recently, and less "quick efficiency" as a breeder reactor. But since they would be used to generate electricity, and the reaction products are part of the fuel cycle, not intended to be used externally for bombs or other reactors, that efficiency matters little.
Among the advantages are: more abundant and easily obtained fuel, inherently much safer design (meltdowns are physically impossible), and greatly reduced waste, especially of the long-half-life variety.
I should also add, as a side note: wind and solar have only been "cheap" where they are very highly subsidized. Which means: they aren't. Where subsidies have been removed or reduced, so have much of those industries.
As far as I know no one has yet built a thorium reactor that demonstrates economic viability. Once they do that we can talk.
One major difference between a passenger jet and a nuclear reactor is the reactor isn't six miles in the air with no where to land for hundreds of miles.
The other majour difference is: a plane crash kills up to 1000 in the plane and a few hundred on the ground.
A nuclear power plant failure potentially kills millions.
Anyway, the discussion is moot. If you have the money to build enough nuclear plants to replace all CO2 producing plants, you would be an idiot if you did not put the money into wind and solar and hydro or bio mass.
But we all know: you would be an idiot who is going for the nukes, you told us often enough ;D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You have any number supporting that? ...
I'm not aware of a single case of death in Germany regarding solar or wind installations
What should be the cause of their death? Thin air?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Here's the deal though.
The deal would be that you start reading up how nuclear power works, what is mined, how it is processed, what the waste is and what the costs are.
It is embarrassing that you post this nonsense since two years, get corrected 100 times per thread, but insist to learn nothing.
If I was your son/daughter I would be to embarrassed to go to school. Nobody can be as dumb as you are pretending to be; unless he is a professional troll or payed agitator for nuclear power (the later is unlikely as no power company outside China is anymore investing into nuclear power)
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/a...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A nuclear power plant failure does not potentially kill millions. It just doesn't! Very few large weapons even have that much power.
The german thorium reactor in the 1980s failed badly.
India is about to finish one right now.
The idea of JaneQPublic, that a melt down is inherently impossible is false anyway. I bet such a reactor can be intentionally sabotaged easily.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, ...
nameplate. Wow
If you have 100% of your power production with nuclear power plants:
Then 40% are running at 95% nameplate (base power)
Then 20% are running at about 50% nameplate (load following stage 1)
Then another 20% are running at 20% nameplate (load following stage 2, around peak times)
The rest is running at 10% or less of nameplate (peak following, balancing power)
Nameplate or "capacity factors" are completely ridiculous "terms" for argumentation about properties of different technologies.
In other words: it is close to impossible to run a country, or controlled grid, with nukes alone. You need pumped storage for balancing power, and/or gas turbines.
Arguing with nameplate makes no sense, when you get the wind power and solar power for free versus coal or uran which costs.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Chernobyl killed a million. In an area that is not even densely populated.
If the infamous three miles island plant had gone boom like Chernobyl you had several millions of deaths next years.
Germany would be similar bad, basically every nuclear plant is close to a densely populated area. The main reason why everyone hates them.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
"In England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011. Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%, that translates to about 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the world produces 15 trillion kWhrs per year from all sources)."
and
"We in the United States actually care more about this kind of thing than most other countries, so our numbers are the lowest in the world. The global averages in energy-related deaths are significantly higher than in America, with coal at 100,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs (China is the worst), natural gas at 4,000 deaths, biomass at 24,000, solar at 440, and wind at 150. Using the worst-case scenarios from Chernobyl and Fukushima brings nuclear up to a whopping 90 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced, still the lowest of any energy source."
Choking on its own pollution is exactly why they're doing this. Carbon is a long-term, more secondary issue with China, while doing something about the unbreathable air in cities is paramount.
Nuclear is for baseload, not load-following, so China is using hydro for that. Wind and solar don't load-follow either; in fact, the grid has to be redesigned ("Smart Grid") to allow such sources in the first place. The battery farms that will have to be developed to allow adding of renewables other than hydro will, if they work out, be add to the load-following capabilities of all the other sources.
Chernobyl killed a million. In an area that is not even densely populated.
This is a lie. Chernobyl did not kill a million people. The only people peddling numbers anywhere near that are anti-nuclear groups.
Less than 100 deaths are directly attributable to Chernobyl.
Fusion was a wet dream 50 years ago.
In our times it goes the same way as fission.
The price will never be able to compete with solar, wind, biomass, hydro or what ever other form of renewables we invent. Not to mention that we are probably 50 years away from being able to build a fusion reactor that is net positive in terms of energy.
Fusion might be a big thing in space craft propulsion, on the planet: never ever.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Nuclear power is not cheap, but it costs less than living in the dark.
I start liking your logic.
How much does living in the dark cost in your country? Perhaps you want to blame Germany again that "living in the dark" is more expensive here?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Obviously you don't know how they are constructed.
Another one just came on line again... in the U.S.
There have been SIX thorium-fueled reactors in the United States, and all were at least limited successes. The main reason they were not continued is that there was more established technology in the uranium-plutonium fuel-cycle reactors.
Just more of your famous willingness to pontificate on things about which you are not quite up to speed. No surprise. I haven't been around here for a long time, but it didn't take you long at all.
In other words: it is close to impossible to run a country, or controlled grid, with nukes alone. You need pumped storage for balancing power, and/or gas turbines.
First, there's not too many people that will claim we can or should run the grid on nuclear power alone.
Second, we'll hear people claim that we can run a grid on wind and solar alone. How? With storage. But you just defined "alone" as lacking storage. How would wind and solar work without storage? You dump your energy? That's wasteful, which just means it'd be expensive. Without storage wind and solar is just as useless as nuclear power.
If we allow energy storage, like what advocates for wind and solar do, then we can in fact run a controlled grid on nuclear power "alone". We can say the grid is powered by nuclear alone because no energy is added except from nuclear, the storage just evens out the load so nuclear can match the load.
To argue that nuclear power cannot power the grid alone means that wind and solar cannot power the grid alone. I believe you should drop this argument if you want to claim wind and solar are better than nuclear power, it does not serve you.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
You think people haven't tried? The US federal government doesn't even have rules in place to allow them to license a thorium reactor. They'll claim that no thorium reactor has been proven safe so they can't issue a license. Well, it's hard to prove one safe if no license is ever issued.
We've written ourselves into a comedy novel. Except it's not funny when it's real life.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
See what I mean, folks?
Chernobyl was cleaned up by 600,000 conscripted soldiers.
500,000 of them are proven dead now.
Probably they all died to car accidents?
You are an idiot.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You can use nuclear power for load following if you want.
France is doing it.
And modern reactors ramp up faster than old ones which were specifically designed to be base load.
Typical load following (noT: not balancing) plants are coal, all over the world. How you use a coal/hydro plant basically depends on context ... the 100 other plants you are running determine what you use with a certain gas/hydro plant.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sorry,
you want to tell me that people die to "bio mass energy plant accidents".
How the funk should that even be possible?
Chernobyl killed about a million. No idea how you calculate that down to 90 per trillion kWh.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Pfft ...
Always full with assumptions.
Which country was amoung the first to build a thorium reactor? So, yes, I have a good idea what types we are thinking about and how they work. Actually I believe I learned that in school.
However I'm not aware about a single working thorium reactor in the USA, and a quick googeling does not show up any as well. You have any sources?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Second, we'll hear people claim that we can run a grid on wind and solar alone.
If someone claims that, he is an idiot.
And if you believe him, you are an idiot, too.
So now you want to argue with postulated idiots arguments ... or what?
I believe you should drop this argument ...
I never made this argument
Of course, technically you could have a bunch of nuclear power plants, and a few load balancing plants, France shows that.
So, I still miss your point, except that you think hat some people claim you can run a grid on solar and wind without anything to perform load balancing.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sources?
Here is mine:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre...
Now, as of 2005, only 50 deaths were directly attributable. So you need to find another million deaths less 50.
Everything else out there is an estimate of the number of future deaths, and there is none that is credible that I have seen that goes beyond 50,000 eventual early deaths (everyone eventually dies though).
I blame Newcomen and Watt.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
The cleanup teams where about 600k conscript recruits. :)
Nearly all of them are dead meanwhile, however they should be roughly 45 years old now.
Nut perhaps you are right and they all died due to a natural case
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The market optimizes for direct costs that a vendor incurs. It doesn't optimize for what's good for people. The basic concept is "externality", a cost not borne by the person making the decision to impose the cost.
The market will push energy producers to the ways to produce energy that are cheapest for them, regardless of what they do to anybody else. If nobody pays extra for producing carbon dioxide, then the power companies will not care how much carbon dioxide they emit (except as a PR measure).
We've seen the results of what happens when industries are allowed to pollute as they please. It's not at all pretty. Government regulation is necessary in cases like these.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I never made this argument
Then what is your argument? You are not making sense. I think you are just trying to stir things up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Sure. However, the big, big problem with solar and wind is that they're not all that reliable. Once we have the big battery packs in place, reliability of power doesn't matter, only whether we overall make enough of it. That means we can use solar and wind, and they're cheaper than nuclear.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Your numbers are really fantastical! As someone else already pointed out, Chernobyl happened 31 years ago, so for people who now be 45 to have been involved in the cleanup operation, they would have been 14 at the time.
In any case, I would generally expect more than a third of people who were alive to now be dead, so just saying x number out of y are now dead is essentially meaningless. You need to talk about excess mortality - i.e. remove the baseline. And it must be radiation related.
Anyway, what are your sources?
Which part of: the clean up troops where conscripted soldiers did you miss?
They where basically all around 19 +/- 1.
Greenpeace and the WHO assume far above 1 million dead ... google yourself.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
WHO most certainly does not assume more than 1 million dead. The last number WHO published was an estimate of 4,000 eventual deaths. Your remaining 1 million deaths are essentially made up.
Greenpeace are very unreliable when it comes to facts.
"Google yourself" is basically you admitting you don't have facts.
I posted the facts often enough here ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You have posted no facts.
1 million dead from Chernobyl is a bare faced lie.
How often do I need to repeat that roughly 600k recruits where used as clean up teams and 90% of them are dead now 30 years later?
The rest of dead are the people who lived in the ares and did not leave, and the few thousand spectator who watched the fire from the other side of the lake.
If you are to lazy to gather informations and make up your mind: your problem.
I was a witness when it happened, you obviously not.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.