President Clinton cancelled the SCSC about five minutes after he assumed the presidency in Jan 1993. He was punishing the state of Texas for voting Republican in the 1992 election.
Dude, you totally missed my point, which is: If we want to get off oil, we need vastly more nuclear power. Yes the transition will take a long time, but mainly because of politically correct foot-dragging, not because of technology. And with coal fired plants being closed by the dozen under Obama, the cost of electricity is going to continue to rise. Wind and solar can't really make more than a tiny dent in the need. Fracking for natural gas can provide a stopgap measure for a couple decades, but environmentalists are starting to gear up against that too.
How odd your perspective that gasoline addiction is for the rich ("What's it worth to you to keep gas filled blow-hards redistributing money..."). You have it exactly backwards. Who do you think is buying those Tesla's at $50K, the 99% or the 1%? Yes, it is only the rich buying them, and that means the subsidies from the government are coming from the 99% to the 1% - so if you are an OWS type or a liberal (but I repeat myself), you should be opposing any government help in subsidizing the Tesla. Second big issue I've not seen addressed in the comments is: Where is the energy supposed to come from for all these electric cars? If all the cars in the US were electric, it would take in excess of 100 additional nuclear power plants to provide energy for them - and that's pretty easy to calculate for an electrical engineer, which I am. Actually, it's easy to calculate using 6th grade math. Very few people have the real estate or the cash to be able to lay out another $10K to $20K for a solar power system to keep their Tesla charged. Maybe that it is included in the Tesla's sale price, but I doubt it. I'm all in favor of electric cars and building additional nuclear power plants, but part 2 isn't happening because the same people who are pushing part 1 are opposing part 2.
I apologize if this has already been addressed, but there is a big difference between pollution (such as acid rain and waterway contamination), and climate change. Our environment is vastly cleaner than it was a few decades ago; and in some areas cleaner than it would be if there were no humans at all around. But the entire area of climate change (aka, global warming) is not so clear, and has nothing to do with clean water to drink. It is well documented, but the bottom line is the data and the analyses on the magnitude of global warming is suspect at best and politicaly contrived at worst. We are left with mostly speculation as to if there even is global warming, especially in light of such things as warmer climes in historical times. It warming is valid, what if anything is causing it, and should we even do anything about it if real? Is our climate today perfect? Anyway, stopping acid rain is NOT the same thing as reducing human impact on the climate. Stop acid rain - yes. Stop emitting CO2 - no.
One vote per person? I recall I think it was in NYC a few years ago some judge wanted Hispanic votes to count more than one vote per person. Anyway, the perfect solution is paper ballots (hand-marked) and purple ink on the finger. Three more things would help: voter ID, careful control while maintaining and transporting ballots, and keep New Black Panthers, KKK, and every other potential intimidating threat away from polling places. Result: 100% perfect voting at negligible cost. Let me guess which party would oppose this? Hmmmmm
The US does not, nor has ever plan to, build an impenetrible missile defense system. Not only would it be prohibitively expensive, it would not even be possible. Nor is there any good reason to do so. So postulating the false dilemma of no missile defense or an impenatrible missile defense, then saying only no system makes sense is clearly illogical. How about a very limited system that cannot possibly threaten Russia's offensive capability?
They don't need our technology to build a missile defense system. For one thing, the Russians have had a deployed missile defense system for 40 years. Also, there isn't just a "technology." Hit-to-kill technology comprises dozens of state of the art developments, most of which have many other defense applications, the details of which if known, would make countermeasures more easy to develop. Since anything given to Russia or China would find its way to other countries, it would only be a short time that we would be victimized by our own foolishness in giving away such technology. That is why there are very strict laws about technology transfer to other countries. Surely that is obvious to even the most.....never mind, no use getting crass.
The vast majority of comments to this subject are uninformed, emotional, and idealistic. I will not try to address them all, but here are some responses to some of the hyperbole expressed. First, missile defense has been pursued LONG before Reagan ever mentioned it. The US had an active, deployed missile defense system in 1972, and obviously the research and development began long before that. Second, the USSR, and now Russia, also had a missile defense system, and still has one deployed to this day with some 100 interceptors, which is far more than the US has. It encircles Moscow. Third, our missile defense system, with only a couple dozen interceptors is not capable of providing any significant defense against Russian ICBMs and SLBMs, which number in the thousands. The Navy missile defense system, which consists of various versions of the Standard Missile on Aegis ships, is quite capable of late midcourse defense against intermediate range missiles. It is not capable of terminal defense. The Army's THAAD and PAC-3 missile defense systems have been proven in tests time and time again, and are in full production, only limited by available funding. THAAD is capable of both exo and endo atmospheric intercepts. PAC-3 can counter anything flying in the atmosphere at any altitude. It takes literally decades of research, development and testing to bring a missile defense system on line. One cannot wait for a potential enemy to deploy a threat missile to start to develop the defense. Surely even the most stupid people would recognize that, but I see comments like, "Well, Iran doesn't even have an intercontinental missile or nuclear capability, so we don't need to defend against it." Sorry, but whomever said that is a complete idiot. Now, also when we have some kind of deployed system, it also has a residual capability in case of an accidental or unauthorized launch of a missile against the US. What is so bad about that? There is no way to "aim" a missile defense system against an enemy; at most, it can be deployed to preferentially defend against a threat from some geographic region. For example, a system to defend the US against missiles launched from North Korea should be deployed in Alaska and or the west cost of the US. Guess what? They are. The old arguments against missile defense about ease of countermeasures are simply the statements of those opposed to missile defense. And the argument that an enemy could smuggle in a nuclear weapon may or may not be true, but it is an irrelevant red herring. Do you lock your front door when you leave the house? Why bother, an enemy could simply break a window and slip in. We must defend against ALL avenues of attack, and a missile is the single most reliable method for an enemy to deliver an nuke to a target. So far, antimissle systems are not 100% effective. Oppostion based on that is another stupid argument. You've got a system that is 90% effective, meaning that it will stop 90% of the missiles. Would it be better to stop 0%? One nuclear tipped missile will do about 1,000 times as much damage as the terrorists did on 9/11, and I think stopping 9 out of 10 of those missiles is therefore worth it. One argument that is posited frequently is that missile defense is destabilizing, but never offers any justification at all for that position. If both sides have missile defense systems, clearly any missiles accidently or hastily launched would be countered, thereby defusing a potential escalation, which is stabilizing, not destabilizing. I could go on and on, and if anyone cares to offer other thoughts, I'll be glad to comment.
Those are pretty good thoughts, but I really don't think the vast majority of people who are opposed to nuclear power are doing it as devils advocates. I think they are opposed for idealistic reasons. They believe in Godzilla, and think every nuclear plant can suffer the same kind of disaster that hit Fukushima. They think the nuclear waste problem is totally intractible and will cause the whole world to glow eventually. They are either incapable of doing simple research or math, or worse, incable of thought in general. There is the beneficial side effect as you note of making nuclear power safer in the long run. We see the liberal media helping their cause. For example, where do we see that nuclear plants which use local rivers for cooling typically raise the water temperature is only a few degrees, sometimes by only one degree? And where do we read that it doesn't matter whether the plant is a coal plant or a nuclear plant, the cooling water requirement is virtually the same? So the anti-nuke argument of raising river water temp by nuclear power plants is a red herring; it applies to all power plants (except hydroelectric of course).
rtb61 - why do you think facts and logic would have anything at all to do with an anti-nuke's position? They claim they don't want CO2 (also stupid), but then oppose power generation technology that produces no CO2. Maybe they want the 17,000 1 MW wind turbines which it takes to produce about the same energy as one mid-size nuclear power plant (Brown's Ferry, e.g.), but then you can't store that wind energy so you have to build the plant anyway. Actually, it's worse than no logic, it is no thought.
A few years ago when I was on active duty in the Air Force, we were entitled to a seemingly generous 30 day per year annual leave policy. I suppose that is still so. Anyway, taking leave amounts to getting approval in advance, which like any other job, means your boss has to decide whether he/she can afford for you to be away. Apparently, the program I was on was important because we (I and the other hundred or people working on the program) were told that if we submitted a request for leave of more than one week, it had to be accompanied by a letter describing why our job was so unimportant that we could be away from it by more than that. A couple years later when I was due for a change of assignment, I was offered the opportunity to stay on this program. I declined. Somehow, it survived without me.
If raising taxes on gasoline would promote better fuel economy, why hasn't the doubling of gasoline prices in the past three years done the same thing? There certainly is a correlation, but it is not as drammatic as the MIT economist would have us believe. Being a professor at MIT makes him a liberal, and all liberals want higher taxes, so his or her conclusion was foregone as they say. Raising taxes is the solution for everything, and socialism is great until you run out of other people's money. Apolgies to Ms Thatcher...
And I certainly agree with the Anonymous Coward who reported on his truck's mileage and power being much superior, improved from 1969 to 2006. Who hasn't seen that same kind of change except perhaps the MIT professor? I also get double the fuel mileage I used to get with the same horsepower, and also much lower maintenance costs; e.g., tune-ups every 100,000 miles instead of every 10,000 miles.
Thanks. What I was thinking was that the hose itself would get hot from direct illumination from the sun, and conduct heat into the water, rather than conducting heat from the warm air through the hose into the water. The cover on the container would simply be to keep the hose from cooling through convection, especially in the winter. I have noticed that my 100 ft, 3/4" black hose, after sitting in the sun for an hour or so, that the water is too hot to touch until it all runs out, which is about 3 gal by my calculations. It seems a shame to waste that heat. Of course, by the time I buy the thermocouples, valves, CPVC pipe, and pumps, I might have expended all the potential savings in my utility bill.
Slashdot Mirror
There are ancient ruins well below sea level all around the Med. The seas have been rising for millenia, ever since the end of the last ice age.
Russian scientists just successfully grew flowers from seeds that were 32,000 years old. Explain that!
I didn't read all the comments, but from the ones I read, no one has recognized that the US represents a mere 2% of the earth's surface. A few weeks of hot weather in one year on a tiny fraction of the earth's surface is hardly anything to get excited about. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/07/editorial-hansen-is-simply-wrong-and-a-complete-and-abject-failure/
I have 265 website accounts. I'm supposed to go through and change the passwords on them every week? Are you crazy?
President Clinton cancelled the SCSC about five minutes after he assumed the presidency in Jan 1993. He was punishing the state of Texas for voting Republican in the 1992 election.
Actually, the hurricanes we get are not only less in number, they are less in intensity. Look it up.
Dude, you totally missed my point, which is: If we want to get off oil, we need vastly more nuclear power. Yes the transition will take a long time, but mainly because of politically correct foot-dragging, not because of technology. And with coal fired plants being closed by the dozen under Obama, the cost of electricity is going to continue to rise. Wind and solar can't really make more than a tiny dent in the need. Fracking for natural gas can provide a stopgap measure for a couple decades, but environmentalists are starting to gear up against that too.
Right.
How odd your perspective that gasoline addiction is for the rich ("What's it worth to you to keep gas filled blow-hards redistributing money..."). You have it exactly backwards. Who do you think is buying those Tesla's at $50K, the 99% or the 1%? Yes, it is only the rich buying them, and that means the subsidies from the government are coming from the 99% to the 1% - so if you are an OWS type or a liberal (but I repeat myself), you should be opposing any government help in subsidizing the Tesla. Second big issue I've not seen addressed in the comments is: Where is the energy supposed to come from for all these electric cars? If all the cars in the US were electric, it would take in excess of 100 additional nuclear power plants to provide energy for them - and that's pretty easy to calculate for an electrical engineer, which I am. Actually, it's easy to calculate using 6th grade math. Very few people have the real estate or the cash to be able to lay out another $10K to $20K for a solar power system to keep their Tesla charged. Maybe that it is included in the Tesla's sale price, but I doubt it. I'm all in favor of electric cars and building additional nuclear power plants, but part 2 isn't happening because the same people who are pushing part 1 are opposing part 2.
Obama ignores court orders which he doesn't like, so it won't make any difference what the court finally decides.
Right. Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer.
I apologize if this has already been addressed, but there is a big difference between pollution (such as acid rain and waterway contamination), and climate change. Our environment is vastly cleaner than it was a few decades ago; and in some areas cleaner than it would be if there were no humans at all around. But the entire area of climate change (aka, global warming) is not so clear, and has nothing to do with clean water to drink. It is well documented, but the bottom line is the data and the analyses on the magnitude of global warming is suspect at best and politicaly contrived at worst. We are left with mostly speculation as to if there even is global warming, especially in light of such things as warmer climes in historical times. It warming is valid, what if anything is causing it, and should we even do anything about it if real? Is our climate today perfect? Anyway, stopping acid rain is NOT the same thing as reducing human impact on the climate. Stop acid rain - yes. Stop emitting CO2 - no.
One vote per person? I recall I think it was in NYC a few years ago some judge wanted Hispanic votes to count more than one vote per person. Anyway, the perfect solution is paper ballots (hand-marked) and purple ink on the finger. Three more things would help: voter ID, careful control while maintaining and transporting ballots, and keep New Black Panthers, KKK, and every other potential intimidating threat away from polling places. Result: 100% perfect voting at negligible cost. Let me guess which party would oppose this? Hmmmmm
The US does not, nor has ever plan to, build an impenetrible missile defense system. Not only would it be prohibitively expensive, it would not even be possible. Nor is there any good reason to do so. So postulating the false dilemma of no missile defense or an impenatrible missile defense, then saying only no system makes sense is clearly illogical. How about a very limited system that cannot possibly threaten Russia's offensive capability?
They don't need our technology to build a missile defense system. For one thing, the Russians have had a deployed missile defense system for 40 years. Also, there isn't just a "technology." Hit-to-kill technology comprises dozens of state of the art developments, most of which have many other defense applications, the details of which if known, would make countermeasures more easy to develop. Since anything given to Russia or China would find its way to other countries, it would only be a short time that we would be victimized by our own foolishness in giving away such technology. That is why there are very strict laws about technology transfer to other countries. Surely that is obvious to even the most .....never mind, no use getting crass.
wrong
Sorry, you are wrong about every point.
The vast majority of comments to this subject are uninformed, emotional, and idealistic. I will not try to address them all, but here are some responses to some of the hyperbole expressed. First, missile defense has been pursued LONG before Reagan ever mentioned it. The US had an active, deployed missile defense system in 1972, and obviously the research and development began long before that. Second, the USSR, and now Russia, also had a missile defense system, and still has one deployed to this day with some 100 interceptors, which is far more than the US has. It encircles Moscow. Third, our missile defense system, with only a couple dozen interceptors is not capable of providing any significant defense against Russian ICBMs and SLBMs, which number in the thousands. The Navy missile defense system, which consists of various versions of the Standard Missile on Aegis ships, is quite capable of late midcourse defense against intermediate range missiles. It is not capable of terminal defense. The Army's THAAD and PAC-3 missile defense systems have been proven in tests time and time again, and are in full production, only limited by available funding. THAAD is capable of both exo and endo atmospheric intercepts. PAC-3 can counter anything flying in the atmosphere at any altitude. It takes literally decades of research, development and testing to bring a missile defense system on line. One cannot wait for a potential enemy to deploy a threat missile to start to develop the defense. Surely even the most stupid people would recognize that, but I see comments like, "Well, Iran doesn't even have an intercontinental missile or nuclear capability, so we don't need to defend against it." Sorry, but whomever said that is a complete idiot. Now, also when we have some kind of deployed system, it also has a residual capability in case of an accidental or unauthorized launch of a missile against the US. What is so bad about that? There is no way to "aim" a missile defense system against an enemy; at most, it can be deployed to preferentially defend against a threat from some geographic region. For example, a system to defend the US against missiles launched from North Korea should be deployed in Alaska and or the west cost of the US. Guess what? They are. The old arguments against missile defense about ease of countermeasures are simply the statements of those opposed to missile defense. And the argument that an enemy could smuggle in a nuclear weapon may or may not be true, but it is an irrelevant red herring. Do you lock your front door when you leave the house? Why bother, an enemy could simply break a window and slip in. We must defend against ALL avenues of attack, and a missile is the single most reliable method for an enemy to deliver an nuke to a target. So far, antimissle systems are not 100% effective. Oppostion based on that is another stupid argument. You've got a system that is 90% effective, meaning that it will stop 90% of the missiles. Would it be better to stop 0%? One nuclear tipped missile will do about 1,000 times as much damage as the terrorists did on 9/11, and I think stopping 9 out of 10 of those missiles is therefore worth it. One argument that is posited frequently is that missile defense is destabilizing, but never offers any justification at all for that position. If both sides have missile defense systems, clearly any missiles accidently or hastily launched would be countered, thereby defusing a potential escalation, which is stabilizing, not destabilizing. I could go on and on, and if anyone cares to offer other thoughts, I'll be glad to comment.
Those are pretty good thoughts, but I really don't think the vast majority of people who are opposed to nuclear power are doing it as devils advocates. I think they are opposed for idealistic reasons. They believe in Godzilla, and think every nuclear plant can suffer the same kind of disaster that hit Fukushima. They think the nuclear waste problem is totally intractible and will cause the whole world to glow eventually. They are either incapable of doing simple research or math, or worse, incable of thought in general. There is the beneficial side effect as you note of making nuclear power safer in the long run. We see the liberal media helping their cause. For example, where do we see that nuclear plants which use local rivers for cooling typically raise the water temperature is only a few degrees, sometimes by only one degree? And where do we read that it doesn't matter whether the plant is a coal plant or a nuclear plant, the cooling water requirement is virtually the same? So the anti-nuke argument of raising river water temp by nuclear power plants is a red herring; it applies to all power plants (except hydroelectric of course).
rtb61 - why do you think facts and logic would have anything at all to do with an anti-nuke's position? They claim they don't want CO2 (also stupid), but then oppose power generation technology that produces no CO2. Maybe they want the 17,000 1 MW wind turbines which it takes to produce about the same energy as one mid-size nuclear power plant (Brown's Ferry, e.g.), but then you can't store that wind energy so you have to build the plant anyway. Actually, it's worse than no logic, it is no thought.
Cooling much more likely than warming http://www.personalliberty.com/conservative-politics/the-global-warning-on-global-warming/?eiid=
A few years ago when I was on active duty in the Air Force, we were entitled to a seemingly generous 30 day per year annual leave policy. I suppose that is still so. Anyway, taking leave amounts to getting approval in advance, which like any other job, means your boss has to decide whether he/she can afford for you to be away. Apparently, the program I was on was important because we (I and the other hundred or people working on the program) were told that if we submitted a request for leave of more than one week, it had to be accompanied by a letter describing why our job was so unimportant that we could be away from it by more than that. A couple years later when I was due for a change of assignment, I was offered the opportunity to stay on this program. I declined. Somehow, it survived without me.
If raising taxes on gasoline would promote better fuel economy, why hasn't the doubling of gasoline prices in the past three years done the same thing? There certainly is a correlation, but it is not as drammatic as the MIT economist would have us believe. Being a professor at MIT makes him a liberal, and all liberals want higher taxes, so his or her conclusion was foregone as they say. Raising taxes is the solution for everything, and socialism is great until you run out of other people's money. Apolgies to Ms Thatcher... And I certainly agree with the Anonymous Coward who reported on his truck's mileage and power being much superior, improved from 1969 to 2006. Who hasn't seen that same kind of change except perhaps the MIT professor? I also get double the fuel mileage I used to get with the same horsepower, and also much lower maintenance costs; e.g., tune-ups every 100,000 miles instead of every 10,000 miles.
Thanks. What I was thinking was that the hose itself would get hot from direct illumination from the sun, and conduct heat into the water, rather than conducting heat from the warm air through the hose into the water. The cover on the container would simply be to keep the hose from cooling through convection, especially in the winter. I have noticed that my 100 ft, 3/4" black hose, after sitting in the sun for an hour or so, that the water is too hot to touch until it all runs out, which is about 3 gal by my calculations. It seems a shame to waste that heat. Of course, by the time I buy the thermocouples, valves, CPVC pipe, and pumps, I might have expended all the potential savings in my utility bill.
Hmmmm, would an ordinary 100 ft black hose coiled up in a container with a glass cover work as well?