Which is why pure speed is pointless: JFK to LHR (or CDG) is great. Except that with the airport security and procedures, and the city-to-airport travel which is damnably slow, it is pretty pointless.
When in the future, mass transit will have become massively efficient, and we all have chips implanted which will remove the need for humans to do border checks, then having a faster plane will again cause travel times to be significantly smaller.
when concorde was introduced, going to the airport would have taken 20 minutes, and the check-in procedures be completed in a couple more minutes. Then, of course, going at Mach 2 made sense.
Now, hours to reach the airports (three hours before departure) So your trip will last the day. Even if your plane is supersonic. So who cares?
The poor pay less as a proportion of the population. However, they pay more as a proportion of income. Middle class will pay in the order of 20-30% of their income, and the top 1%, in the order of 1-10% of their income. How is that "fair", and how will increasing the burden on the poorest correct this sorry state of affairs?
So as it happens, you don't need to raise taxes on the poor and middle class to equalise the brackets. Because the only equalisation which makes sense -- you pay as a proportion of what you earn -- would go the other way.
And taxes need to be raised. You cannot balance the budget without raising taxes. And taxes should be fair: you earn x% of the GDP, you pay x% of the taxes. No ifs or buts.
No bullshit about capital gains being about taking risk. No bullshit about debt servicing reducing revenue. No deductions for mortgages. No deduction for anything. Salaries/dividends/revenues are treated the same.
Let us, for the sake of it, assume abortions are the ultimate evil. In turn, let us assume, like you, that anything linked to the ultimate evil is tainted. We must conclude that roads should not be available to anyone related to providing or getting abortions.
Of course, this makes no sense: you cannot bar two-thirds of Americans from using roads.
You must therefore decide that there is some amount of evil you need to tolerate for society to function at all. That "fighting evil" weighs more than "make society function" for you makes you a bigoted arsehole.
Fact: abortions occur. Always have, always will. They can occur in safe and sanitary circumstances or not. Forcing them to occur in unsanitary circumstances means you arbitrarily decided that the "life" of a foetus is worth more than the life of the woman bearing it. That makes you evil: you will accept actual death and pain to prevent potential death.
Also, as PP does, like roads, mostly other things than provide abortions, you are further either a hypocrite, or unthinking.
The point of fixing the leak is that they can keep circulating water. This is quite important:) Of course, this means that you end up with a flooded containment room (for it _is_ a containment room -- not the containment vessel, but it is distinct from the turbine building: you have the core, the containment vessel, a concrete room, then the rest of the building). The room will be flooded. But at this point, not much else can be hoped for. I completely expected melted cores, so it is actually turning out to be not quite as bad as I thought it would be.
Although I agree this is bad, I should correct you on one point: the big concrete building around the containment vessel is part of the security of the design: notably, the concrete foundation slab is much thicker than would be required for other types of building. Indeed, the fact that the water flooded the building is indication it is mostly watertight (concrete from the 60 cannot be airtight/watertight).
Specifically, the design is such that if the containment vessel starts melting, the corium will be stopped by the foundation. In fact the floor of the building is typically designed such that the molten metal be as spread as possible. Also, as we see here, the water is contained in the building -- to the extent that there is enough capacity -- instead of directly seeping into the ground.
But I agree: the breach of containment is BAD. This should never happen, and (throwing random hypothesis) maybe indicates that the earthquake did damage. The good news is that they seem to have found the leak, and therefore can attempt repairs.
Never mind the paranoïa about breeder plants. But as for the energy consumption? Energy and computational power are the same thing in the end: computation and variation of entropy can be shown experimentally to be the same.
Thus after all has become optimally efficient (within thermodynamically allowable bounds -- and we are surprisingly close in many instances), reducing the energy consumption would mean reducing the computational power of society, and thus make us collectively dumber. I cannot conceive of a desirable scenario where this happens.
In the future, we will all have our little fabs. And they will produce stuff for us. But to produce stuff, they will need to compute tool paths. And this is an NP-complete problem:)
So your point is what? You agree that storage is an issue, smart grids a necessity, baseline difficult to achieve.
The point is this: renewables are great. We should have as much as possible, as early as possible, but they will not be enough. You cannot wave your hand and say "people will stop consuming energy". They will not. In fact, a point will be reached were the political cost of not building nuclear plants will be higher than the reverse. But it will be too late: the plants need to be built now to come on-line in 10 years. They need to be breeder plants to phase out the older ones. And they will be used until fusion (or space solar) works.
We will never lower our energy use. This will not happen (it might happen, but then civilisation will collapse). Rather, we will be using more energy much better. Electric cars are good. Maglev trains are great. Data centres brilliant. Smart roads. Etc, etc. These will use more energy than what we have now. Just in a massively more efficient and clean way.
How do you think the generators are powered? From the grid baseline. You don't have big batteries;)
Dams are only usable half the year: reservoir fills (in the spring), then empties. The pumping back and forth makes it last longer, but is is not constant.
Yes hydro is great as a reservoir, but the capacity is limited, such that your maximum guaranteed output from wind and solar and hydro is in the order of twice the hydro power. This is very good, but not scalable. You definitely should do that. but it will only provide about half your needs (unless you are Switzerland, and hydro covers 60% of your needs already, so all-renewable would be possible if land were available -- alas it is not).
Energy production/export is not so simple: you may well export 25% and not have enough. Dams work in many cases as energy storage: in the hours where energy is cheap, diesel generators pump the water back so it can be sold at a higher price. However, they only produce through half the year (depending on the dam, location blah, blah). Solar and Wind energy ebbs and flows and is hard to store. Gas and coal plants can be stopped and started in a matter of hours/minutes. Nuclear plants takes days to stop and start. Thus a reasonable mix will have a nuclear baseline, as much renewable as possible and gas for backup emergency.
You can have a coal/fuel/gas baseline, but really, it says you don't care much about GW.
The North Sea fields are soon gone, thus all the pipeline politicking going on between the EU, Turkey and Russia... As for preferring to finance Putin rather than using nuclear power: let us just agree that our moral compasses are at odds.
Redundancy is important in infrastructure planning -- don't worry, the plants will get back online. With the current rate of renewables growth, you might reach 100% around 2060 (and some breakthrough with storage technology). Which you should strive for. But in the meantime, nuclear plants are necessary to solve the waste problem as well as providing carbon-and-blood-free electricity. Because the uranium, you buy from Canada, but the gas from Putin...
The solution to nuclear waste (the only one) is breeder plants. So you might as well get on with it, and enjoy the electricity.
But it is _stupid_ to store the waste. Idiotic. Dangerous and wasteful. It must be burnt in a breeder reactor!
Think about it: a reactor is just a radioactive decay accelerator. If you allow the decay to go all the way, you are left with lead, silver, etc. It is not feasible in a classical reactor, as the reaction cannot be sustained all the way. But in a breeder, it is.
We don't have breeders because of opposition to nuclear plants. We have opposition to plants because of waste.
Presumably, if it were only a technical issue, there would be no problems. As is, it is a political issue, and as no arguments is deemed valid with more than one step, we are fucked. But the antinuclear movement is in fact directly responsible for the absence of the implementation of the right solution to nuclear waste.
I did not mean that all carbon was human-originated -- this is clearly not the case. And of course there are many other greenhouse gases -- though carbon dioxide seems to be the principal culprit. Climate change is clearly there to stay, but unless emissions are somehow curbed, there will be dramatic consequences.
No. Just no. The scientific consensus is very clear. There is _no_ science on the side of climate change deniers. Where science means actual research by actual independent researchers publishing in actual journals.
a) breeder reactors will should be used at that point to get rid of the spent fuel. And it also good, because upgrade of nuclear plants should be forced. The absence of fuel is a good enforcement mechanism. b) when oil is worth 1000$ a barrel, you should stop burning it... It is way too valuable for that. As a positive side effect, chewing gums might also disappear.
We will never get away from oil. Just from oil as an energy source.
If you think the science on _both_ side of the climate change issue is bad, you need to stop drinking the spiked cool-aid... There is science on only one side of the debate (it exists, it is caused by carbon, and humans are emitting crazy amounts).
There is a lot of high-quality spin on the other side, though...
no, I left none of those. They are collectively the "renewables". And energy efficiency measures. But the latter will help not at all: more energy will be made available and will be used for other (granted hopefully more productive) purposes.
These are the future (and massive solar collectors in orbit;) )
But the reason you cannot magically build wind turbines is that for mere legal reasons, you will have delays of 2-4 years depending on where you want to build them. Then you need to update your grid, which is a massive undertaking. And in the end you need to provide for the baseline. And take into account that electricity consumption will explode with the coming of electric cars.
Going from large centralised plants to small decentralised sources is a huge shift in the energy network architecture. Saying "build more wind turbines" is as inane as the guy thinking there is no GW, and coal is cool. Of course you need to build wind turbines. Of course you need energy efficiency, of course you need solar, of course you need... etc., etc. But you need to allow for a doubling or trebling of the energy production! And this means nuclear.
Look at Germany. They build renewables like there is no tomorrow, and yet they need to open gas plants and coal plants, and import electricity from nuclear France. And they fight emission caps. Bloody hypocrites. Energy policy is for 50 years, not the current fad. Of course in the long term, you want to get rid of fission. In 50 years. When the grid is smart, the houses efficients, the building codes updated and batteries/solar cells/whatever tech is required works well.
This is true. People don't realise it but when you are thinking about energy policy, you are making a 50-year bet. So now the bet looks something like that:
- there will be no oil
- there will be lots of coal
- there will be uranium
- there should be wind and sun
but also
- geothermal might become practical
- carbon sequestration might become practical
- solar cells might become more efficient
- most cars will be electric
- global warming is a threat
- oil/gas producers are not always nice nations.
So demand in electricity will go massively up as oil is phased out. But you don't want to release too much CO2. Biofuels are probably not a good idea. So you are left, now with two possible strategies:
- use coal as a stopgap for renewables/fusion
- use nuclear as a stopgap for renewable/fusion
- maybe gas is an option. If you don't mind dealing with bloody tyrants.
If you believe in climate change, you will go down the nuclear route. Unless you are so committed against nuclear power that coal is the only option no matter what (Germany, a very, very green country battles against carbon caps in the EU, because they know nuclear is politically toxic and coal is their only option -- in my opinion this is crazy stupid).
Of course you must develop all alternatives as much as you can. This is the only long-term solution, but in energy, this means 40 years. And elections are every 4...
The investment thing is a fallacy. You are not going to start a new business: you got rich because presumably you worked (and are working) hard and have no time for that. Also you might have been lucky. In fact, I fully expect most rich people (who became rich) to be more lucky than brilliant (sure, brilliant also, you need that, but this is not nearly enough).
And even if you got rich, this does not prove you are good at investing, just good at what you do. No, your money will get into a bank and be invested by bankers.
Now the fun thing is that we just got proof that the bankers are actually terrible at investing. So I'll take my chance with the bureaucrat. At least, he has nothing to gain either way, and you can generally trust humans to try and do the right thing.
You also need to realise that things like schools and roads and sanitation and regulations don't bring in money, but they enable the creation of wealth. And you cannot count on an "investor" to give money for the good of all.
fascinating. "defencive" is known by my spell checker but not "defensive". However, I am convinced you are right, after checking 3-4 dictionaries. I learnt something today, thanks:)
Defencive. Some of us write with the proper British spelling. And if the revolution comes, bankers will be the first against the wall; I won't be doing the shooting, though. They cause unbalance in the economy (and wreaked it in recent memory), but particular punishments should not be dished out for collective hubris.
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Which is why pure speed is pointless: JFK to LHR (or CDG) is great. Except that with the airport security and procedures, and the city-to-airport travel which is damnably slow, it is pretty pointless.
When in the future, mass transit will have become massively efficient, and we all have chips implanted which will remove the need for humans to do border checks, then having a faster plane will again cause travel times to be significantly smaller.
when concorde was introduced, going to the airport would have taken 20 minutes, and the check-in procedures be completed in a couple more minutes. Then, of course, going at Mach 2 made sense.
Now, hours to reach the airports (three hours before departure) So your trip will last the day. Even if your plane is supersonic. So who cares?
The poor pay less as a proportion of the population. However, they pay more as a proportion of income. Middle class will pay in the order of 20-30% of their income, and the top 1%, in the order of 1-10% of their income. How is that "fair", and how will increasing the burden on the poorest correct this sorry state of affairs?
So as it happens, you don't need to raise taxes on the poor and middle class to equalise the brackets. Because the only equalisation which makes sense -- you pay as a proportion of what you earn -- would go the other way.
And taxes need to be raised. You cannot balance the budget without raising taxes. And taxes should be fair: you earn x% of the GDP, you pay x% of the taxes. No ifs or buts.
No bullshit about capital gains being about taking risk. No bullshit about debt servicing reducing revenue. No deductions for mortgages. No deduction for anything. Salaries/dividends/revenues are treated the same.
Let us, for the sake of it, assume abortions are the ultimate evil. In turn, let us assume, like you, that anything linked to the ultimate evil is tainted. We must conclude that roads should not be available to anyone related to providing or getting abortions.
Of course, this makes no sense: you cannot bar two-thirds of Americans from using roads.
You must therefore decide that there is some amount of evil you need to tolerate for society to function at all. That "fighting evil" weighs more than "make society function" for you makes you a bigoted arsehole.
Fact: abortions occur. Always have, always will. They can occur in safe and sanitary circumstances or not. Forcing them to occur in unsanitary circumstances means you arbitrarily decided that the "life" of a foetus is worth more than the life of the woman bearing it. That makes you evil: you will accept actual death and pain to prevent potential death.
Also, as PP does, like roads, mostly other things than provide abortions, you are further either a hypocrite, or unthinking.
The point of fixing the leak is that they can keep circulating water. This is quite important :) Of course, this means that you end up with a flooded containment room (for it _is_ a containment room -- not the containment vessel, but it is distinct from the turbine building: you have the core, the containment vessel, a concrete room, then the rest of the building). The room will be flooded. But at this point, not much else can be hoped for. I completely expected melted cores, so it is actually turning out to be not quite as bad as I thought it would be.
Yes, I am a bit of a pessimist :)
Although I agree this is bad, I should correct you on one point: the big concrete building around the containment vessel is part of the security of the design: notably, the concrete foundation slab is much thicker than would be required for other types of building. Indeed, the fact that the water flooded the building is indication it is mostly watertight (concrete from the 60 cannot be airtight/watertight).
Specifically, the design is such that if the containment vessel starts melting, the corium will be stopped by the foundation. In fact the floor of the building is typically designed such that the molten metal be as spread as possible. Also, as we see here, the water is contained in the building -- to the extent that there is enough capacity -- instead of directly seeping into the ground.
But I agree: the breach of containment is BAD. This should never happen, and (throwing random hypothesis) maybe indicates that the earthquake did damage. The good news is that they seem to have found the leak, and therefore can attempt repairs.
Never mind the paranoïa about breeder plants. But as for the energy consumption? Energy and computational power are the same thing in the end: computation and variation of entropy can be shown experimentally to be the same.
Thus after all has become optimally efficient (within thermodynamically allowable bounds -- and we are surprisingly close in many instances), reducing the energy consumption would mean reducing the computational power of society, and thus make us collectively dumber. I cannot conceive of a desirable scenario where this happens.
In the future, we will all have our little fabs. And they will produce stuff for us. But to produce stuff, they will need to compute tool paths. And this is an NP-complete problem :)
So your point is what? You agree that storage is an issue, smart grids a necessity, baseline difficult to achieve.
The point is this: renewables are great. We should have as much as possible, as early as possible, but they will not be enough. You cannot wave your hand and say "people will stop consuming energy". They will not. In fact, a point will be reached were the political cost of not building nuclear plants will be higher than the reverse. But it will be too late: the plants need to be built now to come on-line in 10 years. They need to be breeder plants to phase out the older ones. And they will be used until fusion (or space solar) works.
We will never lower our energy use. This will not happen (it might happen, but then civilisation will collapse). Rather, we will be using more energy much better. Electric cars are good. Maglev trains are great. Data centres brilliant. Smart roads. Etc, etc. These will use more energy than what we have now. Just in a massively more efficient and clean way.
How do you think the generators are powered? From the grid baseline. You don't have big batteries ;)
Dams are only usable half the year: reservoir fills (in the spring), then empties. The pumping back and forth makes it last longer, but is is not constant.
Yes hydro is great as a reservoir, but the capacity is limited, such that your maximum guaranteed output from wind and solar and hydro is in the order of twice the hydro power. This is very good, but not scalable. You definitely should do that. but it will only provide about half your needs (unless you are Switzerland, and hydro covers 60% of your needs already, so all-renewable would be possible if land were available -- alas it is not).
Energy production/export is not so simple: you may well export 25% and not have enough. Dams work in many cases as energy storage: in the hours where energy is cheap, diesel generators pump the water back so it can be sold at a higher price. However, they only produce through half the year (depending on the dam, location blah, blah). Solar and Wind energy ebbs and flows and is hard to store. Gas and coal plants can be stopped and started in a matter of hours/minutes. Nuclear plants takes days to stop and start. Thus a reasonable mix will have a nuclear baseline, as much renewable as possible and gas for backup emergency.
You can have a coal/fuel/gas baseline, but really, it says you don't care much about GW.
The North Sea fields are soon gone, thus all the pipeline politicking going on between the EU, Turkey and Russia... As for preferring to finance Putin rather than using nuclear power: let us just agree that our moral compasses are at odds.
Redundancy is important in infrastructure planning -- don't worry, the plants will get back online. With the current rate of renewables growth, you might reach 100% around 2060 (and some breakthrough with storage technology). Which you should strive for. But in the meantime, nuclear plants are necessary to solve the waste problem as well as providing carbon-and-blood-free electricity. Because the uranium, you buy from Canada, but the gas from Putin...
The solution to nuclear waste (the only one) is breeder plants. So you might as well get on with it, and enjoy the electricity.
But it is _stupid_ to store the waste. Idiotic. Dangerous and wasteful. It must be burnt in a breeder reactor!
Think about it: a reactor is just a radioactive decay accelerator. If you allow the decay to go all the way, you are left with lead, silver, etc. It is not feasible in a classical reactor, as the reaction cannot be sustained all the way. But in a breeder, it is.
We don't have breeders because of opposition to nuclear plants.
We have opposition to plants because of waste.
Presumably, if it were only a technical issue, there would be no problems. As is, it is a political issue, and as no arguments is deemed valid with more than one step, we are fucked. But the antinuclear movement is in fact directly responsible for the absence of the implementation of the right solution to nuclear waste.
I did not mean that all carbon was human-originated -- this is clearly not the case. And of course there are many other greenhouse gases -- though carbon dioxide seems to be the principal culprit. Climate change is clearly there to stay, but unless emissions are somehow curbed, there will be dramatic consequences.
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=gm&v=83
Being a net exporter does not mean you can provide for your baseline. Wind is no good for the baseline without a smart grid.
No. Just no. The scientific consensus is very clear. There is _no_ science on the side of climate change deniers. Where science means actual research by actual independent researchers publishing in actual journals.
Which is just fine.
a) breeder reactors will should be used at that point to get rid of the spent fuel. And it also good, because upgrade of nuclear plants should be forced. The absence of fuel is a good enforcement mechanism.
b) when oil is worth 1000$ a barrel, you should stop burning it... It is way too valuable for that. As a positive side effect, chewing gums might also disappear.
We will never get away from oil. Just from oil as an energy source.
If you think the science on _both_ side of the climate change issue is bad, you need to stop drinking the spiked cool-aid... There is science on only one side of the debate (it exists, it is caused by carbon, and humans are emitting crazy amounts).
There is a lot of high-quality spin on the other side, though...
no, I left none of those. They are collectively the "renewables". And energy efficiency measures. But the latter will help not at all: more energy will be made available and will be used for other (granted hopefully more productive) purposes.
These are the future (and massive solar collectors in orbit ;) )
But the reason you cannot magically build wind turbines is that for mere legal reasons, you will have delays of 2-4 years depending on where you want to build them. Then you need to update your grid, which is a massive undertaking. And in the end you need to provide for the baseline. And take into account that electricity consumption will explode with the coming of electric cars.
Going from large centralised plants to small decentralised sources is a huge shift in the energy network architecture. Saying "build more wind turbines" is as inane as the guy thinking there is no GW, and coal is cool. Of course you need to build wind turbines. Of course you need energy efficiency, of course you need solar, of course you need... etc., etc. But you need to allow for a doubling or trebling of the energy production! And this means nuclear.
Look at Germany. They build renewables like there is no tomorrow, and yet they need to open gas plants and coal plants, and import electricity from nuclear France. And they fight emission caps. Bloody hypocrites. Energy policy is for 50 years, not the current fad. Of course in the long term, you want to get rid of fission. In 50 years. When the grid is smart, the houses efficients, the building codes updated and batteries/solar cells/whatever tech is required works well.
This is true. I tend to forget the algae path. Well, add one more option, then :)
This is true. People don't realise it but when you are thinking about energy policy, you are making a 50-year bet. So now the bet looks something like that:
- there will be no oil
- there will be lots of coal
- there will be uranium
- there should be wind and sun
but also
- geothermal might become practical
- carbon sequestration might become practical
- solar cells might become more efficient
- most cars will be electric
- global warming is a threat
- oil/gas producers are not always nice nations.
So demand in electricity will go massively up as oil is phased out. But you don't want to release too much CO2. Biofuels are probably not a good idea. So you are left, now with two possible strategies:
- use coal as a stopgap for renewables/fusion
- use nuclear as a stopgap for renewable/fusion
- maybe gas is an option. If you don't mind dealing with bloody tyrants.
If you believe in climate change, you will go down the nuclear route. Unless you are so committed against nuclear power that coal is the only option no matter what (Germany, a very, very green country battles against carbon caps in the EU, because they know nuclear is politically toxic and coal is their only option -- in my opinion this is crazy stupid).
Of course you must develop all alternatives as much as you can. This is the only long-term solution, but in energy, this means 40 years. And elections are every 4...
I kid you not: my spell checker really has that bug (defencive/defensive).
Oh, I am aware of that. But this unbalance is very much found everywhere.
The investment thing is a fallacy. You are not going to start a new business: you got rich because presumably you worked (and are working) hard and have no time for that. Also you might have been lucky. In fact, I fully expect most rich people (who became rich) to be more lucky than brilliant (sure, brilliant also, you need that, but this is not nearly enough).
And even if you got rich, this does not prove you are good at investing, just good at what you do. No, your money will get into a bank and be invested by bankers.
Now the fun thing is that we just got proof that the bankers are actually terrible at investing. So I'll take my chance with the bureaucrat. At least, he has nothing to gain either way, and you can generally trust humans to try and do the right thing.
You also need to realise that things like schools and roads and sanitation and regulations don't bring in money, but they enable the creation of wealth. And you cannot count on an "investor" to give money for the good of all.
fascinating. "defencive" is known by my spell checker but not "defensive". However, I am convinced you are right, after checking 3-4 dictionaries. I learnt something today, thanks :)
Defencive. Some of us write with the proper British spelling. And if the revolution comes, bankers will be the first against the wall; I won't be doing the shooting, though. They cause unbalance in the economy (and wreaked it in recent memory), but particular punishments should not be dished out for collective hubris.
Now higher taxation, I would support.