Apologies: too much of a generalization, I was somewhat tarring all the greens with the same brush as the hardline green parties and organizations like greenpeace.
No you're doing the multiplying thing, that was already including mines which aren't currently being used.
It did ignore thorium.
that was however assuming no breeders and assuming no increase in the price of uranium.
There's enough uranium that unless we're very stupid about how we use it we could supply all our power needs for thousands of years but I'd be very dubious about your claim of 250K.
That assumes perfect use of fuel, no increase in demand and perfect extraction of fuel.
now now, renewable is a fair term: you can recycle the old broken components from a plant but you can't get coal back from fly ash.
If they called it "free energy" but renewable is fair.
Also I take it you never played hearts of iron: it had a realistic tech tree, much like in real life trying to extend one area of research far ahead of everything else is insanely expensive while a low bushy tech tree can be cheaper and leave you better off.
You seem to have thought this out a lot though your point 4 I'd challenge. Professors can be wrong sometimes or simply misleading.
16% of the worlds energy already comes from nuclear.
There is apparently a 230-year estimate supply extractable at today's consumption rate with current technologyat current market prices at current rates of use.
36.8 years if tomorrow every single plant was replaced with nuclear if you don't use breeder reactors.
With breeder reactors you could multiply that by something like 50-100 Long enough that it's not a significant worry.
Current market prices is also important: if you increase the price, say double it, then that dramatically increases while not significantly increasing the price of running a nuclear plant as the fuel is very cheap compared to building the reactor.
Now there's claims that it is possible to extract uranium from seawater for about 5 or 6 times the current market price which effectively sets an upper limit on the price of uranium and would supply it forever but I'll wait till I see any kind of large scale operation.
point 2 is valid though it's also true of most industry, hazardous waste can be a serious long term issue even if it's not radioactive, it just doesn't get the same media attention.
point 3 is the most significant one for much of the human race and extremely valid.
I quite agree, yes the greens are not one single group but every hardliner "political" or activist style green I've ever talked to about such things has seemed to have some kind of image in their head of people living in lots of little spread out farmsteads and doing away with big industry... quite divorced from what's actually good for the environment.
I think this plant is a good thing too, I'd love to see the deserts covered in solar thermal if it can be done for a halfway decent price and unlike it's cousin PV solar thermal has the potential to provide reliable power and be more than a toy.
side point:I'm curious what water source it uses for the generators.
You post was blatantly misleading. Yes they don't "have to" but they also don't "have to" live in a house or "have to" have shoes. In reality almost all small startups : ie ones not started by someone with daddies money behind them involve the owners taking on large amounts of personal debt and a large portion of those companies end up folding.
If you want a chunk of the rewards then take some of the risk and throw your own money into the pot at the start.
since LLC's are apparently such an insanely easy and risk free way to make money you do have all your personal savings invested in small startups due to the oh so low risk and huge rewards right? Right?
That's because greens don't hate pollution or love the planet, they simply hate modern industrialization- once any power source becomes serious to the point where you might run a big grey,boring, serious factory off it rather than just some desk lights in an idyllic farmstead it becomes the enemy.
Tidal was a darling until the first big tital plants actually started being built.
The details are just justification. it boils down to factories and cities: bad, little cottages in the mountains:good.
I'm curious: how much do you believe cancer rates went up in eastern europe after Chernobyl? There was a significant increase in thyroid cancers due to the radioactive iodine which is readily absorbed by the body but that's fortunately a very treatable form of cancer.
I've gone looking for stats for an increase in cancer rates and with the exception of the thyroid cancers I've never been able to find much.
in the case of failure it does make land unusable for a long time, hydro makes huge areas of land unusable for as long as your have a dam- which could be effectively forever by design and 100% of the time when it's working correctly.
something can be expensive to build and maintain and still be worth the money many times over. the US rail and road networks are incredibly expensive to build and maintain yet they're worth the cost.
Now I couldn't even take a guess as whether it could be worth the cost since we don't even know what a space elevator might cost so I'm going to stick to fairly safe and general statements and simply argue that there are a lot of possibilities unless a space elevator would cost trillions.
there's a hell of a lot of possibly very valuable applications if you could ship things to orbit for a very low price.
orbital power arrays would be fairly sensible and could even be cheaper long term than some of the current energy production methods: get even a fraction of the world energy market and you'd be able to make/save a lot of money. There's some added advantages with zero pollution etc If it's one country building the elevator they could almost monopolize the market for a fair amount of time and rake in money building arrays for other countries.
Once you build one elevator any more become far cheaper to build so much of the construction costs of the first could be spread out over multiple such elevators.
any country which can ship lots of hardware into space for a low cost would also gain a significant military advantage: it's hard to build a bunker which can survive a thick tungsten bar dropped from orbit.
There's pretty much the whole current worldwide market for launching satellites for communication and anything else which you'd pretty much take over.
So you've got the energy market, the military market, the current space market and probably quite a few I've not thought of for income and those are big big markets.
superinjunctions are nothing new, they've become quite popular in the UK and sometimes they don't leak. Even when they do they stop the big papers from publishing the info and getting it to 99% of the population.
It's a very very valid point about solar 45 degrees+ from the equator.
Trying to run anything serious off batteries, flywheels or even pumped storage is barely sane overnight in places on the equator.
Trying to do the same during winter far from the equator is even less sane.
-Hydro is lovely but very limited unless you're in Brazil, the best sources are already being tapped already and it screws with the river ecosystem and makes vast tracts of land unusable. -Wind is nice but is very unreliable, 20% of your grid is somewhat of an upper limit if you want to keep the grid any way stable. -Solar is still a toy unless you talk to a solar panel salesman. -Geothermal is glorious if you happen to be in iceland. -Tidal is sorta ok until you get serious and then the greens hate it because it totally destroys coastal ecosystems.
And then there's fossil fuels which are terrible on almost every front.
finally there's nuclear which simply kills less people than getting your electricity from fossil fuels but the way it kills people- cancer happens to be how 25% of everyone dies anyway so if an accident happens which raises that to 25.001% then you get the blame for the other 25.000% and everyone will always have lots of people they knew who died of cancer and in their minds every single one of those deaths will be the fault of nuclear.
yes, so many many games seem to invest everything in making things look pretty and somewhere along the way... they forget it's supposed to be a game they're making rather than some kind of interactive movie.
Somewhere around Oblivion or perhaps slightly beyond that is where I stop caring about how pretty a game is and being able to see every follicle on a characters beard really doesn't add much for me.
On the other hand being able to interact with the world in more interesting ways, have the game surprise me with unexpected events or just having a good story adds massively to a game no matter if it looks like crysis or dwarf fortress.
actually there's some decent fan-made maps out there for portal that lend it some more time and it's a fun one to mess around in. it is telling though that I enjoy myself just as much when replaying oblivion but dragon age was painful to try playing through again.
The fact that fast breeder reactors are currently not allowed to be built in the US has little to do with the actual technology. you made a sweeping false statement about reactors, you didn't limit it to "at least the ones we're allowed build in the states"
And did you even read the links?
the supercritical water reactor is a once through reactor (though it can apparently be built as a breeder as well),does not use a graphite moderator and is more efficient specifically because of higher temperature and higher thermal efficiency.
But it was far far too much effort for you to drag your cursor all the way across the screen and google it.
So anyway. in conclusion. -Stop listening to the mad voices in your head. -I said nothing about graphite and -the majority of genIV reactor designs don't use graphite moderators.
also you might want to get educated on subjects before pretending you're doing anything but pulling fantasies out of your ass.
you do know that most of the proposed gen IV reactors don't use graphite moderators right? I mean surely you have at least a clue what you're talking about right?
ferment civil unrest in America, cause America to piss of many of it's allies and destabalise the political and economic foundation of the country.
you ferment civil unrest and dissatisfaction when the government shits all over it's citizens rights. Torture camps and whisking away the citizens of other countries to those torture camps helps to strain americas relationship with it's allies. Finally the cost of wars and the cost of all the anti-terrorism measures fuck with the economic stability of the country.
Keep it going long enough and it all falls apart and they win. Keeping a superpower fucking around in the mountains of afghanistan already contributed to one superpower falling, perhaps they're hoping the same will happen again.
no need for villians who hate you for your freedom- pissing away money and shitting all over your citizens rights plays right into their hands anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I see some people have problems recognizing a joke.
Try reading the sentence I ended on.
Apologies: too much of a generalization, I was somewhat tarring all the greens with the same brush as the hardline green parties and organizations like greenpeace.
No you're doing the multiplying thing, that was already including mines which aren't currently being used.
It did ignore thorium.
that was however assuming no breeders and assuming no increase in the price of uranium.
There's enough uranium that unless we're very stupid about how we use it we could supply all our power needs for thousands of years but I'd be very dubious about your claim of 250K.
That assumes perfect use of fuel, no increase in demand and perfect extraction of fuel.
now now, renewable is a fair term: you can recycle the old broken components from a plant but you can't get coal back from fly ash.
If they called it "free energy" but renewable is fair.
Also I take it you never played hearts of iron: it had a realistic tech tree, much like in real life trying to extend one area of research far ahead of everything else is insanely expensive while a low bushy tech tree can be cheaper and leave you better off.
get back to me in 50 years after a lot have been built.
I'm sure something will have happened by then, one will have fallen over and crushed a school or something.
They seem fairly safe if a bit on the expensive and land hungry side.
You seem to have thought this out a lot though your point 4 I'd challenge.
Professors can be wrong sometimes or simply misleading.
16% of the worlds energy already comes from nuclear.
There is apparently a 230-year estimate supply extractable at today's consumption rate with current technologyat current market prices at current rates of use.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last
36.8 years if tomorrow every single plant was replaced with nuclear if you don't use breeder reactors.
With breeder reactors you could multiply that by something like 50-100
Long enough that it's not a significant worry.
Current market prices is also important: if you increase the price, say double it, then that dramatically increases while not significantly increasing the price of running a nuclear plant as the fuel is very cheap compared to building the reactor.
Now there's claims that it is possible to extract uranium from seawater for about 5 or 6 times the current market price which effectively sets an upper limit on the price of uranium and would supply it forever but I'll wait till I see any kind of large scale operation.
point 2 is valid though it's also true of most industry, hazardous waste can be a serious long term issue even if it's not radioactive, it just doesn't get the same media attention.
point 3 is the most significant one for much of the human race and extremely valid.
I quite agree, yes the greens are not one single group but every hardliner "political" or activist style green I've ever talked to about such things has seemed to have some kind of image in their head of people living in lots of little spread out farmsteads and doing away with big industry... quite divorced from what's actually good for the environment.
I think this plant is a good thing too, I'd love to see the deserts covered in solar thermal if it can be done for a halfway decent price and unlike it's cousin PV solar thermal has the potential to provide reliable power and be more than a toy.
side point:I'm curious what water source it uses for the generators.
Since it's such a trivial and easy hack I assume you've taken this approach and founded your own business by now to take advantage of this?
right?
I mean if you knew of a really easy way to make lots of money with no risk surely you'd be a fool not to use it.
You post was blatantly misleading. Yes they don't "have to" but they also don't "have to" live in a house or "have to" have shoes.
In reality almost all small startups : ie ones not started by someone with daddies money behind them involve the owners taking on large amounts of personal debt and a large portion of those companies end up folding.
If you want a chunk of the rewards then take some of the risk and throw your own money into the pot at the start.
since LLC's are apparently such an insanely easy and risk free way to make money you do have all your personal savings invested in small startups due to the oh so low risk and huge rewards right?
Right?
That's because greens don't hate pollution or love the planet, they simply hate modern industrialization- once any power source becomes serious to the point where you might run a big grey,boring, serious factory off it rather than just some desk lights in an idyllic farmstead it becomes the enemy.
Tidal was a darling until the first big tital plants actually started being built.
The details are just justification.
it boils down to factories and cities: bad,
little cottages in the mountains:good.
an hydro dam is a dangerous thing: more dangerous than a nuclear plant looking at history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
a coal plant is a dangerous thing but it's a sort of low level constant danger.
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm
drilling a hole for gas or geothermal is a dangerous thing
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Locals_Block_Work_At_Indonesian_Mud_Volcano_999.html
etc etc
Every energy source has dangers and problems.
So it makes sense to simply pick the ones which kill the fewest people overall.
[citation needed]
I'm curious: how much do you believe cancer rates went up in eastern europe after Chernobyl?
There was a significant increase in thyroid cancers due to the radioactive iodine which is readily absorbed by the body but that's fortunately a very treatable form of cancer.
I've gone looking for stats for an increase in cancer rates and with the exception of the thyroid cancers I've never been able to find much.
in the case of failure it does make land unusable for a long time, hydro makes huge areas of land unusable for as long as your have a dam- which could be effectively forever by design and 100% of the time when it's working correctly.
something can be expensive to build and maintain and still be worth the money many times over.
the US rail and road networks are incredibly expensive to build and maintain yet they're worth the cost.
Now I couldn't even take a guess as whether it could be worth the cost since we don't even know what a space elevator might cost so I'm going to stick to fairly safe and general statements and simply argue that there are a lot of possibilities unless a space elevator would cost trillions.
there's a hell of a lot of possibly very valuable applications if you could ship things to orbit for a very low price.
orbital power arrays would be fairly sensible and could even be cheaper long term than some of the current energy production methods: get even a fraction of the world energy market and you'd be able to make/save a lot of money.
There's some added advantages with zero pollution etc
If it's one country building the elevator they could almost monopolize the market for a fair amount of time and rake in money building arrays for other countries.
Once you build one elevator any more become far cheaper to build so much of the construction costs of the first could be spread out over multiple such elevators.
any country which can ship lots of hardware into space for a low cost would also gain a significant military advantage: it's hard to build a bunker which can survive a thick tungsten bar dropped from orbit.
There's pretty much the whole current worldwide market for launching satellites for communication and anything else which you'd pretty much take over.
So you've got the energy market, the military market, the current space market and probably quite a few I've not thought of for income and those are big big markets.
In the US there's a run around that as well: even if what you say is true you can be sued.
http://reason.com/blog/2011/03/16/this-week-in-free-speech
superinjunctions are nothing new, they've become quite popular in the UK and sometimes they don't leak.
Even when they do they stop the big papers from publishing the info and getting it to 99% of the population.
It's a very very valid point about solar 45 degrees+ from the equator.
Trying to run anything serious off batteries, flywheels or even pumped storage is barely sane overnight in places on the equator.
Trying to do the same during winter far from the equator is even less sane.
-Hydro is lovely but very limited unless you're in Brazil, the best sources are already being tapped already and it screws with the river ecosystem and makes vast tracts of land unusable.
-Wind is nice but is very unreliable, 20% of your grid is somewhat of an upper limit if you want to keep the grid any way stable.
-Solar is still a toy unless you talk to a solar panel salesman.
-Geothermal is glorious if you happen to be in iceland.
-Tidal is sorta ok until you get serious and then the greens hate it because it totally destroys coastal ecosystems.
And then there's fossil fuels which are terrible on almost every front.
finally there's nuclear which simply kills less people than getting your electricity from fossil fuels but the way it kills people- cancer happens to be how 25% of everyone dies anyway so if an accident happens which raises that to 25.001% then you get the blame for the other 25.000% and everyone will always have lots of people they knew who died of cancer and in their minds every single one of those deaths will be the fault of nuclear.
yes, so many many games seem to invest everything in making things look pretty and somewhere along the way... they forget it's supposed to be a game they're making rather than some kind of interactive movie.
Somewhere around Oblivion or perhaps slightly beyond that is where I stop caring about how pretty a game is and being able to see every follicle on a characters beard really doesn't add much for me.
On the other hand being able to interact with the world in more interesting ways, have the game surprise me with unexpected events or just having a good story adds massively to a game no matter if it looks like crysis or dwarf fortress.
2,977 victims died in the 9/11 attacks.
There's also the 10 years before 9/11 as well for anyone who wants to credit the lack of deaths since then to the new orwellian measures.
with the exception of 2001 bees fairly reliably kill more people than terrists do in the US every year.
actually there's some decent fan-made maps out there for portal that lend it some more time and it's a fun one to mess around in.
it is telling though that I enjoy myself just as much when replaying oblivion but dragon age was painful to try playing through again.
freedom makes a game so much more replayable.
how long ago was it they wanted to prevent a man with no legs running in the olympics because they thought he'd have an unfair advantage?
The fact that fast breeder reactors are currently not allowed to be built in the US has little to do with the actual technology.
you made a sweeping false statement about reactors, you didn't limit it to "at least the ones we're allowed build in the states"
And did you even read the links?
the supercritical water reactor is a once through reactor (though it can apparently be built as a breeder as well) ,does not use a graphite moderator and is more efficient specifically because of higher temperature and higher thermal efficiency.
lets see
Supercritical water reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_water_reactor
Operates at far higher pressure and temperature than current reactors.
No graphite.
Gas-cooled fast reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_cooled_fast_reactor
far higher operating temperatures.
No graphite.
Sodium-cooled fast reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
Cooler than the last 2 but still far hotter than most current reactors.
No graphite.
Lead-cooled fast reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_cooled_fast_reactor
Cooler than the last 2 but still far hotter than most current reactors.
No graphite.
But it was far far too much effort for you to drag your cursor all the way across the screen and google it.
So anyway.
in conclusion.
-Stop listening to the mad voices in your head.
-I said nothing about graphite and
-the majority of genIV reactor designs don't use graphite moderators.
also you might want to get educated on subjects before pretending you're doing anything but pulling fantasies out of your ass.
and?
you do know that most of the proposed gen IV reactors don't use graphite moderators right?
I mean surely you have at least a clue what you're talking about right?
ferment civil unrest in America, cause America to piss of many of it's allies and destabalise the political and economic foundation of the country.
you ferment civil unrest and dissatisfaction when the government shits all over it's citizens rights.
Torture camps and whisking away the citizens of other countries to those torture camps helps to strain americas relationship with it's allies.
Finally the cost of wars and the cost of all the anti-terrorism measures fuck with the economic stability of the country.
Keep it going long enough and it all falls apart and they win.
Keeping a superpower fucking around in the mountains of afghanistan already contributed to one superpower falling, perhaps they're hoping the same will happen again.
no need for villians who hate you for your freedom- pissing away money and shitting all over your citizens rights plays right into their hands anyway.