second that. In fact, when you look at it a bit longer this whole war is based on cultural differences. To literally enforce your culture on anybody will generate a backlash. Even when it's through 'normal' trade there can still be a backlash (for instance the McDonalds firebombings in France). People strangely enough seem to resent being forced to adopt another culture. These things take time... decades, if not centuries.
anybody that takes internet 'slander' serious should grow a thicker skin. And anybody that believes everything that they see on the internet should get some skepticism grafts.
the larger the worlds population the smaller the chance that you have an orginal thought. And with the number of people being networked it is more and more becoming a matter of who can reach the patent office first rather than who should be credited with an 'invention'.
Try coming up with something TRUELY original that stands by itself.
I have the illustrious honour of being 'credited' with 'inventing' the live streaming webcam, but in reality there isn't much to that 'invention', it's just a bunch of code written around the jpeg 6 and the socket library, both of which are a lot more complicated than my 'glue'. Add to that the fact that the 'player' is the browser and there isn't much left of an 'invention' to claim at all. So what if I was the first, I figure that thousands of people have written code like that by now. That doesn't mean I'm happy with those that blatanty ripped off the code but hey, that's the internet for you, shit like that simply happens.
I'll stick with the science people as well, but preferably those that don't have a direct stake in the technology being reviewed. I think if you are eating out of the research budget you should not be in on the policy decisions. That's good practice in accounting and the same goes for science. You want to see a clear separation between those that 'do' and those that 'check'. Science run wild is just as bad as anything else without controls, and possibly worse. Politicians and scientists collaborating to undermine the public good and plunder the planet is the worst of both. Monsanto comes to mind in this context.
Politicians are the scum of the earth as things are right now, but I'm not convinced that a 'meritocracy' based on your scientific status would be any better. From what I can see of the scientific world from my position it is mostly about ego, and that is pretty close to how politicians operate. All these parties have an agenda, as someone without any clout in either of these worlds I like 'full disclosure'.
so, really all we need is a billionaire with vision to go and pull this off. If it's that simple I sure hope that someone will get the attention of Branson, Gates, the google guys and whoever else is in that league. If the pay off is uncertain a consortium of sorts would be a neat solution to get this done.
Science, like everything else can be used for good or for bad.
Another nice example is genetically modified foods, and I think that before we push any technology on the world at large we need to make a serious study of the impact in the longer term, not just the short term benefits.
To give the creators of any technology the final say over its deployment or perceived safety is irresponsible at best.
Technology affects *ALL* of us, not just the people with the PhD's and other degrees that can come up with it, we all have to live with the consequences as well.
To simply take the word of a scientist with a vested interest in any technology about its safety is not good stewardship. Science has a fairly long history of being driven by the fascination with technology, not with it's responsible application.
How else would you explain such things as bio weapons, nuclear bombs and so on ?
I'd expect slashdot to have a larger than average percentage of viewers that are in some way or other involved in scientific research. I also sincerely hope that they look further than their desks or lab benches to look at the consequences of their research and to help make sure that it is applied in a responsible way.
Propaganda is the tool of choice for anybody pushing a certain viewpoint or technology down our collective throats, and to me it doesn't matter if some guy in a white lab coat is trying to ram the latest brand of toothpaste down my throat or nuclear power. It is our collective responsibility to use science as a tool, which means that we, all of us are supposed to be in control and not the people who create the tool.
If we don't do that then we'll have problems bigger than the scientists can solve. The tool will control us instead of the other way around.
coal fired electrical generation is indeed very much polluting and I'm well aware of it.
In case it wasn't clear from the rest of my postings above, I am not in any way afraid of 'low level dose' exposure in the long term, we are all going to die sooner or later anyway.
I just wished that the proponents of any technology would be able to see the ups AND the downs of the tech so that we can come to some kind of a reasonable debate. To simply ignore the dangers of any technology (GM food, clones, nuclear power and so on) is not wise, then you will find out about the dangers through avoidable incidents. Anything that can generate electricity from radioactive isotopes at the levels quoted in the original article is going to be inherently unsafe. Even at relatively high efficiencies (say on the order of 80%, which in practice probably won't be achieved) you are looking at a massive cooling problem and quite probably a serious risk in the case of breaching the containment vessel.
That is something we have learned to deal with to a large extent at the upper end of the scale when looking at nuclear power, specifically the new breed of reactors (pebble bed). But on a small scale (say in the 10 KW to 20 MW range) the number of required reactors would be so large that incidents would be a certainty. It's a bit like air travel, people are scared of air travel more than they are of travelling by road because they perceive the risk as being larger where in fact it is smaller. This mostly due to the fact that there are many more individual movements of vehicles on the road than there are of aircraft, and a single airplane (usually) holds more people than a car does.
My point is (and it is very possibly a wrong one but I have yet to see a single argument that really held water) is that if you spread nuclear technology around where say every town with > 5000 residents could have their own nuclear reactor (and the device mentioned in the article definitely qualifies as a reactor, even if they would like to suggest that it is not) that we would see a dramatic rise in the number of nuclear incidents, not to mention the security headaches this would bring along as well.
I agree that short term probably nuclear is the only way to go, but I really do think that the waste and safety issues are not 'overblown'. Especially waste will take a lot of work to be solved in such a way that we don't simply push the cost of cleanup in to the future.
And the smaller the devices the bigger the safety issues. It's a simple function of the number of of devices (possible targets), even if the damage done per incident goes down the chances of an incident will go up.
Whether wind farms are 'unsightly' is a matter of taste, the same argument was made in the 1600's in the Netherlands and people are still coming here from all over the world to look at the windmills. A good part of that comes from people who are against any form of change, no matter what. I'd certainly be rather looking out my window at a bunch of windmills than at a nuclear dome.
Hydro electric dams can be constructed in such a way that they do minimal damage, especially if they do not create a large basin but are in an area where there is plenty of flow, Sweden has a lot of experience with this. For the UK that would not work however.
And yes, time is running out and something needs to be done.
> Also known as "movie plot threats", some of which wouldn't even make a decent movie.
such as flying airplanes into sky scrapers ? it'd sure be a shitty movie.
> Indeed anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together can probably think of a few.
A couple of years ago on a trip through the US I was sitting around in the evening with a bunch of friends and we were wondering out loud what you could do if you were a terrorist with a $200 budget and plenty of time. The amount of ideas and the ease with which they were implementable was just staggering, but all of them lacked one crucial ingredient for a terrorist, they were not 'mediagenic', in other words they were not sexy enough. But each and every one of them would cripple a large part of society. So, a good terrorist device has to have several conditions satisified, but body count is probably quite low on the list of features.
> You also need people prepared to do them, of which there dosn't appear to be that many..
let's hope you are right on that front. What has happened already has so far exceeded my imagination.
it's true that there are plenty of things that are unsafe when not properly handled, but some things are less safe than others. We don't have safety procedures for handling lots of stuff in place for nothing.
I'm not from the 'all risks are unacceptable' camp, and some radiation exposure is inevitable (and quite possibly one of the driving forces behind mutations in evolution).
I do think that there are good arguments pro nuclear power, but there are also plenty of arguments against. The biggest of these are:
- waste - safety - containment in case the 'safety' bit fails
And the proponents of nuclear tech are very quick to gloss over these as if they don't exist, the detractors are just as quick to magnify them beyond proportion, the truth (as usual) is somewhere in the middle and before we start spreading this stuff far and wide we will need to take a long hard look at what the long term effects will be. We are really only borrowing this planet from our children and grand children after all.
but I'm sure that if he is then he would have put his bias on the line before getting his 'pro nuclear' message out there just so we would know who we are dealing with here.
You make a good point, in fact that 20 GW is only about 6% of the total energy produced in Germany. A big part of the problem here is that Germany is one of the most industrial nations in Europe, the infamous 'Ruhr' area is host to so much industry that it's probably easier to talk about smog quality than air quality there:)
The coal burning plants are really bad, they cause tons of trouble downstream, but with the scrubbers in place at least the particulate pollution is a little better than it was in the past.
Due to the pressure of time nuclear power is probably the only viable short term solution, but the waste problem is still a very big issue, small scale nuclear power should definitely be off the table imho (see postings above), and we should spend massive funds on R&D to get us out of this dependency problem and move towards a truely sustainable future.
That may mean cutting down on energy consumption quite drastically, it's a fact that conservation is a lot cheaper and easier to achieve than generation. Heatpumps instead of natural gas burning for domestic heating would help a lot as well by the way.
> Al Qaeda? Show me Al Qaeda. Not the US-Government spun version - but actually who they are.
At present, Al Qaeda is whoever says they're associated with Al Qaeda. I know that sounds like a cop-out but these guys don't exactly keep a public membership roster. It is estimated that world wide at least serveral tens of thousands of people subscribe to the basic tenets of this 'organization', which are that they need to try to take this world back to where we were centuries ago, and failing that to kill as many people as they can get away with. It's hard to try to get into the mind-set of a person that can subscribe to this, but there are enough gullible idiots in this world that we have a real problem here. The label Al Qaeda is as much a media invention as anything else, it exists because we like to label things for convenience, otherwise you have nothing to talk about. Again, there are only facts, no fear mongering or sticking your head in the sand is going to change those facts. The dis-enfranchised muslim youths in western europe are prime target for recruitment into these loose aggregations of dissatisfied people. They are unhappy with the prospects that life is offering them and these organizations give them a way to vent their anger.
For the record, I'm Dutch, and have lived all over the world, I've seen up close what religious hatred can make people do and I'm seriously impressed with the kind of idiocy people are prepared to subscribe to in the name of their religion. And that - again for the record - includes all religions.
What the US is doing in Iraq is despicable, I have no other words for it. It is a false flag operation so large and so totally ruthlessly sold to the public that it makes me wonder about what we are going to have to do to ever get the world back on an even footing after this. America has lost each and every bit of goodwill that it had in the rest of the world because of it (except maybe in Poland). Time will tell if there is a way out of the hole that has been dug there but from where I'm sitting I can't see it ending in on a positive note.
The fact that the US can now designate anybody a US enemy combatant and that habeas corpus is effectively disbanded is a very scary development, it is a harbinger of the world to come and it is something that the American public should react against until the issue gets solved.
However, given the fact that the superbowl, britney's latest album and reality tv are more on the radar than what is happening to the foundations of society almost guarantee that not enough people are going to wake up to do something about it until it is way too late.
Solar power and wind power combined with a viable short term storage medium (superconducting coils or something to that effect) would work just fine, you'd need a substantial amount of overcapacity though. The only reason there is no alternative for fossil fuels is because we've wasted the better part of 30 years to create a viable and non-polluting alternative. If all the money that has gone in to the 'oil wars' (and those that are probably still to come) had been invested into r&d then I'm pretty sure we'd have had a real long term solution by now. Pellet reactors are a new development, and if they're as safe as they are purported to be (which only time will tell, 'normal' nuclear reactors were supposed to be safe as well when they were first introduced) then they have my vote as a short term solution. Small scale, city sized thermal nuclear reactors definitely do *not* have my vote, and there is nothing irrational about that, it simply seems to me to be asking for trouble.
> 0. You need to go learn a lot more about physics, radioactivity, power generation, the biological effects of radiation, logic, risk assessment, and terrorism before continuing to make assertions that are based on false assumptions.
please don't patronize, it's unattractive.
ad. 1, I disagree, so does the German government, at present there is > 20,000 MW of installed wind power in Germany and the plans are to increase that substantially in the near future.
ad. 2, my personal view on these matters are not very relevant, but the facts that you state exist but do not support in any way are that nuclear radiation is not safe. If you disagree with that then I suggest you sleep with a large block of uranium under your pillow for a couple of months to prove me wrong. All the shielding and safety precautions in nuclear installations is of course just window dressing to keep the 'uninformed' like myself happy.
ad. 3, I see, you know better. Tell you what, I am not too impressed with democracy either but for now it seems to be the best we've got. To say that if people disagree with you they should lose their voice shows that you are not willing to have it any way but your way.
You're assuming that I have smoke alarms, which I don't, but I get your point. Lots of stuff is radio active, but the amount of radioactive material in a smoke alarm is fairly small compared to the amount that would go in to a thermal radio-isotope generator in the 10's of megawatt range. (or even one that would only do a couple of kilowatts). Which makes me wonder if you would put in an order for several 10's of thousands of smoke alarms if that would trigger a red flag somewhere:)
> I believe radioactivity is a great way to generate electricity.
And I don't. It's as simple as that. Spreading out radioactive materials all over the globe in an attempt to generate power when power is available in much less dangerous forms to me seems like a stupid thing to do. The sun puts about 1KW / square metre on the ground at full illumination, wind power is available in vast quantities. And yes, there are literally 100's of thousands of people involved in industries today to make power generated by these renewable sources cheaper, more reliable and more plentiful.
The French have a lot of nuclear power, that is true. They also have a pretty serious nuclear waste problem.
To take any objection against nuclear power as 'fear mongering' is a cheap way of stifling debate. If my neighbour had a baby nuclear generator in his basement I'd move. No matter how 'safe' it was said to be. Nuclear power is not 'safe' by any stretch of the (my?) imagination. Anything that needs a containment vessel with lots of shielding is not safe, period. And that's a different kind of 'not safe' than say an LPG tank. Sure, the LPG tank can go *boom* just the same, but after it does that the remainder is inert, not much more dangerous than the original tank.
Terrorism is mostly a media affair, it's a love triangle between the media, the terrorists and the politicians. Fear mongering is to artificially exaggerate the risks associated with a certain technology, and as far as I'm concerned there are serious risks associated with nuclear technology. Spreading it far and wide will give at least one of the three parties in the above mentioned triangle a hard to resist temptation. That is not a very good thing either.
One the one hand you have fear mongering, the Ostriches (sp?) are on the other end of the spectrum. To completely deny the risks of nuclear tech is not a realistic point of view, neither is a total panic about it. Somewhere in the middle lies realism, if a technology has inherent dangers or risks associated with it then you try to control it as much as you can to minimize those risks & dangers.
Let me try to make it simple for you: the prospect of a dirty bomb going off in some major city does not look good to me. If I can think of it so can any asshole with the funds and the determination to pull it off. And one of the assholes will get lucky. There are several thousand people dead already who would disagree with your 'fear mongering crap' observation. I'm the last to get panicked, I just think that radioactivity is not meant for 'mass distribution'. There are plenty of better ways to make electricity that do not involve half lives in the decades. And to be hit over the head with a solar panel is probably lethal as well but I think that the chances of any 'badass' taking that route are quite limited.
I hope they keep tabs on who buys these things. And the summary is so full of radioactive nonsense that it makes you wonder if this is on the level. Radio-isotope generators are nothing new. Voyager was powered by one, iirc. But what with the potential for high level mischief using the component parts in there let's hope that they don't hit 'mainstream' any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
hilarious... the 14 year old kid you quote there to underpin your argument is a friend of mine.
:)
Hey Gus, if you're reading this you are now the official authority on battery energy density
so, how is that for coincidence ? wildly off-topic but I actually had say hello / wave goodbye playing...
time to fire up the infinite improbability drive I guess.
second that. In fact, when you look at it a bit longer this whole war is based on cultural differences. To literally enforce your culture on anybody will generate a backlash. Even when it's through 'normal' trade there can still be a backlash (for instance the McDonalds firebombings in France). People strangely enough seem to resent being forced to adopt another culture. These things take time... decades, if not centuries.
an os kernel in javascript, now there's an idea. Wonder what it will be interpreted with :) closures anybody ?
anybody that takes internet 'slander' serious should grow a thicker skin. And anybody that believes everything that they see on the internet should get some skepticism grafts.
the larger the worlds population the smaller the chance that you have an orginal thought. And with the number of people being networked it is more and more becoming a matter of who can reach the patent office first rather than who should be credited with an 'invention'.
Try coming up with something TRUELY original that stands by itself.
I have the illustrious honour of being 'credited' with 'inventing' the live streaming webcam, but in reality there isn't much to that 'invention', it's just a bunch of code written around the jpeg 6 and the socket library, both of which are a lot more complicated than my 'glue'. Add to that the fact that the 'player' is the browser and there isn't much left of an 'invention' to claim at all. So what if I was the first, I figure that thousands of people have written code like that by now. That doesn't mean I'm happy with those that blatanty ripped off the code but hey, that's the internet for you, shit like that simply happens.
so, because it works for you the rest is a minority ?
I'll stick with the science people as well, but preferably those that don't have a direct stake in the technology being reviewed. I think if you are eating out of the research budget you should not be in on the policy decisions. That's good practice in accounting and the same goes for science. You want to see a clear separation between those that 'do' and those that 'check'. Science run wild is just as bad as anything else without controls, and possibly worse. Politicians and scientists collaborating to undermine the public good and plunder the planet is the worst of both. Monsanto comes to mind in this context.
Politicians are the scum of the earth as things are right now, but I'm not convinced that a 'meritocracy' based on your scientific status would be any better. From what I can see of the scientific world from my position it is mostly about ego, and that is pretty close to how politicians operate. All these parties have an agenda, as someone without any clout in either of these worlds I like 'full disclosure'.
so, really all we need is a billionaire with vision to go and pull this off. If it's that simple I sure hope that someone will get the attention of Branson, Gates, the google guys and whoever else is in that league. If the pay off is uncertain a consortium of sorts would be a neat solution to get this done.
Science, like everything else can be used for good or for bad.
Another nice example is genetically modified foods, and I think that before we push any technology on the world at large we need to make a serious study of the impact in the longer term, not just the short term benefits.
To give the creators of any technology the final say over its deployment or perceived safety is irresponsible at best.
Technology affects *ALL* of us, not just the people with the PhD's and other degrees that can come up with it, we all have to live with the consequences as well.
To simply take the word of a scientist with a vested interest in any technology about its safety is not good stewardship. Science has a fairly long history of being driven by the fascination with technology, not with it's responsible application.
How else would you explain such things as bio weapons, nuclear bombs and so on ?
I'd expect slashdot to have a larger than average percentage of viewers that are in some way or other involved in scientific research. I also sincerely hope that they look further than their desks or lab benches to look at the consequences of their research and to help make sure that it is applied in a responsible way.
Propaganda is the tool of choice for anybody pushing a certain viewpoint or technology down our collective throats, and to me it doesn't matter if some guy in a white lab coat is trying to ram the latest brand of toothpaste down my throat or nuclear power. It is our collective responsibility to use science as a tool, which means that we, all of us are supposed to be in control and not the people who create the tool.
If we don't do that then we'll have problems bigger than the scientists can solve. The tool will control us instead of the other way around.
coal fired electrical generation is indeed very much polluting and I'm well aware of it.
In case it wasn't clear from the rest of my postings above, I am not in any way afraid of 'low level dose' exposure in the long term, we are all going to die sooner or later anyway.
I just wished that the proponents of any technology would be able to see the ups AND the downs of the tech so that we can come to some kind of a reasonable debate. To simply ignore the dangers of any technology (GM food, clones, nuclear power and so on) is not wise, then you will find out about the dangers through avoidable incidents. Anything that can generate electricity from radioactive isotopes at the levels quoted in the original article is going to be inherently unsafe. Even at relatively high efficiencies (say on the order of 80%, which in practice probably won't be achieved) you are looking at a massive cooling problem and quite probably a serious risk in the case of breaching the containment vessel.
That is something we have learned to deal with to a large extent at the upper end of the scale when looking at nuclear power, specifically the new breed of reactors (pebble bed). But on a small scale (say in the 10 KW to 20 MW range) the number of required reactors would be so large that incidents would be a certainty. It's a bit like air travel, people are scared of air travel more than they are of travelling by road because they perceive the risk as being larger where in fact it is smaller. This mostly due to the fact that there are many more individual movements of vehicles on the road than there are of aircraft, and a single airplane (usually) holds more people than a car does.
My point is (and it is very possibly a wrong one but I have yet to see a single argument that really held water) is that if you spread nuclear technology around where say every town with > 5000 residents could have their own nuclear reactor (and the device mentioned in the article definitely qualifies as a reactor, even if they would like to suggest that it is not) that we would see a dramatic rise in the number of nuclear incidents, not to mention the security headaches this would bring along as well.
Geothermal is indeed a very interesting option. I believe Iceland has a bunch of geothermal electricity plants.
you have large bath tubs !
I thought they were about 300 liters at best.
I agree that short term probably nuclear is the only way to go, but I really do think that the waste and safety issues are not 'overblown'. Especially waste will take a lot of work to be solved in such a way that we don't simply push the cost of cleanup in to the future.
And the smaller the devices the bigger the safety issues. It's a simple function of the number of of devices (possible targets), even if the damage done per incident goes down the chances of an incident will go up.
Whether wind farms are 'unsightly' is a matter of taste, the same argument was made in the 1600's in the Netherlands and people are still coming here from all over the world to look at the windmills. A good part of that comes from people who are against any form of change, no matter what. I'd certainly be rather looking out my window at a bunch of windmills than at a nuclear dome.
Hydro electric dams can be constructed in such a way that they do minimal damage, especially if they do not create a large basin but are in an area where there is plenty of flow, Sweden has a lot of experience with this. For the UK that would not work however.
And yes, time is running out and something needs to be done.
> Also known as "movie plot threats", some of which wouldn't even make a decent movie.
such as flying airplanes into sky scrapers ? it'd sure be a shitty movie.
> Indeed anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together can probably think of a few.
A couple of years ago on a trip through the US I was sitting around in the evening with a bunch of friends and we were wondering out loud what you could do if you were a terrorist with a $200 budget and plenty of time. The amount of ideas and the ease with which they were implementable was just staggering, but all of them lacked one crucial ingredient for a terrorist, they were not 'mediagenic', in other words they were not sexy enough. But each and every one of them would cripple a large part of society. So, a good terrorist device has to have several conditions satisified, but body count is probably quite low on the list of features.
> You also need people prepared to do them, of which there dosn't appear to be that many..
let's hope you are right on that front. What has happened already has so far exceeded my imagination.
it's true that there are plenty of things that are unsafe when not properly handled, but some things are less safe than others. We don't have safety procedures for handling lots of stuff in place for nothing.
I'm not from the 'all risks are unacceptable' camp, and some radiation exposure is inevitable (and quite possibly one of the driving forces behind mutations in evolution).
I do think that there are good arguments pro nuclear power, but there are also plenty of arguments against. The biggest of these are:
- waste
- safety
- containment in case the 'safety' bit fails
And the proponents of nuclear tech are very quick to gloss over these as if they don't exist, the detractors are just as quick to magnify them beyond proportion, the truth (as usual) is somewhere in the middle and before we start spreading this stuff far and wide we will need to take a long hard look at what the long term effects will be. We are really only borrowing this planet from our children and grand children after all.
Every technology has it's fanboys. My guess is that DrDugan somehow makes his money in nuclear power.
he might even be this dr. Dugan:
http://www.nre.ufl.edu/department/perspages/dugan.php
but I'm sure that if he is then he would have put his bias on the line before getting his 'pro nuclear' message out there just so we would know who we are dealing with here.
You make a good point, in fact that 20 GW is only about 6% of the total energy produced in Germany. A big part of the problem here is that Germany is one of the most industrial nations in Europe, the infamous 'Ruhr' area is host to so much industry that it's probably easier to talk about smog quality than air quality there :)
The coal burning plants are really bad, they cause tons of trouble downstream, but with the scrubbers in place at least the particulate pollution is a little better than it was in the past.
Due to the pressure of time nuclear power is probably the only viable short term solution, but the waste problem is still a very big issue, small scale nuclear power should definitely be off the table imho (see postings above), and we should spend massive funds on R&D to get us out of this dependency problem and move towards a truely sustainable future.
That may mean cutting down on energy consumption quite drastically, it's a fact that conservation is a lot cheaper and easier to achieve than generation. Heatpumps instead of natural gas burning for domestic heating would help a lot as well by the way.
> Al Qaeda? Show me Al Qaeda. Not the US-Government spun version - but actually who they are.
At present, Al Qaeda is whoever says they're associated with Al Qaeda. I know that sounds like a cop-out but these guys don't exactly keep a public membership roster. It is estimated that world wide at least serveral tens of thousands of people subscribe to the basic tenets of this 'organization', which are that they need to try to take this world back to where we were centuries ago, and failing that to kill as many people as they can get away with. It's hard to try to get into the mind-set of a person that can subscribe to this, but there are enough gullible idiots in this world that we have a real problem here. The label Al Qaeda is as much a media invention as anything else, it exists because we like to label things for convenience, otherwise you have nothing to talk about. Again, there are only facts, no fear mongering or sticking your head in the sand is going to change those facts. The dis-enfranchised muslim youths in western europe are prime target for recruitment into these loose aggregations of dissatisfied people. They are unhappy with the prospects that life is offering them and these organizations give them a way to vent their anger.
For the record, I'm Dutch, and have lived all over the world, I've seen up close what religious hatred can make people do and I'm seriously impressed with the kind of idiocy people are prepared to subscribe to in the name of their religion. And that - again for the record - includes all religions.
What the US is doing in Iraq is despicable, I have no other words for it. It is a false flag operation so large and so totally ruthlessly sold to the public that it makes me wonder about what we are going to have to do to ever get the world back on an even footing after this. America has lost each and every bit of goodwill that it had in the rest of the world because of it (except maybe in Poland). Time will tell if there is a way out of the hole that has been dug there but from where I'm sitting I can't see it ending in on a positive note.
The fact that the US can now designate anybody a US enemy combatant and that habeas corpus is effectively disbanded is a very scary development, it is a harbinger of the world to come and it is something that the American public should react against until the issue gets solved.
However, given the fact that the superbowl, britney's latest album and reality tv are more on the radar than what is happening to the foundations of society almost guarantee that not enough people are going to wake up to do something about it until it is way too late.
Solar power and wind power combined with a viable short term storage medium (superconducting coils or something to that effect) would work just fine, you'd need a substantial amount of overcapacity though.
The only reason there is no alternative for fossil fuels is because we've wasted the better part of 30 years to create a viable and non-polluting alternative. If all the money that has gone in to the 'oil wars' (and those that are probably still to come) had been invested into r&d then I'm pretty sure we'd have had a real long term solution by now.
Pellet reactors are a new development, and if they're as safe as they are purported to be (which only time will tell, 'normal' nuclear reactors were supposed to be safe as well when they were first introduced) then they have my vote as a short term solution. Small scale, city sized thermal nuclear reactors definitely do *not* have my vote, and there is nothing irrational about that, it simply seems to me to be asking for trouble.
> 0. You need to go learn a lot more about physics, radioactivity, power generation, the biological effects of radiation, logic, risk assessment, and terrorism before continuing to make assertions that are based on false assumptions.
please don't patronize, it's unattractive.
ad. 1, I disagree, so does the German government, at present there is > 20,000 MW of installed
wind power in Germany and the plans are to increase that substantially in the near future.
ad. 2, my personal view on these matters are not very relevant, but the facts that you state exist but do not support in any way are that nuclear radiation is not safe. If you disagree with that then I suggest you sleep with a large block of uranium under your pillow for a couple of months to prove me wrong. All the shielding and safety precautions in nuclear installations is of course just window dressing to keep the 'uninformed' like myself happy.
ad. 3, I see, you know better. Tell you what, I am not too impressed with democracy either but for now it seems to be the best we've got. To say that if people disagree with you they should lose their voice shows that you are not willing to have it any way but your way.
You're assuming that I have smoke alarms, which I don't, but I get your point. :)
Lots of stuff is radio active, but the amount of radioactive material in a smoke alarm is fairly small compared to the amount that would go in to a thermal radio-isotope generator in the 10's of megawatt range. (or even one that would only do a couple of kilowatts). Which makes me wonder if you would put in an order for several 10's of thousands of smoke alarms if that would trigger a red flag somewhere
> I believe radioactivity is a great way to generate electricity.
And I don't. It's as simple as that. Spreading out radioactive materials all over the globe in an attempt to generate power when power is available in much less dangerous forms to me seems like a stupid thing to do. The sun puts about 1KW / square metre on the ground at full illumination, wind power is available in vast quantities. And yes, there are literally 100's of thousands of people involved in industries today to make power generated by these renewable sources cheaper, more reliable and more plentiful.
The French have a lot of nuclear power, that is true. They also have a pretty serious nuclear waste problem.
To take any objection against nuclear power as 'fear mongering' is a cheap way of stifling debate. If my neighbour had a baby nuclear generator in his basement I'd move. No matter how 'safe' it was said to be. Nuclear power is not 'safe' by any stretch of the (my?) imagination. Anything that needs a containment vessel with lots of shielding is not safe, period. And that's a different kind of 'not safe' than say an LPG tank. Sure, the LPG tank can go *boom* just the same, but after it does that the remainder is inert, not much more dangerous than the original tank.
Terrorism is mostly a media affair, it's a love triangle between the media, the terrorists and the politicians. Fear mongering is to artificially exaggerate the risks associated with a certain technology, and as far as I'm concerned there are serious risks associated with nuclear technology. Spreading it far and wide will give at least one of the three parties in the above mentioned triangle a hard to resist temptation. That is not a very good thing either.
One the one hand you have fear mongering, the Ostriches (sp?) are on the other end of the spectrum. To completely deny the risks of nuclear tech is not a realistic point of view, neither is a total panic about it. Somewhere in the middle lies realism, if a technology has inherent dangers or risks associated with it then you try to control it as much as you can to minimize those risks & dangers.
Let me try to make it simple for you: the prospect of a dirty bomb going off in some major city does not look good to me. If I can think of it so can any asshole with the funds and the determination to pull it off. And one of the assholes will get lucky. There are several thousand people dead already who would disagree with your 'fear mongering crap' observation. I'm the last to get panicked, I just think that radioactivity is not meant for 'mass distribution'. There are plenty of better ways to make electricity that do not involve half lives in the decades. And to be hit over the head with a solar panel is probably lethal as well but I think that the chances of any 'badass' taking that route are quite limited.
I hope they keep tabs on who buys these things. And the summary is so full of radioactive nonsense that it makes you wonder if this is on the level. Radio-isotope generators are nothing new. Voyager was powered by one, iirc. But what with the potential for high level mischief using the component parts in there let's hope that they don't hit 'mainstream' any time soon.
http://rndpic.com/