Unlike ISIS, Iran is a country that has existed continuously for 2500 years. I highly doubt they would self-immolate just for a chance to 'nuke the infidel.' Even Israeli intelligence agencies have looked at Iran and concluded that, despite the sabre-rattling, they are rational agents with self-preservation as a primary concern.
I guess America's only true experts in nuclear weapons production - the scientists at LLNL and LANL - must have been wrong then when they analyzed the Iranian nuclear deal and concluded it would eliminate all paths to a nuclear weapon. Thank's Tablizer, you have enlightened me with your knowledge of nuclear weapons.
So far everyone who has tried to prove this claim - including the CIA and Mossad - has come up short.
There's simply no evidence that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. At most, they might be retaining the ability to develop a nuclear weapon in the future should the need arise.
Don't get me wrong. The mullahs are no saints. The Iranian regime is tyrannical and brutal. But realize that the propaganda machine is using the WMD line to trance you into gearing up for war, just like they did for Iraq. And you know the scary part? Even after you said you'd never be fooled again, IT'S WORKING.
No, economic reality fixed this problem. Once the true costs of nuclear came to light - the cost of proper safety, disposal of waste, and decommissioning - investors in energy projects started backing away from nuclear.
I agree that the public is too paranoid about nuclear power, but believe it or not that's not the reason why the world isn't nuclear powered yet. The reason is because nuclear power is just insanely expensive. Even in the 70's (they heyday of 'Nuclear power is the future!', before Chernobyl and TMI and Fukushima) the rate of new reactor construction was too low to even keep up with increasing demand. And the rate is much much lower today.
> Wind and solar, while nice and clean, probably aren't going to ever be capable of delivering all the power the world needs/wants.
They are capable of delivering far more power than we'd ever need on this planet.
I'm the first to agree that a lot of current regulation on the nuclear industry is too choking and limiting. For instance, the constraints on getting new nuclear reactor designs approved. However, a lot of the regulation really is necessary. You need several layers of containment around your reactor and this is the main reason building a reactor is expensive. You need to dispose of your waste safely. Deep geological storage is probably the best option. Once your reactor's life ends, you can't just let it sit around. You need to decommission it carefully and this too is expensive.
Unless you're comfortable with half the population being born with birth defects, you need to do nuclear safely. Nuclear reactions being an inherently messy business, is expensive to do safely. There's no getting around that.
I've got nothing against nuclear. I think nuclear power can play an important role in our energy future. But if you think '4th gen nuclear power' is necessary OR sufficient to solve our energy problems, you are not living in reality.
There are only a handful of nuclear power technologies that have been demonstrated practically, among them PWR, CANDU, AGR, and a few others. They all have in common the fact that they are obscenely expensive ($4 billion might buy you half a power plant). They are far more expensive than wind or solar on average, even taking into account subsidies, and even taking into account intermittent generation. It's not clear at all if '4th gen' designs - by which I'm assuming you're referring to various fast reactor designs and molten salt reactors - would be any cheaper than what we currently have. In fact all indications are that they would be far MORE expensive! And this is even assuming they can be demonstrated to work, which mostly hasn't been done yet.
Nuclear power has one thing going for it, which is that it provides constant power in large amounts with relatively small space requirements. This makes it cost-effective near dense population centers that don't have ready access to wind or solar in the required quantities.
Nuclear is great but we can do without it if we have to. Solar power is sufficient to provide all our energy needs. In fact it could even happen that solar would provide us with a surplus of energy. Bill Gates is a smart guy. He's figured out that the main barrier to widespread adoption of renewables is storage. However, he's falling victim to the typical techie fallacy of putting all faith in technological miracles. We don't need a technological miracle. We need an organizational and political miracle.
In addition to my other reply, you are a perfect example of why pro-nuke nuts are dangerous individuals who should probably be kept in secure institutions.
So let's wrap up this discussion. You lack the ability to read, the ability to absorb facts and analyze them, and also completely lack knowledge of electrical power is generated around the world.
I actually want to thank you because from now on whenever I want to talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect I can refer back to this thread instead of a boring wikipedia article.
You know that Linux isn't an actual company which is competing with Microsoft, right? And putting your own software on a competing platform is very different from actually BUYING something from a competitor and using it as part of your platform. Of course in reality it's not so simple; it's possible that the AMD people figured this would be to their net advantage. And this fits in with the recent pattern of AMD conceding sectors of the market to Intel and focusing more on its core businesses.
Look up north. Canada provides most of its base load power with hydroelectric supplemented with a smaller fraction of oil and natural gas. Coal plays a very small role. Nuclear plays a role but it's almost all around the major population centers of Ontario, consistent with my first point.
There are plenty of other countries (some of them large countries) which don't use coal and nuclear to any large extent. Norway is mostly hydro and wind. Iceland is mostly geothermal and hydro. Brazil is nearly 80% renewables.
But go on, explain to me how nuclear and coal are absolutely essential and everyone uses them. Moronic.
Again, no it's not. Base load is the minimum amount of electric load over 24 hours. Base load power is the amount of power the grid can always be guaranteed (with a certain amount degree of confidence) to produce. Base load power plants aren't just coal and nuclear. They can be anything just as long as adequate spare and storage capacity exists. If you have a solar plant that produces 1 MW during the day and another plant (perhaps a gas plant) that supplements it with 1 MW during the night, plus a storage facility (perhaps pumped hydro or other type) to take over when there are clouds out, you have 1 MW of base load capacity and 3 MW of potential peak capacity. This is a greatly simplified example that illustrates how most grids around the world work - by bringing various power sources online when they are needed. Smart grids close the loop by controlling the demand side so that the difference between peak and base load capacity is reduced.
I'm sorry but saying you HAVE to have either coal or nuclear is just plain dumb - no offense - and there are many countries in the world that use neither of those to any large extent but get by just fine and rarely have blackouts.
What your describing is common sense and most people who think seriously about energy consider decentralized solar to be an important part of our energy future. It's exactly the kind of scenario that Tesla's Powerwall is designed to facilitate. And it's also the reason why there is a massive campaign of FUD (and serious opposition) against solar energy.
Arguments about nuclear power seem to often end in this way - with pro-nuke nuts blaming the failure of their technology on 'hippies'. The facts on the ground paint a different picture, though.
You are using the term 'base load' incorrectly. No source of power is on all the time. The key thing is if you can predict in advance when your power plant will go offline, and how much power you have from storage and other sources when that happens. Complementing wind and solar with batteries and pumped hydro can give a pretty good base load capacity and an approximately 2x peak load capacity. Even so it still winds up being much cheaper than nuclear.
Fast breeders don't work. They're a failed idea. The 'true believers' remind me of people who still obsess over their Amigas.
LFTR is an interesting concept but it has yet to be demonstrated to work. Keep in mind that MSRE was NOT a LFTR demonstrator; the critical part of LFTR is the Actinide separation step which MSRE did not attempt because the technology did not exist at the time (and still doesn't, as far as we know). I'd give LFTR at least 30 years before the concept reaches the maturity level for widespread deployment. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we need clean power NOW.
It's true that people are overly paranoid about nuclear but that's not why reprocessing is not being done. Reprocessing is just too expensive, plain and simple.
Nuclear is expensive and reprocessing of nuclear waste is especially expensive. Plus it doesn't really solve anything; reprocessing just turns a small amount of high-level waste to a larger amount of medium-level waste. Wherever in the world that reprocessing is done, it's done because of government regulations, not for any economic or environmental reason. Deep geological disposal of waste is by far the most economical and environmentally friendly solution.
It's quite feasible to go full renewable in 35 years. The storage problem is due to the fact that we have dumb grids.
You've got nuclear the other way around. Nuclear can never be a short-term solution because of the painfully slow roll-out rate of reactors. Even in the 1970's (the peak of nuclear reactor-building worldwide, before TMI and Chernobyl, when everyone loved nuclear) the rate of new reactor roll-out was far slower than would have been required to merely keep up with the new demand in electricity.
30-50 years would be the timescale required to merely get nuclear to replace some of the current oil and coal capacity, assuming everyone suddenly went full-bore in the nuclear direction. By then we might not even need it any more.
I've got nothing against nuclear. It can play an important role in the energy economics of the future. But pro-nuke nuts really need to get a grip. In the real world, and not in the fantasy world that they imagine, nuclear is extremely expensive; far more expensive than wind or solar, on average. Some people fudge their figures in various ways (not taking into account decommissioning costs and waste handling costs, etc.) to make it look like it isn't, though.
Nuclear makes sense in places where wind, solar, and hydroelectric aren't available or are expensive for the quantity of power needed. For instance, near some dense population centers. But if you look at the way energy technology is going, we don't really need nuclear to transition away from fossil fuels. Sure, it might help, but we can do without it if needed. Solar is a minor player now, but it's growing fast. In the future solar could very well provide us with all the power we're ever going to need and more. Actually, it's even possible there's going to be a huge surplus of power.
I know what Christians believe. Just because some denominations believe something doesn't mean it's not heresy (assuming there is a God). Most Christians consider Mormonism, for instance, to be heresy.
Anyway, the topic of discussion was about reconciling faith with science. Your position is that faith is compatible with science as long as faith retreats into the strategy of admitting that nothing in the faith is really known for certain (except maybe the existence of God). Isn't this then just an implicit an admission of my first point?
> I think scientists like Krauss are basically ignorant about the full scope of religion.
I actually agree with you. Same with Dawkins. But I'm not taking my lines from these people nor do I support them on every issue.
> The Dalai Lama has also said that if science conclusively proves some aspect of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.
So he's grounded in reality and is sane. Man, religions must be really crazy nowadays if a guy who's just exercising common sense is taken to be some kind of progressive.
> Thus I think both science and religion are blundering towards the truth.
Oh come on, man. Now you're just trolling me. What religious works introduced quantum theory or algebraic topology or plasma physics?
Science has always led the way towards the truth and religious thought has mostly just either lagged behind or firmly inserted its fingers in its ears. If the religion of today is any better than that of 1000 years ago it's because of external forces, not because of any change that happened within religion.
> So I wish scientists would be more humble and not automatically place themselves in opposition to religion.
That's weird because I don't wish scientists would be more humble at all. On the list of things I'd change about scientists, the top of my list would be: Productivity, fewer petty squabbles, refusal to do research funded by people with a political agenda, and refusal to do anti-humanitarian (weapons, poisons, etc.) research. I think scientists are mostly too humble as it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike ISIS, Iran is a country that has existed continuously for 2500 years. I highly doubt they would self-immolate just for a chance to 'nuke the infidel.' Even Israeli intelligence agencies have looked at Iran and concluded that, despite the sabre-rattling, they are rational agents with self-preservation as a primary concern.
I guess America's only true experts in nuclear weapons production - the scientists at LLNL and LANL - must have been wrong then when they analyzed the Iranian nuclear deal and concluded it would eliminate all paths to a nuclear weapon. Thank's Tablizer, you have enlightened me with your knowledge of nuclear weapons.
> They are trying to build a nuclear weapon
Prove it.
So far everyone who has tried to prove this claim - including the CIA and Mossad - has come up short.
There's simply no evidence that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. At most, they might be retaining the ability to develop a nuclear weapon in the future should the need arise.
Don't get me wrong. The mullahs are no saints. The Iranian regime is tyrannical and brutal. But realize that the propaganda machine is using the WMD line to trance you into gearing up for war, just like they did for Iraq. And you know the scary part? Even after you said you'd never be fooled again, IT'S WORKING.
No, economic reality fixed this problem. Once the true costs of nuclear came to light - the cost of proper safety, disposal of waste, and decommissioning - investors in energy projects started backing away from nuclear.
I agree that the public is too paranoid about nuclear power, but believe it or not that's not the reason why the world isn't nuclear powered yet. The reason is because nuclear power is just insanely expensive. Even in the 70's (they heyday of 'Nuclear power is the future!', before Chernobyl and TMI and Fukushima) the rate of new reactor construction was too low to even keep up with increasing demand. And the rate is much much lower today.
> Wind and solar, while nice and clean, probably aren't going to ever be capable of delivering all the power the world needs/wants.
They are capable of delivering far more power than we'd ever need on this planet.
> Most here are science types, and realize there is only one thing that can be done with it. Burn it up.
'Burning it up' is obscenely expensive. Deep geological storage is by far the safest and most economically sound solution.
I'm the first to agree that a lot of current regulation on the nuclear industry is too choking and limiting. For instance, the constraints on getting new nuclear reactor designs approved. However, a lot of the regulation really is necessary. You need several layers of containment around your reactor and this is the main reason building a reactor is expensive. You need to dispose of your waste safely. Deep geological storage is probably the best option. Once your reactor's life ends, you can't just let it sit around. You need to decommission it carefully and this too is expensive.
Unless you're comfortable with half the population being born with birth defects, you need to do nuclear safely. Nuclear reactions being an inherently messy business, is expensive to do safely. There's no getting around that.
I've got nothing against nuclear. I think nuclear power can play an important role in our energy future. But if you think '4th gen nuclear power' is necessary OR sufficient to solve our energy problems, you are not living in reality.
There are only a handful of nuclear power technologies that have been demonstrated practically, among them PWR, CANDU, AGR, and a few others. They all have in common the fact that they are obscenely expensive ($4 billion might buy you half a power plant). They are far more expensive than wind or solar on average, even taking into account subsidies, and even taking into account intermittent generation. It's not clear at all if '4th gen' designs - by which I'm assuming you're referring to various fast reactor designs and molten salt reactors - would be any cheaper than what we currently have. In fact all indications are that they would be far MORE expensive! And this is even assuming they can be demonstrated to work, which mostly hasn't been done yet.
Nuclear power has one thing going for it, which is that it provides constant power in large amounts with relatively small space requirements. This makes it cost-effective near dense population centers that don't have ready access to wind or solar in the required quantities.
Nuclear is great but we can do without it if we have to. Solar power is sufficient to provide all our energy needs. In fact it could even happen that solar would provide us with a surplus of energy. Bill Gates is a smart guy. He's figured out that the main barrier to widespread adoption of renewables is storage. However, he's falling victim to the typical techie fallacy of putting all faith in technological miracles. We don't need a technological miracle. We need an organizational and political miracle.
In addition to my other reply, you are a perfect example of why pro-nuke nuts are dangerous individuals who should probably be kept in secure institutions.
So let's wrap up this discussion. You lack the ability to read, the ability to absorb facts and analyze them, and also completely lack knowledge of electrical power is generated around the world.
I actually want to thank you because from now on whenever I want to talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect I can refer back to this thread instead of a boring wikipedia article.
You know that Linux isn't an actual company which is competing with Microsoft, right? And putting your own software on a competing platform is very different from actually BUYING something from a competitor and using it as part of your platform. Of course in reality it's not so simple; it's possible that the AMD people figured this would be to their net advantage. And this fits in with the recent pattern of AMD conceding sectors of the market to Intel and focusing more on its core businesses.
> Name them.
Seriously? You're too lazy to google?
Look up north. Canada provides most of its base load power with hydroelectric supplemented with a smaller fraction of oil and natural gas. Coal plays a very small role. Nuclear plays a role but it's almost all around the major population centers of Ontario, consistent with my first point.
There are plenty of other countries (some of them large countries) which don't use coal and nuclear to any large extent. Norway is mostly hydro and wind. Iceland is mostly geothermal and hydro. Brazil is nearly 80% renewables.
But go on, explain to me how nuclear and coal are absolutely essential and everyone uses them. Moronic.
s/your/you're
Again, no it's not. Base load is the minimum amount of electric load over 24 hours. Base load power is the amount of power the grid can always be guaranteed (with a certain amount degree of confidence) to produce. Base load power plants aren't just coal and nuclear. They can be anything just as long as adequate spare and storage capacity exists. If you have a solar plant that produces 1 MW during the day and another plant (perhaps a gas plant) that supplements it with 1 MW during the night, plus a storage facility (perhaps pumped hydro or other type) to take over when there are clouds out, you have 1 MW of base load capacity and 3 MW of potential peak capacity. This is a greatly simplified example that illustrates how most grids around the world work - by bringing various power sources online when they are needed. Smart grids close the loop by controlling the demand side so that the difference between peak and base load capacity is reduced.
I'm sorry but saying you HAVE to have either coal or nuclear is just plain dumb - no offense - and there are many countries in the world that use neither of those to any large extent but get by just fine and rarely have blackouts.
What your describing is common sense and most people who think seriously about energy consider decentralized solar to be an important part of our energy future. It's exactly the kind of scenario that Tesla's Powerwall is designed to facilitate. And it's also the reason why there is a massive campaign of FUD (and serious opposition) against solar energy.
Arguments about nuclear power seem to often end in this way - with pro-nuke nuts blaming the failure of their technology on 'hippies'. The facts on the ground paint a different picture, though.
I'm not talking about coal.
You are using the term 'base load' incorrectly. No source of power is on all the time. The key thing is if you can predict in advance when your power plant will go offline, and how much power you have from storage and other sources when that happens. Complementing wind and solar with batteries and pumped hydro can give a pretty good base load capacity and an approximately 2x peak load capacity. Even so it still winds up being much cheaper than nuclear.
Fast breeders don't work. They're a failed idea. The 'true believers' remind me of people who still obsess over their Amigas.
LFTR is an interesting concept but it has yet to be demonstrated to work. Keep in mind that MSRE was NOT a LFTR demonstrator; the critical part of LFTR is the Actinide separation step which MSRE did not attempt because the technology did not exist at the time (and still doesn't, as far as we know). I'd give LFTR at least 30 years before the concept reaches the maturity level for widespread deployment. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we need clean power NOW.
It's true that people are overly paranoid about nuclear but that's not why reprocessing is not being done. Reprocessing is just too expensive, plain and simple.
Nuclear is expensive and reprocessing of nuclear waste is especially expensive. Plus it doesn't really solve anything; reprocessing just turns a small amount of high-level waste to a larger amount of medium-level waste. Wherever in the world that reprocessing is done, it's done because of government regulations, not for any economic or environmental reason. Deep geological disposal of waste is by far the most economical and environmentally friendly solution.
It's quite feasible to go full renewable in 35 years. The storage problem is due to the fact that we have dumb grids.
You've got nuclear the other way around. Nuclear can never be a short-term solution because of the painfully slow roll-out rate of reactors. Even in the 1970's (the peak of nuclear reactor-building worldwide, before TMI and Chernobyl, when everyone loved nuclear) the rate of new reactor roll-out was far slower than would have been required to merely keep up with the new demand in electricity.
30-50 years would be the timescale required to merely get nuclear to replace some of the current oil and coal capacity, assuming everyone suddenly went full-bore in the nuclear direction. By then we might not even need it any more.
I've got nothing against nuclear. It can play an important role in the energy economics of the future. But pro-nuke nuts really need to get a grip. In the real world, and not in the fantasy world that they imagine, nuclear is extremely expensive; far more expensive than wind or solar, on average. Some people fudge their figures in various ways (not taking into account decommissioning costs and waste handling costs, etc.) to make it look like it isn't, though.
Nuclear makes sense in places where wind, solar, and hydroelectric aren't available or are expensive for the quantity of power needed. For instance, near some dense population centers. But if you look at the way energy technology is going, we don't really need nuclear to transition away from fossil fuels. Sure, it might help, but we can do without it if needed. Solar is a minor player now, but it's growing fast. In the future solar could very well provide us with all the power we're ever going to need and more. Actually, it's even possible there's going to be a huge surplus of power.
I know what Christians believe. Just because some denominations believe something doesn't mean it's not heresy (assuming there is a God). Most Christians consider Mormonism, for instance, to be heresy.
Anyway, the topic of discussion was about reconciling faith with science. Your position is that faith is compatible with science as long as faith retreats into the strategy of admitting that nothing in the faith is really known for certain (except maybe the existence of God). Isn't this then just an implicit an admission of my first point?
Good on them. Now if only it worked the same way in the USA...
> I think scientists like Krauss are basically ignorant about the full scope of religion.
I actually agree with you. Same with Dawkins. But I'm not taking my lines from these people nor do I support them on every issue.
> The Dalai Lama has also said that if science conclusively proves some aspect of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.
So he's grounded in reality and is sane. Man, religions must be really crazy nowadays if a guy who's just exercising common sense is taken to be some kind of progressive.
> Thus I think both science and religion are blundering towards the truth.
Oh come on, man. Now you're just trolling me. What religious works introduced quantum theory or algebraic topology or plasma physics?
Science has always led the way towards the truth and religious thought has mostly just either lagged behind or firmly inserted its fingers in its ears. If the religion of today is any better than that of 1000 years ago it's because of external forces, not because of any change that happened within religion.
> So I wish scientists would be more humble and not automatically place themselves in opposition to religion.
That's weird because I don't wish scientists would be more humble at all. On the list of things I'd change about scientists, the top of my list would be: Productivity, fewer petty squabbles, refusal to do research funded by people with a political agenda, and refusal to do anti-humanitarian (weapons, poisons, etc.) research. I think scientists are mostly too humble as it is.