> Actually, nuclear generating stations end up being the second cheapest.
Citation needed; it's very easy to make nuclear power look cheap by ignoring waste handling costs, decommissioning costs, and other 'hidden' costs.
That said, I fully agree that nuclear compares favorably to, say, coal. Coal is bad news.
> Solar, at the current state of the art, never generates as much power as it takes to manufacture the solar cells.
A common myth. Today's solar panels can produce many times the power required to manufacture them over their lifetime.
> Wind farms are only intermittent sources for the great majority of the country and have their own high maintenance cost compared to megawatts delivered to contend with.
'Base load' power is an overblown issue; the real issue is matching supply curves with demand curves. In many places in the world wind supply curves are actually fairly well matched with demand. In other places, cheap storage (e.g. pumped hydro) is available. There are actually few places in the world where a combination of solar, wind, and some form of daily storage is not enough to meet demand economically.
> What is criminal is that the U.S. doesn't recycle nuclear fuel. That was required by law under the Atomic Energy Act of 1972 but Uncle Sugar has yet to deliver on MOX fuel. And that is proven technology in use in Germany, France, and soon in China.
Actually, what is criminal is France's insistence on fuel reprocessing and burdening the costs of this reprocessing on customers and taxpayers. Reprocessing is incredibly expensive and it doesn't even solve anything; it just turns a small amount of high-level waste into a very large amount of low-level waste. Once-through cycles are by far the most cost effective (and they also produce less waste overall).
> There's just nothing else that doesn't release CO2 that can do the base-load job.
Maybe, maybe not. Battery storage is getting better all the time. 50 years is a long time. 'Base load' power is also a bit of an overblown issue; the real problem is matching supply curves with demand curves, and I think smart grids will do a really great job of that in the coming years.
> The free market will go nuclear in the short term
I'm afraid I disagree. Nuclear just isn't compatible with the free market. The market gravitates towards ideas that require as little investment as possible, pay off their debts as soon as possible, and have high profit margins. Nuclear is the exact opposite of this. As I said, the economics of nuclear dictate the construction of huge, multi-gigawatt power stations just to turn a profit. It is also common for companies to leave and shoulder the decommissioning costs onto the taxpayer.
That's the most hilarious defence ever. Every single time I think you nuts are actually interested in science, you say some dumb ass thing that makes me realize what a gullible idiot I am.
You were almost doing well up to this last comment.
Those papers have nothing to do with the von Storch paper. Von Storch's central argument that "we find that the continued warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level." is wrong and based on faulty statistical analysis.
We can talk about the global warming 'hiatus' separately, but the fact of the matter is that you really can't make a strong conclusion either way based on the data we have. The time period in question is just too short. These links put forth an alternate explanation based on faulty ocean temperature measurements that seems pretty plausible to me:
That paper was submitted to Nature and rejected. The reasons for rejection haven't been made public but I'd guess that they have to do with the extremely flawed assumptions and deductions in the paper. I can elaborate on this more if you want.
> Global warming has, unfortunately, become a political issue, with people - and media outlets - picking a side and promoting it to demonstrate their allegiance.
Yes, but by whom? By people who have a political agenda against any attempt to address climate change.
> That's a bad thing, even if their side is generally in the right: they refuse to concede on any nuance, because admitting to even the slightest uncertainty in their position means giving ground to the enemy.
If the anti-agw crowd ever made any arguments that were based even in the slightest bit on facts, then I'd be the first to hear them out. But they don't. It's ALWAYS bullshit. Very often it's actually conscious, deliberate lying.
> My impression, for what it's worth, as a scientist in a different field who's read a bit of the literature, is that there's a clear consensus that global warming is happening, but honest disagreement about its extent and consequences.
I'll agree with this, but this isn't what the anti-agw crowd says. They disagree that it's happening or they disagree that it's due to human activity, both of which are demonstrably true and, at this point, far beyond any reasonable doubt.
I wonder when you molten salt freaks will get off it. Molten salt and especially LFTR technology is nowhere near the maturity level for large-scale power production. I'd be surprised if a pilot plant could be built in 30 years. MSRE had numerous serious/fatal problems which LFTR advocates conveniently never mention. Even if LFTR does work, it would likely be INSANELY EXPENSIVE, in terms of final cost per delivered kWh. There are very good reasons why LFTR would be horrendously expensive, and I'll explain them if you want to know.
Exactly. Science is hard. Mixing chemicals and making cool explosions or fire demonstrations or baking soda volcanoes may be fun but it's not science. Study after study has shown that kids that are exposed to effort-intensive mathematics, computer science, and general STEM knowledge early on in life do much better than those who are exposed to it later - even if they do not wind up pursuing STEM fields as careers.
Bullshit, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is unprecedented in the past 800,000 years and the current warming trend is a singularly unique event that hasn't happened in the past interglacial periods.
Then why are you posting as an anonymous coward, coward?
> AGW is a hoax and everyone knows it now.
Actually virtually everyone in the world at large knows that its real. It's just a few fringe anti-agw lunatics sitting in your echo chambers and refusing to accept reality. Most sane and rational people don't even respond to it and so you guys conclude that your viewpoints are unopposed. It's quite pathetic really.
> Since I only listed data that shows facts that back up my view you are fumbling around trying to debunk.
You're hilarious. A single graph without any context or even a link to further research. Quite the scholarly one, you are!
Well yes, some of the saner parts of the world have set moderately acceptable renewable energy targets. But the big picture is that we're still doing very little. The biggest polluters have not done anything meaningful. China seems to be gradually coming around to the importance of climate change, but all too slowly, I fear. And about the US, well, it still remains firmly entrenched in its own alternate reality.
> show a clear long-term warming trend [remss.com], but almost all of the increase is in the first half of the epoch since measurements began in 1979
I'm not seeing that at all. All I see is a clear uniform warming trend up to the present day.
1998 was a particular hot year and that messes up the perception a bit but thankfully we have actual rigorous statistical analysis methods that aren't susceptible to human perception errors.
> which provide a more complete, but more biased, temperature record.
Yet all the bias seems to always point in one direction, doesn't it?
> A real climatologist would, I suspect, be somewhat embarrassed by the parent poster's confident declarations of certainty.
Any real scientist would be embarrassed by this thread. But not because of my comment. The foundation of science is evidence and observation, of which I have seen little in this thread. There are plenty of scientific issues where we are uncertain about the truth. There's no shortage of controversy in science! But climate change is, unfortunately, not one of these issues, and yes, it is quite rational and appropriate to have a high degree of certainty about it.
As I said, nuclear is expensive due to construction costs, maintenance costs, and decommissioning costs. These include both equipment costs and labor costs. Overhead and labor-related costs have gone up over the past few decades. That is true. But it's true of every type of power generation, not just nuclear! Ultimately, the question isn't how much a particular plant costs in absolute terms but how much energy it can produce per unit of cost. In this regard nuclear is not cost-competitive, precisely because it requires far too much labor and overhead to construct them properly and safely.
> while most of the east can't build the damn things fast enough.
Most nuclear power plant projects in 'the east' (by which I'm assuming you're referring to India, China, and other countries) tend to be projects oriented towards political goals and they lose money once you take into account total lifetime operation costs. Usually they lose a LOT of money. Developed countries have scaled back nuclear power because they have correctly concluded that it's not a cost-effective form of power generation.
Of course we will eventually have to learn to live without fossil fuels. The question is whether we do it willingly and peacefully or whether it is forced upon us through violence and political upheaval. At this rate, I don't see anything suggesting that we're really seriously taking the steps needed to get off of fossil fuels before it gets ugly. We will likely go through a disruptive and negative adjusting phase.
For chrissake, step out of the basement and READ. I beg you. I deplore of you. Every single point you're making has been debunked to death for years. There is no such thing as 'global warming hiatus'. Only bad data, measurement inaccuracies over the oceans, and a regional pause in warming over North America and Europe, which has been more than compensated for by an incredible degree of warming at the poles. http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
> Every time someone takes a step, they cause a small earthquake. Does that mean they should sit very still and starve to death? Similarly, if a small amount of AGW isn't seriously dangerous, does that mean we should kill hundreds of millions of people through energy poverty to fail to solve something that really isn't that much of a problem?
Actually climate change is a very serious problem and by far the cheapest way of dealing with it is to deal with it right now. It is projected - based on optimistic predictions! - that the economic damage caused by climate change would dwarf the expense of dealing with it. And if you do it in a smart way, it doesn't even need to be that expensive to deal with. Solar and wind are already pretty cheap and could create lots of jobs. The price of oil is going to continue to rise; the sooner we reduce our oil consumption the less we have to pay in the long run. Any way you look at it, it's beneficial economically and environmentally to deal with climate change as soon as possible. Except, of course, if you're a coal magnate, which anti-agw people either are or are useful idiots for. Sorry to say this but it's true.
> It is worth noting that the various regulations and "oh my god the nuclear" fears, along with the "oh my god someone might reprocess into plutonium or nuclear weapons so we ban half of it", has caused the above...
Not really. Nuclear was already expensive in the 50's and 60's, way before these things were a huge issue. In fact most of the time the people insisting on safety were the nuclear scientists themselves, not the 'eco warrior bogeyman' you've constructed in your mind. The reason was because the scientists were responsible and acknowledged the actual real threats posed by radioactive contamination and the relative ease by which unprotected nuclear reactors could leach radioactive material into the environment.
Is there a lot of unwarranted, irrational fear about nuclear power? Sure. I'm with you 100% on that. But that doesn't mean that nuclear reactors shouldn't be made safe! It's not just accidents either. What if someone crashes a jet into a power plant with the goal of making a large area radioactive and uninhabitable? US regulations require containment buildings to be resistant to bombs and plane impacts, for good reason.
Now as to what makes nuclear power expensive. There are three major issues. One is that the economics of nuclear power favors large, multi-gigawatt, one-off designs that have huge up-front costs that simple can't be made smaller by mass production methods (attempts at small modular reactors have failed and will always fail as the economics of those are even worse). Another issue is decommissioning. Nuclear decommissioning costs are MASSIVE, because you have to extremely carefully take the reactor apart over a period of years. The third major issue is the advanced level of technology required. Custom materials, custom manufacturing processes, labor-intensive fuel preparation, reactor maintenance, and inspection costs.
> It now take more than twice as long to build a new nuclear reactor as it did to invent the things in the first place, when we didn't know how to make them work. That is absurd, imagine if cars took a month to build, you'd be saying that they didn't make any sense either...
It actually makes perfect sense once you realize that the first generation of nuclear power plants were built recklessly and with insane design decisions that made them extremely unsafe and vulnerable to both accidents and terrorist attacks. Over time, we've realized the steps that need to be taken to build safe and secure nuclear sites and these add expense and time.
And as for proliferation fears, well you can blame that on the right wing politicians who insist on backwards arms control methods like total nuclear abstinence instead of rational procedures like international inspections regimes.
A link to a graph without a reference as to where the graph came from? That proves a lot!
For anyone who's observing this fine exchange, take note: When someone doesn't reveal his sources, it's usually because they don't want you to know the sources, because the sources are either bogus or tell a different story. Which is the case here. Turns out, this graph was part of a larger study that actually confirmed the predictions of climate change models, once inadequacies in the experimental data were taken into account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Point me to a single reputable source that predicted that 'snow would be a distant memory'. Blog posts do not count as reputable sources.
You're making up facts to suit your narrative. What I'm not sure about is: why? I mean, you people have already convinced the world to not take action on climate change, and you've convinced most people that the science behind AGW is not settled, which is not true. You've already achieved your goals; what more do you want from us?
Predictable that someone like you would totally lack comprehension of the English language. I never said that nuclear energy is harmful. In fact quite the opposite, I offered a concrete scenario where nuclear power could be useful in the real world and not fantasy-land, something that the person I was replying to did not do. And I'm not opposed to new nuclear power stations and would vastly prefer them to fossil fuel stations. I just question the economics. I'm stating that nuclear is expensive, and any attempt to improve it makes it even more expensive. It's a common myth that we need nuclear to overcome climate change. Having it might not hurt, but we could make do without it.
I love how he used the word 'theorem' incorrectly, and you repeat his incorrect use without batting an eye! I'm really enjoying this thread from people who have absolutely no idea what science is.
I love how the AGW stories always bring the lunatics typing from their mom's basements out of the woodwork.
You know nothing about science. Really, nothing.
> One of THE key tests of a scientific theorem is that it can predict
What is a 'scientific theorem'? Oh maybe you mean a scientific theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And yet these 'state of the art' models have so far had a dismal record of prediction.
Wrong. The reputable models from the 80's and 90's (those that had a good level of peer-review and were based on sound assumptions) quite accurately predicted our current warming rate. The reason you don't know this is because you probably derive most of your 'information' from sources that actually don't deal in science.
> The obvious ones of course being nuclear power in its more modern versions
I knew you'd segue into nuclear power at the end, and you didn't disappoint! Somehow anti-AGW lunacy seems to be highly correlated with nuclear lunacy.
Nuclear energy is not going to solve our problems. It is obscenely expensive - far more expensive than wind or solar. This is true both for construction costs, maintenance costs, total lifetime costs, and also costs per final delivered kWh. Nuclear is only feasible for a very specific set of scenarios - scenarios where you have a large population or industry center located in an area that is poor in renewable energy sources. And even then, only as an augmentative power source to renewable energy, not as a sole source of power.
Nuclear is also non-renewable and reprocessing (to make it renewable) adds even more expense to the point that it could never hope to be commercially competitive. You guys believe in the free market right? That the market always knows best? Well the market decided on nuclear, and it decided that nuclear sucks. It also decided that nuclear reprocessing sucks even harder.
Ok I might have simply misunderstood you previously. I agree with what you're saying here. It's what I'm saying as well: There's nothing special about the Concorde engine, it's just that the speed at which it flew was a great speed for turbojet efficiency (and it had a good intake design). But maybe you've also misunderstood me. I'm not taking a dig at turbofan engines or other modern engines.
Believe me, I think the SABRE engine idea is great and I'd love nothing more than a SSTO reusable rocket. But plenty (and I do mean plenty) of hypersonic aircraft (for example NASA's numerous concepts) have come and gone and none have lived up to their promises. Hypersonic flight is generally where aircraft designs go to die. The aerodynamics are tricky and poorly-understood. Heating is a huge problem. Intakes fail and un-start. There are lots of problems operating craft at such speeds. It's definitely not 'just the intercooler'. Again, I'll believe it when it flies. Skylon's major saving grace is that it's only designed to fly at hypersonic speeds for a very short time, so presumably it can 'punch' out of any failure modes that arise. Even if it does fly successfully, though, hydrogen is an expensive and tricky fuel and the SABRE engine uses a LOT of it. It may be worthwhile for space access but it's definitely not worthwhile for passenger flight.
Thrust specific fuel consumption can't be used to compare a supersonic engine with a subsonic one, because it must be compared at fixed speed.
The concorde's engines had a propulsive efficiency of 43% at cruise. The best modern high-bypass turbofans I'm aware of achieve a propulsive efficiency of 35% at cruise. As I said, the main reason for this discrepancy is the intake which provided good pressure recovery and the losses encountered when you mix a hot fast-moving stream with a cold slow-moving stream. Newer turbofan designs are pushing up against 40% efficiency though.
Slashdot Mirror
> Actually, nuclear generating stations end up being the second cheapest.
Citation needed; it's very easy to make nuclear power look cheap by ignoring waste handling costs, decommissioning costs, and other 'hidden' costs.
That said, I fully agree that nuclear compares favorably to, say, coal. Coal is bad news.
> Solar, at the current state of the art, never generates as much power as it takes to manufacture the solar cells.
A common myth. Today's solar panels can produce many times the power required to manufacture them over their lifetime.
> Wind farms are only intermittent sources for the great majority of the country and have their own high maintenance cost compared to megawatts delivered to contend with.
'Base load' power is an overblown issue; the real issue is matching supply curves with demand curves. In many places in the world wind supply curves are actually fairly well matched with demand. In other places, cheap storage (e.g. pumped hydro) is available. There are actually few places in the world where a combination of solar, wind, and some form of daily storage is not enough to meet demand economically.
> What is criminal is that the U.S. doesn't recycle nuclear fuel. That was required by law under the Atomic Energy Act of 1972 but Uncle Sugar has yet to deliver on MOX fuel. And that is proven technology in use in Germany, France, and soon in China.
Actually, what is criminal is France's insistence on fuel reprocessing and burdening the costs of this reprocessing on customers and taxpayers. Reprocessing is incredibly expensive and it doesn't even solve anything; it just turns a small amount of high-level waste into a very large amount of low-level waste. Once-through cycles are by far the most cost effective (and they also produce less waste overall).
> There's just nothing else that doesn't release CO2 that can do the base-load job.
Maybe, maybe not. Battery storage is getting better all the time. 50 years is a long time. 'Base load' power is also a bit of an overblown issue; the real problem is matching supply curves with demand curves, and I think smart grids will do a really great job of that in the coming years.
> The free market will go nuclear in the short term
I'm afraid I disagree. Nuclear just isn't compatible with the free market. The market gravitates towards ideas that require as little investment as possible, pay off their debts as soon as possible, and have high profit margins. Nuclear is the exact opposite of this. As I said, the economics of nuclear dictate the construction of huge, multi-gigawatt power stations just to turn a profit. It is also common for companies to leave and shoulder the decommissioning costs onto the taxpayer.
That's the most hilarious defence ever. Every single time I think you nuts are actually interested in science, you say some dumb ass thing that makes me realize what a gullible idiot I am.
You were almost doing well up to this last comment.
Those papers have nothing to do with the von Storch paper. Von Storch's central argument that "we find that the continued warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level." is wrong and based on faulty statistical analysis.
We can talk about the global warming 'hiatus' separately, but the fact of the matter is that you really can't make a strong conclusion either way based on the data we have. The time period in question is just too short. These links put forth an alternate explanation based on faulty ocean temperature measurements that seems pretty plausible to me:
http://link.springer.com/artic...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
That paper was submitted to Nature and rejected. The reasons for rejection haven't been made public but I'd guess that they have to do with the extremely flawed assumptions and deductions in the paper. I can elaborate on this more if you want.
> Global warming has, unfortunately, become a political issue, with people - and media outlets - picking a side and promoting it to demonstrate their allegiance.
Yes, but by whom? By people who have a political agenda against any attempt to address climate change.
> That's a bad thing, even if their side is generally in the right: they refuse to concede on any nuance, because admitting to even the slightest uncertainty in their position means giving ground to the enemy.
If the anti-agw crowd ever made any arguments that were based even in the slightest bit on facts, then I'd be the first to hear them out. But they don't. It's ALWAYS bullshit. Very often it's actually conscious, deliberate lying.
> My impression, for what it's worth, as a scientist in a different field who's read a bit of the literature, is that there's a clear consensus that global warming is happening, but honest disagreement about its extent and consequences.
I'll agree with this, but this isn't what the anti-agw crowd says. They disagree that it's happening or they disagree that it's due to human activity, both of which are demonstrably true and, at this point, far beyond any reasonable doubt.
The use of bold uppercase letters doesn't make something true.
Show your evidence or shut up.
I wonder when you molten salt freaks will get off it. Molten salt and especially LFTR technology is nowhere near the maturity level for large-scale power production. I'd be surprised if a pilot plant could be built in 30 years. MSRE had numerous serious/fatal problems which LFTR advocates conveniently never mention. Even if LFTR does work, it would likely be INSANELY EXPENSIVE, in terms of final cost per delivered kWh. There are very good reasons why LFTR would be horrendously expensive, and I'll explain them if you want to know.
Exactly. Science is hard. Mixing chemicals and making cool explosions or fire demonstrations or baking soda volcanoes may be fun but it's not science. Study after study has shown that kids that are exposed to effort-intensive mathematics, computer science, and general STEM knowledge early on in life do much better than those who are exposed to it later - even if they do not wind up pursuing STEM fields as careers.
Bullshit, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is unprecedented in the past 800,000 years and the current warming trend is a singularly unique event that hasn't happened in the past interglacial periods.
Then why are you posting as an anonymous coward, coward?
> AGW is a hoax and everyone knows it now.
Actually virtually everyone in the world at large knows that its real. It's just a few fringe anti-agw lunatics sitting in your echo chambers and refusing to accept reality. Most sane and rational people don't even respond to it and so you guys conclude that your viewpoints are unopposed. It's quite pathetic really.
> Since I only listed data that shows facts that back up my view you are fumbling around trying to debunk.
You're hilarious. A single graph without any context or even a link to further research. Quite the scholarly one, you are!
Well yes, some of the saner parts of the world have set moderately acceptable renewable energy targets. But the big picture is that we're still doing very little. The biggest polluters have not done anything meaningful. China seems to be gradually coming around to the importance of climate change, but all too slowly, I fear. And about the US, well, it still remains firmly entrenched in its own alternate reality.
> show a clear long-term warming trend [remss.com], but almost all of the increase is in the first half of the epoch since measurements began in 1979
I'm not seeing that at all. All I see is a clear uniform warming trend up to the present day.
1998 was a particular hot year and that messes up the perception a bit but thankfully we have actual rigorous statistical analysis methods that aren't susceptible to human perception errors.
> which provide a more complete, but more biased, temperature record.
Yet all the bias seems to always point in one direction, doesn't it?
> A real climatologist would, I suspect, be somewhat embarrassed by the parent poster's confident declarations of certainty.
Any real scientist would be embarrassed by this thread. But not because of my comment. The foundation of science is evidence and observation, of which I have seen little in this thread. There are plenty of scientific issues where we are uncertain about the truth. There's no shortage of controversy in science! But climate change is, unfortunately, not one of these issues, and yes, it is quite rational and appropriate to have a high degree of certainty about it.
As I said, nuclear is expensive due to construction costs, maintenance costs, and decommissioning costs. These include both equipment costs and labor costs. Overhead and labor-related costs have gone up over the past few decades. That is true. But it's true of every type of power generation, not just nuclear! Ultimately, the question isn't how much a particular plant costs in absolute terms but how much energy it can produce per unit of cost. In this regard nuclear is not cost-competitive, precisely because it requires far too much labor and overhead to construct them properly and safely.
> while most of the east can't build the damn things fast enough.
Most nuclear power plant projects in 'the east' (by which I'm assuming you're referring to India, China, and other countries) tend to be projects oriented towards political goals and they lose money once you take into account total lifetime operation costs. Usually they lose a LOT of money. Developed countries have scaled back nuclear power because they have correctly concluded that it's not a cost-effective form of power generation.
Of course we will eventually have to learn to live without fossil fuels. The question is whether we do it willingly and peacefully or whether it is forced upon us through violence and political upheaval. At this rate, I don't see anything suggesting that we're really seriously taking the steps needed to get off of fossil fuels before it gets ugly. We will likely go through a disruptive and negative adjusting phase.
For chrissake, step out of the basement and READ. I beg you. I deplore of you. Every single point you're making has been debunked to death for years. There is no such thing as 'global warming hiatus'. Only bad data, measurement inaccuracies over the oceans, and a regional pause in warming over North America and Europe, which has been more than compensated for by an incredible degree of warming at the poles. http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
> Every time someone takes a step, they cause a small earthquake. Does that mean they should sit very still and starve to death? Similarly, if a small amount of AGW isn't seriously dangerous, does that mean we should kill hundreds of millions of people through energy poverty to fail to solve something that really isn't that much of a problem?
Actually climate change is a very serious problem and by far the cheapest way of dealing with it is to deal with it right now. It is projected - based on optimistic predictions! - that the economic damage caused by climate change would dwarf the expense of dealing with it. And if you do it in a smart way, it doesn't even need to be that expensive to deal with. Solar and wind are already pretty cheap and could create lots of jobs. The price of oil is going to continue to rise; the sooner we reduce our oil consumption the less we have to pay in the long run. Any way you look at it, it's beneficial economically and environmentally to deal with climate change as soon as possible. Except, of course, if you're a coal magnate, which anti-agw people either are or are useful idiots for. Sorry to say this but it's true.
> It is worth noting that the various regulations and "oh my god the nuclear" fears, along with the "oh my god someone might reprocess into plutonium or nuclear weapons so we ban half of it", has caused the above...
Not really. Nuclear was already expensive in the 50's and 60's, way before these things were a huge issue. In fact most of the time the people insisting on safety were the nuclear scientists themselves, not the 'eco warrior bogeyman' you've constructed in your mind. The reason was because the scientists were responsible and acknowledged the actual real threats posed by radioactive contamination and the relative ease by which unprotected nuclear reactors could leach radioactive material into the environment.
Is there a lot of unwarranted, irrational fear about nuclear power? Sure. I'm with you 100% on that. But that doesn't mean that nuclear reactors shouldn't be made safe! It's not just accidents either. What if someone crashes a jet into a power plant with the goal of making a large area radioactive and uninhabitable? US regulations require containment buildings to be resistant to bombs and plane impacts, for good reason.
Now as to what makes nuclear power expensive. There are three major issues. One is that the economics of nuclear power favors large, multi-gigawatt, one-off designs that have huge up-front costs that simple can't be made smaller by mass production methods (attempts at small modular reactors have failed and will always fail as the economics of those are even worse). Another issue is decommissioning. Nuclear decommissioning costs are MASSIVE, because you have to extremely carefully take the reactor apart over a period of years. The third major issue is the advanced level of technology required. Custom materials, custom manufacturing processes, labor-intensive fuel preparation, reactor maintenance, and inspection costs.
> It now take more than twice as long to build a new nuclear reactor as it did to invent the things in the first place, when we didn't know how to make them work. That is absurd, imagine if cars took a month to build, you'd be saying that they didn't make any sense either...
It actually makes perfect sense once you realize that the first generation of nuclear power plants were built recklessly and with insane design decisions that made them extremely unsafe and vulnerable to both accidents and terrorist attacks. Over time, we've realized the steps that need to be taken to build safe and secure nuclear sites and these add expense and time.
And as for proliferation fears, well you can blame that on the right wing politicians who insist on backwards arms control methods like total nuclear abstinence instead of rational procedures like international inspections regimes.
A link to a graph without a reference as to where the graph came from? That proves a lot!
For anyone who's observing this fine exchange, take note: When someone doesn't reveal his sources, it's usually because they don't want you to know the sources, because the sources are either bogus or tell a different story. Which is the case here. Turns out, this graph was part of a larger study that actually confirmed the predictions of climate change models, once inadequacies in the experimental data were taken into account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Point me to a single reputable source that predicted that 'snow would be a distant memory'. Blog posts do not count as reputable sources.
You're making up facts to suit your narrative. What I'm not sure about is: why? I mean, you people have already convinced the world to not take action on climate change, and you've convinced most people that the science behind AGW is not settled, which is not true. You've already achieved your goals; what more do you want from us?
Predictable that someone like you would totally lack comprehension of the English language. I never said that nuclear energy is harmful. In fact quite the opposite, I offered a concrete scenario where nuclear power could be useful in the real world and not fantasy-land, something that the person I was replying to did not do. And I'm not opposed to new nuclear power stations and would vastly prefer them to fossil fuel stations. I just question the economics. I'm stating that nuclear is expensive, and any attempt to improve it makes it even more expensive. It's a common myth that we need nuclear to overcome climate change. Having it might not hurt, but we could make do without it.
I love how he used the word 'theorem' incorrectly, and you repeat his incorrect use without batting an eye! I'm really enjoying this thread from people who have absolutely no idea what science is.
I love how the AGW stories always bring the lunatics typing from their mom's basements out of the woodwork.
You know nothing about science. Really, nothing.
> One of THE key tests of a scientific theorem is that it can predict
What is a 'scientific theorem'? Oh maybe you mean a scientific theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And yet these 'state of the art' models have so far had a dismal record of prediction.
Wrong. The reputable models from the 80's and 90's (those that had a good level of peer-review and were based on sound assumptions) quite accurately predicted our current warming rate. The reason you don't know this is because you probably derive most of your 'information' from sources that actually don't deal in science.
> The obvious ones of course being nuclear power in its more modern versions
I knew you'd segue into nuclear power at the end, and you didn't disappoint! Somehow anti-AGW lunacy seems to be highly correlated with nuclear lunacy.
Nuclear energy is not going to solve our problems. It is obscenely expensive - far more expensive than wind or solar. This is true both for construction costs, maintenance costs, total lifetime costs, and also costs per final delivered kWh. Nuclear is only feasible for a very specific set of scenarios - scenarios where you have a large population or industry center located in an area that is poor in renewable energy sources. And even then, only as an augmentative power source to renewable energy, not as a sole source of power.
Nuclear is also non-renewable and reprocessing (to make it renewable) adds even more expense to the point that it could never hope to be commercially competitive. You guys believe in the free market right? That the market always knows best? Well the market decided on nuclear, and it decided that nuclear sucks. It also decided that nuclear reprocessing sucks even harder.
Ok I might have simply misunderstood you previously. I agree with what you're saying here. It's what I'm saying as well: There's nothing special about the Concorde engine, it's just that the speed at which it flew was a great speed for turbojet efficiency (and it had a good intake design). But maybe you've also misunderstood me. I'm not taking a dig at turbofan engines or other modern engines.
Believe me, I think the SABRE engine idea is great and I'd love nothing more than a SSTO reusable rocket. But plenty (and I do mean plenty) of hypersonic aircraft (for example NASA's numerous concepts) have come and gone and none have lived up to their promises. Hypersonic flight is generally where aircraft designs go to die. The aerodynamics are tricky and poorly-understood. Heating is a huge problem. Intakes fail and un-start. There are lots of problems operating craft at such speeds. It's definitely not 'just the intercooler'. Again, I'll believe it when it flies. Skylon's major saving grace is that it's only designed to fly at hypersonic speeds for a very short time, so presumably it can 'punch' out of any failure modes that arise. Even if it does fly successfully, though, hydrogen is an expensive and tricky fuel and the SABRE engine uses a LOT of it. It may be worthwhile for space access but it's definitely not worthwhile for passenger flight.
Thrust specific fuel consumption can't be used to compare a supersonic engine with a subsonic one, because it must be compared at fixed speed.
The concorde's engines had a propulsive efficiency of 43% at cruise. The best modern high-bypass turbofans I'm aware of achieve a propulsive efficiency of 35% at cruise. As I said, the main reason for this discrepancy is the intake which provided good pressure recovery and the losses encountered when you mix a hot fast-moving stream with a cold slow-moving stream. Newer turbofan designs are pushing up against 40% efficiency though.