Yeah, my conversation with cleverbot went off the rails immediately:
me: Would you object to talking about nuclear physics?
cb: Can you tell me about Lucifer?
me: I don't think so; I don't follow mythology.
cb: I thought you were a dodgers fan?
Sorry, but that hardcore a non-sequitur isn't human.
Seriously. I've no degree, programming for a living at six figs, and when I finally got fed up with the mess the last job's management had unleashed upon us, it took me under a month to start a suitable replacement job at half-again my salary.
I don't know how that rates for CS grads; they tend to be kinda useless theoretical asshats until you've broken 'em in a bit. But whatever.
Gimme a link. I couldn't find the photos of which you speak, but I did find an article from "In these times, 1987", in which, in accusatory tones, they describe the denitrating of actinide nitrates, with ammonia and spraying the resultant ammonium nitrate (i.e., sans actinides) on their own farmland. Seems reasonable enough to me, but then, I know some chemistry. To convert your waste from a stream of undisposable nitrates into a solid you can dispose of within the realm of government regulations, you take the nitrate groups off. You then have to do something with the nitrate groups that isn't going to piss people off, despite it's being non-radioactive and fairly valuable fertilizer otherwise. So, spray it on your own lands. Problem solved.
Best I can tell, the cattle thing is a synthesis. If you can link me the photos, I can probably help track down their source. They could be legit, but the fact is there are lots of sources of photos for mutilated and/or simply dead cattle. Hell, my wife grew up on a farm, and her family's entire herd died of a virus one year, ending their farming lives forever. Of course, I'm biased: I've seen some of the more zealous of environmentalists bald-facedly lie about important things; I would not ever put it past them to tell a whopper, even in picture form.
Meh. If it were legal, I'd let the industry bury a dry cask in my back yard. Those things are solid ultra-dense concrete and steel. Put it about 20m down below, and the spent fuel is really just not getting out. Hell, they're dens enough and thickly shielded enough that there's nearly no gamma flux, and gamma's damn near impossible to stop fully.
I'd do it because I'd have no fear whatsoever of any harm as a result. I know what's in there; I know what's protecting the world from it; I know it's sufficient.
I'd do it; besides the fact that I'd be storing all the nuclear waste needed for my lifetime as well as about 200 other people, I'd do it just to shut up all the NIMBYs and BANANAs.
NIMBYs are whiny, ignorant fuckers. Do you fear, say, Yucca Mountain? Then I consider you to be a whiny, ignorant fucker. Do you know why? Because you are demonstrably in no danger, and yet you feel you have reason to prevent what is an otherwise necessary action.
If you're curious about the working of nuclear energy - specifically breeder reactors, Wikipedia's actually surprisingly accurate for a topic that can be sometimes controversial.
Try the following searches:
"Nuclear fission"
"Uranium 235"
"Light Water Reactor"
"Integral Fast Reactor"
"Travelling Wave Reactor"
Also, if you're interested in thermal spectrum breeders, try:
"Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment"
There's also a relatively new American project working on MSRs, called LFTR, run by FLiBe energy. Google for that if you're interested; they've been putting all their 30,000 foot technology documents online.
That said.
Breeders don't burn waste, at least, not until it's been enriched further. Then the tailings can be bred and the HEMO (highly enriched mixed oxide) can be burned; then the tailings must be reprocessed to pull out the bred Pu-239 and put into the fuel stream, rinse and repeat until it's all changed into fission products, which you then sit on for about 300 years.
This carries a proliferation risk that's been the bane of any fast reactor project - you're making and breaking out the best isotope for making nuclear weapons. Mind, you'll often see refuel/reprocessing cycles tuned to make sure a lot of Pu-240 and Pu-241 are produced (which are very, very bad for weapons making, largely for predetonational reasons), but that's a variable that can be changed without a fundamental change to the design of the plant. And, in my opinion, any safety feature that's held in place through sheer force of bureaucracy is not to be trusted.
MSRs have a better plan - though none have been built yet. Basically, since the whole system is fluids (i.e., molten salts with dissolved fissiles in), you can, in theory, do your reprocessing continuously deep inside the reactor building via basic lanthanide and actinide chemistry. You're still breeding a weaponable material (in this case, U-233), but it never has a need or opportunity to leave the reactor. Basically, it's trapped in there until it's fission products, at which point it's not weaponable. Proliferation resistance that has physical barrier to back it up. It's a good thing.
Yeeeah... Just one drunk ships' captain - actually, much of the waste is in crazy-solid concrete and steel containers already. Would anyone notice if we just started tipping them off into the pacific?
The agreement was that fees would be paid to the government which would (in theory) be used to build a central repository at which location the US government could choose to store or reprocess the waste. The fees have been (and are being) paid. The repo has not come to pass, however.
they should be required to have full insurance up to chernobyl style accidents
Power companies are liable for up to $2B/GW, which is significantly more than was spent cleaning up TMI. The cost of Fukushima, by the way, despite being a natural disaster that's going to cost Japan orders of magnitude more than the clean-up costs of the plant, is being mostly paid for by TEPCO, with the government chipping in about a third.
"Greenpeace may not be the most credible organization here"
Give the man a gold star.
"but the whole reprocessing story reeks"
Jeez; you release a few micrograms of tritium per gallon of water and suddenly it's armageddon. I'll put it this way, dude: I have a keyring. It contains about half a gram of tritium, in a phosphorescent plastic chamber. If I were to burn that tritium into tritated water, then mix it into a liter of regular water, I'd have somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 billion picocuries of tritium per liter water - more than a million times the concentration released from AREVA's operations.
And then I'd drink it, secure in the knowledge that tritium is not that damned harmful. It doesn't reek. France set extremely conservative radiological standards, and AREVA exceeded them, then brought their operation back under the limit.
Now, mind, there are other waste streams - DUF6 being the largest one. But DUF6 isn't even that big a problem; it's just more expensive to defluoronate and bury (generally back in the uranium mines it came from) than it is to retain on-site. It's less radioactive than/natural/ uranium, for pity's sake.
No, see, chemical issue are/actual/ problems. You know, like coal ash, and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, nuclear waste, while mildly radioactive, is an easily contained solid, and is produced in tiny quantities when compared to fossil fuel ash. Someone who actually gives a shit about the environment would do their research on nuclear power (and not from Greenpeace's website), learn what the/real/ safety concerns are, and push for solutions to those concerns. They would not, mind, push to eliminate the smallest mining/waste footprint per joule, lowest fatality count per joule, lowest land-use per watt technology we have, renewables included.
Anti-nuclear environmentalists always worry me: how is it you can be concerned about all the right things and still get such a wrong answer?
"WIthout about 10 million dead babies and misformed born babies in twe lost worldwide due to radioactivity you would be spreading propaganda. And we had enough of that shit. So just turn those damn things off. And leave them off."
Trolol.
Sorry, there are no dead babies as a result of nuclear power. None misformed either. There are several million misinformed babies (such as yourself) as a result of the dogmatic opponents of nuclear power, but that's not really what we're talking about.
Gee, I wonder why no one was listening to the/.ers ten years ago when we were basically warning anyone who held still for long enough that buy-in == lock-in.
Additionally, I did not say no one learned from the mistake - but a lead engineer is a man with 10 or more years of engineering experience and education. The project is now deprived of that because a culture has a self-indulgent pride issue.
"When we fuck up and kill 10k people... its the 10k peoples fault they died, not the CEO or Engineers."
a) I don't think anyone in the US behaves like that b) I don't see how that's relevant.
"The Japanese have a since of honor and pride, the rest of the world would do good to have some of it....some people actually feel bad when they fuck up"
There is no honor in suicide, and pride, when injured, does not justify giving up. If you feel bad, you help fix the problem. Committing suicide because you don't want to face the fact that you made a mistake and that mistake had real consequences? That is the height of dishonor.
Ok, so Seagate sells a USB 3.0 SATA drive where the adaptor can be removed and used for other drives. Get one of those, and when if fills up, just start buying 1TB laptop SATA drives. They're small, cheap-ish, and more impact-resistant than their desktop counterparts.
"The senior engineer on the effort committed suicide after this."
That is truly a shame, and one of the few things I really dislike about Japanese culture.
You don't learn without making mistakes. Epic mistakes deliver epic lessons. Suicide deprives/everyone/ of your experience, and has literally/nothing/ to do with some antique sense of "honor". It's cowardice; you can't stand the embarrassment, so you run away. If the Japanese had any sense in the matter, they'd shame the families of those that have committed suicide, so as to disincentivize that as a solution to shame.
Ehh... Reprocessing hasn't exactly stood still since the 1970's. And, I mean, it's not easy or anything, but AREVA does it every day.
Now, while I agree that waste reuse (and, of course, avoiding the isotopic mess that comes with natural uranium) and thorium breeding are a good idea to develop, I think you may be a little out of your depth on the subject of "accelerated thorium"; the fission-fusion reaction hasn't even demonstrated the ability to reach 10% break-even from the energy used to accelerate the Th beam, and was largely designed to produce high-neutron isotopes of transition elements. It's not geared for power production.
That's a bit ironic, yeah? I mean you basically said, "Don't pretend [older, difficult magic process] will fix everything, but hey, [new, poorly understood magic process]!"
Hi! You must be new here. Let me introduce you to the Slashdot resident "sodium cooled reactors have crazy potential safety issues, we should probably use molten salts instead" contingent.
"For someone who has a swear word every second sentence... well it might be hard to understand for you that having a discussion with you is kinda... irritating"
That you can't see the content for the swear words says something about your usefulness. Still, I'm going to briefly assume you're not simply being an incendiary troll and try to address you with some respect this round.
"Your geographic knowledge just sucks."
On the contrary: I was able to visit most of Europe's major cities on a three month sabbatical last year, spending a good bit of time in each of the major cities. Three months in the states with the same methodology would have gotten me maybe half the east coast. Europe is/tiny/. I mean, my commute alone is about an hour long; that would get you into another country on your side of the pond. E.g., Karlsruhe to Strasbourg.
I'll put it this way: When was the last time you suffered 45 C weather before noon? Floridians get that shit in the spring. When was the last time you got 2 meters of snow? Upstate New York gets that 4-5 times annually. Virtually anyone south of the Mason Dixon is running their AC virtually 24-7 between June and August - in many cases/so as to not die/ - but in most cases so they're not so hot they can't think. Almost anyone north of Pennsylvania has to heat their houses for 3/4 of the year, for the opposite, but similar reasons.
The United States is large enough, vertically, and stable enough, industrially, that is unsurprising it uses more energy per capita than Europe based on climate gradient alone. You can ignore that if you like, but that would be valid reason to apply the moniker "ignorant".
"your cars burn fuel like insane"
That's fair; too many Hummers, not enough Fits. As long as we're using gasoline and diesel vehicles, though, we have the same set of problems, all based on one fact: there are a diminishing number of ways to centrally, unintrusively reduce our vehicles' emissions profiles. Conversion to electric vehicles as a standard is how this is is solved. There are the complaints that you're just shunting the pollution to a central source - but it's a central source that can - will - be replaced if other best practices go into effect. Replacing coal with nukes and renewables - and later, Gen 4 nukes and renewables.
Back to the Hummers v. Fits: that's not who you're talking to; I drive a Mazda2 and get about 35 MPG (~15 km/l). I bought it specifically because of its fuel efficiency, and would have gotten electric if not for the practical concern that I live in an apartment, don't have the hookups, and don't have the right to install them. Our gasoline consumption is something we/all/ need to work on - but that's not who you're talking to.
Point is, with the economic downturn, more people are using that methodology - lower cost, higher mileage - but there are other problems as caused by a downturn and a geographically sprawling country: my commute, for example, is roughly an hour each way. You take what jobs you can, and they're often farther than you'd like. It's not always practical to move house either. My wife is a city planner, and how to avoid and solve that sort of urban sprawl is one of her main concerns.
So do me a favor: Leave the broad brush in its sheath next post, will you? Your objections, so far, may apply to my countrymen, but not me. I'm a conservationist, efficiency-concerned, and careful about my energy choices in/all/ sectors. Further, you've been complaining about how I should be Googling, but if you actually/understood/ anything I was saying, or what Google and Wikipedia brought you, you'd notice that my complaints are valid: "numbers" are given, but only the ones you can't draw actual conclusions from. I have real money to invest, and concrete numbers are important to that.
Incidentally, Aquamarine got back to me (if you wer
"You still did not google to answer your questions yourself"
I did google, dipshit. The answers are not yet publicly available. If you think differently, how about you show me the google term that tells me different.
"BTW, what is kWe supposed to be? Do you mean kW? Or more likely kW/h?"
kilowatts electric. As opposed to heat, or BTUs from fossil fuels. It's a relatively standard term, as opposed to "homes".
"i wonder if your kWe does include gas/oil or only electric power"
Nope. And it didn't for Germany or France, either. There's a very good reason citizens of the US, on average, use more energy than Europeans: all but the temperate strip of them are industrialized households living in harser (hotter or colder) climates than Europe. As I said above, climate control is the main driver of electrical use, followed by lighting. The rest is cake.
"Anyway, go and dream your useless dreams, with no change in power generation the planet is doomed."
You are correct. In the US, we have a LOT of coal generation to replace, we SHOULD replace it with nuclear, and we are not doing so. That's a problem. China's got the right idea. Germany has not, opting instead to let other european countries do their power generation for them, lest they have the scary nuclear, or boost their emissions past EU limits.
"You barked very loud it seems"
And you, rather than addressing what I gave a shit about (failure of journalistic duty on Inhabitat's part), opted to attack me for "not googling". You "kicked" pretty fucking hard for no goddamned reason - though I suspect your "reasoning" was that I was in some way attacking a new generation technology. Let me correct your ignorant ass: If this works and is scalable, that's an awesome thing - but I want real numbers, not a shitty corporate press release.
I mean, why are you so adamantly defensive? Do you work for Inhabitat or something?
"I assume you never learned to talk polite to strangers"
I don't talk polite to those that respond without first understanding what they read. I address them as the flippant little fucknuts they've behaved like.
Funny thing is how/defensive/ people are getting over the demand for a news source to provide actual information, rather than a simple feel-good story about energy tech. How people are really obviously not reading what I commented, but skimming, getting a feel of "Oh, he's being critical; better defend this thing I think is cool", and ranting off about irrelevancies.
Science and technology journalism is pretty damned broken - but it seems like the readership is partially to blame. I thought Slashdot was supposed to have a geeky readership?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, my conversation with cleverbot went off the rails immediately: me: Would you object to talking about nuclear physics? cb: Can you tell me about Lucifer? me: I don't think so; I don't follow mythology. cb: I thought you were a dodgers fan? Sorry, but that hardcore a non-sequitur isn't human.
Seriously. I've no degree, programming for a living at six figs, and when I finally got fed up with the mess the last job's management had unleashed upon us, it took me under a month to start a suitable replacement job at half-again my salary. I don't know how that rates for CS grads; they tend to be kinda useless theoretical asshats until you've broken 'em in a bit. But whatever.
http://www.zianet.com/web/mcgee.htm
Gimme a link. I couldn't find the photos of which you speak, but I did find an article from "In these times, 1987", in which, in accusatory tones, they describe the denitrating of actinide nitrates, with ammonia and spraying the resultant ammonium nitrate (i.e., sans actinides) on their own farmland. Seems reasonable enough to me, but then, I know some chemistry. To convert your waste from a stream of undisposable nitrates into a solid you can dispose of within the realm of government regulations, you take the nitrate groups off. You then have to do something with the nitrate groups that isn't going to piss people off, despite it's being non-radioactive and fairly valuable fertilizer otherwise. So, spray it on your own lands. Problem solved.
Best I can tell, the cattle thing is a synthesis. If you can link me the photos, I can probably help track down their source. They could be legit, but the fact is there are lots of sources of photos for mutilated and/or simply dead cattle. Hell, my wife grew up on a farm, and her family's entire herd died of a virus one year, ending their farming lives forever. Of course, I'm biased: I've seen some of the more zealous of environmentalists bald-facedly lie about important things; I would not ever put it past them to tell a whopper, even in picture form.
Meh. If it were legal, I'd let the industry bury a dry cask in my back yard. Those things are solid ultra-dense concrete and steel. Put it about 20m down below, and the spent fuel is really just not getting out. Hell, they're dens enough and thickly shielded enough that there's nearly no gamma flux, and gamma's damn near impossible to stop fully.
I'd do it because I'd have no fear whatsoever of any harm as a result. I know what's in there; I know what's protecting the world from it; I know it's sufficient.
I'd do it; besides the fact that I'd be storing all the nuclear waste needed for my lifetime as well as about 200 other people, I'd do it just to shut up all the NIMBYs and BANANAs.
NIMBYs are whiny, ignorant fuckers. Do you fear, say, Yucca Mountain? Then I consider you to be a whiny, ignorant fucker. Do you know why? Because you are demonstrably in no danger, and yet you feel you have reason to prevent what is an otherwise necessary action.
If you're curious about the working of nuclear energy - specifically breeder reactors, Wikipedia's actually surprisingly accurate for a topic that can be sometimes controversial.
There's also a relatively new American project working on MSRs, called LFTR, run by FLiBe energy. Google for that if you're interested; they've been putting all their 30,000 foot technology documents online.
That said.
Breeders don't burn waste, at least, not until it's been enriched further. Then the tailings can be bred and the HEMO (highly enriched mixed oxide) can be burned; then the tailings must be reprocessed to pull out the bred Pu-239 and put into the fuel stream, rinse and repeat until it's all changed into fission products, which you then sit on for about 300 years.
This carries a proliferation risk that's been the bane of any fast reactor project - you're making and breaking out the best isotope for making nuclear weapons. Mind, you'll often see refuel/reprocessing cycles tuned to make sure a lot of Pu-240 and Pu-241 are produced (which are very, very bad for weapons making, largely for predetonational reasons), but that's a variable that can be changed without a fundamental change to the design of the plant. And, in my opinion, any safety feature that's held in place through sheer force of bureaucracy is not to be trusted.
MSRs have a better plan - though none have been built yet. Basically, since the whole system is fluids (i.e., molten salts with dissolved fissiles in), you can, in theory, do your reprocessing continuously deep inside the reactor building via basic lanthanide and actinide chemistry. You're still breeding a weaponable material (in this case, U-233), but it never has a need or opportunity to leave the reactor. Basically, it's trapped in there until it's fission products, at which point it's not weaponable. Proliferation resistance that has physical barrier to back it up. It's a good thing.
Yeeeah... Just one drunk ships' captain - actually, much of the waste is in crazy-solid concrete and steel containers already. Would anyone notice if we just started tipping them off into the pacific?
while not taking care of their trash
The agreement was that fees would be paid to the government which would (in theory) be used to build a central repository at which location the US government could choose to store or reprocess the waste. The fees have been (and are being) paid. The repo has not come to pass, however.
they should be required to have full insurance up to chernobyl style accidents
Power companies are liable for up to $2B/GW, which is significantly more than was spent cleaning up TMI. The cost of Fukushima, by the way, despite being a natural disaster that's going to cost Japan orders of magnitude more than the clean-up costs of the plant, is being mostly paid for by TEPCO, with the government chipping in about a third.
"Greenpeace may not be the most credible organization here" Give the man a gold star. "but the whole reprocessing story reeks" Jeez; you release a few micrograms of tritium per gallon of water and suddenly it's armageddon. I'll put it this way, dude: I have a keyring. It contains about half a gram of tritium, in a phosphorescent plastic chamber. If I were to burn that tritium into tritated water, then mix it into a liter of regular water, I'd have somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 billion picocuries of tritium per liter water - more than a million times the concentration released from AREVA's operations. And then I'd drink it, secure in the knowledge that tritium is not that damned harmful. It doesn't reek. France set extremely conservative radiological standards, and AREVA exceeded them, then brought their operation back under the limit. Now, mind, there are other waste streams - DUF6 being the largest one. But DUF6 isn't even that big a problem; it's just more expensive to defluoronate and bury (generally back in the uranium mines it came from) than it is to retain on-site. It's less radioactive than /natural/ uranium, for pity's sake.
No, see, chemical issue are /actual/ problems. You know, like coal ash, and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, nuclear waste, while mildly radioactive, is an easily contained solid, and is produced in tiny quantities when compared to fossil fuel ash. Someone who actually gives a shit about the environment would do their research on nuclear power (and not from Greenpeace's website), learn what the /real/ safety concerns are, and push for solutions to those concerns. They would not, mind, push to eliminate the smallest mining/waste footprint per joule, lowest fatality count per joule, lowest land-use per watt technology we have, renewables included.
Anti-nuclear environmentalists always worry me: how is it you can be concerned about all the right things and still get such a wrong answer?
"WIthout about 10 million dead babies and misformed born babies in twe lost worldwide due to radioactivity you would be spreading propaganda. And we had enough of that shit. So just turn those damn things off. And leave them off."
Trolol.
Sorry, there are no dead babies as a result of nuclear power. None misformed either. There are several million misinformed babies (such as yourself) as a result of the dogmatic opponents of nuclear power, but that's not really what we're talking about.
I wonder what the nominal ambient flux actually is (i.e., W/m^3), and how much of it they're actually capturing.
Gee, I wonder why no one was listening to the /.ers ten years ago when we were basically warning anyone who held still for long enough that buy-in == lock-in.
Additionally, I did not say no one learned from the mistake - but a lead engineer is a man with 10 or more years of engineering experience and education. The project is now deprived of that because a culture has a self-indulgent pride issue.
Union Carbide was held responsible for what they did.
"When we fuck up and kill 10k people ... its the 10k peoples fault they died, not the CEO or Engineers."
a) I don't think anyone in the US behaves like that
b) I don't see how that's relevant.
"The Japanese have a since of honor and pride, the rest of the world would do good to have some of it....some people actually feel bad when they fuck up"
There is no honor in suicide, and pride, when injured, does not justify giving up. If you feel bad, you help fix the problem. Committing suicide because you don't want to face the fact that you made a mistake and that mistake had real consequences? That is the height of dishonor.
Oh, no. I've been in this argument before.
Ok, so Seagate sells a USB 3.0 SATA drive where the adaptor can be removed and used for other drives. Get one of those, and when if fills up, just start buying 1TB laptop SATA drives. They're small, cheap-ish, and more impact-resistant than their desktop counterparts.
"The senior engineer on the effort committed suicide after this."
/everyone/ of your experience, and has literally /nothing/ to do with some antique sense of "honor". It's cowardice; you can't stand the embarrassment, so you run away. If the Japanese had any sense in the matter, they'd shame the families of those that have committed suicide, so as to disincentivize that as a solution to shame.
That is truly a shame, and one of the few things I really dislike about Japanese culture.
You don't learn without making mistakes. Epic mistakes deliver epic lessons. Suicide deprives
Live through it. You'll be better for it.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US, the costs of decommissioning is baked into the fees paid by the plant owner to be allowed to build.
No, you see, people who deal with nuclear energy are /responsible/ humans that clean up after themselves.
Ehh...
Reprocessing hasn't exactly stood still since the 1970's. And, I mean, it's not easy or anything, but AREVA does it every day.
Now, while I agree that waste reuse (and, of course, avoiding the isotopic mess that comes with natural uranium) and thorium breeding are a good idea to develop, I think you may be a little out of your depth on the subject of "accelerated thorium"; the fission-fusion reaction hasn't even demonstrated the ability to reach 10% break-even from the energy used to accelerate the Th beam, and was largely designed to produce high-neutron isotopes of transition elements. It's not geared for power production.
That's a bit ironic, yeah? I mean you basically said, "Don't pretend [older, difficult magic process] will fix everything, but hey, [new, poorly understood magic process]!"
Hi! You must be new here. Let me introduce you to the Slashdot resident "sodium cooled reactors have crazy potential safety issues, we should probably use molten salts instead" contingent.
1200kWh / yr? No. Sorry. You're lying, and I'm done with you.
"For someone who has a swear word every second sentence ... well it might be hard to understand for you that having a discussion with you is kinda ... irritating"
/tiny/. I mean, my commute alone is about an hour long; that would get you into another country on your side of the pond. E.g., Karlsruhe to Strasbourg.
/so as to not die/ - but in most cases so they're not so hot they can't think. Almost anyone north of Pennsylvania has to heat their houses for 3/4 of the year, for the opposite, but similar reasons.
/all/ need to work on - but that's not who you're talking to.
/all/ sectors. Further, you've been complaining about how I should be Googling, but if you actually /understood/ anything I was saying, or what Google and Wikipedia brought you, you'd notice that my complaints are valid: "numbers" are given, but only the ones you can't draw actual conclusions from. I have real money to invest, and concrete numbers are important to that.
That you can't see the content for the swear words says something about your usefulness. Still, I'm going to briefly assume you're not simply being an incendiary troll and try to address you with some respect this round.
"Your geographic knowledge just sucks."
On the contrary: I was able to visit most of Europe's major cities on a three month sabbatical last year, spending a good bit of time in each of the major cities. Three months in the states with the same methodology would have gotten me maybe half the east coast. Europe is
I'll put it this way: When was the last time you suffered 45 C weather before noon? Floridians get that shit in the spring. When was the last time you got 2 meters of snow? Upstate New York gets that 4-5 times annually. Virtually anyone south of the Mason Dixon is running their AC virtually 24-7 between June and August - in many cases
The United States is large enough, vertically, and stable enough, industrially, that is unsurprising it uses more energy per capita than Europe based on climate gradient alone. You can ignore that if you like, but that would be valid reason to apply the moniker "ignorant".
"your cars burn fuel like insane"
That's fair; too many Hummers, not enough Fits. As long as we're using gasoline and diesel vehicles, though, we have the same set of problems, all based on one fact: there are a diminishing number of ways to centrally, unintrusively reduce our vehicles' emissions profiles. Conversion to electric vehicles as a standard is how this is is solved. There are the complaints that you're just shunting the pollution to a central source - but it's a central source that can - will - be replaced if other best practices go into effect. Replacing coal with nukes and renewables - and later, Gen 4 nukes and renewables.
Back to the Hummers v. Fits: that's not who you're talking to; I drive a Mazda2 and get about 35 MPG (~15 km/l). I bought it specifically because of its fuel efficiency, and would have gotten electric if not for the practical concern that I live in an apartment, don't have the hookups, and don't have the right to install them. Our gasoline consumption is something we
Point is, with the economic downturn, more people are using that methodology - lower cost, higher mileage - but there are other problems as caused by a downturn and a geographically sprawling country: my commute, for example, is roughly an hour each way. You take what jobs you can, and they're often farther than you'd like. It's not always practical to move house either. My wife is a city planner, and how to avoid and solve that sort of urban sprawl is one of her main concerns.
So do me a favor: Leave the broad brush in its sheath next post, will you? Your objections, so far, may apply to my countrymen, but not me. I'm a conservationist, efficiency-concerned, and careful about my energy choices in
Incidentally, Aquamarine got back to me (if you wer
"You still did not google to answer your questions yourself"
I did google, dipshit. The answers are not yet publicly available. If you think differently, how about you show me the google term that tells me different.
"BTW, what is kWe supposed to be? Do you mean kW? Or more likely kW/h?"
kilowatts electric. As opposed to heat, or BTUs from fossil fuels. It's a relatively standard term, as opposed to "homes".
"i wonder if your kWe does include gas/oil or only electric power"
Nope. And it didn't for Germany or France, either. There's a very good reason citizens of the US, on average, use more energy than Europeans: all but the temperate strip of them are industrialized households living in harser (hotter or colder) climates than Europe. As I said above, climate control is the main driver of electrical use, followed by lighting. The rest is cake.
"Anyway, go and dream your useless dreams, with no change in power generation the planet is doomed."
You are correct. In the US, we have a LOT of coal generation to replace, we SHOULD replace it with nuclear, and we are not doing so. That's a problem. China's got the right idea. Germany has not, opting instead to let other european countries do their power generation for them, lest they have the scary nuclear, or boost their emissions past EU limits.
"You barked very loud it seems"
And you, rather than addressing what I gave a shit about (failure of journalistic duty on Inhabitat's part), opted to attack me for "not googling". You "kicked" pretty fucking hard for no goddamned reason - though I suspect your "reasoning" was that I was in some way attacking a new generation technology. Let me correct your ignorant ass: If this works and is scalable, that's an awesome thing - but I want real numbers, not a shitty corporate press release.
I mean, why are you so adamantly defensive? Do you work for Inhabitat or something?
"I assume you never learned to talk polite to strangers"
I don't talk polite to those that respond without first understanding what they read. I address them as the flippant little fucknuts they've behaved like.
Funny thing is how /defensive/ people are getting over the demand for a news source to provide actual information, rather than a simple feel-good story about energy tech. How people are really obviously not reading what I commented, but skimming, getting a feel of "Oh, he's being critical; better defend this thing I think is cool", and ranting off about irrelevancies.
Science and technology journalism is pretty damned broken - but it seems like the readership is partially to blame. I thought Slashdot was supposed to have a geeky readership?