Vaccines haven't contained mercury for many years.
While looking up the details of the flu vaccine I was administered last fall in the US, Fluarix Quad, I saw that multi-dose bottles, I think it was 10 per, had thimerosal in them, they're obviously vulnerable to bacteria getting in when a dose is withdrawn. Single dose handily packed in a syringe like I received doesn't have it.
Maybe, but it's traditionally been held to be a quality control measure, especially when the chain was starting up and their greasy spoon competition's food safety was iffy. I mean, prior to their creation of the Egg McMuffin, it wasn't a place you went to because their food was great, but because it was dependable and you were likely to have good to at least OK options.
Claiming that wind and solar has no impact in the environment is a myth. There is an impact which so many people ignore.
Windmills kill lots of birds and bats. Lots of endangered ones, but that's OK by the weird logic of the Greens, just like minute amounts of mercury you get from coal plants is intolerable, but we had to buy lots of CFLs for our homes, each with its own droplet of mercury when cold and you shattered one by accident. It's almost like they have agendas other than their Official ones....
There are these things called bulk carrier ships, you know. One of the reasons WWII went so awry for Hitler, cut off from British coal his Western empire was energy starved. Didn't have enough food to feed miners enough to dig enough coal in the Lowlands, not enough coal to smelt much aluminum from the plentiful bauxite France had, not enough aluminum for the French to in theory to build many planes for the Luftwaffe.... One economic factor behind Operation Barbarossa was to starve the captured cities and send the food surplus west. If you find this sort of thing interesting, the go to book is The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze, although be warned he's a Marxist (relevant to economic analysis)).
When the alternative is paying the Ruskys for gas (and being extorted), Germans are happy to pay more.
Or, you know, they could have kept their nuclear reactors running, Germans have a safety culture that's up to the job, unlike the Japanese. Per Wikipedia, 8 permanently closed just coincidentally before state elections representing 43% of their nuclear electrical power, the rest by 2022, although I seem to recall some recent waffling about that.
Or, you know, continue and/or resume burning a lot of coal, as nasty as it is. A lack of common failure modes is perhaps its greatest advantage.
And I seriously doubt poorer people "are happy to pay [3 times] more."
Mein Gott! I knew it was bad, but per these two sources, one and two, for households it's 33 US cents per kWh, 33.29 from the last and Bing's currency conversion calculator. Three times the general US price indeed, and I've heard its really pinching people in the winter. I guess it was more than low natural gas prices that prompted BASF to do their lastest rounds of expansion in the US, especially Texas, which has its own grid since it's big enough to have a stable one and that avoids a lot of Federal regulation.
Merkel had better hope the current anti-Green counter-revolution in France doesn't spread (which historically has been a bad bet).
You have not lost $10,000.00 worth of panels to a hail storm have you?
OMG, can't believe I've overlooked this issue. Live in Tornado Alley, my family has suffered smaller losses from hail storms, and hail can get pretty big. Yeah, maintenance costs are not going to be small, and in things like this, they're always underestimated.
(In the Worm ("parahumans") web novel, one of the "Engbringers" (yeah, the name tells you most of what you need to know) main power is hydrokinesis on a massive scale, tsunamis are a regular part of his repertoire. But if you've got clean nukes....)
And you still need copper, wires, steel, etc to build power plants, no matter the source. The argument is disingenuous, but then again, most anti-solar folks are.
Not disingenuous when the solar crowd pretends it's so "clean".
I think of it like diversifying my investment portfolio: don't put all your eggs in one bag. Relying upon 100% coal and gas is just as stupid as relying upon 100% solar.
Ummm, relying "100% on coal and gas" is a lot more diversified than relying 100% on solar. In fact, there was a recent report on what they think happened in 538, or per Wikipedia it started in 535. Your technological civilization would not survive a several years long volcanic dust veil drastically reducing your solar radiation. That's one of the few things I like about coal, it's one of the generation methods least prone to common mode failures. Nuclear would be too if not for the politics, although, really, any method has that problem.
Could be true, but you have to factor in the degradation of societies that are no longer able to do reprocessing sorts of things for hosts of reasons, like the US and France (read that they smashed their old system that worked pretty damn well, and their new plants under construction are... not going well). Heck, the US isn't even refining, or at least enriching uranium anymore, right?
Coal and LNG, to have diversity of supply and to favor whichever is cheaper at any given time. Both are good for baseline supply, and the gas for peaking power through turbines. Oil before we got better at processing heavy, sour crude, and using the residuals in massive diesel engines to power commercial ships (some so thick it has to be warmed above room temperature to flow).
There are biomass conversion technologies, but they're usually called "biofuels", not synfuels.
And you have to be careful introducing them into an already running system, since all that I know of have a polar section, resulting in their freeing up polar gunk that's accumulated.
If you make policies pretending that all people are equally intelligent, culturally enlightened, etc., well, you'll get exactly the mess we've made of the current world. You want to pretend that humans are not biologically diverse, when such diversity is celebrated, even championed by our betters, and obvious to anyone with eyes to see (you know, "white", "black", "brown", "yellow", etc.), then have fun living in the fact free basement of your mind, till reality wacks you upside the head.
If you're really worried about this, never eat bananas per your #1 or sleep with more than one person, based on the doses you'll get from the radioactive potassium found in both.
That's amusing, but debunked. Bananas do contain potassium, some of which is 40, but the body maintains homeostatic levels of potassium: you don't incorporate more potassium in your body if you eat bananas. Even the Wikipedia article points that out.
Why didn't you quote my preceding sentence:
Which in the eyes of the Greens is "deadly", since they take the fraudulent linear dose hypothesis as gospel, in contravention with real toxicology where "the dose makes the poison".
To those for whom the, per Wikipedia current Official Name of linear no-threshold model (LNT) is gospel, not debunked at all. It's all poison, and you should be flushing the radioactive potassium out of your body.
Current thinking is that diverting thorium-cycle production to bomb use is not practical.
Which is utter bullshit, since you can't fission thorium, you have to breed U-233 from it, and start up a plant with something that'll fission as well to get it going. And as you note, they're "are more theoretical than actual" because (from memory) there's a required "And then a miracle occurs" step where you in a constant process chemically muck with the contents to concentrate the U-233 and remove neutron poisons. Messy, messy, utterly messy, unless you can find a way to omit this step they'll never be practical, and through that process, through the simple fact that you've got useful and chemically isolateble U-233 will always be a proliferation hazard (as I recall, it's said India's first nuclear device was U-233 powered).
As you say (or imply), solar turns out to be a very good source for distributed small scale applications in regions that have good solar availability-- which is much of the third world, which turns out to be the part of the world that most needs new energy sources.
Except, you know, the reason they're the Third World is that their populations don't have the intelligence and very much linked culture to even maintain such complicated systems, let alone build them in the first place. One of the clearest and most extreme examples being all those wells naive young Americans dig for villages to provide clean(er) water, only to find they get filled with trash within a few months, assuming they ever bother to go back and check up on things.
That's unlike algae based fuel which is still mostly theoretical.
That's ignorant at best, or more likely knowing you, an outright lie. It's not theoretical at all; the ground work was laid in the 1980s. Most of the work being done now is to make it more profitable
Aquaculture in general is plagued, in a very literally sense, by extreme ease at which bad stuff can jump from item to item, be it tiny algae or fish, crustaceans, etc. The problem is that it's just way too easy for a pool or whatever of algae to get contaminated, or for the conditions to change so that the algae change to a bad mode, and you have to throw it all out. Something I researched in detail for my father in 2012-4 or so, no one has been able to make it work reliably and at scale yet. And they're trying hard, because if they could pull it off it should be a very cheap and efficient source of fuel. Well, evil fuel you have to burn....
Not "anywhere". Nuclear plants need cooling, so you want to have access to water.
You can use cooling towers as many plants do, and this is true of all thermal power plants, you need to get rid of waste heat for best thermodynamic efficiency.
That's not "quite a few", although thanks for reminding me of the Magnox design, making a total of 3. It's inherent in the CANDU design, where you push fuel through horizontal tubes in the original manner used by the Manhattan Project. Push them through so a fuel assembly stays there only a few months, and there won't be too much of the thermally hot or fissions too easily plutonium isotopes.
But those reactors are not the ones the lies were made about, I'm thinking in particular the hue and cry about that Japanese fuel in the early 1990s, here's the first link I found, by the New "Scientist" at that. Outright total lying, unless you define a "crude bomb" as one that requires 1kW of constant heat removal, quite a trick and makes the whole thing huge (refrigeration equipment plus generator(s) to power it), and a yield less than a kT.
Then show us your math. You're replying to someone who questions the economics of merely maintaining the national fleet of panels, which is a very good question, including keeping them clean, I want to see how you get around the problem that solar can provide neither baseline nor peaking power. The cost and maintenance of new transmission systems would also be good.
And while you're at it, how many billions of dollars for the environmental regulatory process, inevitable numerous failures to get the permits for a lot of projects, etc.? Although I'd accept a "compared to nuclear, that would be a wash" hand wave, but if you've done the math as you claim, you'll have done that part too. Ah, and what interest rates do you assume?
You do know that many states require a utility to borrow money to build a system, instead of taking it out of current ratepayers, "because the project might fail". Which was part of what killed nuclear power in the US, back in those all around bad days this alone doubled the price of a nuclear power plant, which trades off up front capital for lower operating costs (not constantly feeding it coal, new natural gas plants were banned during that period, BTW).
Nobody is going back to nuclear. It costs too much to store the waste.
Only if your country is run by idiots. For one thing, you shouldn't be storing it, you should be recycling it, remove the neutron poisons, recover the unused uranium and the plutonium which was incidentally bred during operation (although I'm not sure how much you can usefully include in new fuel due to the isotope that's thermally hot). What's left over is quite small in volume, and then you have to wait a maximum of 600 years before it's no more radioactive than the ore from which is was mined.
# 7: An American "Chernobyl" would kill thousands of people.
Truth: A Chernobyl-type accident could not have happened outside of the Soviet Union because this type of reactor was never built or operated here.
Edward Teller made very sure that civilian nuclear power plants with positive void coefficients were outlawed in the US. One reason we never adopted CANDU reactors.
9: Used nuclear fuel is deadly for 10,000 years.
Most of the waste from [the recycling] process will require a storage time of less than 300 years.
There's a much better bottom line, especially since the Greens with their lies* have generally been successful in stopping "waste" recycling: leave it alone, and within 600 years it's no more dangerous than the ore it was mined from. Which in the eyes of the Greens is "deadly", since they take the fraudulent linear dose hypothesis as gospel, in contravention with real toxicology where "the dose makes the poison".
If you're really worried about this, never eat bananas per your #1 or sleep with more than one person, based on the doses you'll get from the radioactive potassium found in both. Also avoid emergency rooms and modern medicine in general, and jet flight. Don't move to Denver as well, 1 mile less atmosphere protecting you.
* Lie I personally find most annoying: you can't use civilian reactor bred plutonium to make nuclear weapons, it's in there too long, too much of the isotopes that are hot or fission too easily. Only possible exceptions are the CANDU and RMBK designs, which as I mentioned are outlawed in the US for safety reasons.
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest energy sources, as well as one of the safest.
Demonstrably not in the hands of the Japanese, which was clear long before the tsunamis. They have a very poor safety culture about these sorts of things. In many ways, when you say "modern industrialized nation" that's not quite so accurate compared to the West, especially since they were purely feudal only a century and a half ago (although that doesn't explain why other countries in the region who started developing later, with many similar cultural attributes, seem to be able to run civilian nuclear power plants safely).
Japan's big problem is that when those plants were built the understanding of the geology and potential failure modes was poor.
Their real problem is that they have a general safety culture that's so poor the people doing that sort of thing, or at least the managers directing them, just don't give a damn. This was very clear long before the tsunami in a number of incidents, they simply don't have what it takes to safely run civilian nuclear power reactors.
Slashdot Mirror
While looking up the details of the flu vaccine I was administered last fall in the US, Fluarix Quad, I saw that multi-dose bottles, I think it was 10 per, had thimerosal in them, they're obviously vulnerable to bacteria getting in when a dose is withdrawn. Single dose handily packed in a syringe like I received doesn't have it.
Maybe, but it's traditionally been held to be a quality control measure, especially when the chain was starting up and their greasy spoon competition's food safety was iffy. I mean, prior to their creation of the Egg McMuffin, it wasn't a place you went to because their food was great, but because it was dependable and you were likely to have good to at least OK options.
Windmills kill lots of birds and bats. Lots of endangered ones, but that's OK by the weird logic of the Greens, just like minute amounts of mercury you get from coal plants is intolerable, but we had to buy lots of CFLs for our homes, each with its own droplet of mercury when cold and you shattered one by accident. It's almost like they have agendas other than their Official ones....
There are these things called bulk carrier ships, you know. One of the reasons WWII went so awry for Hitler, cut off from British coal his Western empire was energy starved. Didn't have enough food to feed miners enough to dig enough coal in the Lowlands, not enough coal to smelt much aluminum from the plentiful bauxite France had, not enough aluminum for the French to in theory to build many planes for the Luftwaffe.... One economic factor behind Operation Barbarossa was to starve the captured cities and send the food surplus west. If you find this sort of thing interesting, the go to book is The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze, although be warned he's a Marxist (relevant to economic analysis)).
Or, you know, they could have kept their nuclear reactors running, Germans have a safety culture that's up to the job, unlike the Japanese. Per Wikipedia, 8 permanently closed just coincidentally before state elections representing 43% of their nuclear electrical power, the rest by 2022, although I seem to recall some recent waffling about that.
Or, you know, continue and/or resume burning a lot of coal, as nasty as it is. A lack of common failure modes is perhaps its greatest advantage.
And I seriously doubt poorer people "are happy to pay [3 times] more."
Mein Gott! I knew it was bad, but per these two sources, one and two, for households it's 33 US cents per kWh, 33.29 from the last and Bing's currency conversion calculator. Three times the general US price indeed, and I've heard its really pinching people in the winter. I guess it was more than low natural gas prices that prompted BASF to do their lastest rounds of expansion in the US, especially Texas, which has its own grid since it's big enough to have a stable one and that avoids a lot of Federal regulation.
Merkel had better hope the current anti-Green counter-revolution in France doesn't spread (which historically has been a bad bet).
OMG, can't believe I've overlooked this issue. Live in Tornado Alley, my family has suffered smaller losses from hail storms, and hail can get pretty big. Yeah, maintenance costs are not going to be small, and in things like this, they're always underestimated.
Works in certain fiction universes.
(In the Worm ("parahumans") web novel, one of the "Engbringers" (yeah, the name tells you most of what you need to know) main power is hydrokinesis on a massive scale, tsunamis are a regular part of his repertoire. But if you've got clean nukes....)
Not disingenuous when the solar crowd pretends it's so "clean".
Ummm, relying "100% on coal and gas" is a lot more diversified than relying 100% on solar. In fact, there was a recent report on what they think happened in 538, or per Wikipedia it started in 535. Your technological civilization would not survive a several years long volcanic dust veil drastically reducing your solar radiation. That's one of the few things I like about coal, it's one of the generation methods least prone to common mode failures. Nuclear would be too if not for the politics, although, really, any method has that problem.
Could be true, but you have to factor in the degradation of societies that are no longer able to do reprocessing sorts of things for hosts of reasons, like the US and France (read that they smashed their old system that worked pretty damn well, and their new plants under construction are ... not going well). Heck, the US isn't even refining, or at least enriching uranium anymore, right?
Coal and LNG, to have diversity of supply and to favor whichever is cheaper at any given time. Both are good for baseline supply, and the gas for peaking power through turbines. Oil before we got better at processing heavy, sour crude, and using the residuals in massive diesel engines to power commercial ships (some so thick it has to be warmed above room temperature to flow).
It is by the metric that counts for more than anything else, politics.
Don't let the PRC know that.
And you have to be careful introducing them into an already running system, since all that I know of have a polar section, resulting in their freeing up polar gunk that's accumulated.
If you make policies pretending that all people are equally intelligent, culturally enlightened, etc., well, you'll get exactly the mess we've made of the current world. You want to pretend that humans are not biologically diverse, when such diversity is celebrated, even championed by our betters, and obvious to anyone with eyes to see (you know, "white", "black", "brown", "yellow", etc.), then have fun living in the fact free basement of your mind, till reality wacks you upside the head.
Why didn't you quote my preceding sentence:
To those for whom the, per Wikipedia current Official Name of linear no-threshold model (LNT) is gospel, not debunked at all. It's all poison, and you should be flushing the radioactive potassium out of your body.
Which is utter bullshit, since you can't fission thorium, you have to breed U-233 from it, and start up a plant with something that'll fission as well to get it going. And as you note, they're "are more theoretical than actual" because (from memory) there's a required "And then a miracle occurs" step where you in a constant process chemically muck with the contents to concentrate the U-233 and remove neutron poisons. Messy, messy, utterly messy, unless you can find a way to omit this step they'll never be practical, and through that process, through the simple fact that you've got useful and chemically isolateble U-233 will always be a proliferation hazard (as I recall, it's said India's first nuclear device was U-233 powered).
Except, you know, the reason they're the Third World is that their populations don't have the intelligence and very much linked culture to even maintain such complicated systems, let alone build them in the first place. One of the clearest and most extreme examples being all those wells naive young Americans dig for villages to provide clean(er) water, only to find they get filled with trash within a few months, assuming they ever bother to go back and check up on things.
Aquaculture in general is plagued, in a very literally sense, by extreme ease at which bad stuff can jump from item to item, be it tiny algae or fish, crustaceans, etc. The problem is that it's just way too easy for a pool or whatever of algae to get contaminated, or for the conditions to change so that the algae change to a bad mode, and you have to throw it all out. Something I researched in detail for my father in 2012-4 or so, no one has been able to make it work reliably and at scale yet. And they're trying hard, because if they could pull it off it should be a very cheap and efficient source of fuel. Well, evil fuel you have to burn....
You can use cooling towers as many plants do, and this is true of all thermal power plants, you need to get rid of waste heat for best thermodynamic efficiency.
That's not "quite a few", although thanks for reminding me of the Magnox design, making a total of 3. It's inherent in the CANDU design, where you push fuel through horizontal tubes in the original manner used by the Manhattan Project. Push them through so a fuel assembly stays there only a few months, and there won't be too much of the thermally hot or fissions too easily plutonium isotopes.
But those reactors are not the ones the lies were made about, I'm thinking in particular the hue and cry about that Japanese fuel in the early 1990s, here's the first link I found, by the New "Scientist" at that. Outright total lying, unless you define a "crude bomb" as one that requires 1kW of constant heat removal, quite a trick and makes the whole thing huge (refrigeration equipment plus generator(s) to power it), and a yield less than a kT.
Then show us your math. You're replying to someone who questions the economics of merely maintaining the national fleet of panels, which is a very good question, including keeping them clean, I want to see how you get around the problem that solar can provide neither baseline nor peaking power. The cost and maintenance of new transmission systems would also be good.
And while you're at it, how many billions of dollars for the environmental regulatory process, inevitable numerous failures to get the permits for a lot of projects, etc.? Although I'd accept a "compared to nuclear, that would be a wash" hand wave, but if you've done the math as you claim, you'll have done that part too. Ah, and what interest rates do you assume?
You do know that many states require a utility to borrow money to build a system, instead of taking it out of current ratepayers, "because the project might fail". Which was part of what killed nuclear power in the US, back in those all around bad days this alone doubled the price of a nuclear power plant, which trades off up front capital for lower operating costs (not constantly feeding it coal, new natural gas plants were banned during that period, BTW).
Only if your country is run by idiots. For one thing, you shouldn't be storing it, you should be recycling it, remove the neutron poisons, recover the unused uranium and the plutonium which was incidentally bred during operation (although I'm not sure how much you can usefully include in new fuel due to the isotope that's thermally hot). What's left over is quite small in volume, and then you have to wait a maximum of 600 years before it's no more radioactive than the ore from which is was mined.
Edward Teller made very sure that civilian nuclear power plants with positive void coefficients were outlawed in the US. One reason we never adopted CANDU reactors.
There's a much better bottom line, especially since the Greens with their lies* have generally been successful in stopping "waste" recycling: leave it alone, and within 600 years it's no more dangerous than the ore it was mined from. Which in the eyes of the Greens is "deadly", since they take the fraudulent linear dose hypothesis as gospel, in contravention with real toxicology where "the dose makes the poison".
If you're really worried about this, never eat bananas per your #1 or sleep with more than one person, based on the doses you'll get from the radioactive potassium found in both. Also avoid emergency rooms and modern medicine in general, and jet flight. Don't move to Denver as well, 1 mile less atmosphere protecting you.
* Lie I personally find most annoying: you can't use civilian reactor bred plutonium to make nuclear weapons, it's in there too long, too much of the isotopes that are hot or fission too easily. Only possible exceptions are the CANDU and RMBK designs, which as I mentioned are outlawed in the US for safety reasons.
Demonstrably not in the hands of the Japanese, which was clear long before the tsunamis. They have a very poor safety culture about these sorts of things. In many ways, when you say "modern industrialized nation" that's not quite so accurate compared to the West, especially since they were purely feudal only a century and a half ago (although that doesn't explain why other countries in the region who started developing later, with many similar cultural attributes, seem to be able to run civilian nuclear power plants safely).
Their real problem is that they have a general safety culture that's so poor the people doing that sort of thing, or at least the managers directing them, just don't give a damn. This was very clear long before the tsunami in a number of incidents, they simply don't have what it takes to safely run civilian nuclear power reactors.