"Not true, multiple studies have shown that increased availability of guns increase gun violence"
Those studies include suicides, police actions, lawful self defense, as well as the actions of criminals as "gun violence". I recall a disclaimer on one of those studies that read in part something like, "we consider all use of a gun inherently violent". If that is the definition of "violence" then nothing involving a gun is "non-violent".
What has been proven is that access to guns decreases violence, "gun violence" might increase because old ladies are killing degenerates that want to rape them but violent crime does go down. Crime in general does go down when gun ownership increases. The only crime that didn't go down with increased gun ownership was vandalism, unoccupied home invasions, and other non-violent crime.
An interesting thing happens when more people own guns, the thugs that want to rob homes don't enter a home when someone is inside. In places where gun ownership is rare the thugs don't care, because they likely have a gun that they stole from some other home they invaded.
An increase in gun ownership might increase "gun violence" but total violent crime goes down.
Tell me something, which states have more violent crime? Is it the states that make gun ownership difficult? The 30 states that allow open carry without a license? The eight states that allow concealed carry without a license? Perhaps its the District of Columbia where people need a government permit to even purchase a gun?
DC is the murder capital of the USA. It has 15 murders per 100,000 people, beating out the second highest by a wide margin with Louisiana at 10. You cannot tell me that increasing gun ownership will result in increased violent crime. It fails on even the most basic of research on the topic. We have three possible outcome, more guns == more crime, more guns == less crime, and more guns == more guns. Evidence will show either more guns leads to less crime or simply more guns. What has never been proven true is that more guns results in less crime.
"There is an appalling rate of gun accidents in this country. "
Really? I've seen the rates of gun accidents in the past years and I don't recall them increasing. While the death of every child is tragic I don't believe that the gun control laws that The Lancet proposes would do anything to reduce it.
Tell me something, which of the following would reduce child deaths more... School gun free zones or armed guards at schools? Parents keeping the firearm on their person in a holster or keeping it on a high shelf in the closet? Locking up guns in a basement safe or having it in a quick access security box on the bedside table? Because people that break into houses always call ahead, no? Teaching children gun safety as soon as they are able to understand or keeping them ignorant of what a gun is, what it can do, or how to act if they find one?
I remember reading about an experiment done by a TV station, they put a gun (unloaded) in a toy box at a preschool and watched with cameras recording. The children from gun owning homes stayed far away while the children from homes that did not own a gun played with it like any other toy. The best way to kid proof a gun is to gun proof the kid.
Gun control does not reduce deaths. Numerous studies have been done to prove this. The Lancet study used "models" to come up with their numbers but people that looked at the real and actual effects of gun control on real and actual populations show that their "models" are, to put it mildly, flawed.
Tell me, how would ballistic fingerprinting, "universal" background checks (I put that in quotes because there never will be universal anything), or removing "stand your ground" legal protections stop someone from shooting up a school? It might help in finding out who did it after the fact but such people tend not to care if they get caught and/or killed. What concerns them is if they will be successful in taking as many lives as possible before they die.
What has been shown to prevent such shootings is a legally armed public. That guy that I don't care to name that shot up a movie theater did not go to the closest theater, he went to the one with a "no guns allowed" policy. That is what is killing our children, these "no gun" zones.
The laws that The Lancet proposes would not reduce anything. They'd only create an environment for criminals to kill with greater ease.
Why the focus on "gun deaths"? Are not other deaths just as terrible? What history has taught is that when gun control is enacted you do, almost by definition, reduce gun deaths but that does not mean the total death rate is reduced.
From the article:
In fact, some laws, such as those that restrict gun access to children through locks and age restrictions, were simply ineffective while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defence, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly.
Reducing child injury and death from unsecured weapons is certainly important, just like we don't let children play with knives, power tools, or household chemicals. What we have seen though is that people end up dead from having self defense weapons restricted from access to them by trigger lock laws. I recall a SCOTUS justice mocking such laws during arguments when the DC gun control laws came before them.
Also, I'm not so sure I want "stand your ground" deaths to go down. In those cases it is something like a young lady that is going home late at night from a bar, college campus, or work at a night shift, the lady is assaulted by some young punk with nothing better to do, and that punk ends up dead from the lady's lawful use of that weapon. The alternative is that lady being raped, robbed, and stabbed to death.
Another common tactic on counting "gun deaths" are including suicides. Removing guns from the hands of the suicidal does tend to prevent them from blowing their brains out but does not typically prevent them from ending up dead. Instead they will find some rope, a high bridge, gasoline and a match, a knife or razor blade, or whatever else and end their life that way. The gun control people then pat themselves on the back.
Another good bit from the article:
According to the study's model, a federal law expanding background checks for all gun purchases could reduce the national gun death rate by 57%, lowering it from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people while background checks for all ammunition purchases could lower the rate by 81% to 1.99 per 100,000 and firearm identification could reduce it by 83% to 1.81 per 100,000.
I'd like to see this "model" since it is in total contradiction to how criminals get their weapons. I recall a study where they asked criminals in jail about how they got their weapons and a large portion of them either stole the gun or had a friend or family member buy it for them. This law would only work if the murderers of the world would follow the law on gun transfers and volunteer to submit themselves to a background check. These transfers do not happen at a gun show, or in a gun dealers shop, they happen between two people willing to break the law or by someone stealing it from another.
The laws on ballistic fingerprinting and microstamping is science fiction. No one has been able to prove either technology would work. Much of the problem with these technologies is that it tells you who last registered the weapon that was used in the crime. Since something like 5 of 6 or 9 of 10 guns used in a crime were obtained illegally such information is worthless. Which just goes with the background check fantasy, thinking that people willing to knowingly hand over weapons to a criminal will register that transfer. The desire for a background check is just a more politically correct way to say they want to register every gun owned. The only use a gun registry has to the government is so they can take the guns from people they don't like.
One more thing, this was published in The Lancet, a medical journal. I'll take my advice on gun control from physicians right after I take advice on kidney transplants from the National Rifle Association. Crime is a social problem, that's something I'd expect people like psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, or perhaps even economists, or biologists, to consider.
These people are Luddites, just people scared of a technology they don't understand. So, their response is not to learn more about the topic but instead trying to remove it from society so they don't have to.
Unless you know something about the US Navy capabilities that I don't I doubt this is true. The US Navy has trouble tracking it's own assets. There are incidents of the US Navy running into other vessels at sea, including their own, because they did not see them.
This means that they cannot track vessels, in some cases, even if they could have reached out and touched them. Tracking a vessel many miles out is a much more difficult task.
A tactic used by drug smugglers is to build a semi-submersible built much like a diesel electric submarine. They'd submerge to a level that just the head of the pilot and a breathing tube would stick out. Out in the open waters they'd be powered by an off the shelf V-8 diesel engine but when approaching the (usually California) coast they'd run on batteries so that they would not be detected by passing Coast Guard. The Coast Guard and Navy are in big ships with brightly colored flags while they are in a sub with just a tiny little bubble for the pilot's head sticking out, the pilot can see them for miles but the pursuers would have to be on top of them to see them. If these guys can build a machine capable of this from parts obtained from a Home Depot and a Ford dealership then the North Korean Navy can build a ship with the backing of the Russian and Chinese governments that can be undetected from miles away and under hundreds of meters under water.
I can hear it now... "Sailor! Did you just say the words 'weapon' and 'lost' in the same sentence?"
Oh, wait, you mean "lost' as in not really lost. Right, because the US Navy has a habit of "losing" weapons while training in waters near hostile nations. Because "losing" a weapon would not cause an international incident, no?
I have little doubt that this sub sank due to no action from an outside nation. It could have been a mechanical failure or a training failure. Either way the families will likely be told nothing of what truly happened, they will be told that their sons and brothers were lost at sea in battle with the evil Americans, be compensated for their loss (or to buy their silence) and it will not be spoken of again.
Let's see, $80k is perhaps what a typical experienced engineer, executive, or other white collar worker would make in a year. Even a someone with a blue collar job or someone starting out in IT might make that in two years. A person without technology like this might end up in a wheelchair and end up stuck at a job with much lower pay, like answering phones, end up without a job on disability, or suffer complications and get further injury because they could not move around. Just the psychological effects, both for the patient and those they interact with, must be just life sucking.
Even if this were not FDA approved I'd hope that patients, insurers, and other decision makers in this loop would realize the benefits of this technology and find a way to pay for it. Taking out a loan for this so someone can still walk to work might take ten years to pay off but that would mean someone is going to work instead of sitting at home waiting for the mail carrier to hand them a government issued check so that they can buy food for that week.
At this price range I'd think it would be worth it. I'd think that the price would come down in time with economies of scale and improvements in production. I just did a Google search for wheel chairs and a non-powered one can be had for a couple hundred dollars, a powered one can easily exceed $8000, a "cheap" one is still in the thousands. Some of the cost is offset by what one would have to pay for the alternatives. Wheelchair, ramps, perhaps an elevator, that's all a cost a person would have to bear. This tech would let them walk up steps, that alone is huge.
"Why take the risk when there are much safer options available?"
Precisely, but you don't seem to gather how that safety affects lives. The chances of dying from an accident at a nuclear power plant is many orders of magnitude less than that of a windmill.
With a nuclear power plant in my back yard and a windmill in your back yard we both have very small chances of getting killed but the difference is that while I have a single nuclear power plant in my back yard you have thousands of windmills to get the same power output. The chances of one of those windmills exploding, burning, and landing on your house is still small but many orders of magnitude higher than that of the nuclear power plant exploding and landing on my house.
"With the reactor above, it could displace tens of millions and make the entire state of New York uninhabitable for decades."
You watch too many movies or something. The evacuation around Chernobyl was because they built a reactor with a known fatal flaw, built it with substandard material, had no containment dome, performed a test with safeties disabled, when the people staffing the plant were poorly trained, and then they were surprised when it blew up in their face. With Fukushima the evacuation was unnecessary, more people died or were put at risk than if they simply stayed at home. This desire to act "out of an abundance of caution" likely resulted in deaths that didn't need to happen.
Any new plant would certainly not be built like Chernobyl, and they certainly would not be built like the much safer reactor like at Fukushima. We have better designs now. We also have something like 200 nuclear power plants in the world operating very safely. But we hear about the deaths from the catastrophic failures because that is news. The hundreds of people killed every year from building windmills don't make the news because those are common every day industrial accidents.
Also, the "uninhabitable for decades" part is unlikely. The tritium in heavy water decays naturally with a half life of 12 years. Water also moves because of rain. Tritium is also naturally occurring so there is a "safe" level of that in the water. Any leak will be gone one way or the other in days, months, or (unlikely) years. Other common isotopes from nuclear reactors are things like iodine, xenon, and krypton can be released as gasses if there is a failure of containment. These either decay quickly, in days, or have a half life so long that only those with very sensitive equipment designed to detect it would notice. It was the iodine that made the scare in the first month at Fukushima, no one talks about it any more because it's gone now.
The really nasty stuff, cesium and strontium, can only be released if the reactor explodes and burns intensely like Chernobyl did, and none of those kind of reactors are in operation and have likely been dismantled decades ago. Those elements are very heavy so they don't blow around, they tend to stay put. If a modern reactor melts down, which is highly unlikely, then these very nasty elements stay in the reactor.
So you see the real hazards of a nuclear reactor are very small. That is why nuclear power has such a great record. We'd be much safer as a society if we replaced all our current electricity production with nuclear power because even in the unlikely event of a melt down then the people in the area leave for a day, week, perhaps a month, and then they go back. No one would die and life goes on. But if we built up windmills then workers would die daily from industrial accidents. That won't make the news though because it's just that uncle Billy went to work one morning and he will never come home again.
If you are not outraged then you aren't paying attention.
There are numerous stories of the FDA holding up testing and treatment out of this desire for safety. I don't know how many but numerous drugs for potentially fatal diseases have been held up because the FDA thinks the drugs are not safe. The patients are desperate, they've given their informed consent, but the FDA will not allow the tests to proceed out of desire to keep the patients safe.
I had a professor in college that worked for a medical devices company part time while he taught. In one class he had explained how the rules from the FDA made the medical device development unprofitable. It took too long to get these devices to market so his company effectively abandoned medicine and went into veterinary devices, perhaps hoping they'd make it to human use in the future. The FDA made saving people's lives unprofitable but saving the lives of rich people's pets is where they could make money.
At some point in the past the FDA may have been beneficial to American society. That time is no more. I say fuck the FDA and let the states regulate drugs and medical devices. Theoretically states already can regulate medical devices used within their own borders but the way the federal government interprets the "interstate commerce" clause they can merely decide that something is "interstate" based on the flimsiest of evidence. That medical device may have been designed, produced, and used wholly in the state but if it is shipped from one end of the state to the other in a cardboard box made out of state then it is now "interstate commerce" and the federal government can shut them down.
Let's not have all these technological black boxes where the government can't see what's inside. We need to get to the bottom of this. People's lives are at stake! The FBI must investigate, leave no byte unexposed.
Wait...
You mean we aren't talking about the Clintons' e-mail server? Because all this talk of encrypted sensitive data, threats to our security, and what not I thought for certain this was about the former Secretary Clinton not letting the FBI look at her old e-mails, those created while she was under the employment of the federal government.
Sure, let's talk about what secrets the people can keep from the government but not about what secrets the government wants to keep from the people.
FDA => Food and Drug Administration. Is this something to be eaten? No, it's a mechanical device. No doubt it's use has benefits for people with a variety of medical conditions but I fail to see why this needs FDA approval to get on the market. Even in the article they equate much of it's capability to that of a Segway, did the Segway need FDA approval before it could come on the market?
Perhaps I'm reading more into this than I should. Was this marketable before, without the FDA approving it? I'm trying to think of how they'd define this as a medical device, requiring some sort of medical approval for use, when there are all kinds of mechanical devices that can improve mobility and strength for the disabled and able bodied alike.
Speaking of which, imagine how an able bodied person might take advantage of this technology. This technology might make a person able to carry 70 pounds for a mile and turn that person that can carry 200 pounds for two miles. Think of the search and rescue applications. Cranes and trucks can do a lot of things but if you have the mobility of a person with the lifting capacity of a small forklift then you've got something amazing.
I keep hearing about the contaminated water in Japan but I'd like to know what's in it to get an idea of the problem this poses.
If the problem is heavy hydrogen then I suspect the problem will resolve itself before anyone gets around to processing the water. Some stuff like cesium and strontium are quite deadly but that is also what makes them valuable. There might be money to be made in "mining" this water for valuable radiation sources like that, for things like cancer treatments and disinfecting food.
Just how radioactive is this stuff? Couldn't we just fill an old oil tanker with this water, seal it up tight, then flood the outer hull and watch it sink into a deep sea subduction zone?
Right, because a sample size of one is how we should make our decisions.
If that's how you want to play I can post links to videos showing windmills explode and burn because the winds got too high. Do you want a windmill that could explode in your back yard?
I'm taking a freshman level statistics course now and this is first chapter stuff here, go read a book.
(BTW, I am not a freshman in college. I have two engineering degrees but if I want to get my graduate degree I must have at least two statistics courses on my transcript. I'm amazed they let me get my bachelor degree without at least one.)
I understand market forces. When a tax is applied to one energy source all energy sources get more expensive. Why is that? Two reasons.
First, it takes energy to make energy. Those windmill factories run off the electric grid like every other factory. When their costs go up so does the cost of their product.
Second, even if people *CAN* produce energy more cheaply they won't necessarily do so. I recall hearing that the cost to Saudi Arabia for a barrel of oil is less that $20, but at the time oil was selling for $80. Where did that $60 go? Into the Saudi coffers. They aren't going to sell it cheaper if the competition in other parts of the world are struggling to make a profit. They are going to get as much profit they can for as long as they can.
Same would go for electric prices. It takes time to build more power plants and people are often reluctant to do so if they cannot be assured of a return on the capital expense. So while the coal plant produces electricity at 12 cents, because of the taxes, the nuclear power plant will also charge 12 cents, because charging at 10% above their costs might make a nice profit they can make more at the higher price and no one has grounds to complain. If you complain to the nuclear power plant that you don't like their prices then they don't have to sell to you, they'll go to someone else more desperate for that electricity and they will get their 12 cents.
Nobody wins in the artificial market produced by taxes and subsidies but politicians and their campaign donors.
There was a time I would have believed you but not any more. I now know some of the limitations of the technology we have available to us and how quickly we are approaching physical limits.
Here's an example, my brother works on two way radios and he's responsible for the cooling systems on them. He was showing the latest and greatest radio to the customer and they were not impressed. What used to take an entire room in electronics quickly shrunk down to where it could fit in a suitcase. These radios stayed pretty much at the same size for years now, but the customer was expecting this shrinking of the technology to continue. I don't know how small of a box he was expecting but we can't shrink them down ad infinitum. Why? Because it takes power to communicate, that power *WILL* turn to heat. You can make it more efficient, you can use more durable materials, and you can make it smaller, but at some point that heat load will lead to temperatures that can melt steel.
Forget an AI, just having something as powerful as a modern 12 core processor in the size of a wristwatch and it will burn you. Perhaps in theory the AI processor could fit in the size of a wristwatch but it would be in a case the size of a refrigerator for the cooling systems, power supplies, and I/O interfaces.
" A carbon tax would be very useful here, since it would bring the plant's dollar cost for coal power more in line with its cost to humanity."
Are you sure about that? I'm not.
First, how does a carbon tax aid in addressing the total costs to humanity that burning fossil fuels creates? This doesn't help anyone, all that would do is that the government takes energy users' money (through the coal company taxes), the government and the coal burners take a cut to pay for the people that had to manage this tax, and then give the money back to those energy users with limits on how it can be spent (such as specifying that it must be used for treating lung disease).
The people harmed by this carbon output would have been better off if there was no carbon tax because then they'd have more money to spend on healthcare and also greater freedom on how it could be spent, such as buying a new energy efficient car rather than having to keep an old clunker around.
Second, how does this tax benefit wind and solar? Windmills and solar panels need a lot of materials to manufacture, which would have to be mined and that takes energy. This material would then have to be made into working windmills, solar panels, wires to connect them all, and the structures to hold them up. This manufacturing takes energy, it also takes a lot of minerals from the ground. Where does this energy come from now? That's right, coal, oil, natural gas, and a little bit of nuclear. If you raise the price of energy with a carbon tax then you raise the costs of building out wind and solar.
Third, wind and solar are inherently unreliable. If a utility needs more electricity then they cannot simply make the wind blow more or the sun brighter. They'd have to build up more wind and solar, which takes a lot of time and money, or build up natural gas turbines, which are cheaper and easier to find a suitable site to build. Natural gas turbines costs more to operate than coal or gas boilers, and they produce more carbon output for the energy they produce. Because of this pairing of wind and solar to natural gas backups the wind and solar business is just a proxy for burning more natural gas. This isn't a big problem now because natural gas is cheap so the real cost increase to the customer is minimal.
What is a big problem is that because we burn more gas per watt-hour in a turbine than if we'd burned that same gas in a boiler or combined cycle plant there is little actual reduction in carbon output, in fact it can increase the carbon output. Wind and solar does not decrease our carbon output in any meaningful way, nuclear would.
Carbon taxes are an incredibly stupid way to try to reduce carbon output. The only way we have now to reduce output is to build nuclear. Some future advancement in technology might change that but for right now we have three choices: - Keep burning coal, with all the pros and cons that has - Build out wind and solar, see energy prices rise and quality of life go down - Nuclear power
If you want to see a real environmental disaster then go tax carbon. When that doesn't work then raise it some more. At some point people will have a hard time paying for both food and heat. When that happens people will turn to looking for anything that will burn, like trees. It won't take long before people are shivering in the dark, cooking vermin over a burning tire. It won't come to that of course, politicians are smarter than that. They'd make that carbon tax disappear long before then because they know torches and pitchfork would not be long behind.
"Also, considering nuclear power "safe" stands on shaky ground at best. A solar array is safe. A wind turbine is safe. Radiation is inherently unsafe, and there are always unforeseeable factors, like natural disasters, plane crashes or terrorist attacks."
Look up how deadly wind, solar, and nuclear power are and compare. One source I found that compares energy sources finds the deaths per trillion kilowatt hours as 10,000 for coal, 4000 for natural gas, 440 for solar, 150 for wind, 0.01 for hydro and 0.01 for nuclear. Some of those numbers are USA averages and some global averages. While globally nuclear power has an average 90 deaths per trillion kilowatt hours those number still do not compare to the averages for wind and solar.
No one is proposing we build nuclear power like Chernobyl or Fukushima, we learned from those failures. We can build them safer still. By building out solar and wind power we are letting people die that would not have to if we only built nuclear power instead. I assume you want to reduce needless death where we can, and we can do that with nuclear power.
Bio-mass energy is not particularly safe either. Past experience tells us that we can expect 24,000 people to die from bio-fuels per trillion kilowatt hours, which is not that different than coal, oil, or natural gas.
When it comes down to it the real threats in nuclear power is not the radiation, the greater threats come from falls, electrocution, burns, and other hazards one would see in any industrial setting.
"Except for the resource depletion, pollution etc. that will lead to life sucking and already has led to life sucking for parts of the globe."
No doubt the party will end at some point but that will be potentially centuries from now. We just seem to keep finding more coal and oil. Just the known reserves we have now are estimated to last 300 years at the current rate of consumption.
"Strong economy? You must not be paying attention."
Compared to an economy powered by wind and sun this is a strong economy.
"Where the hell are you getting your numbers from? Renewables are practically on par with fossil fuel sources and , unlike oil, will still be around in 50 years and quite likely will be even cheaper and more efficient. They also pollute a whole lot less."
I'm getting them from the federal government. It may be true that based on nameplate capacity natural gas, coal, wind, and PV solar are near parity the real costs end up quite different because the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine. For wind and solar to be a viable energy source it must be over built to make up for it's poor capacity factor, and also have backups like natural gas turbines for when there is not enough wind and sun. That will easily double the cost of energy, and more likely triple it.
If you want to see an environmental disaster then drive up the cost of energy. People will look for things to burn to stay warm. It might be relatively benign at first, such as people burning trash to keep warm. When that is not enough then they will burn trees. When trees become hard to get then people will burn paint, solvents, motor oil, treated lumber, old shingles, basically anything not nailed down and a few things that are. There would be a haze over every population center not unlike what we see in China now.
"Scientists have known that global warming would be a result of the massive re-introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere for over a century. We should have started addressing this issue 30 years ago, and every year we delay meaningful action adds even more costs."
You are absolutely correct. Not about the global warming thing, I think that is a scam. What you are right about is that we should have been working on this for decades. If we had some sane people in the federal government then we'd never have stopped building nuclear power plants. If we had been doing that for the past thirty years then it's quite likely we would not be burning coal for electricity. We'd probably be still burning coal but pretty much only for industrial heat.
"Your information is flawed, and therefore your options and resulting conclusions are flawed. There are no winning scenarios here."
There is no doubt that there are flaws in my conclusions but I have confidence in that they are for the most part valid. I used to believe what you do, that only wind and sun can save us from ourselves. Then I got an education. I went to college and got two engineering degrees. I did some reading on my own. I was disappointed in how I've been lied to for so long by people that should (and probably do) know better. Wind and sun cannot replace natural gas and coal, not even close. Nuclear power is not the danger that it's been portrayed.
One thing that stuck in my mind was I read an article about the supposed nuclear waste problem we have. What the article was about was researchers trying to develop structures to contain the nuclear waste for the hundreds of years that it would take for it to decay away. I remember this clearly because of a rather odd detail, these people were trying to develop a language that would hold up over time so that future generations would understand the dangers that the radioactive material holds. This was all utter bullshit. Just anti-nuclear propaganda trying to pretend it was real science.
First off, if something takes a long time to decay then it also is not very radioactive. Second, if it is radioactive then it is most likely fuel. The soluti
"Or we could spend "$trillions" on renewable (your wild-assed guess) and save $600 Billion per year on health care costs alone (an actual estimate from experts)."
Or we could move to nuclear power, which is as cheap as coal, and we'd have cleaner air and we don't have to spend any more money on it than we already do in building new coal and natural gas plants.
" I'll also back my numbers up with a citation:"
I won't. There is plenty of evidence that nuclear power is both as clean as wind/solar/whatever and as cheap as coal. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. I did find it interesting that your citation made no mention of nuclear power, which I believe is quite revealing. If nuclear power were more expensive, produced more greenhouse gasses, or was unreliable (like wind and solar are) then I'd expect a paper like the one you cite to make that apparent.
The absence of the data on nuclear power in your citation alone proves something.
"There IS global warming. That is not open to discussion, it's settled."
That's not how science works. All we have are theories and evidence to support them. There are people still debating if E=MC^2 and if F=ma.
"So your point 1 is invalid. One of your "oh, we got it good" ones."
It's not invalid because I made no claim about it's probability. The hypothesis is that we have global warming, the alternative is that we don't. If it makes you feel better then I can rephrase it as we do nothing but global warming is negated by other means. That could mean unforeseen solar dimming, volcanic activity clouding the skies, aliens from outer space stop by to tank up their carbon-oxygen fusion powered spacecraft in our atmosphere, or the flying spaghetti monster blesses us with his noodled appendage and takes the excess CO2 from out atmosphere. These things may be exceedingly unlikely but to complete the scenario it must be considered.
"But it is also invalid that there's nothing that says spending on removing the option of AGW means we ruin the economy. So it is invalid in toto."
I have a question for you, what does a physician call an alternative medicine that works? The answer is, "Medicine."
We don't burn coal, oil, and natural gas because we want to ruin the environment. We do this because it is the cheapest means we have to produce usable energy. Alternative energy like solar and wind not only cost more on a watt or watt-hour basis but their inherent unreliability creates additional cost. Should those issues be resolved then we can stop calling them "alternative energy" and use them as energy. Moving to alternatives before the cost issue is solved will mean a hit to our economy. We can debate how much of a hit that would be but I'd rather not. You simply cannot claim that moving to wind, solar, and whatever else is "green" and we would not feel that cost, because if that were true we'd have done it already.
I saw numbers on the cost of the various energy sources and I saw that nuclear power is as cheap as coal. We can switch over to nuclear power now, and not see any hit to our economy. The only thing holding it up is that the powers that be in the federal government just don't like nuclear power. We should be building a new 1GW nuclear power plant every week in the USA. That would allow us to transition to all nuclear power in 30 or 40 years, at which point we'd still be building them at that same rate so that the old ones can be retired and we would not lose capacity.
"You done fucked up, kid."
First, no one has called me a "kid" in a long time. Second, you completely ignored my nuclear power option before which is why I went over it again. Global warming or not we need nuclear power. If it's not global warming that will be our undoing it will be the economic hit that will come when the cheap coal runs out.
I agree, we should move away from fossil fuels. What I disagree on is what should replace it. Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and so on simply cannot replace coal. If it isn't the cost that kills it then it's that the energy source is dependent on favorable weather, geography, or something that makes it non-viable for widespread use.
What we do have is a technology that is as cheap as coal, perhaps cheaper, reliable, plentiful, safe, clean, and available now. That is nuclear power. In spite of what people might believe because of some high profile and spectacular failures of the technology it is still safer than anything else we have based on deaths per megawatt-hour produced. Also, we know how to make it safer and cheaper.
What's stopping us? A bunch of fear mongering from ignorant fools. If we can get them out of public office then we'd have our clean air and cheap power.
Or we could compute this another way: - There is no global warming, and we do nothing, and we all live happily with a strong economy - There is no warming, and we spend $trillions in shifting the economy from cheap oil to expensive wind and solar, life sucks - There is global warming, and we do nothing, and we end up spending $trillions to adjust to the new climate, life sucks - There is global warming, and we spend $trillions to stop it, life sucks
Of those options 3 of 4 have life sucking. So, it appears to me that the best choice is to gamble that there is no global warming and do nothing because that gives us 1 of 2 options of life not sucking. If we do change our economy to address global warming then we have 2 of 2 options of life sucking, either one or the other and life sucks.
However, there is another option that few people will consider. That is nuclear power. If we build a fleet of nuclear power plants to replace the coal powered plants and synthesize fuel for planes, trains, and automobiles then we get cheap energy and no global warming. But then we'd still have the possibility that we have global warming but human activity didn't cause it, which is 1 of 4 possibilities now. But at least then we'd have clean air and a strong economy, which we are going to need to adjust for the changes that global warming will bring.
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"Not true, multiple studies have shown that increased availability of guns increase gun violence"
Those studies include suicides, police actions, lawful self defense, as well as the actions of criminals as "gun violence". I recall a disclaimer on one of those studies that read in part something like, "we consider all use of a gun inherently violent". If that is the definition of "violence" then nothing involving a gun is "non-violent".
What has been proven is that access to guns decreases violence, "gun violence" might increase because old ladies are killing degenerates that want to rape them but violent crime does go down. Crime in general does go down when gun ownership increases. The only crime that didn't go down with increased gun ownership was vandalism, unoccupied home invasions, and other non-violent crime.
An interesting thing happens when more people own guns, the thugs that want to rob homes don't enter a home when someone is inside. In places where gun ownership is rare the thugs don't care, because they likely have a gun that they stole from some other home they invaded.
An increase in gun ownership might increase "gun violence" but total violent crime goes down.
Tell me something, which states have more violent crime? Is it the states that make gun ownership difficult? The 30 states that allow open carry without a license? The eight states that allow concealed carry without a license? Perhaps its the District of Columbia where people need a government permit to even purchase a gun?
DC is the murder capital of the USA. It has 15 murders per 100,000 people, beating out the second highest by a wide margin with Louisiana at 10. You cannot tell me that increasing gun ownership will result in increased violent crime. It fails on even the most basic of research on the topic. We have three possible outcome, more guns == more crime, more guns == less crime, and more guns == more guns. Evidence will show either more guns leads to less crime or simply more guns. What has never been proven true is that more guns results in less crime.
"There is an appalling rate of gun accidents in this country. "
Really? I've seen the rates of gun accidents in the past years and I don't recall them increasing. While the death of every child is tragic I don't believe that the gun control laws that The Lancet proposes would do anything to reduce it.
Tell me something, which of the following would reduce child deaths more... School gun free zones or armed guards at schools? Parents keeping the firearm on their person in a holster or keeping it on a high shelf in the closet? Locking up guns in a basement safe or having it in a quick access security box on the bedside table? Because people that break into houses always call ahead, no? Teaching children gun safety as soon as they are able to understand or keeping them ignorant of what a gun is, what it can do, or how to act if they find one?
I remember reading about an experiment done by a TV station, they put a gun (unloaded) in a toy box at a preschool and watched with cameras recording. The children from gun owning homes stayed far away while the children from homes that did not own a gun played with it like any other toy. The best way to kid proof a gun is to gun proof the kid.
Because if the robot does not have arms then it can't fold my laundry or bring me a beer.
Mmmmmm.... beeeeer.
Gun control does not reduce deaths. Numerous studies have been done to prove this. The Lancet study used "models" to come up with their numbers but people that looked at the real and actual effects of gun control on real and actual populations show that their "models" are, to put it mildly, flawed.
Tell me, how would ballistic fingerprinting, "universal" background checks (I put that in quotes because there never will be universal anything), or removing "stand your ground" legal protections stop someone from shooting up a school? It might help in finding out who did it after the fact but such people tend not to care if they get caught and/or killed. What concerns them is if they will be successful in taking as many lives as possible before they die.
What has been shown to prevent such shootings is a legally armed public. That guy that I don't care to name that shot up a movie theater did not go to the closest theater, he went to the one with a "no guns allowed" policy. That is what is killing our children, these "no gun" zones.
The laws that The Lancet proposes would not reduce anything. They'd only create an environment for criminals to kill with greater ease.
Why the focus on "gun deaths"? Are not other deaths just as terrible? What history has taught is that when gun control is enacted you do, almost by definition, reduce gun deaths but that does not mean the total death rate is reduced.
From the article:
In fact, some laws, such as those that restrict gun access to children through locks and age restrictions, were simply ineffective while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defence, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly.
Reducing child injury and death from unsecured weapons is certainly important, just like we don't let children play with knives, power tools, or household chemicals. What we have seen though is that people end up dead from having self defense weapons restricted from access to them by trigger lock laws. I recall a SCOTUS justice mocking such laws during arguments when the DC gun control laws came before them.
Also, I'm not so sure I want "stand your ground" deaths to go down. In those cases it is something like a young lady that is going home late at night from a bar, college campus, or work at a night shift, the lady is assaulted by some young punk with nothing better to do, and that punk ends up dead from the lady's lawful use of that weapon. The alternative is that lady being raped, robbed, and stabbed to death.
Another common tactic on counting "gun deaths" are including suicides. Removing guns from the hands of the suicidal does tend to prevent them from blowing their brains out but does not typically prevent them from ending up dead. Instead they will find some rope, a high bridge, gasoline and a match, a knife or razor blade, or whatever else and end their life that way. The gun control people then pat themselves on the back.
Another good bit from the article:
According to the study's model, a federal law expanding background checks for all gun purchases could reduce the national gun death rate by 57%, lowering it from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people while background checks for all ammunition purchases could lower the rate by 81% to 1.99 per 100,000 and firearm identification could reduce it by 83% to 1.81 per 100,000.
I'd like to see this "model" since it is in total contradiction to how criminals get their weapons. I recall a study where they asked criminals in jail about how they got their weapons and a large portion of them either stole the gun or had a friend or family member buy it for them. This law would only work if the murderers of the world would follow the law on gun transfers and volunteer to submit themselves to a background check. These transfers do not happen at a gun show, or in a gun dealers shop, they happen between two people willing to break the law or by someone stealing it from another.
The laws on ballistic fingerprinting and microstamping is science fiction. No one has been able to prove either technology would work. Much of the problem with these technologies is that it tells you who last registered the weapon that was used in the crime. Since something like 5 of 6 or 9 of 10 guns used in a crime were obtained illegally such information is worthless. Which just goes with the background check fantasy, thinking that people willing to knowingly hand over weapons to a criminal will register that transfer. The desire for a background check is just a more politically correct way to say they want to register every gun owned. The only use a gun registry has to the government is so they can take the guns from people they don't like.
One more thing, this was published in The Lancet, a medical journal. I'll take my advice on gun control from physicians right after I take advice on kidney transplants from the National Rifle Association. Crime is a social problem, that's something I'd expect people like psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, or perhaps even economists, or biologists, to consider.
These people are Luddites, just people scared of a technology they don't understand. So, their response is not to learn more about the topic but instead trying to remove it from society so they don't have to.
Unless you know something about the US Navy capabilities that I don't I doubt this is true. The US Navy has trouble tracking it's own assets. There are incidents of the US Navy running into other vessels at sea, including their own, because they did not see them.
This means that they cannot track vessels, in some cases, even if they could have reached out and touched them. Tracking a vessel many miles out is a much more difficult task.
A tactic used by drug smugglers is to build a semi-submersible built much like a diesel electric submarine. They'd submerge to a level that just the head of the pilot and a breathing tube would stick out. Out in the open waters they'd be powered by an off the shelf V-8 diesel engine but when approaching the (usually California) coast they'd run on batteries so that they would not be detected by passing Coast Guard. The Coast Guard and Navy are in big ships with brightly colored flags while they are in a sub with just a tiny little bubble for the pilot's head sticking out, the pilot can see them for miles but the pursuers would have to be on top of them to see them. If these guys can build a machine capable of this from parts obtained from a Home Depot and a Ford dealership then the North Korean Navy can build a ship with the backing of the Russian and Chinese governments that can be undetected from miles away and under hundreds of meters under water.
I can hear it now...
"Sailor! Did you just say the words 'weapon' and 'lost' in the same sentence?"
Oh, wait, you mean "lost' as in not really lost. Right, because the US Navy has a habit of "losing" weapons while training in waters near hostile nations. Because "losing" a weapon would not cause an international incident, no?
I have little doubt that this sub sank due to no action from an outside nation. It could have been a mechanical failure or a training failure. Either way the families will likely be told nothing of what truly happened, they will be told that their sons and brothers were lost at sea in battle with the evil Americans, be compensated for their loss (or to buy their silence) and it will not be spoken of again.
"Ambassador, are you telling me you lost *another* submarine?"
Let's see, $80k is perhaps what a typical experienced engineer, executive, or other white collar worker would make in a year. Even a someone with a blue collar job or someone starting out in IT might make that in two years. A person without technology like this might end up in a wheelchair and end up stuck at a job with much lower pay, like answering phones, end up without a job on disability, or suffer complications and get further injury because they could not move around. Just the psychological effects, both for the patient and those they interact with, must be just life sucking.
Even if this were not FDA approved I'd hope that patients, insurers, and other decision makers in this loop would realize the benefits of this technology and find a way to pay for it. Taking out a loan for this so someone can still walk to work might take ten years to pay off but that would mean someone is going to work instead of sitting at home waiting for the mail carrier to hand them a government issued check so that they can buy food for that week.
At this price range I'd think it would be worth it. I'd think that the price would come down in time with economies of scale and improvements in production. I just did a Google search for wheel chairs and a non-powered one can be had for a couple hundred dollars, a powered one can easily exceed $8000, a "cheap" one is still in the thousands. Some of the cost is offset by what one would have to pay for the alternatives. Wheelchair, ramps, perhaps an elevator, that's all a cost a person would have to bear. This tech would let them walk up steps, that alone is huge.
"Why take the risk when there are much safer options available?"
Precisely, but you don't seem to gather how that safety affects lives. The chances of dying from an accident at a nuclear power plant is many orders of magnitude less than that of a windmill.
With a nuclear power plant in my back yard and a windmill in your back yard we both have very small chances of getting killed but the difference is that while I have a single nuclear power plant in my back yard you have thousands of windmills to get the same power output. The chances of one of those windmills exploding, burning, and landing on your house is still small but many orders of magnitude higher than that of the nuclear power plant exploding and landing on my house.
"With the reactor above, it could displace tens of millions and make the entire state of New York uninhabitable for decades."
You watch too many movies or something. The evacuation around Chernobyl was because they built a reactor with a known fatal flaw, built it with substandard material, had no containment dome, performed a test with safeties disabled, when the people staffing the plant were poorly trained, and then they were surprised when it blew up in their face. With Fukushima the evacuation was unnecessary, more people died or were put at risk than if they simply stayed at home. This desire to act "out of an abundance of caution" likely resulted in deaths that didn't need to happen.
Any new plant would certainly not be built like Chernobyl, and they certainly would not be built like the much safer reactor like at Fukushima. We have better designs now. We also have something like 200 nuclear power plants in the world operating very safely. But we hear about the deaths from the catastrophic failures because that is news. The hundreds of people killed every year from building windmills don't make the news because those are common every day industrial accidents.
Also, the "uninhabitable for decades" part is unlikely. The tritium in heavy water decays naturally with a half life of 12 years. Water also moves because of rain. Tritium is also naturally occurring so there is a "safe" level of that in the water. Any leak will be gone one way or the other in days, months, or (unlikely) years. Other common isotopes from nuclear reactors are things like iodine, xenon, and krypton can be released as gasses if there is a failure of containment. These either decay quickly, in days, or have a half life so long that only those with very sensitive equipment designed to detect it would notice. It was the iodine that made the scare in the first month at Fukushima, no one talks about it any more because it's gone now.
The really nasty stuff, cesium and strontium, can only be released if the reactor explodes and burns intensely like Chernobyl did, and none of those kind of reactors are in operation and have likely been dismantled decades ago. Those elements are very heavy so they don't blow around, they tend to stay put. If a modern reactor melts down, which is highly unlikely, then these very nasty elements stay in the reactor.
So you see the real hazards of a nuclear reactor are very small. That is why nuclear power has such a great record. We'd be much safer as a society if we replaced all our current electricity production with nuclear power because even in the unlikely event of a melt down then the people in the area leave for a day, week, perhaps a month, and then they go back. No one would die and life goes on. But if we built up windmills then workers would die daily from industrial accidents. That won't make the news though because it's just that uncle Billy went to work one morning and he will never come home again.
If you are not outraged then you aren't paying attention.
There are numerous stories of the FDA holding up testing and treatment out of this desire for safety. I don't know how many but numerous drugs for potentially fatal diseases have been held up because the FDA thinks the drugs are not safe. The patients are desperate, they've given their informed consent, but the FDA will not allow the tests to proceed out of desire to keep the patients safe.
I had a professor in college that worked for a medical devices company part time while he taught. In one class he had explained how the rules from the FDA made the medical device development unprofitable. It took too long to get these devices to market so his company effectively abandoned medicine and went into veterinary devices, perhaps hoping they'd make it to human use in the future. The FDA made saving people's lives unprofitable but saving the lives of rich people's pets is where they could make money.
At some point in the past the FDA may have been beneficial to American society. That time is no more. I say fuck the FDA and let the states regulate drugs and medical devices. Theoretically states already can regulate medical devices used within their own borders but the way the federal government interprets the "interstate commerce" clause they can merely decide that something is "interstate" based on the flimsiest of evidence. That medical device may have been designed, produced, and used wholly in the state but if it is shipped from one end of the state to the other in a cardboard box made out of state then it is now "interstate commerce" and the federal government can shut them down.
Let's not have all these technological black boxes where the government can't see what's inside. We need to get to the bottom of this. People's lives are at stake! The FBI must investigate, leave no byte unexposed.
Wait...
You mean we aren't talking about the Clintons' e-mail server? Because all this talk of encrypted sensitive data, threats to our security, and what not I thought for certain this was about the former Secretary Clinton not letting the FBI look at her old e-mails, those created while she was under the employment of the federal government.
Sure, let's talk about what secrets the people can keep from the government but not about what secrets the government wants to keep from the people.
FDA => Food and Drug Administration. Is this something to be eaten? No, it's a mechanical device. No doubt it's use has benefits for people with a variety of medical conditions but I fail to see why this needs FDA approval to get on the market. Even in the article they equate much of it's capability to that of a Segway, did the Segway need FDA approval before it could come on the market?
Perhaps I'm reading more into this than I should. Was this marketable before, without the FDA approving it? I'm trying to think of how they'd define this as a medical device, requiring some sort of medical approval for use, when there are all kinds of mechanical devices that can improve mobility and strength for the disabled and able bodied alike.
Speaking of which, imagine how an able bodied person might take advantage of this technology. This technology might make a person able to carry 70 pounds for a mile and turn that person that can carry 200 pounds for two miles. Think of the search and rescue applications. Cranes and trucks can do a lot of things but if you have the mobility of a person with the lifting capacity of a small forklift then you've got something amazing.
I keep hearing about the contaminated water in Japan but I'd like to know what's in it to get an idea of the problem this poses.
If the problem is heavy hydrogen then I suspect the problem will resolve itself before anyone gets around to processing the water. Some stuff like cesium and strontium are quite deadly but that is also what makes them valuable. There might be money to be made in "mining" this water for valuable radiation sources like that, for things like cancer treatments and disinfecting food.
Just how radioactive is this stuff? Couldn't we just fill an old oil tanker with this water, seal it up tight, then flood the outer hull and watch it sink into a deep sea subduction zone?
Right, because a sample size of one is how we should make our decisions.
If that's how you want to play I can post links to videos showing windmills explode and burn because the winds got too high. Do you want a windmill that could explode in your back yard?
I'm taking a freshman level statistics course now and this is first chapter stuff here, go read a book.
(BTW, I am not a freshman in college. I have two engineering degrees but if I want to get my graduate degree I must have at least two statistics courses on my transcript. I'm amazed they let me get my bachelor degree without at least one.)
I understand market forces. When a tax is applied to one energy source all energy sources get more expensive. Why is that? Two reasons.
First, it takes energy to make energy. Those windmill factories run off the electric grid like every other factory. When their costs go up so does the cost of their product.
Second, even if people *CAN* produce energy more cheaply they won't necessarily do so. I recall hearing that the cost to Saudi Arabia for a barrel of oil is less that $20, but at the time oil was selling for $80. Where did that $60 go? Into the Saudi coffers. They aren't going to sell it cheaper if the competition in other parts of the world are struggling to make a profit. They are going to get as much profit they can for as long as they can.
Same would go for electric prices. It takes time to build more power plants and people are often reluctant to do so if they cannot be assured of a return on the capital expense. So while the coal plant produces electricity at 12 cents, because of the taxes, the nuclear power plant will also charge 12 cents, because charging at 10% above their costs might make a nice profit they can make more at the higher price and no one has grounds to complain. If you complain to the nuclear power plant that you don't like their prices then they don't have to sell to you, they'll go to someone else more desperate for that electricity and they will get their 12 cents.
Nobody wins in the artificial market produced by taxes and subsidies but politicians and their campaign donors.
There was a time I would have believed you but not any more. I now know some of the limitations of the technology we have available to us and how quickly we are approaching physical limits.
Here's an example, my brother works on two way radios and he's responsible for the cooling systems on them. He was showing the latest and greatest radio to the customer and they were not impressed. What used to take an entire room in electronics quickly shrunk down to where it could fit in a suitcase. These radios stayed pretty much at the same size for years now, but the customer was expecting this shrinking of the technology to continue. I don't know how small of a box he was expecting but we can't shrink them down ad infinitum. Why? Because it takes power to communicate, that power *WILL* turn to heat. You can make it more efficient, you can use more durable materials, and you can make it smaller, but at some point that heat load will lead to temperatures that can melt steel.
Forget an AI, just having something as powerful as a modern 12 core processor in the size of a wristwatch and it will burn you. Perhaps in theory the AI processor could fit in the size of a wristwatch but it would be in a case the size of a refrigerator for the cooling systems, power supplies, and I/O interfaces.
While the loser of the match was struck silent by the defeat the computer just... will... not.. stop... talking. GAWD! How annoying.
Does the computer not know either pity or remorse for its opponent?
" A carbon tax would be very useful here, since it would bring the plant's dollar cost for coal power more in line with its cost to humanity."
Are you sure about that? I'm not.
First, how does a carbon tax aid in addressing the total costs to humanity that burning fossil fuels creates? This doesn't help anyone, all that would do is that the government takes energy users' money (through the coal company taxes), the government and the coal burners take a cut to pay for the people that had to manage this tax, and then give the money back to those energy users with limits on how it can be spent (such as specifying that it must be used for treating lung disease).
The people harmed by this carbon output would have been better off if there was no carbon tax because then they'd have more money to spend on healthcare and also greater freedom on how it could be spent, such as buying a new energy efficient car rather than having to keep an old clunker around.
Second, how does this tax benefit wind and solar? Windmills and solar panels need a lot of materials to manufacture, which would have to be mined and that takes energy. This material would then have to be made into working windmills, solar panels, wires to connect them all, and the structures to hold them up. This manufacturing takes energy, it also takes a lot of minerals from the ground. Where does this energy come from now? That's right, coal, oil, natural gas, and a little bit of nuclear. If you raise the price of energy with a carbon tax then you raise the costs of building out wind and solar.
Third, wind and solar are inherently unreliable. If a utility needs more electricity then they cannot simply make the wind blow more or the sun brighter. They'd have to build up more wind and solar, which takes a lot of time and money, or build up natural gas turbines, which are cheaper and easier to find a suitable site to build. Natural gas turbines costs more to operate than coal or gas boilers, and they produce more carbon output for the energy they produce. Because of this pairing of wind and solar to natural gas backups the wind and solar business is just a proxy for burning more natural gas. This isn't a big problem now because natural gas is cheap so the real cost increase to the customer is minimal.
What is a big problem is that because we burn more gas per watt-hour in a turbine than if we'd burned that same gas in a boiler or combined cycle plant there is little actual reduction in carbon output, in fact it can increase the carbon output. Wind and solar does not decrease our carbon output in any meaningful way, nuclear would.
Carbon taxes are an incredibly stupid way to try to reduce carbon output. The only way we have now to reduce output is to build nuclear. Some future advancement in technology might change that but for right now we have three choices:
- Keep burning coal, with all the pros and cons that has
- Build out wind and solar, see energy prices rise and quality of life go down
- Nuclear power
If you want to see a real environmental disaster then go tax carbon. When that doesn't work then raise it some more. At some point people will have a hard time paying for both food and heat. When that happens people will turn to looking for anything that will burn, like trees. It won't take long before people are shivering in the dark, cooking vermin over a burning tire. It won't come to that of course, politicians are smarter than that. They'd make that carbon tax disappear long before then because they know torches and pitchfork would not be long behind.
"Also, considering nuclear power "safe" stands on shaky ground at best. A solar array is safe. A wind turbine is safe. Radiation is inherently unsafe, and there are always unforeseeable factors, like natural disasters, plane crashes or terrorist attacks."
Look up how deadly wind, solar, and nuclear power are and compare. One source I found that compares energy sources finds the deaths per trillion kilowatt hours as 10,000 for coal, 4000 for natural gas, 440 for solar, 150 for wind, 0.01 for hydro and 0.01 for nuclear. Some of those numbers are USA averages and some global averages. While globally nuclear power has an average 90 deaths per trillion kilowatt hours those number still do not compare to the averages for wind and solar.
No one is proposing we build nuclear power like Chernobyl or Fukushima, we learned from those failures. We can build them safer still. By building out solar and wind power we are letting people die that would not have to if we only built nuclear power instead. I assume you want to reduce needless death where we can, and we can do that with nuclear power.
Bio-mass energy is not particularly safe either. Past experience tells us that we can expect 24,000 people to die from bio-fuels per trillion kilowatt hours, which is not that different than coal, oil, or natural gas.
When it comes down to it the real threats in nuclear power is not the radiation, the greater threats come from falls, electrocution, burns, and other hazards one would see in any industrial setting.
"Except for the resource depletion, pollution etc. that will lead to life sucking and already has led to life sucking for parts of the globe."
No doubt the party will end at some point but that will be potentially centuries from now. We just seem to keep finding more coal and oil. Just the known reserves we have now are estimated to last 300 years at the current rate of consumption.
"Strong economy? You must not be paying attention."
Compared to an economy powered by wind and sun this is a strong economy.
"Where the hell are you getting your numbers from? Renewables are practically on par with fossil fuel sources and , unlike oil, will still be around in 50 years and quite likely will be even cheaper and more efficient. They also pollute a whole lot less."
I'm getting them from the federal government. It may be true that based on nameplate capacity natural gas, coal, wind, and PV solar are near parity the real costs end up quite different because the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine. For wind and solar to be a viable energy source it must be over built to make up for it's poor capacity factor, and also have backups like natural gas turbines for when there is not enough wind and sun. That will easily double the cost of energy, and more likely triple it.
If you want to see an environmental disaster then drive up the cost of energy. People will look for things to burn to stay warm. It might be relatively benign at first, such as people burning trash to keep warm. When that is not enough then they will burn trees. When trees become hard to get then people will burn paint, solvents, motor oil, treated lumber, old shingles, basically anything not nailed down and a few things that are. There would be a haze over every population center not unlike what we see in China now.
"Scientists have known that global warming would be a result of the massive re-introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere for over a century. We should have started addressing this issue 30 years ago, and every year we delay meaningful action adds even more costs."
You are absolutely correct. Not about the global warming thing, I think that is a scam. What you are right about is that we should have been working on this for decades. If we had some sane people in the federal government then we'd never have stopped building nuclear power plants. If we had been doing that for the past thirty years then it's quite likely we would not be burning coal for electricity. We'd probably be still burning coal but pretty much only for industrial heat.
"Your information is flawed, and therefore your options and resulting conclusions are flawed. There are no winning scenarios here."
There is no doubt that there are flaws in my conclusions but I have confidence in that they are for the most part valid. I used to believe what you do, that only wind and sun can save us from ourselves. Then I got an education. I went to college and got two engineering degrees. I did some reading on my own. I was disappointed in how I've been lied to for so long by people that should (and probably do) know better. Wind and sun cannot replace natural gas and coal, not even close. Nuclear power is not the danger that it's been portrayed.
One thing that stuck in my mind was I read an article about the supposed nuclear waste problem we have. What the article was about was researchers trying to develop structures to contain the nuclear waste for the hundreds of years that it would take for it to decay away. I remember this clearly because of a rather odd detail, these people were trying to develop a language that would hold up over time so that future generations would understand the dangers that the radioactive material holds. This was all utter bullshit. Just anti-nuclear propaganda trying to pretend it was real science.
First off, if something takes a long time to decay then it also is not very radioactive. Second, if it is radioactive then it is most likely fuel. The soluti
"Or we could spend "$trillions" on renewable (your wild-assed guess) and save $600 Billion per year on health care costs alone (an actual estimate from experts)."
Or we could move to nuclear power, which is as cheap as coal, and we'd have cleaner air and we don't have to spend any more money on it than we already do in building new coal and natural gas plants.
" I'll also back my numbers up with a citation:"
I won't. There is plenty of evidence that nuclear power is both as clean as wind/solar/whatever and as cheap as coal. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. I did find it interesting that your citation made no mention of nuclear power, which I believe is quite revealing. If nuclear power were more expensive, produced more greenhouse gasses, or was unreliable (like wind and solar are) then I'd expect a paper like the one you cite to make that apparent.
The absence of the data on nuclear power in your citation alone proves something.
"There IS global warming. That is not open to discussion, it's settled."
That's not how science works. All we have are theories and evidence to support them. There are people still debating if E=MC^2 and if F=ma.
"So your point 1 is invalid. One of your "oh, we got it good" ones."
It's not invalid because I made no claim about it's probability. The hypothesis is that we have global warming, the alternative is that we don't. If it makes you feel better then I can rephrase it as we do nothing but global warming is negated by other means. That could mean unforeseen solar dimming, volcanic activity clouding the skies, aliens from outer space stop by to tank up their carbon-oxygen fusion powered spacecraft in our atmosphere, or the flying spaghetti monster blesses us with his noodled appendage and takes the excess CO2 from out atmosphere. These things may be exceedingly unlikely but to complete the scenario it must be considered.
"But it is also invalid that there's nothing that says spending on removing the option of AGW means we ruin the economy. So it is invalid in toto."
I have a question for you, what does a physician call an alternative medicine that works? The answer is, "Medicine."
We don't burn coal, oil, and natural gas because we want to ruin the environment. We do this because it is the cheapest means we have to produce usable energy. Alternative energy like solar and wind not only cost more on a watt or watt-hour basis but their inherent unreliability creates additional cost. Should those issues be resolved then we can stop calling them "alternative energy" and use them as energy. Moving to alternatives before the cost issue is solved will mean a hit to our economy. We can debate how much of a hit that would be but I'd rather not. You simply cannot claim that moving to wind, solar, and whatever else is "green" and we would not feel that cost, because if that were true we'd have done it already.
I saw numbers on the cost of the various energy sources and I saw that nuclear power is as cheap as coal. We can switch over to nuclear power now, and not see any hit to our economy. The only thing holding it up is that the powers that be in the federal government just don't like nuclear power. We should be building a new 1GW nuclear power plant every week in the USA. That would allow us to transition to all nuclear power in 30 or 40 years, at which point we'd still be building them at that same rate so that the old ones can be retired and we would not lose capacity.
"You done fucked up, kid."
First, no one has called me a "kid" in a long time. Second, you completely ignored my nuclear power option before which is why I went over it again. Global warming or not we need nuclear power. If it's not global warming that will be our undoing it will be the economic hit that will come when the cheap coal runs out.
I agree, we should move away from fossil fuels. What I disagree on is what should replace it. Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and so on simply cannot replace coal. If it isn't the cost that kills it then it's that the energy source is dependent on favorable weather, geography, or something that makes it non-viable for widespread use.
What we do have is a technology that is as cheap as coal, perhaps cheaper, reliable, plentiful, safe, clean, and available now. That is nuclear power. In spite of what people might believe because of some high profile and spectacular failures of the technology it is still safer than anything else we have based on deaths per megawatt-hour produced. Also, we know how to make it safer and cheaper.
What's stopping us? A bunch of fear mongering from ignorant fools. If we can get them out of public office then we'd have our clean air and cheap power.
Or we could compute this another way:
- There is no global warming, and we do nothing, and we all live happily with a strong economy
- There is no warming, and we spend $trillions in shifting the economy from cheap oil to expensive wind and solar, life sucks
- There is global warming, and we do nothing, and we end up spending $trillions to adjust to the new climate, life sucks
- There is global warming, and we spend $trillions to stop it, life sucks
Of those options 3 of 4 have life sucking. So, it appears to me that the best choice is to gamble that there is no global warming and do nothing because that gives us 1 of 2 options of life not sucking. If we do change our economy to address global warming then we have 2 of 2 options of life sucking, either one or the other and life sucks.
However, there is another option that few people will consider. That is nuclear power. If we build a fleet of nuclear power plants to replace the coal powered plants and synthesize fuel for planes, trains, and automobiles then we get cheap energy and no global warming. But then we'd still have the possibility that we have global warming but human activity didn't cause it, which is 1 of 4 possibilities now. But at least then we'd have clean air and a strong economy, which we are going to need to adjust for the changes that global warming will bring.