I got addicted to Frosted Flakes in the Army. I never had Frosted Flakes as a kid, Mom just wouldn't buy it. When in garrison we'd be given our choice of cereals at the dining facility and I'd just pick what I grew up with, shredded wheat. It started with the day we had field chow and they ran out of shredded wheat. When in the field we didn't have much of a choice, it was often just Frosted Flakes or nothing.
I didn't know what it was at first. I thought I just had a certain enjoyment of field training and sleeping under the stars. I looked forward to breakfast, which is normal since running around in the woods carrying a 50 pound rucksack can make a man tired and hungry. I then found myself eating Frosted Flakes when in garrison. When in the field I'd volunteer for chow duty so I could hide a box of Frosted Flakes for myself since sometimes we'd run out before I could eat, the people serving the food always ate last. Do you understand that? I volunteered for chow duty so I could eat Frosted Flakes!
After my discharge I found myself eating Frosted Flakes every day for breakfast. One bowl at first. Then two. Then three. Some mornings I'd empty the whole box. It got real bad. I had to stop. So I quit cold turkey. It was real hard, I craved Frosted Flakes so bad.
I still catch myself reaching for the Frosted Flakes at the grocery store only to stop myself at the last second. I had to stop going down that aisle. I can't even eat shredded wheat any more since it's next to the Frosted Flakes on the shelf. Now I only dare go as far down the aisle to get some oatmeal for breakfast. Sometimes I absentmindedly go down the aisle and I catch the sight of that tiger on the box calling for me to pick up the box and put it in my cart.
So why is it so unlikely to suspect that the chemical industry is doing the same thing with GMOs?
Because a genetically modified plant is still made of the same stuff as any other plant. The proportions of these chemicals in these plants might be different but the fundamental chemistry is unchanged. If the proportions of the chemicals is different then the cause of any health issue is in the chemicals, not the genetics.
Suppose I have two different potatoes. One is a common variety of potato but was grown in soil that is rich in chromium. The other was grown in more typical soil but has been genetically modified in a way that makes it take chromium from the soil more efficiently. If someone shows up with poisoning from chromium do we blame the potato farmers for planting in high chromium soil or for planting a GMO?
If this is from growing crops in chromium rich soil we'd probably have the soil treated and the farmer would be held blameless. If this was from a GMO then we'd have people ready to have this farmer tarred and feathered. Both cases the farmer had no intent to harm anyone, and the poisoning would have been out of ignorance. It also would likely have been from someone eating a lot of "organic" potatoes from the same local community garden. Buying potatoes shipped in from long distances means the risk of such kind of poisoning is rare as the potatoes would be mixed from many locations.
Barring some freak side effect like a potato taking up a heavy metal from the soil the ability for a GMO to pose any health risk is non-existent. GMOs don't suddenly gain the ability to produce some crazy chemical structure. These plants must still be able to process air, water, and sun like any other plant. We can test for things like heavy metals, or bacteria growing on the plant, or whatever. We test for many of such risks and we treat plants for others, like using radiation to kill the bacteria on plants.
If you think that irradiating plants is also bad then you are doubly stupid. Stupid for thinking GMOs are bad and stupid twice over for thinking irradiating plants is also bad.
Think what you want though, that just means more potato chips for me.
That's a stupid law on so many levels. This reminds me of another stupid law.
A guy gets a hunting license for a polar bear and goes hunting. As much as people scream and yell about the poor poor polar bears they are actually quite numerous and many licenses to hunt them are issued in the USA, Canada, and other nations. There are endangered bear subspecies that share territory with the polar bears, and hunting them is a crime. So, this hunter sees this huge white bear out on the snow and shoots it. When he gets close to the now dead bear he notices that it's got some odd features to it, as I recall the shape of the head and shoulders were atypical for a polar bear. So, the hunter does what he thinks is right and calls the wildlife protection service to look at this bear.
When the officers look at the bear they suspect it's an albino from a protected subspecies and by killing this bear the hunter could be liable for hefty fines and potentially jail time. It takes a DNA test to figure out what kind of a bear it was. Turns out it was a hybrid, the child of a polar bear and the protected kind of bear. They ruled the bear as "51% polar bear" or some shit and didn't charge him with any crime.
To my mind it should have stopped long before it got to the DNA test. If the wildlife service could not tell what kind of bear it was by looking at it up close, and far away it was indistinguishable from a polar bear, then this should have been a non-issue. Maybe they might still want to run a DNA test just for the sake of tracking the different species, this might be useful scientific information. What should not have happened is the potential for being a crime based on the results of the DNA test. It was quite literally something that looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck. A duck hunter should not be fined for shooting this "odd duck" if a DNA test ends up saying it's actually a goose.
Whenever something bad happens there's always someone that says, "There should be a law against that!" Well, we can't bubblewrap the world. There's just some things that the law cannot fix.
Beating people up is still illegal. So, there is already a law against offering someone a ride, then dragging them from the vehicle, and kicking them in the face. The connection to some ride share app is pretty tenuous. The whole point of services like Lyft and Uber is that it's a cheaper ride because they did away with the overhead of running a taxi service, that comes with a cost somewhere else. If you want someone giving you a ride to have gone through a background check from the FBI then go call a traditional taxi service.
If we make a law that ride sharing services have to run background checks then prices will go up. Then we'll see someone come up with some other way to sell rides at a lower cost by circumventing the regulations on ride sharing services. What would that look like? I don't know, maybe it'd be an app that claims to sell anything on a short time scale but people merely use it to offer rides. When the next person gets in a drag out and beat down fight because of some argument over fares then someone will scream, "There should be a law!" We simply cannot make a law to cover every variation on every possible threat to someone getting beat up. What we can do, and should do, is when someone does beat up someone else over a trivial matter like a $10 fare that violent behavior needs to be punished.
Imagine I create an app that allows people to advertise their services to tie people's shoelaces. I have no intention of creating such an app, nor do I think such a thing would have any success but just imagine any arbitrary service. Now imagine we have someone using this app to offer their services to tie laces ends up beating up one of the people instead of tying their laces. Am I now going to be required to run a background check on the people that advertise on my app? What happens if the person offering their services to tie shoelaces ends up getting beat up? Will there then be a law requiring that the people asking for the shoelace tying service to have a background check before they can request services through my app? The connection to people offering the service of a car ride is really meaningless, this could have been any service. The only reason we are talking about this is because these services are popular and still relatively new.
It turns out that the world is a dangerous place and we cannot make it safe by piling on more laws. Sure, we need law to place limits on behavior to have a polite society but even law needs its limits on behavior. Beating up people is bad, and those that do it need to be punished. Does past behavior have a tendency to predict future behavior? Do people with a history of violence tend to have a violent future? Sure. If Uber and Lyft want to run their drivers through a background check voluntarily then that should be their choice. Don't make it the law to have to do so.
I remember seeing an advertisement for someone wanting to do a ride share. Not a ride share like Uber and Lyft, which are really just taxi services now. What I saw was someone that wanted to share a ride every day between near where I live and where I go to school. If I took up this offer for getting paid to drive this person would I be in violation of this law for not going through a background check? Who would be liable if something happened? I don't recall where I saw this ride share request, I recall it was just some general job posting website. Would job posting websites now have to run background checks for ride share offers? Would they have to now check every posting to see if it's some kind of ride share and remove them or risk getting fined?
This is just stupid. If we keep piling up the regulations on everything then we'll just end up burying ourselves.
I don't get your point. California voted Democrat almost 2 to 1 last election.
If you are implying that criminals tend to vote Democrat then I'm inclined to agree with you, that might account for the large Democrat vote margin. If you are implying that criminals tend to vote Republican then how does the felon vote matter when the count ends up being two Democrat votes for every one Republican vote?
We already have a process of hydrocarbon chains on an industrial scale. This has been employed by the Germans during WWII and in South Africa during their trade embargoes. The problem is that it is an energy intensive process. What we need is a low CO2 energy source to drive this process.
The US Navy has been researching the process of taking hydrogen (from water) and attaching it to carbon (as CO2 dissolved in same water) and making hydrocarbons. They have proven the process works and produces usable hydrocarbon fuels. All they need is some help in scaling up the process.
Being the US Navy they, of course, see this as a process driven by nuclear power. They envision ships with nuclear reactors on board producing fuel for the aircraft it carries. No more oil supply ships running back and forth threatening the readiness of the Navy to perform it's duties. Of course this same fuel can be brought to shore for fueling trucks, tanks, jeeps, generators, cooking stoves, heaters, and so much more.
Solar power, no matter how it's collected and stored, is too diffuse and intermittent to be all that useful outside of very few applications, like pocket calculators and communications satellites.
-Windows 10 Pro -MS Office -Visual Studio -Hyper-V with Linux
Or VMWare Fusion with Windows and Linux virtual machines, and being able to switch from Mac OSX to Windows, to Linux, with a key combo. I like being able to run all three of these operating systems on my laptop at the same time. I'm sure someone has hacked up something to make it work on non-Apple hardware but is that kind of a hack something you want to rely upon for the work that makes you money?
I find it hilarious that people who claim to be highly paid software developers will bitch about the cost of Apple computers, and then spend all kinds of time to get cheap hardware to do what Apple hardware can do out of the box. That's saving a few hundred bucks for what is likely days of accumulated effort. Sure, I'm sure that there's a certain kind of satisfaction of "sticking it to the man" or some shit. If the person doing this is really some kind of professional then running a hackintosh, or other legally questionable behavior, is just asking for getting fired, fined, or other trouble for not playing by some very simple rules. The kind of rules that allows them to sell their services rather than have some other supposed "professional" from walking off with the products of their work without compensating them for it.
JARVIS, start a new project. "New project created. Shall I copy this to the corporate servers?"
I like that. JARVIS, begin automated assembly. Fabricate it. Paint it. "Assembly commenced. Estimated completion time, five hours."
JARVIS, what is the altitude record for manned aircraft? "85,000 feet, sir." Give me a weather report, check for aircraft in the area, and listen in on ATC.
I don't know, I'd think having this level of voice command might be helpful for even professionals. Especially for professionals. Siri is not JARVIS but give it time.
What I said was it is easy to spend money and get millions of voters on a national scale to believe. A company can try to make a big project fail, mess it up by underbidding, let shell companies fail and be left holding the bag with the egg ending up on the government's face.
Yes, that is what you said. As I said this is not going to change much if the government is committed to seeing nuclear power succeed. We know nuclear power can succeed because there are a dozen companies in the USA succeeding at it daily. We'll hear on the news about the one that failed, and the anti-nukes will prop them up as to why we can't have nuclear power, but nuclear power will succeed.
Much of the reason nuclear power will succeed is because it must succeed. We don't have any other option at this point for so many things. Without nuclear power the Navy has no aircraft carriers or submarines. Without nuclear power we'd have rolling blackouts or sky high electrical rates. We can ease into more and more nuclear power or we can have an all out mass deployment due to war, another oil crisis, or other national emergency.
We have people that can make nuclear power happen. They are making it happen now. One small group creating a failed nuclear project is not going to stop all nuclear projects. This would be like one bridge falling in a river leading to the closing of all bridges. Or, one plane crash ending all flights. We might, and have, seen such incidents lead to temporary shutdowns out of extreme caution but we return to normal as soon as the failure is identified. A management failure of a nuclear power reactor project does not keep other properly managed projects from moving forward. Sure, such a conspiracy can cost the government a lot of money but that's got nothing to do with any kind of failure of nuclear physics.
A single nuclear power plant building project failure is not going to create decades of renewed mining of coal. Coal is not dead but it's dying, from competition from natural gas mostly. It's not doing well against nuclear either. Germany, Japan, and France have tried to abandon nuclear power and they are seeing costs rise and air quality be reduced for it. Nuclear power is not going away. What will go away is a lot of the nonsense of nuclear power being too expensive. We'll make it cheaper just like how we've made wind and solar power cheaper, with technological advancement and economy of scale.
I find this laughable. Solar is too expensive now but with gobs of government money and years of research it can be cheaper than coal. Nuclear is too expensive, but for some reason gobs of government money and years of research can NEVER make it cheaper than coal. There's the lie though, nuclear is already cheaper than coal. We don't need gobs of money and years of research, all we need is a government willing to allow nuclear to succeed outside of where it already succeeds in military reactors.
Here's my problem with the CAGW alarmists. They say it is urgent that we reduce our CO2 output immediately. I say fine, let's build more nuclear power plant starting right now. But these people will think up every excuse they can to try to not use nuclear power. They bring up costs, safety, or whatever. I look at the numbers, nuclear is right now, today, cheaper and safer than solar, and has a lower CO2 output. Nope, still can't use it. Well, if we can't use something that is demonstrably better than solar right now then I have to question the resolve to solve the problem. If they will not accept nuclear power as part of the solution to the problem then I must wonder if there is a problem at all.
Once I hear these people demand nuclear power then I will believe their claims of an immediate problem that requires immediate solutions. Even if they give a reluctant acceptance that maybe we should do some building of nuclear power now, until solar and wind technology catches up, then I'll believe the problem is in need of an immediate solution.
So long as they scream both that we need to do something now and that something cannot include nuclear power then they are just sounding like fools to me. Which is it? Is this an immediate threat that even "bad" nuclear is an acceptable solution? Or, is nuclear so "bad" that the end of humanity by CAGW is preferable?
So long as nuclear power is "worse" than CAGW then I see no reason to fear CAGW.
And whose problem is it, if you don't accept the reality of CO2 driven climate change? Because it sounds like you are trying to make it our problem: a classic burden of proof fallacy. If you have some better explanation as to what happens when the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are doubled, feel free to post that explanation, along with observational proof.
I'm saying this again. My doubt arises from the lack of urgency on responding to the problem. I offered an "all the above" solution. That is, "all the above" includes nuclear power. If you want to convince me that CO2 output is a problem then just tell me that you accept nuclear power as part of the "all the above" solution.
If you cannot accept that we, as Americans, need to build a new nuclear power plant every month, then we have a problem. If you cannot accept that we, as a species, need to build a new nuclear power plant on Earth every week, then I question your commitment to solve this problem and perhaps even that the problem exists.
These two are tied together in my mind, to accept that CAGW is a real threat then nuclear power must be a large part of the solution. If anyone cannot support nuclear power to avert the problems of CAGW then I must assume that CAGW is not the threat so many claim it is.
You think that in an energy crisis a handful of people can create a ruse of incompetent people to fail at building a nuclear power plant to show nuclear power is too expensive? What of the other dozen companies capable of building nuclear power plants?
They can't all make the same kind of plants, but there are perhaps a dozen of companies building these reactors in the USA for civil and military use. Some make big ones for aircraft carriers, small ones for submarines, some really big for civil power plants, and maybe even some that make really small power plants for moving on site by truck or rail.
As it is now the US Navy usually asks for a new aircraft carrier every four years, and they need two reactors. That's their minimum production rate. The Navy likes to second source everything so there is another company that can make carrier power plants, that means they can also produce two reactors every four years minimum. Then there are the destroyer and cruiser reactor designs on a shelf. Two of three submarine designs with the ability to produce one of those per year. That's four or six companies ready to make nuclear reactors for just military nuclear power.
For civilian power there's another half dozen or more. Total we have something like a dozen of companies ready to produce nuclear power if only given permission. In a crisis the government will pull out the stops and open purse strings. They cannot allow the country to have the power go out.
We'll have reactors go from drawing board to first critical in months. Small reactors will be mass produced as quickly as possible for use in military vessels. Larger ones will be for providing power, clean water, and synthetic jet fuel. Those coal and gas miners will be busy piling up coal and gas for the fuel synthesis factory. If any joker wants to try to play games and take government funds but not produce will simply find themselves replaced by someone that can produce. If the powers that be see this as sabotage and not mere incompetence then they can find themselves charged with treason.
In a true energy crisis it won't be pick and choose, it will be all the above. Coal miners will still mine but that might be used as industrial feedstock for aluminum, steel, and synthetic fuel. We might not even bother to burn it for energy. Biofuel will disappear, except maybe the ethanol plants might be used to make medical grade antiseptics, solvents for gunpowder, and I'm sure a bit "lost" on the way here and there for "cough medicine". Everything for the cause. We will either be at war at this point or the threat of war so high that everyone is put to task of getting ready to fight.
Again, any one that wants to mess with the nuclear power build up in a hope to restore coal as dominant will find themselves fighting a strong current. They will also be stupid to try to get people to burn coal, that will be needed as and industrial product. Plastics, fertilizer, graphite, lubricants, paints, polymers, metal alloys, ans so much more.
I used Google as one of my spell checkers. I thought it'd be easier to lump that in with my browser internal spell checker and the dictionary app included with Mac OSX. Google "auto corrects" that with "non-dispatchable", BTW, so let's go with that instead. It still makes my browser highlight it as a misspelling but it at least doesn't make my head hurt to read it.
Since you made me doubt myself and go back to Google I'll discuss what I found clicking on some of the links. We seem to agree on what defines dispatchable power. With non-dispatchable I'll see some that call this only reliable power sources like coal and nuclear. That would mean wind and solar would be defined as intermittent. If wind, solar, coal, and nuclear are lumped together as non-dispatchable then the distinction is made between base power and intermittent power.
So, there seems to be two camps that divide the power sources differently. Those that define two groups, dispatchable and non-dispatchable, they still separate non-dispatchable into base and intermittent. Those that define three main groups do away with "non-dispatchable" and group power into dispatchable, base, and intermittent. Perhaps some of this distinction comes from the idea that "dispatchable" means it can be managed on a fine gradient. This leave "non-dispatchable" meaning if the power is there then it must be taken.
Nuclear power is sometimes considered neither dispatchable nor non-dispatchable as it cannot be given fine control but it can be refused. Refusing to take nuclear power can be for many reasons, including economic, physical, and legal. In Germany they are sometimes forced to refuse nuclear power as the law defines solar and wind as "non-dispatchable" and therefore must be bought at the price defined by law even if cheaper nuclear is available. Nuclear can be considered non-dispatchable as it is very inexpensive. Output can be changed but changing output suddenly, up or down, causes physical stresses and may involve penalties by some regulator for imposing such stresses or forcing the purchase of more expensive power. Changing output back to where it was quickly may be impossible physically due to the build up of elements in the reactor, as well as the stress it can cause on the reactor. This may simply mean that nuclear is "non-dispatchable" not that it can't be refused but that it won't.
What it comes down to, by my understanding, is that defining wind and solar as non-dispatchable can only be due to legal reasons. In many cases wind and solar will in fact be more expensive than natural gas but the utility cannot refuse or "dispatch" this power legally. The non-dispatchable nature may exist solely in law not due to economic pressure or physical limitation like what often happens with nuclear power.
What some may not realize is that by refusing or "dispatching" nuclear power the costs to the nuclear power plant now increase. They are still paying for rent, insurance, staff, and so on, but they can't sell. So when they do have the chance to sell power their spot energy prices just went up.
No wonder Germany's electricity prices are so high, they are forced to pay for the expensive wind and solar and then also pay the nuclear power engineers and technicians to sit on their hands with an idle plant until the wind stops and the sun doesn't shine.
Right. Just like the campaign to eradicate polio. And mandatory seat belts in cars. And banning lead paint and asbestos. Librul gubbmit power grabs, I tell you.
Just because some of what the government does is a money and power grab does not mean that all of them are.
Because nuclear power is completely and utterly unjustifiable based on cost alone.
Can we let the market and not the government decide that? As it is now new nuclear power costs are infinite because the government is not issuing licenses. Once they can show that they are at least willing to issue licenses then we can tell if it's "utterly" justifiable or not.
The CIA and even Mossad have said for 15 years that Iran has had no nuclear weapons program.
They agreed to inspections as a trade for civilian nuclear power technology. They've been caught violating this agreement several times and a report from 2015 shows them to be uncooperative at best in holding up their end on openness of their civil nuclear power program. If they want civil nuclear power so badly then they are going the wrong way about it.
I don't care if they aren't building nuclear weapons. So long as they chant "death to America" in their parliament I see no reason for any Western nation to trade with them. That counts double for anything of military value.
North Korea has nukes because:
North Korea has nuclear weapons because the nation is run by an increasingly paranoid group of little dictators. They allow their citizens to starve instead of open themselves up to trade. Like Iran they openly state an intent to kill Americans unprovoked and I see no reason to trust them with a rusty butterknife.
No shit, Sherlock. Why don't you got volunteer for the Fukushima clean up crew and ponder why regulations are needed with nuclear power plants and the waste they create.
I see, you equate a policy of issuing licenses as lifting all regulation completely. You do know that Fukushima is older than Chernobyl, right? That site should have been shut down a decade ago but the inability to build new nuclear power means forcing old reactors to run long past their originally designed lifespan. We can retire these plants ourselves quietly or they will retire themselves violently. To retire them means we need something to replace them.
You want to get rid of the nuclear power subsidies? So do I. The subsidies largely just pay for the costs imposed by the government anyway. Take away some of the government costs and nuclear won't be so expensive.
While we're at it let's get rid of the wind and solar subsidies too.
If the goal is low CO2 power and the government supporting it with regulation and subsidies then wind, solar, and nuclear should all be on an equal footing.
Rather than just mock my ignorance how about you inform me?
How does the iodine know my ideas? It doesn't know, it tells me. The half life of iodine means all but trace amounts decayed to inert xenon by now. I say "effectively gone" because any radioactive material cannot be said to every be truly gone but it's "effectively gone" because it would take the most sensitive instruments we have to see it's there.
Go look up tritium on Wikipedia yourself, there's a section on Fukushima there. This tells me you didn't bother to read Wikipedia before you directed your rant at me.
I actually wrote a (short, I''ll admit) report in college about the power grid in Japan. They barely have the infrastructure now to keep the north islands connected to the south islands reliably. To get them to produce enough wind AND have this transmitted reliably across their nation would be quite expensive. The north and south divide is actually two separate power grids, one running 50HZ and the other 60HZ.
This is far from trivial. You can claim that the wind always blows somewhere in Japan but that does not mean it will be cheap. They are building islands for airports, you think that it's going to be easy to put up windmills? They can out windmills out on the water but what happens to that with the next tsunami?
I know that English is not your first language but what else do you call an energy source that you cannot rely upon to be there when you need it? That's unreliable. Calling it "undispatchable" is just happy mouth noises trying to cover up that it cannot keep the traffic lights running at night.
The word "undispatchable" shows up as a non-word in three of the spell checkers I've tried. A more appropriate word might be "intermittent" which is also just happy mouth noises that mean the same as unreliable.
I heard a power engineering student refer to unreliable energy like solar and wind as "negative loads". That makes sense from a power plant operator perspective. Before this person is effectively two things, a meter showing the load and a lever to control the output of this "dispatchable" power plant. As the load goes up the lever for output gets pushed up. Since solar and wind is not something the power plant operator can control it just shows up on the equation to be balanced as a negative load.
Oh, and "dispatchable" shows up as a non-word on my spell check too, so that could just mean my electronic dictionary needs an update. It could also mean I should use words like "reliable", "controllable", or something else instead.
So why not the Republican climate change solution?
That is what we call a "RINO". It's more taxing the rich to give to the poor. That's not very "Republican" of him. I also addressed the problems of adding taxes to fix this problem. It requires support from the public. They might be willing to vote themselves a government check every month but not necessarily vote for a crushing tax on gasoline. If you can find enough senators with enough resolve to keep voting for both the tax and the subsidy then you win the internet... forever.
Look up Swanson's law - the Moore's law of solar.
Both have their limits. It's quite likely we've hit that limit already, on both. Assuming we haven't hit that limit, what do we do until solar is cheap enough to care about?
But solar energy with no subsidies has already become cheaper than coal near the equator.
Right, and what should the rest of us do until this is true where they live? Assuming they don't live near the equator. What should we do if this cost advantage doesn't move beyond this narrow band of the Earth's surface?
It's hard to imagine solar panels ever being useful during cloudy Canadian winters, but solar in the south plus nuclear in the north makes a lot of sense.
Maybe, someday. What do we do until that time comes? It's the same question over and over. Sure, we can find something better in the future but what do we do today? What if this promise of cheap solar power doesn't ever come to us? Is there a fallback plan?
I offer something we can do right now. The only thing holding this back right now is the federal government. If they announce the willingness to actually issue operating licenses then we'll see nuclear power grow.
As the sibling post points out well, the high cost of nuclear is largely because of the cost of regulations that need to be met. I watched a talk by an experienced engineer and student in nuclear engineering that the cost of materials and engineering between coal and nuclear power were effectively identical. The cost difference was entirely in regulation, inspection, and licensing.
Here's what I expect to happen. We can have a gradual acceptance of nuclear power. This will come after just one new nuclear power plant gets built in the USA. After that we'll see a half dozen more people try, probably two will succeed. Another half dozen will try, four will succeed. When the success rate of nuclear power gets somewhere on parity with other power plants then nuclear power will reach a tipping point and we'll never go back.
Another possibility is a crisis, much like the oil crisis in the 1970s that likely started off the nuclear power plant construction boom then. We'll have some kind of crisis that will leave us with no other choice but to turn to new nuclear. The problem with this is that in a crisis we'll have cut corners, spiking prices for everything, and general economic suckage. This means what I guess will be a 50/50 chance of some big nuclear accident. Depending on if such an accident happens, and how deep the crisis becomes, we can come out as strong as ever or merely beaten and bruised but alive.
We have another option though. We can have people agree, in a calm and measured argument, that we are going to have to turn to nuclear sooner or later. The difference is that the sooner we turn to nuclear the better we can ride through some future energy crisis, or avoid it completely. By agreeing that nuclear power is inevitable we can agree to take a close look at how we regulate nuclear power and find a way to make the production of nuclear power as inexpensive and safe as reasonably possible. Not that there is a safety problem now, but we'll need to better understand the diminishing returns on the higher margins of safety.
I'll hear people tell me that solar power will be cheaper than coal in 5 years and too cheap to meter in 10. So, what should we do until then? What do we do if the promise of cheap solar is never fulfilled? I don't care much what we choose, so long as we are honest. Saying nuclear power is too expensive and will always be too expensive to build is not honest.
Building nuclear plants uses lots of concrete, which itself is a big producer of CO2.
Solar and wind uses no concrete? Pretty sure that in the ground below all of those windmills on the horizon there is a very large block of concrete holding up that tower.
If your complaint against nuclear power is the CO2 produce then you're holding it wrong. For the energy produced nuclear produces half the CO2 compared to wind or solar. That's only one of many reasons I support getting more nuclear power. Cost to produce is another, BTW.
Modelling an analogue systems with infinite levels of complexity will always involve a degree of error.
There's also error bars on the measurements. I'll read news articles on how "it's been the hottest July/year/whatever on record!" What's the error bars on that? What's the level of confidence in those numbers? Often we are talking a fraction of a tenth of a degree C here so the "hottest" of whatever seems very suspect, and theoretical even. Perhaps that's because I'll often read beyond the headline, or even the first paragraph. It's also because I realize that so many of these historical measurements were done with people just reading a mercury thermometer back in 1867. I'm sure those 150 year old records were generally correct and were often done with great care to the accuracy, but what's the expected error on that?
If throughout history we based all our decisions on such logic we would still be in the stone age, which is what climate change deniers will return us to if we choose to listen to their moronic arguments.
This sky is falling scaremongering bullshit isn't buying any points with me either. I'm sure it will likely suck but even the models show this change will be very gradual and over a very long time. If the problem needed to be solved now then let's start building nuclear power rather than wait for solar power to get cheaper than coal. If we're just waiting for solar power to get cheap then we got time to calm down and stop shoveling the bullshit. If we don't have that time then use that shovel to break ground on some nuclear power plants instead of making the bullshit deeper.
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I got addicted to Frosted Flakes in the Army. I never had Frosted Flakes as a kid, Mom just wouldn't buy it. When in garrison we'd be given our choice of cereals at the dining facility and I'd just pick what I grew up with, shredded wheat. It started with the day we had field chow and they ran out of shredded wheat. When in the field we didn't have much of a choice, it was often just Frosted Flakes or nothing.
I didn't know what it was at first. I thought I just had a certain enjoyment of field training and sleeping under the stars. I looked forward to breakfast, which is normal since running around in the woods carrying a 50 pound rucksack can make a man tired and hungry. I then found myself eating Frosted Flakes when in garrison. When in the field I'd volunteer for chow duty so I could hide a box of Frosted Flakes for myself since sometimes we'd run out before I could eat, the people serving the food always ate last. Do you understand that? I volunteered for chow duty so I could eat Frosted Flakes!
After my discharge I found myself eating Frosted Flakes every day for breakfast. One bowl at first. Then two. Then three. Some mornings I'd empty the whole box. It got real bad. I had to stop. So I quit cold turkey. It was real hard, I craved Frosted Flakes so bad.
I still catch myself reaching for the Frosted Flakes at the grocery store only to stop myself at the last second. I had to stop going down that aisle. I can't even eat shredded wheat any more since it's next to the Frosted Flakes on the shelf. Now I only dare go as far down the aisle to get some oatmeal for breakfast. Sometimes I absentmindedly go down the aisle and I catch the sight of that tiger on the box calling for me to pick up the box and put it in my cart.
Friends don't let friends eat Frosted Flakes.
So why is it so unlikely to suspect that the chemical industry is doing the same thing with GMOs?
Because a genetically modified plant is still made of the same stuff as any other plant. The proportions of these chemicals in these plants might be different but the fundamental chemistry is unchanged. If the proportions of the chemicals is different then the cause of any health issue is in the chemicals, not the genetics.
Suppose I have two different potatoes. One is a common variety of potato but was grown in soil that is rich in chromium. The other was grown in more typical soil but has been genetically modified in a way that makes it take chromium from the soil more efficiently. If someone shows up with poisoning from chromium do we blame the potato farmers for planting in high chromium soil or for planting a GMO?
If this is from growing crops in chromium rich soil we'd probably have the soil treated and the farmer would be held blameless. If this was from a GMO then we'd have people ready to have this farmer tarred and feathered. Both cases the farmer had no intent to harm anyone, and the poisoning would have been out of ignorance. It also would likely have been from someone eating a lot of "organic" potatoes from the same local community garden. Buying potatoes shipped in from long distances means the risk of such kind of poisoning is rare as the potatoes would be mixed from many locations.
Barring some freak side effect like a potato taking up a heavy metal from the soil the ability for a GMO to pose any health risk is non-existent. GMOs don't suddenly gain the ability to produce some crazy chemical structure. These plants must still be able to process air, water, and sun like any other plant. We can test for things like heavy metals, or bacteria growing on the plant, or whatever. We test for many of such risks and we treat plants for others, like using radiation to kill the bacteria on plants.
If you think that irradiating plants is also bad then you are doubly stupid. Stupid for thinking GMOs are bad and stupid twice over for thinking irradiating plants is also bad.
Think what you want though, that just means more potato chips for me.
That's a stupid law on so many levels. This reminds me of another stupid law.
A guy gets a hunting license for a polar bear and goes hunting. As much as people scream and yell about the poor poor polar bears they are actually quite numerous and many licenses to hunt them are issued in the USA, Canada, and other nations. There are endangered bear subspecies that share territory with the polar bears, and hunting them is a crime. So, this hunter sees this huge white bear out on the snow and shoots it. When he gets close to the now dead bear he notices that it's got some odd features to it, as I recall the shape of the head and shoulders were atypical for a polar bear. So, the hunter does what he thinks is right and calls the wildlife protection service to look at this bear.
When the officers look at the bear they suspect it's an albino from a protected subspecies and by killing this bear the hunter could be liable for hefty fines and potentially jail time. It takes a DNA test to figure out what kind of a bear it was. Turns out it was a hybrid, the child of a polar bear and the protected kind of bear. They ruled the bear as "51% polar bear" or some shit and didn't charge him with any crime.
To my mind it should have stopped long before it got to the DNA test. If the wildlife service could not tell what kind of bear it was by looking at it up close, and far away it was indistinguishable from a polar bear, then this should have been a non-issue. Maybe they might still want to run a DNA test just for the sake of tracking the different species, this might be useful scientific information. What should not have happened is the potential for being a crime based on the results of the DNA test. It was quite literally something that looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck. A duck hunter should not be fined for shooting this "odd duck" if a DNA test ends up saying it's actually a goose.
Whenever something bad happens there's always someone that says, "There should be a law against that!" Well, we can't bubblewrap the world. There's just some things that the law cannot fix.
Beating people up is still illegal. So, there is already a law against offering someone a ride, then dragging them from the vehicle, and kicking them in the face. The connection to some ride share app is pretty tenuous. The whole point of services like Lyft and Uber is that it's a cheaper ride because they did away with the overhead of running a taxi service, that comes with a cost somewhere else. If you want someone giving you a ride to have gone through a background check from the FBI then go call a traditional taxi service.
If we make a law that ride sharing services have to run background checks then prices will go up. Then we'll see someone come up with some other way to sell rides at a lower cost by circumventing the regulations on ride sharing services. What would that look like? I don't know, maybe it'd be an app that claims to sell anything on a short time scale but people merely use it to offer rides. When the next person gets in a drag out and beat down fight because of some argument over fares then someone will scream, "There should be a law!" We simply cannot make a law to cover every variation on every possible threat to someone getting beat up. What we can do, and should do, is when someone does beat up someone else over a trivial matter like a $10 fare that violent behavior needs to be punished.
Imagine I create an app that allows people to advertise their services to tie people's shoelaces. I have no intention of creating such an app, nor do I think such a thing would have any success but just imagine any arbitrary service. Now imagine we have someone using this app to offer their services to tie laces ends up beating up one of the people instead of tying their laces. Am I now going to be required to run a background check on the people that advertise on my app? What happens if the person offering their services to tie shoelaces ends up getting beat up? Will there then be a law requiring that the people asking for the shoelace tying service to have a background check before they can request services through my app? The connection to people offering the service of a car ride is really meaningless, this could have been any service. The only reason we are talking about this is because these services are popular and still relatively new.
It turns out that the world is a dangerous place and we cannot make it safe by piling on more laws. Sure, we need law to place limits on behavior to have a polite society but even law needs its limits on behavior. Beating up people is bad, and those that do it need to be punished. Does past behavior have a tendency to predict future behavior? Do people with a history of violence tend to have a violent future? Sure. If Uber and Lyft want to run their drivers through a background check voluntarily then that should be their choice. Don't make it the law to have to do so.
I remember seeing an advertisement for someone wanting to do a ride share. Not a ride share like Uber and Lyft, which are really just taxi services now. What I saw was someone that wanted to share a ride every day between near where I live and where I go to school. If I took up this offer for getting paid to drive this person would I be in violation of this law for not going through a background check? Who would be liable if something happened? I don't recall where I saw this ride share request, I recall it was just some general job posting website. Would job posting websites now have to run background checks for ride share offers? Would they have to now check every posting to see if it's some kind of ride share and remove them or risk getting fined?
This is just stupid. If we keep piling up the regulations on everything then we'll just end up burying ourselves.
I don't get your point. California voted Democrat almost 2 to 1 last election.
If you are implying that criminals tend to vote Democrat then I'm inclined to agree with you, that might account for the large Democrat vote margin. If you are implying that criminals tend to vote Republican then how does the felon vote matter when the count ends up being two Democrat votes for every one Republican vote?
"JARVIS, send an SMS to Dr. Strange confirming lunch... and do it as a 3-D talking poop emoji"
"Assembly commenced. Estimated completion time, five hours."
We already have a process of hydrocarbon chains on an industrial scale. This has been employed by the Germans during WWII and in South Africa during their trade embargoes. The problem is that it is an energy intensive process. What we need is a low CO2 energy source to drive this process.
The US Navy has been researching the process of taking hydrogen (from water) and attaching it to carbon (as CO2 dissolved in same water) and making hydrocarbons. They have proven the process works and produces usable hydrocarbon fuels. All they need is some help in scaling up the process.
Being the US Navy they, of course, see this as a process driven by nuclear power. They envision ships with nuclear reactors on board producing fuel for the aircraft it carries. No more oil supply ships running back and forth threatening the readiness of the Navy to perform it's duties. Of course this same fuel can be brought to shore for fueling trucks, tanks, jeeps, generators, cooking stoves, heaters, and so much more.
Solar power, no matter how it's collected and stored, is too diffuse and intermittent to be all that useful outside of very few applications, like pocket calculators and communications satellites.
-Powerful PC at half the Apple price
When I find one I'll let you know.
-Windows 10 Pro
-MS Office
-Visual Studio
-Hyper-V with Linux
Or VMWare Fusion with Windows and Linux virtual machines, and being able to switch from Mac OSX to Windows, to Linux, with a key combo. I like being able to run all three of these operating systems on my laptop at the same time. I'm sure someone has hacked up something to make it work on non-Apple hardware but is that kind of a hack something you want to rely upon for the work that makes you money?
I find it hilarious that people who claim to be highly paid software developers will bitch about the cost of Apple computers, and then spend all kinds of time to get cheap hardware to do what Apple hardware can do out of the box. That's saving a few hundred bucks for what is likely days of accumulated effort. Sure, I'm sure that there's a certain kind of satisfaction of "sticking it to the man" or some shit. If the person doing this is really some kind of professional then running a hackintosh, or other legally questionable behavior, is just asking for getting fired, fined, or other trouble for not playing by some very simple rules. The kind of rules that allows them to sell their services rather than have some other supposed "professional" from walking off with the products of their work without compensating them for it.
Questions?
No, I think I got this figured out.
You mean like JARVIS from the Iron Man movies?
JARVIS, start a new project.
"New project created. Shall I copy this to the corporate servers?"
I like that. JARVIS, begin automated assembly. Fabricate it. Paint it.
"Assembly commenced. Estimated completion time, five hours."
JARVIS, what is the altitude record for manned aircraft?
"85,000 feet, sir."
Give me a weather report, check for aircraft in the area, and listen in on ATC.
I don't know, I'd think having this level of voice command might be helpful for even professionals. Especially for professionals. Siri is not JARVIS but give it time.
What I said was it is easy to spend money and get millions of voters on a national scale to believe. A company can try to make a big project fail, mess it up by underbidding, let shell companies fail and be left holding the bag with the egg ending up on the government's face.
Yes, that is what you said. As I said this is not going to change much if the government is committed to seeing nuclear power succeed. We know nuclear power can succeed because there are a dozen companies in the USA succeeding at it daily. We'll hear on the news about the one that failed, and the anti-nukes will prop them up as to why we can't have nuclear power, but nuclear power will succeed.
Much of the reason nuclear power will succeed is because it must succeed. We don't have any other option at this point for so many things. Without nuclear power the Navy has no aircraft carriers or submarines. Without nuclear power we'd have rolling blackouts or sky high electrical rates. We can ease into more and more nuclear power or we can have an all out mass deployment due to war, another oil crisis, or other national emergency.
We have people that can make nuclear power happen. They are making it happen now. One small group creating a failed nuclear project is not going to stop all nuclear projects. This would be like one bridge falling in a river leading to the closing of all bridges. Or, one plane crash ending all flights. We might, and have, seen such incidents lead to temporary shutdowns out of extreme caution but we return to normal as soon as the failure is identified. A management failure of a nuclear power reactor project does not keep other properly managed projects from moving forward. Sure, such a conspiracy can cost the government a lot of money but that's got nothing to do with any kind of failure of nuclear physics.
A single nuclear power plant building project failure is not going to create decades of renewed mining of coal. Coal is not dead but it's dying, from competition from natural gas mostly. It's not doing well against nuclear either. Germany, Japan, and France have tried to abandon nuclear power and they are seeing costs rise and air quality be reduced for it. Nuclear power is not going away. What will go away is a lot of the nonsense of nuclear power being too expensive. We'll make it cheaper just like how we've made wind and solar power cheaper, with technological advancement and economy of scale.
I find this laughable. Solar is too expensive now but with gobs of government money and years of research it can be cheaper than coal. Nuclear is too expensive, but for some reason gobs of government money and years of research can NEVER make it cheaper than coal. There's the lie though, nuclear is already cheaper than coal. We don't need gobs of money and years of research, all we need is a government willing to allow nuclear to succeed outside of where it already succeeds in military reactors.
"I guess she's my cousin but she needs some sweet lovin' anyway!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Here's my problem with the CAGW alarmists. They say it is urgent that we reduce our CO2 output immediately. I say fine, let's build more nuclear power plant starting right now. But these people will think up every excuse they can to try to not use nuclear power. They bring up costs, safety, or whatever. I look at the numbers, nuclear is right now, today, cheaper and safer than solar, and has a lower CO2 output. Nope, still can't use it. Well, if we can't use something that is demonstrably better than solar right now then I have to question the resolve to solve the problem. If they will not accept nuclear power as part of the solution to the problem then I must wonder if there is a problem at all.
Once I hear these people demand nuclear power then I will believe their claims of an immediate problem that requires immediate solutions. Even if they give a reluctant acceptance that maybe we should do some building of nuclear power now, until solar and wind technology catches up, then I'll believe the problem is in need of an immediate solution.
So long as they scream both that we need to do something now and that something cannot include nuclear power then they are just sounding like fools to me. Which is it? Is this an immediate threat that even "bad" nuclear is an acceptable solution? Or, is nuclear so "bad" that the end of humanity by CAGW is preferable?
So long as nuclear power is "worse" than CAGW then I see no reason to fear CAGW.
And whose problem is it, if you don't accept the reality of CO2 driven climate change? Because it sounds like you are trying to make it our problem: a classic burden of proof fallacy. If you have some better explanation as to what happens when the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are doubled, feel free to post that explanation, along with observational proof.
I'm saying this again. My doubt arises from the lack of urgency on responding to the problem. I offered an "all the above" solution. That is, "all the above" includes nuclear power. If you want to convince me that CO2 output is a problem then just tell me that you accept nuclear power as part of the "all the above" solution.
If you cannot accept that we, as Americans, need to build a new nuclear power plant every month, then we have a problem.
If you cannot accept that we, as a species, need to build a new nuclear power plant on Earth every week, then I question your commitment to solve this problem and perhaps even that the problem exists.
These two are tied together in my mind, to accept that CAGW is a real threat then nuclear power must be a large part of the solution. If anyone cannot support nuclear power to avert the problems of CAGW then I must assume that CAGW is not the threat so many claim it is.
You think that in an energy crisis a handful of people can create a ruse of incompetent people to fail at building a nuclear power plant to show nuclear power is too expensive? What of the other dozen companies capable of building nuclear power plants?
They can't all make the same kind of plants, but there are perhaps a dozen of companies building these reactors in the USA for civil and military use. Some make big ones for aircraft carriers, small ones for submarines, some really big for civil power plants, and maybe even some that make really small power plants for moving on site by truck or rail.
As it is now the US Navy usually asks for a new aircraft carrier every four years, and they need two reactors. That's their minimum production rate. The Navy likes to second source everything so there is another company that can make carrier power plants, that means they can also produce two reactors every four years minimum. Then there are the destroyer and cruiser reactor designs on a shelf. Two of three submarine designs with the ability to produce one of those per year. That's four or six companies ready to make nuclear reactors for just military nuclear power.
For civilian power there's another half dozen or more. Total we have something like a dozen of companies ready to produce nuclear power if only given permission. In a crisis the government will pull out the stops and open purse strings. They cannot allow the country to have the power go out.
We'll have reactors go from drawing board to first critical in months. Small reactors will be mass produced as quickly as possible for use in military vessels. Larger ones will be for providing power, clean water, and synthetic jet fuel. Those coal and gas miners will be busy piling up coal and gas for the fuel synthesis factory. If any joker wants to try to play games and take government funds but not produce will simply find themselves replaced by someone that can produce. If the powers that be see this as sabotage and not mere incompetence then they can find themselves charged with treason.
In a true energy crisis it won't be pick and choose, it will be all the above. Coal miners will still mine but that might be used as industrial feedstock for aluminum, steel, and synthetic fuel. We might not even bother to burn it for energy. Biofuel will disappear, except maybe the ethanol plants might be used to make medical grade antiseptics, solvents for gunpowder, and I'm sure a bit "lost" on the way here and there for "cough medicine". Everything for the cause. We will either be at war at this point or the threat of war so high that everyone is put to task of getting ready to fight.
Again, any one that wants to mess with the nuclear power build up in a hope to restore coal as dominant will find themselves fighting a strong current. They will also be stupid to try to get people to burn coal, that will be needed as and industrial product. Plastics, fertilizer, graphite, lubricants, paints, polymers, metal alloys, ans so much more.
I used Google as one of my spell checkers. I thought it'd be easier to lump that in with my browser internal spell checker and the dictionary app included with Mac OSX. Google "auto corrects" that with "non-dispatchable", BTW, so let's go with that instead. It still makes my browser highlight it as a misspelling but it at least doesn't make my head hurt to read it.
Since you made me doubt myself and go back to Google I'll discuss what I found clicking on some of the links. We seem to agree on what defines dispatchable power. With non-dispatchable I'll see some that call this only reliable power sources like coal and nuclear. That would mean wind and solar would be defined as intermittent. If wind, solar, coal, and nuclear are lumped together as non-dispatchable then the distinction is made between base power and intermittent power.
So, there seems to be two camps that divide the power sources differently. Those that define two groups, dispatchable and non-dispatchable, they still separate non-dispatchable into base and intermittent. Those that define three main groups do away with "non-dispatchable" and group power into dispatchable, base, and intermittent. Perhaps some of this distinction comes from the idea that "dispatchable" means it can be managed on a fine gradient. This leave "non-dispatchable" meaning if the power is there then it must be taken.
Nuclear power is sometimes considered neither dispatchable nor non-dispatchable as it cannot be given fine control but it can be refused. Refusing to take nuclear power can be for many reasons, including economic, physical, and legal. In Germany they are sometimes forced to refuse nuclear power as the law defines solar and wind as "non-dispatchable" and therefore must be bought at the price defined by law even if cheaper nuclear is available. Nuclear can be considered non-dispatchable as it is very inexpensive. Output can be changed but changing output suddenly, up or down, causes physical stresses and may involve penalties by some regulator for imposing such stresses or forcing the purchase of more expensive power. Changing output back to where it was quickly may be impossible physically due to the build up of elements in the reactor, as well as the stress it can cause on the reactor. This may simply mean that nuclear is "non-dispatchable" not that it can't be refused but that it won't.
What it comes down to, by my understanding, is that defining wind and solar as non-dispatchable can only be due to legal reasons. In many cases wind and solar will in fact be more expensive than natural gas but the utility cannot refuse or "dispatch" this power legally. The non-dispatchable nature may exist solely in law not due to economic pressure or physical limitation like what often happens with nuclear power.
What some may not realize is that by refusing or "dispatching" nuclear power the costs to the nuclear power plant now increase. They are still paying for rent, insurance, staff, and so on, but they can't sell. So when they do have the chance to sell power their spot energy prices just went up.
No wonder Germany's electricity prices are so high, they are forced to pay for the expensive wind and solar and then also pay the nuclear power engineers and technicians to sit on their hands with an idle plant until the wind stops and the sun doesn't shine.
A bit from the Wall Street Journal (via non-paywalled site) on the electricity crisis in Germany:
https://www.thegwpf.com/german...
Right. Just like the campaign to eradicate polio. And mandatory seat belts in cars. And banning lead paint and asbestos. Librul gubbmit power grabs, I tell you.
Just because some of what the government does is a money and power grab does not mean that all of them are.
Because nuclear power is completely and utterly unjustifiable based on cost alone.
Can we let the market and not the government decide that? As it is now new nuclear power costs are infinite because the government is not issuing licenses. Once they can show that they are at least willing to issue licenses then we can tell if it's "utterly" justifiable or not.
The CIA and even Mossad have said for 15 years that Iran has had no nuclear weapons program.
They agreed to inspections as a trade for civilian nuclear power technology. They've been caught violating this agreement several times and a report from 2015 shows them to be uncooperative at best in holding up their end on openness of their civil nuclear power program. If they want civil nuclear power so badly then they are going the wrong way about it.
I don't care if they aren't building nuclear weapons. So long as they chant "death to America" in their parliament I see no reason for any Western nation to trade with them. That counts double for anything of military value.
North Korea has nukes because:
North Korea has nuclear weapons because the nation is run by an increasingly paranoid group of little dictators. They allow their citizens to starve instead of open themselves up to trade. Like Iran they openly state an intent to kill Americans unprovoked and I see no reason to trust them with a rusty butterknife.
No shit, Sherlock. Why don't you got volunteer for the Fukushima clean up crew and ponder why regulations are needed with nuclear power plants and the waste they create.
I see, you equate a policy of issuing licenses as lifting all regulation completely. You do know that Fukushima is older than Chernobyl, right? That site should have been shut down a decade ago but the inability to build new nuclear power means forcing old reactors to run long past their originally designed lifespan. We can retire these plants ourselves quietly or they will retire themselves violently. To retire them means we need something to replace them.
You want to get rid of the nuclear power subsidies? So do I. The subsidies largely just pay for the costs imposed by the government anyway. Take away some of the government costs and nuclear won't be so expensive.
While we're at it let's get rid of the wind and solar subsidies too.
If the goal is low CO2 power and the government supporting it with regulation and subsidies then wind, solar, and nuclear should all be on an equal footing.
Rather than just mock my ignorance how about you inform me?
How does the iodine know my ideas? It doesn't know, it tells me. The half life of iodine means all but trace amounts decayed to inert xenon by now. I say "effectively gone" because any radioactive material cannot be said to every be truly gone but it's "effectively gone" because it would take the most sensitive instruments we have to see it's there.
Go look up tritium on Wikipedia yourself, there's a section on Fukushima there. This tells me you didn't bother to read Wikipedia before you directed your rant at me.
I actually wrote a (short, I''ll admit) report in college about the power grid in Japan. They barely have the infrastructure now to keep the north islands connected to the south islands reliably. To get them to produce enough wind AND have this transmitted reliably across their nation would be quite expensive. The north and south divide is actually two separate power grids, one running 50HZ and the other 60HZ.
This is far from trivial. You can claim that the wind always blows somewhere in Japan but that does not mean it will be cheap. They are building islands for airports, you think that it's going to be easy to put up windmills? They can out windmills out on the water but what happens to that with the next tsunami?
undispatchable (unreliable is simply wrong)
I know that English is not your first language but what else do you call an energy source that you cannot rely upon to be there when you need it? That's unreliable. Calling it "undispatchable" is just happy mouth noises trying to cover up that it cannot keep the traffic lights running at night.
The word "undispatchable" shows up as a non-word in three of the spell checkers I've tried. A more appropriate word might be "intermittent" which is also just happy mouth noises that mean the same as unreliable.
I heard a power engineering student refer to unreliable energy like solar and wind as "negative loads". That makes sense from a power plant operator perspective. Before this person is effectively two things, a meter showing the load and a lever to control the output of this "dispatchable" power plant. As the load goes up the lever for output gets pushed up. Since solar and wind is not something the power plant operator can control it just shows up on the equation to be balanced as a negative load.
Oh, and "dispatchable" shows up as a non-word on my spell check too, so that could just mean my electronic dictionary needs an update. It could also mean I should use words like "reliable", "controllable", or something else instead.
So why not the Republican climate change solution?
That is what we call a "RINO". It's more taxing the rich to give to the poor. That's not very "Republican" of him. I also addressed the problems of adding taxes to fix this problem. It requires support from the public. They might be willing to vote themselves a government check every month but not necessarily vote for a crushing tax on gasoline. If you can find enough senators with enough resolve to keep voting for both the tax and the subsidy then you win the internet... forever.
Look up Swanson's law - the Moore's law of solar.
Both have their limits. It's quite likely we've hit that limit already, on both. Assuming we haven't hit that limit, what do we do until solar is cheap enough to care about?
But solar energy with no subsidies has already become cheaper than coal near the equator.
Right, and what should the rest of us do until this is true where they live? Assuming they don't live near the equator. What should we do if this cost advantage doesn't move beyond this narrow band of the Earth's surface?
It's hard to imagine solar panels ever being useful during cloudy Canadian winters, but solar in the south plus nuclear in the north makes a lot of sense.
Maybe, someday. What do we do until that time comes? It's the same question over and over. Sure, we can find something better in the future but what do we do today? What if this promise of cheap solar power doesn't ever come to us? Is there a fallback plan?
I offer something we can do right now. The only thing holding this back right now is the federal government. If they announce the willingness to actually issue operating licenses then we'll see nuclear power grow.
As the sibling post points out well, the high cost of nuclear is largely because of the cost of regulations that need to be met. I watched a talk by an experienced engineer and student in nuclear engineering that the cost of materials and engineering between coal and nuclear power were effectively identical. The cost difference was entirely in regulation, inspection, and licensing.
Here's what I expect to happen. We can have a gradual acceptance of nuclear power. This will come after just one new nuclear power plant gets built in the USA. After that we'll see a half dozen more people try, probably two will succeed. Another half dozen will try, four will succeed. When the success rate of nuclear power gets somewhere on parity with other power plants then nuclear power will reach a tipping point and we'll never go back.
Another possibility is a crisis, much like the oil crisis in the 1970s that likely started off the nuclear power plant construction boom then. We'll have some kind of crisis that will leave us with no other choice but to turn to new nuclear. The problem with this is that in a crisis we'll have cut corners, spiking prices for everything, and general economic suckage. This means what I guess will be a 50/50 chance of some big nuclear accident. Depending on if such an accident happens, and how deep the crisis becomes, we can come out as strong as ever or merely beaten and bruised but alive.
We have another option though. We can have people agree, in a calm and measured argument, that we are going to have to turn to nuclear sooner or later. The difference is that the sooner we turn to nuclear the better we can ride through some future energy crisis, or avoid it completely. By agreeing that nuclear power is inevitable we can agree to take a close look at how we regulate nuclear power and find a way to make the production of nuclear power as inexpensive and safe as reasonably possible. Not that there is a safety problem now, but we'll need to better understand the diminishing returns on the higher margins of safety.
I'll hear people tell me that solar power will be cheaper than coal in 5 years and too cheap to meter in 10. So, what should we do until then? What do we do if the promise of cheap solar is never fulfilled? I don't care much what we choose, so long as we are honest. Saying nuclear power is too expensive and will always be too expensive to build is not honest.
Building nuclear plants uses lots of concrete, which itself is a big producer of CO2.
Solar and wind uses no concrete? Pretty sure that in the ground below all of those windmills on the horizon there is a very large block of concrete holding up that tower.
If your complaint against nuclear power is the CO2 produce then you're holding it wrong. For the energy produced nuclear produces half the CO2 compared to wind or solar. That's only one of many reasons I support getting more nuclear power. Cost to produce is another, BTW.
When chatting with a beer drinking German Catholic preacher on Saint Patty's Day I had him tell me we're all Irish one day every year.
So, just wait.
Modelling an analogue systems with infinite levels of complexity will always involve a degree of error.
There's also error bars on the measurements. I'll read news articles on how "it's been the hottest July/year/whatever on record!" What's the error bars on that? What's the level of confidence in those numbers? Often we are talking a fraction of a tenth of a degree C here so the "hottest" of whatever seems very suspect, and theoretical even. Perhaps that's because I'll often read beyond the headline, or even the first paragraph. It's also because I realize that so many of these historical measurements were done with people just reading a mercury thermometer back in 1867. I'm sure those 150 year old records were generally correct and were often done with great care to the accuracy, but what's the expected error on that?
If throughout history we based all our decisions on such logic we would still be in the stone age, which is what climate change deniers will return us to if we choose to listen to their moronic arguments.
This sky is falling scaremongering bullshit isn't buying any points with me either. I'm sure it will likely suck but even the models show this change will be very gradual and over a very long time. If the problem needed to be solved now then let's start building nuclear power rather than wait for solar power to get cheaper than coal. If we're just waiting for solar power to get cheap then we got time to calm down and stop shoveling the bullshit. If we don't have that time then use that shovel to break ground on some nuclear power plants instead of making the bullshit deeper.
How that for logic?