Roy Spencer is right but 95% of the climate scientists on the planet are wrong ? really?
I've heard this before. It's used often as an argument, and it works now with me just about as well as it worked on my parents when I was in high school. I don't care if all your friends believe in CAGW, that just makes a lot of people wrong, assuming Roy Spencer is correct.
Make an argument on CAGW that is not an appeal to authority then I might believe you. What would help a lot to convince me is a focus on finding solutions. Widespread support for nuclear power among the CAGW community would certainly help their cause. We can have the near certain global scale suckage that is CAGW or the teeny tiny chance of localized suckage that is another Fukushima. If you choose to avoid the risk of another Fukushima style event by banning all future nuclear power then I find your conviction to solve this problem very weak, and therefore your argument very weak.
and they're liars. and Al Gore is fat.
Well, we can at least halfway agree here. I'll let you ponder on which half.
I'm reminded of some crazy idea from some city manager, council member, or whatever some time ago. The guy wanted to ban backyard grilling to cut down on CO2 output. When it was explained to him that this would be impossible to enforce, no one is going to drive around looking in yards for warm grills. His solution? Fly a police helicopter over the city to look for people grilling.
Discussion on the topic pretty much ended right there.
Show voters that your side will sacrifice things to solve climate change. Because most people just see yet another power and money grab, in a long series of power and money grabs.
I'm pretty well convinced that the CAGW scare is in fact another power and money grab in a long series of grabs. We've long had low CO2 and affordable energy from nuclear fission and yet these same people have been opposed to "nukular" for a long time now. If these people agreed to building new nuclear power then I'd have much less to complain about them about and might even be agreeable on the other things they want since they might actually seem sincere rather than just another power grab.
Let's not fool ourselves, it's the Democrats that are largely opposing nuclear power. The Republicans aren't great on nuclear power either but at least they have the mental capacity to know the difference between civilian nuclear power reactors and a military weapons program. Mention nuclear power to a Democrat and you can only get as far as the first syllable, "nuke", before they jump up and down about "THE BOMBS!!!"
The likes of North Korea and Iran will try to hide their weapons development behind the facade of a civil power program but they either lack the mental capacity to hide this successfully or are arrogant enough to think the rest of the world will let them develop nuclear weapons unopposed. Which is also another reason to dislike the Democrats, they will let these nations develop a "civil nuclear power reactor program" but not allow that same thing to happen in the USA. Which is it Democrats? Is civilian nuclear power good or bad? If Iran can have it then I want it here too. It's not like Iran has a shortage of oil, coal, sun, wind, and hydro to get their energy from.
If the Democrats cannot support nuclear power to stave off global warming then it's real easy to conclude that they are using the scare of global warming as a way to grab more money and power.
Claiming some kind of taxation or subsidy to solve this problem will not work. So long as people can vote the people will vote away a tax they view as unfair, excessive, or otherwise not in their interest. Same goes for subsidies, although far worse. We can subsidize house insulation upgrades, electric cars, energy efficient bulbs, solar panels, or whatever else we tried. All this does is make the poor poorer (they are paying the taxes to support this subsidy in some fashion, though not always directly) and the rich richer (to collect the subsidy one has to have money to spend on the subsidized item).
The only way to fix this is to make CO2 expensive naturally. Raising the cost artificially, with taxes, can go as quickly as it came. How do we raise the cost of CO2 naturally? Well, for one it is going to rise as we keep using it up. The price goes down naturally with increased technology and economy of scale. Same applies for low CO2 energy, we need to fix this with technology and economy of scale.
We already have an artificially high cost of a low CO2 energy source, nuclear power. Make the process of getting a license to build a clear and straightforward process would help a lot. There's plenty of people that have applied with what I assume are reasonable applications, just issue the damned license already. We've been building very safe nuclear power plants in the USA for a long time, I think we have it figured out. Allow economy of scale to take place. If one reactor is approved then every one after it should only need approval for updates and site specific differences.
Wind and solar have already enjoyed economy of scale cost savings, I have difficulty believing we can improve much here. This will need technology improvements and after 50 years of trying real hard on this there's not likely to be much left to gain.
Once we stop digging deeper with nuclear we can learn to fill this hole by carbon sequestration. This was mentioned in the article but claimed it can only be done at great expense. A professor in Idaho (I forget his name) claims we might be able to mine a common rock called basalt and use that as fertilizer. It's rich in lime which farmers already spread on their fields to control acidity from spreading manure and such. This is an ongoing process so they have to keep applying more. Right now they mine limestone for this, which is "cooked" into the lime they need and this process produces a lot of CO2.
Basalt is a much harder rock than limestone, and it produces only half the lime content per mass. To make this a viable alternative to limestone we need energy that is too valuable to use to turn limestone into lime. This has an inherent contradiction since it's cheap energy that makes cooking limestone worthwhile. The solution, as I understand it, is to make energy cheap enough that it's easier to simply mine and move the readily usable (but more massive) basalt than mine, cook, and move the "lighter and softer" limestone.
This professor believes the only way to do this is with an energy source as cheap, reliable, and plentiful as nuclear power. Solar and wind will not do since the mines for basalt will have to run full speed, day and night, in all weather, to compete with limestone.
Inevitably this accumulates in the food chain so the sooner we resolve the situation the less damage will be done to the human genome and our foodchain.
What elements are producing this radioactivity? As I understand it the largest source, as far as the ground water is concerned anyway, is tritium. Tritium has a half life of 12 years. Tritium is a naturally occurring element, life evolved with it in the environment, so it's not near the risk that other radioactive elements might pose. It exists as heavy water and so it just mixes in the ocean, with all the rest of the heavy water on Earth.
All the radioactive iodine in the water, which had people freaking out at the beginning, is effectively gone now. We can still detect it but that says more on the sensitivity of our equipment than any risk to life. With a half life of days, months, or millennia it's either gone or radioactive in only the strictest sense of the word.
Merely saying the water is radioactive is meaningless. Depleted uranium is radioactive too but we use it regularly as a radiation shield, as it's radioactivity is more theoretical than anything since it's so low. How radioactive is it? What are the radioactive elements it carries?
About the only elements of concern now are strontium and cesium, those have half lives in the decades and can accumulate in bones. The rest are either so inert that they have no biological role or such long half lives that they pose no risk outside of the quantities seen in the core itself.
Of course given the choice you wouldn't do it that way, but it proved something important. It proved that nuclear was not essential, which greatly strengthened the anti-nuclear movement's arguments.
If nuclear was not essential then why is Japan building new nuclear power reactors now? They expect to have 20% of their electricity from nuclear by 2030, at least that's what I read on Wikipedia.
Large nations like the USA, Canada, and Russia, can spread wind and solar power over large tracts of land to avoid localized effects like weather and daylight shifting. Japan is an island nation that is on not so friendly terms with the nations on the nearest large land mass. Their hydro power is limited and wave power is not a developed energy source yet. They don't have much choice but to turn to nuclear power.
They can import coal and oil for their electricity for only so long. This is not a long term solution for them. This is costing them a lot of money, and as even you admit it is reducing air quality.
The "nuclear renaissance" died that day.
No, it was merely delayed.
We will have to be building a new nuclear reactor somewhere in the world every week to just keep up with the shutting down of old coal and nuclear. That's going to happen at some point unless something better comes along. For an island nation like Japan it's not going to be wind and solar.
They would have been replaced 20 years ago if the federal government would just issue licenses to build new reactors. I recall reading how a single reactor was held up in getting it's license issued for more than 40 years. FORTY YEARS !!!!!
We can get a natural gas power plant approved in a week, a new hydro dam in a couple years, but it takes a decade to get a nuclear power plant approved. This is not acceptable and we should no longer accept it. We should see these plants get approved in months, not years. Perhaps even approvals granted in weeks if using a standardized proven design.
There are about 100 operating nuclear power reactors in the USA. If we want to see them all replaced in 10 years then we'd need to see a new nuclear power reactor license issued nearly once every month. If we want to do it in 3 years, then that's 3 every month. I guess President Trump better get going on that, he's got about 3 years left before the end of his term.
Or they'll blame lack of progress on the "greens".
That seems like blame that is well placed. Or have the "greens" changed their minds and support new nuclear power construction now? I do know such exist, I'm pretty sure they are still rare.
CANDU does not describe a single reactor, or single reactor design. There are hundreds of CANDU and CANDU-derived reactors in the world and all built 2 or 3 at a time, meaning dozens of variations on this theme.
They are safe designs, and I'm not disputing that. I'm saying that we can't say CANDU is any more or less safe than an American reactor unless we narrow that down some.
This safety of CANDU comes at a cost. They use heavy water which adds to the capital cost, that initial charge of heavy water is very expensive for needing so much. Later CANDU reactors reduce the need for so much heavy water by using light water in some loops. Using light water means that these CANDU reactors cannot use natural uranium any more, they must use enriched fuel. Needing enriched fuel means losing the inherent safety factor of natural uranium.
I believe the use of heavy water by Canada was more of a political choice than that of safety. Canada no doubt did not want to rely on a foreign nation (even one as friendly to them as the USA) for it's fuel and did not want the political ramifications of operating their own enrichment facilities. Something has changed in that calculus since it appears they've abandoned the natural uranium reactors for the future.
Nobody likes to decommission an operating nuclear power plant because they know it will be difficult to replace it once shut down.
As it is now the USA has about 1000 GW of electrical generation capacity, and demand is growing (slowly). A single nuclear reactor will produce about 1 GW of power. No big deal, right? So what if we shut one down? Well, that might be true but there are about 100 nuclear power reactors in the USA, we can't shut them ALL down or the lights go out. Due to the near 24/7 operation of these reactors they have a much larger impact on the grid than just the generation capacity alone might indicate. Even though the generation capacity is 10% of the total they produce 20% of the electricity we use.
Shutting down 2 GW of nuclear capacity is like shutting down 3 GW of coal, 5 GW of natural gas, 7 GW of wind, or 8 GW of solar. If we start to shut down nuclear reactors, and with no new reactor in it's place, that means a lot of windmills need to be erected. That's ignoring the difference between base load nuclear to unreliable wind and solar. We can manage base load nuclear pretty well on a daily and seasonal scale with a few pumped hydro storage dams like the Tennessee Valley Authority does at Raccoon Mountain. Managing this on a hour or minute scale like wind and solar, is a quite different problem. This would be a very expensive problem.
If we want to shut down old nuclear we need to build new nuclear. Anything else means lots of natural gas getting burned, very expensive unreliable energy from wind and solar, or rolling blackouts.
Places with a lot of people in them have a lot of gun deaths?
I see the problem right there. You define the problem as "gun deaths" and not "murders". When you define the problem correctly then get back to me. Until then all you have is a circular argument. Of course getting rid of the guns will reduce "gun deaths", but what other effects will that have on the safety of the public?
Here's a clue, when innocent people are denied the ability to own guns for self defense murderers, including those with guns, can continue murdering unopposed.
I don't understand. Are you saying that if a madman is shooting from a school or hospital that no one can shoot back? I mean this murderer is doing his murdering but we cannot end the murdering because then someone other than the murderer might get hurt? That's nonsense.
I'll hear stories like this about war. There's a pill box picking off friendly ships, killing dozens with each shot. Inside the pill box there is a near certainty of friendly POWs. Do you not take out that pill box? Of course you do. You put your sights on the target, ask the good Lord for His blessing and forgiveness, and pull the trigger. You hope and pray that no innocent lives are lost but if you do nothing you know that many more will be lost.
I figure the perp can probably get 5 people before justice is served by said gun nut.
Sounds about right. Saw something like that at another church shooting. Madman goes to doors of church as people are filing out, immediately kills 5 or so people, armed citizen returns fire, man flees and bleeds out while cowering in a corner. As sad of an outcome that is the result was better than letting the killer go unopposed until he ran out of ammunition.
How is leaving the worshipers disarmed in the church going to improve things? These people might be crazy but they aren't stupid. They seek out places where they know they can create the most death, destruction, and mayhem. They go to places with as many unarmed people as possible. Sure, you'll find one crazy idiot one in a while that tries to shoot people at a police station, rifle range, or something like that, but those are just suicidal.
The fact that there are people in this forum who have built their own fusors is pretty good evidence that any such claim is untrue.
That's not fusion energy research. That's not even research. It's fusion but it's not anything interesting. I recall Dr. Bussard made that distinction in his talk. People do fusion all the time but if people want to do anything new and interesting they need to compile enough radioactive material in one place to get the federal government's attention.
Yeah. You know, for when you need to kill 15 geese per minute.
Or one motherfucker wearing body armor that wants to kill a church full of children and unarmed worshipers.
It's a good thing that the guy across the street had one of those "goose shooters" or things could have been worse. This baby killer reportedly had more guns and ammo in his truck, this was likely just his first stop that day if someone had not stopped him.
No doubt the gun banners will be adding the death of this piece of garbage in human skin to the tally of "gun deaths" to justify their bans. They'll probably also call his death a suicide*, because good people can't ever use a gun to good ends. Especially one of those "assault weapons".
*(There is doubt as to who made the kill shot, the pursuing citizens or if it was a suicide. Regardless the armed law abiding citizen stopped this garbage from doing further harm and by calling this a suicide the gun grabbers can count against the justifiable homicide tally and add to the suicide tally. If it's a suicide they can at least try to claim it's just poor soul that had a bad day. I guess he did have a bad day, it just wasn't some poor soul.)
You can't lock up crazy people until after they've committed the crime.
You can't stop them from buying guns either until they've committed a crime. Current gun laws on prohibiting dangerous people from buying guns cannot stop crazy people until they do something crazy enough to get on the list of prohibited persons, this might not always be a crime but it must be reported to the government. If the government is not informed, or the government fails in some manner to get the person on the list, then the crazy people can still get approved to buy when the gun dealers ask the government if it's allowed to sell to the person.
The guy that shot up this church was known to the government for being violent. They failed to keep this guy confined, supervised, or even put on the list of crazy people.
If you want to go back to the argument of banning what kind of weapon people are allowed by the government to purchase and own then we get back to the kind of weapon used to stop this child killer. If you limit the kind of weapons the future crazy people of the USA can buy then you also limit the kind of weapons the future protectors of innocent children can buy. If we declare a church, school, or park, a "gun free zone" and don't enforce that with people that are armed then we have just created a place where children congregate and killers like this will be able to kill unopposed. If you don't want guns in a church or school then that's just fine. That just means you have to have metal detectors and armed guards on the perimeter. Without those guards it's not a "gun free zone".
If all it took to keep guns from a place was a sign then we could replace the entire TSA with a contract with Kinko's.
The self-described "Chief Homophobe of Virginia" who'd held his seat since 1992 lost to a transgender journalist who's the lead singer in a death metal band.
Was this person also named Trump? I didn't follow the race but I assume not. Is Virginia the USA? It's in the USA but it's not the totality of the USA. I fail to see how this is relevant to the social intelligence of our current POTUS.
A quick Google search tells me that Virginia has a higher proportion of non-white and non-Christian people than the totality of the USA. I didn't bother to look for their sexual preferences or their preferences for death metal music. Demographic differences quite likely played a part in the differing outcome. Also, the outcome likely differed on being that one of the choices weren't named Clinton. Maybe there were candidates named Clinton, I didn't look that up either.
Maybe this transgender journalist pandered better. Maybe he/she/ze/it/they was, perhaps, just more qualified and it had nothing to do with pandering. This may actually apply to Trump too. Perhaps voters did not want someone that was a US Senator, Secretary of State, or whatever else Hilary Clinton did or claimed to have done.
But equally valid is the perspective that life is better when we don't have to worry about being shot, so as a society we should take some simple precautions to prevent that.
The places in the USA where one is most likely to get shot are the places where the government has the greatest precautions to prevent people from being shot. Places like New York, DC, and Chicago. It's almost as if the precautions are causing the problem. Maybe the government shouldn't be trying so hard to protect people and allow them to protect themselves.
The US Constitution says, explicitly and implicitly, that the government is not allowed to restrict my right of self defense. If the government wants to put limits on those rights then should there not be irrefutable evidence of these limits being effective? Or at least some plausible evidence? These laws might in fact prevent a person from being shot but that does not mean it prevents people from being injured or killed by other means. I did a simple statistical study for a college course on the differing state gun laws and found nothing to give evidence that gun laws actually reduce crimes like rape, murder, or assault. I may just do a more in depth study for another course. Do you expect me to find a different result if I do so?
Well, the late Dr. Robert Bussard would have disagreed with you.
He goes into this with several questions in the Q&A section near the end of this talk at about 1:20. I watched the talk before and I'm pretty sure that he made mention of this earlier too, but I'm not going to watch the whole thing again to catch every mention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He predicts the USA will fund, or even license, this research only after someone in China proves it works. I believe he was right.
Oh, and I'd think that he'd know what he was talking about. He worked for what was then called the Atomic Energy Commission. His last job, before he died, was in private industry trying to get the government to allow him to continue his research. He did as much research on fusion energy as the government would allow in his 50 year career, which wasn't much. If there was more research in the ten years or so since he died, outside of the tokamak, then the government has been real quiet about it.
A lot of fucking good those laws did on preventing crazy people from buying guns. This guy was nuts. He beat up his wife and her kid, got a year in prison for it. If he was considered a threat of repeating what he did, threatening to kill others with a loaded gun, then he should have been kept in the graybar hotel.
The Air Force knew this guy was a threat but they "forgot" to do the paperwork on putting him on the list of people prohibited from buying a gun.
I believe your trust in the government is misplaced. They can't stop all these people with a screw loose unless someone lets them know who they are. Even then they'll just drive a truck over a curb, get all stabby with something sharp, grab a baseball bat and start swinging, or whatever. I'm just tired of the bullshit of blaming the gun laws for this. You want this to stop? Then lock up the truly crazy people, not those that decided to smoke some ditch weed for a buzz, or bought "too much" cold medicine.
Oh, then we hear about the government selling guns to cop killers. That was years ago. Anyone go to prison over that yet? I mean other than the cops that tried to shoot these same kind of cop killing bastards jumping over the border with Mexico. Can't have cops shooting the people trying to kill them, they have RIGHTS!
Oh, and this?
they're designed to do as much harm as possible, as quickly as possible.
Good thing too, otherwise this child killer could have gotten away. It was an armed citizen that stopped this animal, with the same kind of gun that these Democrats want to ban. They think the NRA is the problem? The life saving citizen was a licensed NRA firearm safety instructor. I think we need more people like this NRA member. Sign me up.
Dude, the Patriots are from New England. The guy was more likely a Cowboys fan. Or that other team in Texas... what's their name? Oh, the "Texans". Real original there. Maybe that's to help those in Texas that don't know where Houston is located.
At least they didn't call the team the "Houstons".
So it sounds to me like you'd like the same level of licensing and proactive enforcement for firearms as we have for poisons, cars, property safety, and drugs.
I agree, we should have the same proactive enforcement on all those things as on guns, which is none at all. Or rather none done by the government.
I'd personally stop short of having guns sold in vending machines, like cigarettes were at one time. Let's not do background checks. Check that the buyer of the gun is an adult, like we do with cigarettes now or going to an R-rated movie, if there is doubt then ask to see an ID. If there is an adult that we cannot trust with a gun then that person needs confinement, like a prison or mental institution, or constant supervision, like we'd do with a child.
We should not have the government try to bubblewrap the world for us. Certain rules on building construction make sense, such as fire exits and railings on staircases. Although a lot of them are also bullshit, such as penalties for violating laws on disabled person access for having a bathroom mirror a half inch too high. When it comes to drugs and guns we don't need the government to "save" us from ourselves. When it comes to poisons that's just impossible, there's enough stuff to kill us out there that we don't need the government on that either. Labels on things are fine, I want to know what's in my stuff, but I shouldn't need to sign a register to buy laundry detergent. If people want to poison themselves it doesn't take anything other than water, go look up water intoxication.
If you believe that car licenses, registration, and so forth are what keeps us safe then I'll just laugh at you. What keeps us safe is people's inherent desire to stay alive. People don't generally want to drive unsafe vehicles and people generally want to arrive at their destination. Traffic law enforcement is fine, as are setting some basic rules on the roads so we have a way to predict how other drivers will act. The licenses don't do shit but inconvenience a lot of law abiding people and create the feature creep that's come to what a license to drive means as a government issued identification card. We managed without these cards before, we can do so without them again.
Nope. Pandering isn't related to intelligence, it is related to integrity. Any idiot can pander.
Really? Then why didn't Hilary Clinton just "out pander" him? To successfully pander for votes one must be able to calculate what kind of pandering will be successful. Clinton pandered too, she just didn't do as well of a job at it. She wanted to lay many of the troubles of the nation on white Christian heterosexual males and guess what happened? Those white Christian heterosexual males came out to vote and voted for Trump. As did most anyone that fit in only one of the white, Christian, heterosexual, and male boxes.
Sorry, but the biggest loser is still Trump.
Except that he's President and you are not.
As for everything else you claimed, I'll need some sources on that or it didn't happen.
Tell me, why are we comparing only "gun deaths"? Would you rather they were tossed from a window? Dead is dead. Why does it matter what tool is used?
I recall seeing a cartoon with three frames. First frame, man with club stands over a dead victim, a commenter protests on the rising crime in the streets. Second frame, a man with a knife stands over a dead victim, commenter states on how crazy men are roaming free. Third frame, a man with a gun stands over a dead victim, BAN ALL THE GUNS!
The guns aren't the problem and anyone that comments on "gun deaths" is looking for some inanimate objects to pour all of the evil of society into so that by destroying these objects we can try to destroy this evil.
What is amazing about this is that there are some very important details left out on this story. The murder was stopped when an armed citizen stepped up. This man was an NRA member. This man was a Christian. This man acted on his own, not the instruction of some government official, with the assistance of another citizen to chase this man down and prevent him from doing further harm.
I don't know if there was some law that prevented anyone in the church from being armed but I'm quite certain that if such a law exists it is now in the process of being repealed.
In a nation of people that build their own cars, brew their own beer, bake their own bread, raise their own meat and vegetables, do their own plumbing, write their own code, we expect to have a ban on making their own weapons to be effective? We can make it illegal to make a gun but people will just figure out how to do it on their own. Enforcement is impossible. We can make it illegal to have gun in a church but who's going to stop someone from doing that? The police? Well, what exactly is a police officer? A police officer is little more than an armed citizen. So, if we want to keep armed killers out of churches then we need armed citizens to enforce that law. Here's the great thing about allowing people to keep armed killers from churches on their own, it costs nothing. Passing a ban on guns in churches, and failing to enforce it, can cost lives.
Oh, one last thing about that "gun death" statistic. Does the death of this mass murderer at the hands of an armed citizen stopping him from killing more count as a "gun death"? Sure it does. That alone is why any statistics on "gun deaths" is meaningless.
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Roy Spencer is right but 95% of the climate scientists on the planet are wrong ? really?
I've heard this before. It's used often as an argument, and it works now with me just about as well as it worked on my parents when I was in high school. I don't care if all your friends believe in CAGW, that just makes a lot of people wrong, assuming Roy Spencer is correct.
Make an argument on CAGW that is not an appeal to authority then I might believe you. What would help a lot to convince me is a focus on finding solutions. Widespread support for nuclear power among the CAGW community would certainly help their cause. We can have the near certain global scale suckage that is CAGW or the teeny tiny chance of localized suckage that is another Fukushima. If you choose to avoid the risk of another Fukushima style event by banning all future nuclear power then I find your conviction to solve this problem very weak, and therefore your argument very weak.
and they're liars. and Al Gore is fat.
Well, we can at least halfway agree here. I'll let you ponder on which half.
I'm reminded of some crazy idea from some city manager, council member, or whatever some time ago. The guy wanted to ban backyard grilling to cut down on CO2 output. When it was explained to him that this would be impossible to enforce, no one is going to drive around looking in yards for warm grills. His solution? Fly a police helicopter over the city to look for people grilling.
Discussion on the topic pretty much ended right there.
Show voters that your side will sacrifice things to solve climate change. Because most people just see yet another power and money grab, in a long series of power and money grabs.
I'm pretty well convinced that the CAGW scare is in fact another power and money grab in a long series of grabs. We've long had low CO2 and affordable energy from nuclear fission and yet these same people have been opposed to "nukular" for a long time now. If these people agreed to building new nuclear power then I'd have much less to complain about them about and might even be agreeable on the other things they want since they might actually seem sincere rather than just another power grab.
Let's not fool ourselves, it's the Democrats that are largely opposing nuclear power. The Republicans aren't great on nuclear power either but at least they have the mental capacity to know the difference between civilian nuclear power reactors and a military weapons program. Mention nuclear power to a Democrat and you can only get as far as the first syllable, "nuke", before they jump up and down about "THE BOMBS!!!"
The likes of North Korea and Iran will try to hide their weapons development behind the facade of a civil power program but they either lack the mental capacity to hide this successfully or are arrogant enough to think the rest of the world will let them develop nuclear weapons unopposed. Which is also another reason to dislike the Democrats, they will let these nations develop a "civil nuclear power reactor program" but not allow that same thing to happen in the USA. Which is it Democrats? Is civilian nuclear power good or bad? If Iran can have it then I want it here too. It's not like Iran has a shortage of oil, coal, sun, wind, and hydro to get their energy from.
If the Democrats cannot support nuclear power to stave off global warming then it's real easy to conclude that they are using the scare of global warming as a way to grab more money and power.
Claiming some kind of taxation or subsidy to solve this problem will not work. So long as people can vote the people will vote away a tax they view as unfair, excessive, or otherwise not in their interest. Same goes for subsidies, although far worse. We can subsidize house insulation upgrades, electric cars, energy efficient bulbs, solar panels, or whatever else we tried. All this does is make the poor poorer (they are paying the taxes to support this subsidy in some fashion, though not always directly) and the rich richer (to collect the subsidy one has to have money to spend on the subsidized item).
The only way to fix this is to make CO2 expensive naturally. Raising the cost artificially, with taxes, can go as quickly as it came. How do we raise the cost of CO2 naturally? Well, for one it is going to rise as we keep using it up. The price goes down naturally with increased technology and economy of scale. Same applies for low CO2 energy, we need to fix this with technology and economy of scale.
We already have an artificially high cost of a low CO2 energy source, nuclear power. Make the process of getting a license to build a clear and straightforward process would help a lot. There's plenty of people that have applied with what I assume are reasonable applications, just issue the damned license already. We've been building very safe nuclear power plants in the USA for a long time, I think we have it figured out. Allow economy of scale to take place. If one reactor is approved then every one after it should only need approval for updates and site specific differences.
Wind and solar have already enjoyed economy of scale cost savings, I have difficulty believing we can improve much here. This will need technology improvements and after 50 years of trying real hard on this there's not likely to be much left to gain.
Once we stop digging deeper with nuclear we can learn to fill this hole by carbon sequestration. This was mentioned in the article but claimed it can only be done at great expense. A professor in Idaho (I forget his name) claims we might be able to mine a common rock called basalt and use that as fertilizer. It's rich in lime which farmers already spread on their fields to control acidity from spreading manure and such. This is an ongoing process so they have to keep applying more. Right now they mine limestone for this, which is "cooked" into the lime they need and this process produces a lot of CO2.
Basalt is a much harder rock than limestone, and it produces only half the lime content per mass. To make this a viable alternative to limestone we need energy that is too valuable to use to turn limestone into lime. This has an inherent contradiction since it's cheap energy that makes cooking limestone worthwhile. The solution, as I understand it, is to make energy cheap enough that it's easier to simply mine and move the readily usable (but more massive) basalt than mine, cook, and move the "lighter and softer" limestone.
This professor believes the only way to do this is with an energy source as cheap, reliable, and plentiful as nuclear power. Solar and wind will not do since the mines for basalt will have to run full speed, day and night, in all weather, to compete with limestone.
Inevitably this accumulates in the food chain so the sooner we resolve the situation the less damage will be done to the human genome and our foodchain.
What elements are producing this radioactivity? As I understand it the largest source, as far as the ground water is concerned anyway, is tritium. Tritium has a half life of 12 years. Tritium is a naturally occurring element, life evolved with it in the environment, so it's not near the risk that other radioactive elements might pose. It exists as heavy water and so it just mixes in the ocean, with all the rest of the heavy water on Earth.
All the radioactive iodine in the water, which had people freaking out at the beginning, is effectively gone now. We can still detect it but that says more on the sensitivity of our equipment than any risk to life. With a half life of days, months, or millennia it's either gone or radioactive in only the strictest sense of the word.
Merely saying the water is radioactive is meaningless. Depleted uranium is radioactive too but we use it regularly as a radiation shield, as it's radioactivity is more theoretical than anything since it's so low. How radioactive is it? What are the radioactive elements it carries?
About the only elements of concern now are strontium and cesium, those have half lives in the decades and can accumulate in bones. The rest are either so inert that they have no biological role or such long half lives that they pose no risk outside of the quantities seen in the core itself.
Of course given the choice you wouldn't do it that way, but it proved something important. It proved that nuclear was not essential, which greatly strengthened the anti-nuclear movement's arguments.
If nuclear was not essential then why is Japan building new nuclear power reactors now? They expect to have 20% of their electricity from nuclear by 2030, at least that's what I read on Wikipedia.
Large nations like the USA, Canada, and Russia, can spread wind and solar power over large tracts of land to avoid localized effects like weather and daylight shifting. Japan is an island nation that is on not so friendly terms with the nations on the nearest large land mass. Their hydro power is limited and wave power is not a developed energy source yet. They don't have much choice but to turn to nuclear power.
They can import coal and oil for their electricity for only so long. This is not a long term solution for them. This is costing them a lot of money, and as even you admit it is reducing air quality.
The "nuclear renaissance" died that day.
No, it was merely delayed.
We will have to be building a new nuclear reactor somewhere in the world every week to just keep up with the shutting down of old coal and nuclear. That's going to happen at some point unless something better comes along. For an island nation like Japan it's not going to be wind and solar.
They would have been replaced 20 years ago if the federal government would just issue licenses to build new reactors. I recall reading how a single reactor was held up in getting it's license issued for more than 40 years. FORTY YEARS !!!!!
We can get a natural gas power plant approved in a week, a new hydro dam in a couple years, but it takes a decade to get a nuclear power plant approved. This is not acceptable and we should no longer accept it. We should see these plants get approved in months, not years. Perhaps even approvals granted in weeks if using a standardized proven design.
There are about 100 operating nuclear power reactors in the USA. If we want to see them all replaced in 10 years then we'd need to see a new nuclear power reactor license issued nearly once every month. If we want to do it in 3 years, then that's 3 every month. I guess President Trump better get going on that, he's got about 3 years left before the end of his term.
Or they'll blame lack of progress on the "greens".
That seems like blame that is well placed. Or have the "greens" changed their minds and support new nuclear power construction now? I do know such exist, I'm pretty sure they are still rare.
CANDU does not describe a single reactor, or single reactor design. There are hundreds of CANDU and CANDU-derived reactors in the world and all built 2 or 3 at a time, meaning dozens of variations on this theme.
They are safe designs, and I'm not disputing that. I'm saying that we can't say CANDU is any more or less safe than an American reactor unless we narrow that down some.
This safety of CANDU comes at a cost. They use heavy water which adds to the capital cost, that initial charge of heavy water is very expensive for needing so much. Later CANDU reactors reduce the need for so much heavy water by using light water in some loops. Using light water means that these CANDU reactors cannot use natural uranium any more, they must use enriched fuel. Needing enriched fuel means losing the inherent safety factor of natural uranium.
I believe the use of heavy water by Canada was more of a political choice than that of safety. Canada no doubt did not want to rely on a foreign nation (even one as friendly to them as the USA) for it's fuel and did not want the political ramifications of operating their own enrichment facilities. Something has changed in that calculus since it appears they've abandoned the natural uranium reactors for the future.
Nobody likes to decommission an operating nuclear power plant because they know it will be difficult to replace it once shut down.
As it is now the USA has about 1000 GW of electrical generation capacity, and demand is growing (slowly). A single nuclear reactor will produce about 1 GW of power. No big deal, right? So what if we shut one down? Well, that might be true but there are about 100 nuclear power reactors in the USA, we can't shut them ALL down or the lights go out. Due to the near 24/7 operation of these reactors they have a much larger impact on the grid than just the generation capacity alone might indicate. Even though the generation capacity is 10% of the total they produce 20% of the electricity we use.
Shutting down 2 GW of nuclear capacity is like shutting down 3 GW of coal, 5 GW of natural gas, 7 GW of wind, or 8 GW of solar. If we start to shut down nuclear reactors, and with no new reactor in it's place, that means a lot of windmills need to be erected. That's ignoring the difference between base load nuclear to unreliable wind and solar. We can manage base load nuclear pretty well on a daily and seasonal scale with a few pumped hydro storage dams like the Tennessee Valley Authority does at Raccoon Mountain. Managing this on a hour or minute scale like wind and solar, is a quite different problem. This would be a very expensive problem.
If we want to shut down old nuclear we need to build new nuclear. Anything else means lots of natural gas getting burned, very expensive unreliable energy from wind and solar, or rolling blackouts.
Places with a lot of people in them have a lot of gun deaths?
I see the problem right there. You define the problem as "gun deaths" and not "murders". When you define the problem correctly then get back to me. Until then all you have is a circular argument. Of course getting rid of the guns will reduce "gun deaths", but what other effects will that have on the safety of the public?
Here's a clue, when innocent people are denied the ability to own guns for self defense murderers, including those with guns, can continue murdering unopposed.
I don't understand. Are you saying that if a madman is shooting from a school or hospital that no one can shoot back? I mean this murderer is doing his murdering but we cannot end the murdering because then someone other than the murderer might get hurt? That's nonsense.
I'll hear stories like this about war. There's a pill box picking off friendly ships, killing dozens with each shot. Inside the pill box there is a near certainty of friendly POWs. Do you not take out that pill box? Of course you do. You put your sights on the target, ask the good Lord for His blessing and forgiveness, and pull the trigger. You hope and pray that no innocent lives are lost but if you do nothing you know that many more will be lost.
I figure the perp can probably get 5 people before justice is served by said gun nut.
Sounds about right. Saw something like that at another church shooting. Madman goes to doors of church as people are filing out, immediately kills 5 or so people, armed citizen returns fire, man flees and bleeds out while cowering in a corner. As sad of an outcome that is the result was better than letting the killer go unopposed until he ran out of ammunition.
How is leaving the worshipers disarmed in the church going to improve things? These people might be crazy but they aren't stupid. They seek out places where they know they can create the most death, destruction, and mayhem. They go to places with as many unarmed people as possible. Sure, you'll find one crazy idiot one in a while that tries to shoot people at a police station, rifle range, or something like that, but those are just suicidal.
The fact that there are people in this forum who have built their own fusors is pretty good evidence that any such claim is untrue.
That's not fusion energy research. That's not even research. It's fusion but it's not anything interesting. I recall Dr. Bussard made that distinction in his talk. People do fusion all the time but if people want to do anything new and interesting they need to compile enough radioactive material in one place to get the federal government's attention.
So, you're saying there's a chance!
We landed on the moon!!! WOO!!
Yeah. You know, for when you need to kill 15 geese per minute.
Or one motherfucker wearing body armor that wants to kill a church full of children and unarmed worshipers.
It's a good thing that the guy across the street had one of those "goose shooters" or things could have been worse. This baby killer reportedly had more guns and ammo in his truck, this was likely just his first stop that day if someone had not stopped him.
No doubt the gun banners will be adding the death of this piece of garbage in human skin to the tally of "gun deaths" to justify their bans. They'll probably also call his death a suicide*, because good people can't ever use a gun to good ends. Especially one of those "assault weapons".
*(There is doubt as to who made the kill shot, the pursuing citizens or if it was a suicide. Regardless the armed law abiding citizen stopped this garbage from doing further harm and by calling this a suicide the gun grabbers can count against the justifiable homicide tally and add to the suicide tally. If it's a suicide they can at least try to claim it's just poor soul that had a bad day. I guess he did have a bad day, it just wasn't some poor soul.)
You can't lock up crazy people until after they've committed the crime.
You can't stop them from buying guns either until they've committed a crime. Current gun laws on prohibiting dangerous people from buying guns cannot stop crazy people until they do something crazy enough to get on the list of prohibited persons, this might not always be a crime but it must be reported to the government. If the government is not informed, or the government fails in some manner to get the person on the list, then the crazy people can still get approved to buy when the gun dealers ask the government if it's allowed to sell to the person.
The guy that shot up this church was known to the government for being violent. They failed to keep this guy confined, supervised, or even put on the list of crazy people.
If you want to go back to the argument of banning what kind of weapon people are allowed by the government to purchase and own then we get back to the kind of weapon used to stop this child killer. If you limit the kind of weapons the future crazy people of the USA can buy then you also limit the kind of weapons the future protectors of innocent children can buy. If we declare a church, school, or park, a "gun free zone" and don't enforce that with people that are armed then we have just created a place where children congregate and killers like this will be able to kill unopposed. If you don't want guns in a church or school then that's just fine. That just means you have to have metal detectors and armed guards on the perimeter. Without those guards it's not a "gun free zone".
If all it took to keep guns from a place was a sign then we could replace the entire TSA with a contract with Kinko's.
The self-described "Chief Homophobe of Virginia" who'd held his seat since 1992 lost to a transgender journalist who's the lead singer in a death metal band.
Was this person also named Trump? I didn't follow the race but I assume not. Is Virginia the USA? It's in the USA but it's not the totality of the USA. I fail to see how this is relevant to the social intelligence of our current POTUS.
A quick Google search tells me that Virginia has a higher proportion of non-white and non-Christian people than the totality of the USA. I didn't bother to look for their sexual preferences or their preferences for death metal music. Demographic differences quite likely played a part in the differing outcome. Also, the outcome likely differed on being that one of the choices weren't named Clinton. Maybe there were candidates named Clinton, I didn't look that up either.
Maybe this transgender journalist pandered better. Maybe he/she/ze/it/they was, perhaps, just more qualified and it had nothing to do with pandering. This may actually apply to Trump too. Perhaps voters did not want someone that was a US Senator, Secretary of State, or whatever else Hilary Clinton did or claimed to have done.
But equally valid is the perspective that life is better when we don't have to worry about being shot, so as a society we should take some simple precautions to prevent that.
The places in the USA where one is most likely to get shot are the places where the government has the greatest precautions to prevent people from being shot. Places like New York, DC, and Chicago. It's almost as if the precautions are causing the problem. Maybe the government shouldn't be trying so hard to protect people and allow them to protect themselves.
The US Constitution says, explicitly and implicitly, that the government is not allowed to restrict my right of self defense. If the government wants to put limits on those rights then should there not be irrefutable evidence of these limits being effective? Or at least some plausible evidence? These laws might in fact prevent a person from being shot but that does not mean it prevents people from being injured or killed by other means. I did a simple statistical study for a college course on the differing state gun laws and found nothing to give evidence that gun laws actually reduce crimes like rape, murder, or assault. I may just do a more in depth study for another course. Do you expect me to find a different result if I do so?
Well, the late Dr. Robert Bussard would have disagreed with you.
He goes into this with several questions in the Q&A section near the end of this talk at about 1:20. I watched the talk before and I'm pretty sure that he made mention of this earlier too, but I'm not going to watch the whole thing again to catch every mention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He predicts the USA will fund, or even license, this research only after someone in China proves it works. I believe he was right.
Oh, and I'd think that he'd know what he was talking about. He worked for what was then called the Atomic Energy Commission. His last job, before he died, was in private industry trying to get the government to allow him to continue his research. He did as much research on fusion energy as the government would allow in his 50 year career, which wasn't much. If there was more research in the ten years or so since he died, outside of the tokamak, then the government has been real quiet about it.
A lot of fucking good those laws did on preventing crazy people from buying guns. This guy was nuts. He beat up his wife and her kid, got a year in prison for it. If he was considered a threat of repeating what he did, threatening to kill others with a loaded gun, then he should have been kept in the graybar hotel.
The Air Force knew this guy was a threat but they "forgot" to do the paperwork on putting him on the list of people prohibited from buying a gun.
I believe your trust in the government is misplaced. They can't stop all these people with a screw loose unless someone lets them know who they are. Even then they'll just drive a truck over a curb, get all stabby with something sharp, grab a baseball bat and start swinging, or whatever. I'm just tired of the bullshit of blaming the gun laws for this. You want this to stop? Then lock up the truly crazy people, not those that decided to smoke some ditch weed for a buzz, or bought "too much" cold medicine.
Oh, then we hear about the government selling guns to cop killers. That was years ago. Anyone go to prison over that yet? I mean other than the cops that tried to shoot these same kind of cop killing bastards jumping over the border with Mexico. Can't have cops shooting the people trying to kill them, they have RIGHTS!
Oh, and this?
they're designed to do as much harm as possible, as quickly as possible.
Good thing too, otherwise this child killer could have gotten away. It was an armed citizen that stopped this animal, with the same kind of gun that these Democrats want to ban. They think the NRA is the problem? The life saving citizen was a licensed NRA firearm safety instructor. I think we need more people like this NRA member. Sign me up.
Dude, the Patriots are from New England. The guy was more likely a Cowboys fan. Or that other team in Texas... what's their name? Oh, the "Texans". Real original there. Maybe that's to help those in Texas that don't know where Houston is located.
At least they didn't call the team the "Houstons".
So it sounds to me like you'd like the same level of licensing and proactive enforcement for firearms as we have for poisons, cars, property safety, and drugs.
I agree, we should have the same proactive enforcement on all those things as on guns, which is none at all. Or rather none done by the government.
I'd personally stop short of having guns sold in vending machines, like cigarettes were at one time. Let's not do background checks. Check that the buyer of the gun is an adult, like we do with cigarettes now or going to an R-rated movie, if there is doubt then ask to see an ID. If there is an adult that we cannot trust with a gun then that person needs confinement, like a prison or mental institution, or constant supervision, like we'd do with a child.
We should not have the government try to bubblewrap the world for us. Certain rules on building construction make sense, such as fire exits and railings on staircases. Although a lot of them are also bullshit, such as penalties for violating laws on disabled person access for having a bathroom mirror a half inch too high. When it comes to drugs and guns we don't need the government to "save" us from ourselves. When it comes to poisons that's just impossible, there's enough stuff to kill us out there that we don't need the government on that either. Labels on things are fine, I want to know what's in my stuff, but I shouldn't need to sign a register to buy laundry detergent. If people want to poison themselves it doesn't take anything other than water, go look up water intoxication.
If you believe that car licenses, registration, and so forth are what keeps us safe then I'll just laugh at you. What keeps us safe is people's inherent desire to stay alive. People don't generally want to drive unsafe vehicles and people generally want to arrive at their destination. Traffic law enforcement is fine, as are setting some basic rules on the roads so we have a way to predict how other drivers will act. The licenses don't do shit but inconvenience a lot of law abiding people and create the feature creep that's come to what a license to drive means as a government issued identification card. We managed without these cards before, we can do so without them again.
Nope. Pandering isn't related to intelligence, it is related to integrity. Any idiot can pander.
Really? Then why didn't Hilary Clinton just "out pander" him? To successfully pander for votes one must be able to calculate what kind of pandering will be successful. Clinton pandered too, she just didn't do as well of a job at it. She wanted to lay many of the troubles of the nation on white Christian heterosexual males and guess what happened? Those white Christian heterosexual males came out to vote and voted for Trump. As did most anyone that fit in only one of the white, Christian, heterosexual, and male boxes.
Sorry, but the biggest loser is still Trump.
Except that he's President and you are not.
As for everything else you claimed, I'll need some sources on that or it didn't happen.
Because they went through the trouble of getting a search warrant, duh.
(For the sarcasm impaired, I understand this can all be a legal construct to add another high profile case to the "evidence" against encryption.)
Tell me, why are we comparing only "gun deaths"? Would you rather they were tossed from a window? Dead is dead. Why does it matter what tool is used?
I recall seeing a cartoon with three frames. First frame, man with club stands over a dead victim, a commenter protests on the rising crime in the streets. Second frame, a man with a knife stands over a dead victim, commenter states on how crazy men are roaming free. Third frame, a man with a gun stands over a dead victim, BAN ALL THE GUNS!
The guns aren't the problem and anyone that comments on "gun deaths" is looking for some inanimate objects to pour all of the evil of society into so that by destroying these objects we can try to destroy this evil.
What is amazing about this is that there are some very important details left out on this story. The murder was stopped when an armed citizen stepped up. This man was an NRA member. This man was a Christian. This man acted on his own, not the instruction of some government official, with the assistance of another citizen to chase this man down and prevent him from doing further harm.
I don't know if there was some law that prevented anyone in the church from being armed but I'm quite certain that if such a law exists it is now in the process of being repealed.
In a nation of people that build their own cars, brew their own beer, bake their own bread, raise their own meat and vegetables, do their own plumbing, write their own code, we expect to have a ban on making their own weapons to be effective? We can make it illegal to make a gun but people will just figure out how to do it on their own. Enforcement is impossible. We can make it illegal to have gun in a church but who's going to stop someone from doing that? The police? Well, what exactly is a police officer? A police officer is little more than an armed citizen. So, if we want to keep armed killers out of churches then we need armed citizens to enforce that law. Here's the great thing about allowing people to keep armed killers from churches on their own, it costs nothing. Passing a ban on guns in churches, and failing to enforce it, can cost lives.
Oh, one last thing about that "gun death" statistic. Does the death of this mass murderer at the hands of an armed citizen stopping him from killing more count as a "gun death"? Sure it does. That alone is why any statistics on "gun deaths" is meaningless.
Fuck your "gun deaths".