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TheFuglyStik posted:Reasonable point; repeated entreaties to discuss reasonable point Everyone else posted:Blah blah blah nuclear blah blah cloud whitening TheFuglyStik, if the discussion in this thread and on the forums at large (which themselves are vastly more intelligent than what you'll see the media spewing) are any indication, then the human race is already ten ways to hosed. Between the news about the permafrost and the European debt crisis that appears poised to become a global debt crisis, I think we've moved beyond the "What can we do to solve the problem?" stage to the "Holy poo poo, batten down the hatches!" stage. I'm no 2012 doomsday theorist by any means, but based on even the limited observations I am making, things seem very fragile right now and it is easy to imagine that they could unravel very rapidly. Your Sledgehammer fucked around with this message at 22:33 on May 22, 2012 |
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May 22, 2012 22:24
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Your Sledgehammer posted:TheFuglyStik, if the discussion in this thread and on the forums at large (which themselves are vastly more intelligent than what you'll see the media spewing) are any indication, then the human race is already ten ways to hosed. Because people take what TheFuglyStick says as a given, and if I recall, we've worried over that topic a few times already in this thread.
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May 23, 2012 02:45
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Fatkraken posted:There are multiple forms of fission too, with wildly different costs and efficiencies (and waste profiles). For whatever reason* the forms that are widely in use at the moment are objectively some of the worst ways of actually using nuclear fuels. Piloting and ramping up production in efficient nuclear would probably take quite a while, not least because of the excessive amount of bureaucratic red tape and political hoops you have to jump through to do anything new with atoms. Yeah, though none of those processes are "decades away." Fusion is feasibly decades away due to the engineering challenges of putting a self-sustaining tiny sun in a bottle, whereas the engineering of fission containment has been done for over half a century and has seen constant refinement for most of that time.
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May 23, 2012 04:58
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Fatkraken posted:There are multiple forms of fission too, with wildly different costs and efficiencies (and waste profiles). For whatever reason* the forms that are widely in use at the moment are objectively some of the worst ways of actually using nuclear fuels. Piloting and ramping up production in efficient nuclear would probably take quite a while, not least because of the excessive amount of bureaucratic red tape and political hoops you have to jump through to do anything new with atoms. This is missing the point I'd like to see discussed at least once on this topic. Instead of worrying about how we generate more energy (or insert resources in other contexts) more efficiently, why do we never discuss ways to use less in these discussions? The discussion of how to generate energy more efficiently, but only so long as we don't have to cut back on the total amount, is what really causes me to worry that society won't really do anything about these problems. Your Sledgehammer posted:TheFuglyStik, if the discussion in this thread and on the forums at large (which themselves are vastly more intelligent than what you'll see the media spewing) are any indication, then the human race is already ten ways to hosed. No argument with you at all on signs pointing to us being hosed in the long run. At this point, I would just love to see the damaged contained as much as we possibly can at this point. TheFuglyStik fucked around with this message at 05:28 on May 23, 2012 |
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May 23, 2012 05:21
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TheFuglyStik posted:This is missing the point I'd like to see discussed at least once on this topic. Instead of worrying about how we generate more energy (or insert resources in other contexts) more efficiently, why do we never discuss ways to use less in these discussions? The reason why power generation dominates these discussions is because solving power generation puts us in an extremely comfortable position to solve a lot of other problems related to our environment. Sane remediation solutions such as carbon capture, zero-emission synthetic fuels and fertilizers, complete elemental recyclage, water body remediation, and general pollution cleanup will all require ridiculous amounts of energy to perform. Cheaper energy would also put us in a better position to improve our infrastructures and efficiencies, with many of the larger changes necessitating a large amount of energy and material costs up front. I believe nuclear could accomplish this task because it is thermodynamically favorable over everything else imaginable, being some millions of times more power-dense and specific than any simple chemically bonded system. Simply put, nuclear should use the least amount of everything by several magnitudes to produce the same amount of power as any other conventional source of energy, when considering every source' perfect implementation. That kind of effectiveness should theoretically make it far cheaper to use than any other source, as well as giving it a far smaller footprint on the environment. There are also things that nuclear technologies can do that no other chemical technology can, such as nuclear transmutation of fissile isotopes, medically and industrially relevant isotopes, and nuclear isomers. The issue is we're not even tapping into a fraction of nuclear's utility right now. There's no reason why we can't aim for both improvement of societal efficiency and implementation of cleaner, more cost-effective power generation, since the two would compliment each other anyways. Office Thug fucked around with this message at 13:00 on May 23, 2012 |
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May 23, 2012 12:57
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TheFuglyStik posted:This is missing the point I'd like to see discussed at least once on this topic. Instead of worrying about how we generate more energy (or insert resources in other contexts) more efficiently, why do we never discuss ways to use less in these discussions? There is certainly discussion of using energy more efficiently in terms of policy. Home insulation schemes are pretty widespread to reduce heat loss in winter, white roof policies to reduce AC use in summer, tax breaks and trade in schemes for efficient cars and so on. Incandescent light bulbs are banned in many places, congestion charges keep cars out of the cities and encourage people to use mass transit. Some countries have improved building codes so that new homes have to meet pretty stringent efficiency requirements. It's not ENOUGH by any means but it's not completely off the agenda. What's really needed in developed countries is large infrastructural and cultural changes. MASSIVE investment in low energy mass transit like trains and electric busses perhaps accompanied by punitive taxes for inefficient cars, changes to food supply infrastructure (you can do this at least in part with subsidies and tariffs), changes to the way people view meat eating (make it a twice a week treat not a daily staple), changes to how people work (I bet half the workers in the country could telecommute), increased recycling of high-energy-of-extraction materials like electronics, better insulation and heating infrastructure (imagine using the waste heat from power generation or data-centres for municipal heating, reduction of water leakages (water needs a fair bit of energy to treat and move around and leaks are very wasteful) and of course changes in consumption habits. In developing countries, a stable sensible and corruption free governance is the only way to ensure that they are able to develop in a low energy/low emissions manner. This includes being free from IMF interference and "free trade" policies which tend to encourage exploitation by multinationals. I'd be more than happy to discuss energy-use reduction, either existing initiatives or hypotheticals. I think this could include new technologies which many environmentalists might balk at, like genetically modified crops which require lower inputs of pesticide, fertilizer, water and labour for the same yield. It's kinda ironic that two technologies which have the potential to have an enormous positive impact on the environment compared to business as usual, Nuclear power and GMOs, are the two things which many dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists refuse to even consider. Not that I trust Monsanto or the power industry further than I can spit, but the *technologies* are enormously promising.
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May 23, 2012 13:05
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duck monster posted:...we just turn the things off and learn a lesson from the whole exercise. Why can't we say this about our current industrial system? It's really hosed up that people think it would be easier to risk further destabilizing the climate than to give up (or even just scale back) our ridiculously decadent and wasteful way of living. The definition of insanity, etc.
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May 23, 2012 19:46
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TheFuglyStik posted:The discussion of how to generate energy more efficiently, but only so long as we don't have to cut back on the total amount, is what really causes me to worry that society won't really do anything about these problems. We don't discuss it because conservation efforts will make life much less affordable in the west and require state policies that are politically unviable at present. A huge amount of energy can be saved through relatively simple measures such as limiting families to only one car and discouraging gas consumption with a carbon tax. However both these measures are unpopular in North America, and arguably have been actively rejected by electorates in recent elections (Al Gore in the US, Stephen Dion in Canada and the associated rise of the Conservative party). I wish I was educated in media and political studies to give more informed views, but observationally it seems certain types of problems can't be resolved in democracies. Democracies can handle limited conflicts between interests where the losing party doesn't lose too much or at least the loss isn't permanent. Issues where the solution results in some group enduring a significant and permanent loss can't be resolved, as the losing party doesn't have a reason to participate in the democratic process and has to be forced to comply. I'd argue that the necessary cuts to energy consumption qualify as significant and permanent losses for all Westerners, and this is why even discussing the issue is anathema. I realize this argument involves a lot of hand-waving and would appreciate if an informed person could confirm this is a real thing in democracies or that I'm just wrong. It's worth pointing out that even with entirely renewable energy source or nuclear we'd still need to implement massive energy conservation efforts to afford replacing fossil fuel sources, especially when electric cars become popular. So in any case conservation is inevitable unless we discover workable fusion (magic). Edit: This comes across as too negative, I am hopeful that large investments in infrastructure through existing institutions could make it possible for democratic states to reduce net carbon emissions to zero (ie. make it so the cost to the population won't be too high). North Americans use twice as much energy per capita than Germans, so there's a lot of room for consumption reductions while maintaining high living standards. I'm not sure what to do about those frozen methane deposits, and it would certainly be nice if large scale carbon sequestration became cheap. Nocturtle fucked around with this message at 21:03 on May 23, 2012 |
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May 23, 2012 20:32
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Don We Now posted:Why can't we say this about our current industrial system? It's really hosed up that people think it would be easier to risk further destabilizing the climate than to give up (or even just scale back) our ridiculously decadent and wasteful way of living. The definition of insanity, etc. We'd need basically a full-blown world revolution for this, you realise. I mean, if that's your view that's totally fine by me, but it's not a small thing you're describing here.
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May 23, 2012 20:38
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V. Illych L. posted:We'd need basically a full-blown world revolution for this, you realise. I mean, if that's your view that's totally fine by me, but it's not a small thing you're describing here. It requires deep, concrete systemic change, I agree. The problems we face are systemic and most likely cannot be solved with how we currently live. We can't change ourselves, but we can change our institutions and the way they gather, produce, and exchange resources. Maybe capital will swoop in and marshal the necessary workforce and change needed to radically alter our society, but I doubt it.
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May 23, 2012 20:51
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That's perhaps the thing that is most frustrating about this topic - to really solve it is going to require massive change on a cultural level, and the type of change required is not taking place at all. It feels totally helpless. It's like I'm a small insect that's trying to change the direction of a speeding train by buzzing my wings. No amount of "evangelizing" on my part will convince enough people to actually make a real difference, and the alternative is watching in horror as everyone suffers through the catastrophic collapse of the whole system, which is undoubtedly the direction we are headed right now (if the collapse hasn't already begun). Other than it being the cultural system I've lived in all my life, I have no great feelings for industrial civilization, so I don't think I'll really lament the loss of the system itself all that much. The human suffering that results from a collapse scenario is horrifying and depressing, though, and even more depressing is the realization that even if folks were to willingly give up our destructive lifestyle right now in order to head off collapse, we couldn't support anywhere near 7 billion people without it. There's no easy way out of this, and if there ever was, we should have been looking 20 or 30 years ago. I fear that all there is to do now is for each of us to mitigate as much suffering as we can and help as many people as we can.
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May 23, 2012 21:35
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Welcome to non-mainstream politics. I get periods of severe melancholia from time to time and I've known people who have gotten honest-to-god depressions over this. My parents were radicals in their youth, they know someone who basically broke down and never recovered once their movement petered out and who is now a junkie. I remember realising what you're describing there and it was the worst day of my life.
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May 23, 2012 21:50
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It's important to remember that you're responsible for doing your part, and not much more. Humanity has been lucky so far, and I think most of what we are, what we've learned, will survive this somehow. And rest assured if there is a population bottleneck to pass through, first order of business is stringing up the bastards who did this to us so they don't live to enjoy whatever's left of their obscene wealth. agarjogger fucked around with this message at 21:57 on May 23, 2012 |
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May 23, 2012 21:54
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V. Illych L. posted:We'd need basically a full-blown world revolution for this, you realise. I mean, if that's your view that's totally fine by me, but it's not a small thing you're describing here. Can we start yesterday please?
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May 23, 2012 22:57
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Don We Now posted:Why can't we say this about our current industrial system? It's really hosed up that people think it would be easier to risk further destabilizing the climate than to give up (or even just scale back) our ridiculously decadent and wasteful way of living. The definition of insanity, etc. Because solutions to climate change should be realistic. Going back to a pre-industrial state isn't going to happen, especially because it would mean the deaths of billions.
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May 23, 2012 23:18
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Your Sledgehammer posted:That's perhaps the thing that is most frustrating about this topic - to really solve it is going to require massive change on a cultural level, and the type of change required is not taking place at all. It feels totally helpless. It's like I'm a small insect that's trying to change the direction of a speeding train by buzzing my wings. No amount of "evangelizing" on my part will convince enough people to actually make a real difference, and the alternative is watching in horror as everyone suffers through the catastrophic collapse of the whole system, which is undoubtedly the direction we are headed right now (if the collapse hasn't already begun). I know I end up coming off all kinds of  whenever I talk about this seriously but I really think we're moving into an age within our lifetimes when the government is simply not going to be able to effectively look after us like we're used to. I'd argue they're already showing that by being unable to think and act on timescales larger than ~20 years (or sometimes even the next election cycle) - so it's up to each of us to do so. Maybe I'm pessimistic but I really think the best plan is to move somewhere with a sustainability-minded community (I've been looking at places like Chew Magna), learn to grow some food and a trade that doesn't require much high-tech stuff. Get independent.Thought: do you really think we'll all be driving cars with carefree abandon like we do now in say, 50 years? If not, do you see any movement towards restructuring our society (American in particular) to function without such easy car access?
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May 24, 2012 01:22
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TACD posted:Thought: do you really think we'll all be driving cars with carefree abandon like we do now in say, 50 years? If not, do you see any movement towards restructuring our society (American in particular) to function without such easy car access? In the UK people are talking about having to reign in driving for cost reasons NOW, let alone in 50 years. Whether they follow through or not is another matter, but costs are HIGH: unleaded is currently £1.40 a litre ($9 a gallon) and climbing and a lot of people are feeling the pinch, especially those with an excessive commute. Speaking for the UK, for most urban people a car often isn't necessary. I live on the outskirts of a large city and gave up driving well over a year ago when my last car broke down and I chose not to replace it, and life is pretty manageable. I hire a car maybe 2-3 times a year for events but don't use one on a daily basis. Very few of my 20-30something friends here have cars. It's less easy with young kids but still, I see plenty of mothers with pushchairs using the bus or tram and they seem to be doing fine. Commutes might be a pain if you don't work on the bus route or near a station, but living nearer work would solve that. Shopping is already moving towards an internet-delivery model, and the number of delivery vehicles would be smaller and have a far lower footprint than personal cars, especially because a well planned commercial fleet would be much easier to electrify. In rural areas it's a lot tougher, in more remote villages the public transport is pretty poor so a car is really handy. However, because of the relatively short distances involved in 90% of cases, it would just require a bit of planning and investment in better buses, not a wholesale restructuring of the way we live. I would say maybe 70-80% of people with cars could get along day to day without them with relatively minimal disruption to their lives with just a bit of bolstering to existing public transport routes. It might require quite a few people living closer to where they work though. I take it that the US differs from this significantly? I know the distances involved are often much larger, urban planning means walking can be difficult and public transport is often very poor. Would a lot of peoples day to day existence be impossible without a car?
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May 24, 2012 02:26
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The thing I've noticed about consumerism, is that there's something everyone. Whether you're into dirt bikes, joulies to keep your coffee warm (what), the smartphone upgrade treadmill, designer prams, cloth nappies, there's someone out there trying to support your consumption habit. Ecological awareness brings in new markets of consumerism with composting bins, organic food, Eco-this that and the other, but consumerism goes on strong by morphing to fit the audience. It will need to hit a hard limit to stop.
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May 24, 2012 03:24
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Your Sledgehammer posted:That's perhaps the thing that is most frustrating about this topic - to really solve it is going to require massive change on a cultural level, and the type of change required is not taking place at all. It feels totally helpless. It's like I'm a small insect that's trying to change the direction of a speeding train by buzzing my wings. No amount of "evangelizing" on my part will convince enough people to actually make a real difference, and the alternative is watching in horror as everyone suffers through the catastrophic collapse of the whole system, which is undoubtedly the direction we are headed right now (if the collapse hasn't already begun). I couldn't have stated my real feelings about this any better. I've been doing several things from a personal level to get myself closer to what the ideal society would be in my mind, but I can't do any more than that no matter how much I would like to. I'm just hoping that making myself more self-sufficient in terms of personal food, dropping out of the economy to the limited extent that I can right now, and trying to move over into earning my living from growing local food can be an example of how working in an office until death just to buy more toys isn't the only way to live, nor the most satisfying. It's been a great experience for me. poo poo, I'm not on anti-anxiety meds and antidepressants anymore, and I feel fine for the first time in years. No matter how much I think my life has improved, though, I know not everyone would enjoy the lifestyle changes I've made. And there is no way I could realistically or ethically force them to live this way. My greatest fear is that a combination of resource depletion, climate change, and any resulting political & economic chaos will force everyone to at a great cost in lives. All I know to do in such a situation is to try and teach people the skills I've learned so that they can survive. I think it's far more sane and moral than building a doomsday bunker in the Ozarks and telling everyone else to get hosed. Maluco Marinero posted:Ecological awareness brings in new markets of consumerism with composting bins, organic food, Eco-this that and the other, but consumerism goes on strong by morphing to fit the audience. This is what kills me about the current tide of the environmental movement. It's more about showing off how your laundry detergent cleans baby seagulls in oil spills or how this Chinese grown garlic is organic certified than actually teaching people how to make their own drat soap or grow their own drat garlic. So long as people are buying the products with a green plastic bottle instead of cutting their consumption, the wheels will just keep turning. Even the products we deem necessary to buy has increased over the past several decades. Disposable electronics that may last three years if you splurged, energy drinks to keep you from feeling that normal human feeling people call "tired", bottled tap water with a picture of a mountain stream on it, and on and on. Really, I think we've just gone balls-out, batshit crazy with the consumerism in the past few decades. And we did it to ourselves.
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May 24, 2012 05:10
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Fatkraken posted:I take it that the US differs from this significantly? I know the distances involved are often much larger, urban planning means walking can be difficult and public transport is often very poor. Would a lot of peoples day to day existence be impossible without a car? Car ownership in America is probably right up there with military dominance and endless growth as an unquestionable assumed fact of life.
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May 24, 2012 06:40
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So this seems like the place to ask: Was listening to a random podcast and someone was ranting about how Fukushima right now is a credibly threat to life on earth. Apparently if the busted reactor 2 can cause meltdown in one of the other reactors, we're boned, in some sense? I don't know. The only things I can find on the internet are credible news sites talking about how Fukushima is still a bit of a cluster and is an embarrassment for Japan or yadda yadda, and then fringe-y blog people who are saying it's the apocalypse. Does anyone else see it as a possible global threat? If so why?
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May 24, 2012 07:34
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Loving Life Partner posted:So this seems like the place to ask: No. Chernobyl was and will for the forseeable future be the Worst Case Scenario, and it didn't even come close to a threat to all life on Earth. Fukushima was not Chernobyl.
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May 24, 2012 07:54
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Loving Life Partner posted:So this seems like the place to ask: Nuclear accidents are dangerous because they can disperse radioactive material through a steam explosion or even just smoke from fires. In the worst case this can be stopped by encasing the entire damaged reactor in concrete, as was the case for Chernobyl. I imagine there's risk of ground water contamination if the core is allowed to melt through the base of the facility, but this too can be mitigated. While it's hazardous and can contaminate the surrounding region it could never be world ending. It can certainly increase the risk of cancer in affected areas. Fukushima is certainly an embarrassment for nuclear power proponents and it's changed my views on the subject. I don't think any private corporation can be trusted to manage the safety issues associated with nuclear energy, as ultimately they can just go bankrupt and leave the expensive long term issues to the state. The profit motive also makes it too easy to skimp on safety or to use reactors beyond their designed lifetime. Nuclear power could certainly help reduce carbon emissions (which is the big issue), but I think in future it will have to be managed by state owned utilities.
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May 24, 2012 08:08
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Loving Life Partner posted:So this seems like the place to ask: I've seen some speculation that another earthquake could breach some of the cooling pools and make a huge mess, but even then it's still mostly a threat to Japan
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May 24, 2012 08:16
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Wow how did I miss this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/09/fukushima-owner-saved-japanese-government "Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company at the centre of Japan's worst-ever nuclear accident, has been saved from collapse after the government in effect nationalised the firm by agreeing to inject 1 trillion yen ($12.5bn) in fresh capital. ... Under the 10-year restructuring plan, the government will acquire more than half of Tepco's shares, with the option of increasing its stake to more than two-thirds if the company fails to reach its restructuring targets." I suppose this isn't surprising as I don't think any corporation could pay what TEPCO owed in liabilities. The profits of capitalism go to the investors and the environmental costs are paid by the state with nuclear power no exception. I wonder if people in this thread (myself included) are fooling themselves when suggesting nuclear power as a means to address climate change. Given recent history in the financial sector, can we really believe regulatory capture of nuclear safety organizations won't occur?
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May 24, 2012 09:07
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TACD posted:I'm actually from the UK, I've just been living in the US for a couple of years. One of the things I really miss about England is the walkable / pedestrianised town centres and the availability of public transport, especially in big cities. Over here (at least in the Bay Area where I am) a lot of 'cities' (smaller areas like Santa Clara apparently count as cities) don't have any discernible centre, just a six-lane road with shops on either side stretching for miles that you drive down until you get to the one you want. There is just no way to get to many places without a car, because these places were designed with car ownership being assumed. Don't get me wrong, I love it here. But drat what a strange, strange place this is. Back on topic, nuclear is still significantly safer than coal and it is our only option at the moment. I'm a disgusting hippie who thinks that we should all live in Earthships but I'm not delusional enough to think that renewables are viable right now.
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May 24, 2012 09:29
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Loving Life Partner posted:So this seems like the place to ask: No. Just do the raw numbers. There are currently around 4.5 billion tons of uranium in seawater, only a small percentage is radioactive but it's still millions and millions of tons. There is millions of tons of radium, uranium, thorium and other radioisotopes in rocks and mineral deposits. Tons of radioactive isotopes are released from burning coal. None of these things have ended life on Earth. Radiation isn't a cake walk, it can cause major local damage and of course there are unpleasant isotopes in the waste, but there's just not enough material in a couple of power plants to be any credible threat on a planetary scale. In Chernobyl, which was much worse than Fukushima, the vast majority of the zone of alienation is in better ecological shape than before the accident: barring the red forest and the zones VERY near the plant, human presence and farming displaced and damaged more species than radiation. That's not to say there wasn't an effect, there were certainly impacts on numbers and genetic health, but animals and plants are rather good at coping with radioactivity at the population level. Remember that even in a clean environment most plants and small animals have ENORMOUS rates of attrition between birth and reproduction, unfit mutants are bred out surprisingly quickly. Hell, there are forms of crop plant breeding which involve bombarding plants with ionizing radiation. Outside acute radiation poisoning which really only occurs with clean up workers o people onsite DURING an accident, the biggest threat from radiation is cancer. The biggest single identifiable cause of cancer is smoking. Over one and a half billion people smoke, and 5 million die from it each year. That's a couple of orders of magnitude worse than the WORST most fringe projections for the WORST nuclear accident ever to have occurred, and several more orders of magnitude worse than more sensible projections.
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May 24, 2012 10:20
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the kawaiiest posted:Back on topic, nuclear is still significantly safer than coal and it is our only option at the moment. I'm a disgusting hippie who thinks that we should all live in Earthships but I'm not delusional enough to think that renewables are viable right now. I don't know what you mean by "viable", but using renewable sources to supply the majority of baseline power is certainly possible. It's definitely more expensive ,some basic cost estimates can be found in David Mackay's "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" online textbook provide and in the references of the related Wikipedia article: http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source As a VERY rough estimate supplying baseline power with mainly renewable sources would cost 4-5 times more than a nuclear system. This includes the cost of energy storage systems required to deal with the uneven production from renewable sources as well as modifications to the electrical grid. At what cost-multiple does renewable energy become viable, does it have to be exactly equal with nuclear in cost?
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May 24, 2012 10:50
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Changing the subject slightly for a moment, one tiny ray of hope: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/24/heartland-institute-billboard-controversy Those terrible billboards equating belief in climate change with mass murder have backfired spectacularly and the Heartland institute is in a financial crisis and dropping donors left right and centre. I know it's not a big thing, but a major part of political apathy on this issue is due to public apathy, and a major part of public apathy is created or fostered by well funded denialism. Public support for sustainable energy IS growing, and the floundering of denialist think tanks is no bad thing.
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May 24, 2012 11:03
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Fatkraken posted:No. Just do the raw numbers. There are currently around 4.5 billion tons of uranium in seawater, only a small percentage is radioactive but it's still millions and millions of tons. There is millions of tons of radium, uranium, thorium and other radioisotopes in rocks and mineral deposits. Tons of radioactive isotopes are released from burning coal. None of these things have ended life on Earth. Radiation isn't a cake walk, it can cause major local damage and of course there are unpleasant isotopes in the waste, but there's just not enough material in a couple of power plants to be any credible threat on a planetary scale. This is the source of what he was talking about, I think. For what it's worth, I think that requires a lot of assumptions of certain things such as particulate size if there even was some kind of fire. Assuming the coolant does run out of the pool, assuming the fuel rods do catch fire, assuming what's in there is still potent enough to maintain that fire, assuming nobody does anything about it, and assuming the particles listed into the atmosphere stay aloft and end up all over the place, then sure, ok, you might have a tremendous problem on your hands. Basically the potential is there in absolute terms, but getting from "potential" to "reality" requires a very Rube Goldberg-esque sequence of events under the assumption nobody tries to stop it in the first place.
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May 24, 2012 11:04
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The Entire Universe posted:This is the source of what he was talking about, I think. The kind of scenario being spoken of would undoubtedly be a horrible disaster, and cause a significant number of excess cancer deaths and environmental damage. It would be a tremendous problem, but something on a catastrophic scale, not an apocalyptic one.
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May 24, 2012 11:26
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Fatkraken posted:The kind of scenario being spoken of would undoubtedly be a horrible disaster, and cause a significant number of excess cancer deaths and environmental damage. It would be a tremendous problem, but something on a catastrophic scale, not an apocalyptic one. Yeah, I should have thrown that in there, it wouldn't sterilize the entire northern hemisphere, but you'd see a significant spike in cancers and possibly large-scale dieoffs of plants/trees/animals.
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May 24, 2012 11:30
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Nocturtle posted:As a VERY rough estimate supplying baseline power with mainly renewable sources would cost 4-5 times more than a nuclear system. This includes the cost of energy storage systems required to deal with the uneven production from renewable sources as well as modifications to the electrical grid. At what cost-multiple does renewable energy become viable, does it have to be exactly equal with nuclear in cost? Considering energy is 9% of the US GDP a five-fold increase in cost is not really viable. That book also doesn't deal with the intermittency aspect of renewables, Mackay basically leaves that as a problem that needs to be solved for his models to work. Also the cost of grid level storage is a complete unknown. Even in California there can be periods of 2 weeks with non-stop lower than average solar insolation - how do you store that much electricity?
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May 24, 2012 11:53
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I dunno about you guys but I sure as gently caress couldn't afford to pay for an electric bill that's five times as large every month. That would literally make my electric bill more than my rent in summer 
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May 24, 2012 13:28
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-Troika- posted:I dunno about you guys but I sure as gently caress couldn't afford to pay for an electric bill that's five times as large every month. That would literally make my electric bill more than my rent in summer The cost wouldn't necessarily have to be passed onto the consumer, nationalised government funded development of clean energy would be the sensible move and that could be heavily subsidised. Of course that would require not kowtowing to free market capitalism, so it about as likely as everyone voluntarily giving up their cars.
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May 24, 2012 14:18
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TheFuglyStik posted:Even the products we deem necessary to buy has increased over the past several decades. Disposable electronics that may last three years if you splurged, energy drinks to keep you from feeling that normal human feeling people call "tired", bottled tap water with a picture of a mountain stream on it, and on and on. Really, I think we've just gone balls-out, batshit crazy with the consumerism in the past few decades. And we did it to ourselves. I learned the other day that detergent falls into this category too. It's no more effective than regular old soap, but we happily pay for it to be mostly water anyway. And in plastic bottles. And heavier per unit of suds.
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May 24, 2012 14:37
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V. Illych L. posted:Welcome to non-mainstream politics. I get periods of severe melancholia from time to time and I've known people who have gotten honest-to-god depressions over this. My parents were radicals in their youth, they know someone who basically broke down and never recovered once their movement petered out and who is now a junkie. I remember realising what you're describing there and it was the worst day of my life. During the forest blockades of the 90s I was involved in I saw a lot of people just went crazy after spending months up trees and stuff and the general horror of watching some of the most beautiful and endangered forest in the world getting loving massacred by the chainsaws. I can count at least 3 suicides from all that. I honestly recomend taking breaks from activism when you find yourself in despair. Just become a regular joe for a few months, with perhaps a chilled out bohemian lifestyle or something to lose the pressure a bit, and when your feeling sharp again rip out the jetpack and go nuts again. Its one of the reasons I refuse to completely disown the "lifestylists", to be honest sometimes just being a loving backpacker kid is far saner than drowning in the utter despair of a losing battle. Perhaps the secret is to oscilate between the two a bit to balance sanity and action.
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May 24, 2012 14:38
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Fatkraken posted:Changing the subject slightly for a moment, one tiny ray of hope:
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May 24, 2012 15:38
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The Entire Universe posted:This is the source of what he was talking about, I think. There's a reasonable amount of worry and preparations to be done for rare events that have enormous consequences, but we should be doing a lot more worrying about predictable, highly likely events with consequences that will just keep steadily ramping up for as long as any of us are alive. Basically I agree with you 
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May 24, 2012 15:54
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Loving Life Partner posted:So this seems like the place to ask: The scenario described here is utter bullshit. But let's assume it would happen, would it be the end of the world? Let's examine this a little bit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield The two radioisotopes that are the most dangerous by yield-per-fission, biological half-life, and radioactivity are Iodine-131, Caesium-134, and Caesium-137. None of the other substances matter in even the worst possible radiological release compared to these, no matter what the media spouts. Iodine-137, for instance, is a long-lived radioisotope (15 million years half-life) that's always touted by the media as some sort of infinite ever-present killing machine. The issue is that people have done the dosimetry calculations and it so happens you'd need magnitudes more radiodine to suffer from radiological damage as you would from simply dying of iodide poisoning. Back to spent fuel, iodine-131 is an incredibly active radioisotope with strong radioactive decay energies. However, because it's so radioactive, its half-life is extremely short and thus it ceases to exist after roughly a month in used fuel rods. None of the short-lived radioisotopes that constitute the incredible threat from melt-downs are present in spent fuel; most have decayed and stabilized. The threat of spent fuel lies almost exclusively in medium-lived things like Caesium-137, with long-lived things not being radioactive enough to pose a significant threat unless highly concentrated. However, if the fuel rods catch on fire, then Strontium-90 release becomes possible as was the case in Chernobyl. Both cesium and strontium isotopes can replace some common alkali elements in organic tissues which is what makes them biologically incorporable and relevant to dosimetry. Combining that with the fact that they're high-energy emitters makes them potent threats. So I'll be examining these exclusively. Both are produced in high relative yields as fission products, radiocaesium being roughly 6% of the total yield and radiostrontium being around 4%, so for every fission, you can expect 10% of these guys to be yielded on average. Let's run some calculations based on the article: - The amount of spent fuel rods stored and under threat is 1535. - The Fukushima units were boiling water reactors that used fuel rods containing 183.3 kilograms of total uranium (http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/hlwaste.htm). - 5% of that is uranium-235, the actual fuel, so the fuel content per rod was 9.165 kilograms. - Of that, an estimate 60% burnup is expected, so 60% of that U-235 should now be fission products, 5.5 kilograms. - Now we need to convert that mass into mols using Avogadro's number in order to figure out how many nuclei of U-235 will be converted into nuclei of radiostrontium and radiocaesium (I'm using rounded conversion numbers because I don't have my exact isotope mass table handy): 5.5 kg / 235 kg/kmol = 0.0234 kmol of U-235 For radiocaesium: 0.0234 kmol * 0.06 * 137 kg/kmol = 0.19 kg of radiocaesium For radiocaesium: 0.0234 kmol * 0.04 * 90 kg/kmol = 0.084 kg of radiostrontium That's my estimated yield per spent fuel rod. It could be more or less depending on the burnup (probably less due to boiling water reactors being pieces of poo poo) So assuming the worst possible accident ever where every ounce of both of those were released from all 1535 rods, we'd have a total of 291 kilos of radiocaesium and 129 kilos of radiostrontium released. A gram of radiocaesium has an activity of 3.215 trillion becquerels, and a gram of radiostrontium has an activity of 2.147 trillion becquerels. The total activity of both sums up to become 1,213,000 trillion becquerels (1,213 Peta-Bq). Becquerels only express the amount of nuclear disintegrations (or emissions) per second however. To convert that into biologically relevant dosages like sieverts you need to consider the total amount of the isotope that can be incorporated into your system, its biological half-life, and its emission energies and types. I'm going to keep going with the Becquerel to keep things simple. The surface area of the planet is 510,072,000 square kilometers. Spreading 1,213 PBq across all of that would lead to an increase in radioactivity of 2.377 megabecquerels per square kilometer, or 2.4 kilobecquerels per square meter. In our bodies at this very moment there is 7 kilobecquerels of radioactive activity, and urban homes can contain from 5 kilobecquerels to more than 30 from Radon alone (for a 100 square meter home). Alright so that doesn't look too swell, but that's not the whole story. To give you some perspective in terms of accident scenarios, Chernobyl spread 5,200 PBq over 191,560 square kilometers because it released an astronomical amount of fresh iodine-131 (400 loving kilograms, or 1760 PBq) and radioactive noble gases such as xenon and krypton which subsequently decayed into solid isotopes that rained back down as fallout. Even a hypothetical 100% "gently caress-this-and-throw-everything-up-in-the-air" combustion of all the spent fuel rods at Fukushima would still release less than a quarter of what Chernobyl did, and about 130% of what Fukushima is estimated to have released in the first place (900 PBq). Neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl spelled the end of the world as previously noted, so maybe people are just making poo poo up about the dangers of radiological releases after all? As for the danger of radiation, I tend to look back at Chernobyl's cases to demonstrate the point that even bursts of low accute radiation exposure from things like iodine-131 rarely spell death in humans, even if little to no proper care is taken during the event: http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/hlwaste.html So yes, in the end the numbers point to this being more alarmist bullshit from every angle. Our lovely 60s era nuclear plants are still safer than anything else as demonstrated by empirical statistical evidence and so long as the media doesn't portray them as such they're making poo poo up: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html Office Thug fucked around with this message at 19:21 on May 24, 2012 |
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May 24, 2012 19:07
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