Quote:
Originally Posted by Uplifter
Your lack of understanding scientific issues is clearly your second biggest flaw.
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Your lack of understanding of the political issues is yours.
Climate change HAS ALWAYS been happening. It has been warmer in the recent past, and it has been colder in the recent past. IT IS A DYNAMIC SYSTEM, and, just like meterorology, no matter how many Crays they throw at it, they can't model it well enough to produce a weather forcast for tomorrow, never mind 50 years time.
In the meantime, we have a financial sytem which HAS COLLAPSED. The banks are insolvent. €350 billion of "unprecidented" money thrown at the situation today, only days after the "unprecidented" $50 billion combined central bank effort. I wonder how long todays injection of "liquidity" will be "unprecidented" for? A day? A week?
The financial system is in a worse state than it was in 1929. This kind of thing is always what happens when a system is deregulated to the extent ours has been, because greedy bankers do stupider and stupider things for short term gain.
THIS is the problem of the day, not global warming, which is being promoted in a (futile) attempt to create yet another financial bubble to keep the already dead system going for a few more years.
In the meantime, nothing is being done about African poverty, AIDS, malaria. Our own power, water, transport and health systems crumble around our ears.
Well, fine, ignore todays problems and worry about something that has happened naturally since the beginning of time. You want to stop the use of fossil fuels, so do I, but for different reasons. I want to be able to breathe clean air, thanks.
So if we suspend our distaste for each others positions for a moment, we couldn solve that problem today, with nuclear. In 25 years, we could have removed fossil fuels from the equation totally. But no, we can't do that, can we? We can't have other countries having access to nuclear energy. No sirree! So lets stoke up the green lobby to hate nuclear power, that'll keep that genie in the bottle.
The environmentalist fear of nuclear energy is irrational, just as is their fear of climate change.
Reprocessing nuclear fuel vastly reduces the quantity of waste from nuclear fission. Only 3% of the material sent for reprocessing is unusable High Level Waste. That’s approximately 750kgs from a 1000MW reactor. Read that again - 750 kilogrammes.
This 750 kgs of material is normally incorporated into solid blocks of borosilicate glass, in a process known as vitrification.
Vitrification produces a stable solid that has the high-level waste incorporated its structure. That 750kgs of waste from a 1000MW reactor is contained in 5 tonnes of such glass, which can be readily transported and stored, with appropriate shielding.
There is a cooling period of about 50 years between removal from the reactor and disposal, with the conditioned HLW being retained in interim storage. The level of radioactivity and heat fall rapidly in the first few years and is down to about one thousandth of the level at discharge by 40 years.
So if we reprocess, how much waste is produced?
The UK generating capacity is presently about 70GW. In one year, therefore, we would produce 53 tonnes of high level waste if we were completely nuclear. At any one time, based on a 50 year cycle before this waste can be vitrified, we would be storing close to 3000 tonnes of HLW, equivalent to approx 450,000 litres. To put that in perspective, it compares to 5.5 billion litres of oil based fuels stored in the UK at any one time. I think even the UK has enough space that waste could be stored without being in someone’s back yard.
Nuclear power plants can be used to produce:
* Fresh water
* Hydrogen
* Oxygen
* Precious metals such as palladium, rhodium, and ruthenium
* Radioisotopes for medicine
(In fact, the shutdown of the Chalk River reactor, Ontario, for maintenance, has almost completely halted the global supply of radioactive isotopes used for diagnosing and treating thousands of patients with cancer and other diseases.)
The propaganda from the global warming lobby promotes a world where I must save energy, reduce my “carbon footprint.” This is a world which will devolve scientifically and technologically. It’s a world of slavery, where everything I do is taxed to “offset” my use of energy. It is a world where 3rd world countries are not permitted to develop, and where people continue to starve due to biofoolery. It is a world where the rich get richer by blowing bubbles. That's the world promoted by Al Gore who has only one agenda - keeping his pocket full of cash. (Well, he's also a racist, but lets not discuss that ...)
Instead we could have a world where all nation states have access to cheap energy, fresh water (how many conflicts are going currently over water?), unlimited hydrogen, access to new raw materials and medical isotopes.
But lets have a few windfarms and trade some carbon dioxide derivatives instead. Much better.