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At the end of the week when Al Gore brought his global warming message to Congress, Jonathan Rauch asks whether climate change problem-solvers know what they're doing.
|3.23.07 @ 12:02AM|#
OMG, global warming is just a hoax by the water-flouridaters and the UN to destroy America.
|3.23.07 @ 12:04AM|#
Oh, come on. There's science here. But these people are using worst-case or worse than worst-case scenarios...
|3.23.07 @ 12:06AM|#
I mock you both for doubting any aspect of Gore's agenda! You two are equivalent!
|3.23.07 @ 3:40AM|#
[not for Eric the .5b, he had his thread]
Jonathan's article sorta kinda makes sense, except for one little
thing. What are these "alternate" technologies that a carbon tax is
supposed to "encourage"?
Hydrogen powered cars? Try again. That's going to up the
concentration of H2O, which is a much more potent "green house
gas". Jump from frying pan into fire.
Go electric cars and nukes?
As an engineer who used to work in the electric power industry, I
know nukes are much safer than the shrews say.
But as an engineer who now works in aerospace, and knows a thing or
two about establishing genuine hardware reliability, I say we
cannot ignore the facts. We try really hard to make sure commercial
planes don't ever crash. In spite of our best, sometimes they
do.
Start building nukes all over the globe, and the question won't be
if but when we're going to melt one down. Is the melt down of a few
big nukes really putting us ahead environmentally?
I don't think so. And that's before you even address the problems
and costs of waste disposal. Or nuclear bomb proliferation. Or the
fact that you don't just throttle back a nuke plant during
off-peak, so you still need gas turbines to handle the peak loads.
Nukes are good for base generating capacity only, and the peak
loads are still a substantial fraction of the total. So you aren't
even getting rid of fossil fuels.
The only "alternate" technologies we could have in place 40 years
out, are already in front of us. Nobody has shown that these
alternatives are any net environmental improvement.
Most likely scenerio -- a carbon tax cuts productivity, forces a
huge investment in some other approach to base generating capacity,
and we find out that we've traded Problem A for Problem B.
"Carbon sequestration"? I haven't seen anybody even address the
side effects of this. But you can't do anything, without it impacts
something.
Nobody has come close to convincing me we should do anything.
[/not for Eric the .5b, he had his thread]
|3.23.07 @ 11:08AM|#
Getting the dumb repetition out of the way isn't anything
against useful conversation!
Start building nukes all over the globe, and the question won't be if but when we're going to melt one down. Is the melt down of a few big nukes really putting us ahead environmentally?
What about pebble bed
reactors that get around that problem?
|3.23.07 @ 11:21AM|#
"Hinode, the newest solar observatory on the space scene, has
obtained never-before-seen images showing that the sun's magnetic
field is much more turbulent and dynamic than previously known." -
European Space Agency, from a press release makred "Hinode sees the
dynamic and violent sun as sharply as never before"
(http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.rss.html?pid=22175)
Surely we already knew enough to determine that solar activity has
far less to do with global temperature than things like Bubba
firing up his Ford F-150 four-wheel-drive pickup truck to go
"mudding" and Muffy firing up her Mercedes-Benz SUV to shuttle her
kids to and from soccer practice, right? Right?
In other news, a remarkable article on Al Gore's Brain,
"Brain-damaged people give insights into morality":
"It's wartime, and an enemy doctor is conducting painful and
inevitably fatal experiments on children. You have two kids, ages 8
and 5. You can surrender one of them within 24 hours or the doctor
will kill both. What is the right thing to do?
For most people, this scenario based on one in William Styron's
novel "Sophie's Choice" is almost an impossible dilemma. But for a
group of people with damage in a part of the brain's frontal lobe
that helps govern emotions, the decision was far more clear. They
would choose one child for death."
I'm not saying the guy is actually brain-damaged, but it does seem
eerily similar to the sort of decision that Gore proposes:
sacrificing Capitalism (the child of Freedom and Liberty) to stop
Global Warming (the child of Environmentalism and Socialism) is
obviously the sort of choice that Gore is not only comfortable with
but one he argues is MORALLY necessary.
And the best quote in the whole article is at the very end:
"'They are perfectly capable of endorsing the kind of extreme
high-conflict dilemma in which indeed you would produce harm to
someone because there would be greater good coming to a larger
group,' said study co-author Antonio Damasio, director of the
University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute.
'And this is something that human beings in general reject.'"
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2039270620070321?src=032107_1924_ARTICLE_PROMO_also_on_reuters
|3.23.07 @ 1:09PM|#
Getting the dumb repetition out of the way isn't anything
against useful conversation!
[grin] I was just busting your chops a little.
The pebble bed is safer than the old fashioned design. But it still
isn't fool proof. Nothing is.
I can't see how we could roll out nukes on a large scale, and not
face the fact that someday, somewhere, the unthinkable is actually
going to happen.
Maybe just my opinion. I got out of the power industry before
pebble bed reactors had gotten beyond a twinkle in the eye, so I'm
admittedly not on top of the technology.
But I'm sure, the reliability problem of nuke plant (any flavor) is
not simpler than the reliability of a commercial airliner. In fact,
radiation degrades materials over time, which makes nukes a much
harder problem at a very fundamental level.
On an aircraft I have to worry about turbine blade fracture due to
combined fatigue and corrosion. In a nuke plant I have to add
radiation degradation to the mix, which reduces the fatigue life of
the metal even more. Now you need even bigger, bulkier hardware to
carry loads in the long run.
But the "solution" isn't that simple. As hardware gets bigger and
bulkier, that tends to cause other problems in the overall system
and then you have to figure out how to solve those.
So, it looks like a step forward. And I get filleted for being so
pessimistic, in the field that I work in -- but I just don't
believe 100% reliability exists. I have never lead a design or
development team that Murphy didn't joint sooner or later.
|3.23.07 @ 1:18PM|#
So, it looks like a step forward. And I get filleted for being so pessimistic, in the field that I work in -- but I just don't believe 100% reliability exists.
Neither do I, but failure modes are the important issue. The
described failure modes of a pebble-bed reactor cause problems of
vastly smaller scope than older systems. When the concern is
meltdown and contamination, a system that can't melt down addresses
it.
|3.25.07 @ 11:12AM|#
Pebble bed reactors can't melt down? What about contamination? Why is this? Can you tell me more?
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