[TheForge] OT: nukes etc. WAS:Hellooooooo!

[Todd Rich]

Just a note here.  I've read your other response downthread. Your advocacy 
of the ostrich solution leads me to belive you don't care about this, it 
is just a chance to rant at humanity.  Just be aware that what you are 
choosing is a path that will lead to us poisoning ourselves with ever 
increasing speed...


On Sun, 7 May 2006, Demon Buddha wrote:

(snip)
> with nukes can be tied to profit motives.  OTOH, the Soviet morons didn't do 
> a whole lot better with their centrally controlled nuclear programs.  The 
> events at places such as Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk serve of shining examples 
> of state owned possibilities.  The USA is not exempt, either.  I audited a 
> class with a guy at CCNY, Mishio Kaku, and he went through all these nuclear 
> disasters from the 40s through the 60s.  We've had plenty and the results 
> were not so pretty, though they were pretty well hushed up to the public eye.
>
Just a point here about Chernobyl, since it gets brought up a lot in 
discussions like this.  Chernobyl was built in the 70s using a design that 
was abandoned by the US in the late 40s/early 50s as inherently unsafe.

(snip)
> 	I agree that it can, as long as nothing extraordinary happens.  But 
> what happens with the extraordinary occurs?  1000 years is a very long time 
> when your environment is posioned.  A few thousand square miles surrounding 
> Chernobyl are in pretty sad shape these days and aren't going to get better 
> any time soon.  Do you think that these risks are really worth it?  I don't 
> care how well you design a system, it can fail.

Yes systems can fail.  However systems can be inherently safe too, so that 
the worst case scenario is acceptable.

For example, I'm assuming you have cast iron at least once in your life. 
Can you melt 1kg of iron to cast in any possible scenario where your fuel 
is 10 grams of charcoal?  Even with liquid oxygen added in, you just don't 
have the calories available.  Several of the new designs are like that. 
They have just enough fuel in them to do their job of heating water. 
Remove all regulation an it runs normally.  There are other safer designs 
that if you remove the regulation it shuts off.  It takes quite a bit of 
work to get them to work, and if everything isn't just right it shuts 
down.  Failure modes are safe.  True you could get somebody to walk in and 
sit on the fuel and pick up a fatal dose, but if you are basing your 
opposition to them on that, you really are out on a limb.

>> If you are worried that it will be too long, we can make thorium 
>> reverberatory nuclear furnaces.  Basic concept is a particle accelerator 
>> pointed a a pile of thorium.  When it is on, it produced more energy than 
>> needed to keep powering the acclerator.  When you want to shut it down, you 
>> turn off the acclerator.  The waste it produces, while hotter than the 
>> convention fuel cycle is much shorter lived, plus you can use the high 
>> level waste produced from a conventional fuel cycle as fuel, burning it up.
>
> 	Sounds promising, but are there any hidden costs?  Rather, what ARE 
> the hidden costs.  There are no free rides.
>
Of course there are no free rides.  If you are talking thermodynamic free 
ride, it is a simple, well understood controlled conversion of matter to 
energy.  As far as financial, it costs a fair amount to build and maintain 
particle accelerators, but given it turns modertate to short lived highly 
radioactive waste into fuel/energy even if it is run at a net negative 
cost, it is still money well spent. However we don't seem to want to do it 
in this country.  We'll just have to watch India develop the technology. 
THEY are doing it now.

>> It has the added benefit of not producing isotopes that are easily turned 
>> into weapons grade nuclear material.
>> 
>> Switching from coal to nuclear would also have added benefits of 
>> dramatically reducing the amound of CO2 dumped into our atmosphere.
>
> 	But we'd still be introducing plenty of additional heat into the 
> atmosphere.  I suspect that such schemes will only encourage an ever growing 
> habit of wastefulness, people feeling they now have a free ride situation on

The additional heat is a cost of living.  Thermodynamics. It is happening 
now. The only way to avoid this is to kill off the entire human race. 
Even then the next animal will evolve and the cycle will start all over 
again.  Eventually you wind up with the heat death of the universe even if 
every living thing in the universe is killed.

> their hands.  There's too much historical precedent to let me think 
> otherwise.  The only cure for that is through pricing and we're too used to 
> whining about such things so that legislators cave and make pricing controls 
> illegal.

No, there is no 'cure' to heat production other than killing about 6-7 
billion people.