[TheForge] now Japanese nuke plants OT: POL:

[Andrew Vida]

peter fels wrote:
> On Mar 18, 2011, at 8:08 AM, Andrew Vida wrote:
> 
>>
>> James Binnion wrote:
>>> On Mar 17, 2011, at 11:47 AM, peter fels wrote:
>>>
>>>> That's changing, both in the cost and efficiency of solar cells
>>>> etc,
>>> Alternative energy sources aren't even close by orders of magnitude
>>> yet, yes they are getting better but they still cannot compete in
>>> scale or cost with petro or nuke.
> 
> Petro is a diminishing resource and a serious balance of payments problem.
>  If you count  construction cost, waste disposal ,decommissioning, risk and cleanup in the nuke cost..
> ...it doesn't look so good.
>> A truth the nuts and twigs crowd flatly refuse to acknowledge.  If they 
>> want to return to the stone age, I support them fully so long as they 
>> leave the rest of us to live as we see fit.  Unfortunately, the 
>> watermelon marxists seem ill-contented to  leave us alone.
> 
> Does the name calling make you feel better Andy?

	Much. :)

> What's a watermelon Marksist BTW?

	Green on the outside, red on the inside. :)^2

> The idea is, we have a serious problem and we need
>  to start working on it real hard now,
> while we still have the margin to do so.

	Don't hold your breath.  The problem is manifold.  First, those in 
power want to stay there, whether in the corporate or governmental 
worlds... increasingly in both as we are a defacto quasi-fascist state 
now :(

	This being the case, government sets market regulation such that 
barriers to entry in a given industry become nearly impossibly high and 
the establishment of new industries that might cannibalize the extant 
ones are prohibited by regulation.  For example, were I to brilliantly 
develop a high temperature superconducting material good to well over 
the boiling point of water by spilling red wine on iron (this has been 
recently claimed by Japanese researchers), one of three things would 
befall me to prevent my capitalizing on this invention that would change 
the face of life on the planet in ways most people cannot imagine: I 
would be simply shut out by regulation, I would be bought out by the 
competition or, refusing to submit, I would be executed.  The great 
blessing of "regulation" has a purpose: to maintain seats of economic 
and political power.  There is no other purpose, all grotesquely 
distorted proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding.

	This being the case, those at the top have no interest in changing the 
game until such time as they extract the maximum market value from the 
existing investments.  The collateral benefit is that conditions in the 
world go so far to hell that those in power now use that as the pretext 
for further arrogation of power to which they are in no way entitled. 
Whether "the people" grant such expansion of authority is irrelevant to 
the question of legitimacy because the grant would be made under 
fraudulent circumstances.  History provides us with examples of this old 
trick in such abundance as to herniate the mind before assuming 5% of 
them in one's thoughts.

>> 	And it is not "green", so what's the point - at least until the oil 
>> spigots run dead-dry?
> 
> It's somewhat cleaner and we have a lot of it so we don't have to go further into debt to the Arabs.
> The nat gas can act as a transitional fuel.
>  Burning fossil fuels when we are going to need them as feedstocks is awful shortsighted.

	I was being a bit facetious about the "green" thing, which is pure 
idiocy and provably non-viable on the whole.  When a unit of energy a 
consumer uses requires more than a unit of energy to produce, you can 
rest easy in the knowledge that you do not have a viable system at hand.

That all said, I must declare that good old fashioned home made ginger 
tea is one of life's fair and simple pleasures.