Amen

Bucko36

The only warming that need concern people is whether they end up in hell or not during that aforementioned eternity.

I wish I could agree with you Bryan, but having been a health physics technician in the nuclear power industry (San Onofre power station) I know just a little too much to agree at this stage in the game. Get back to me when the problem of spent fuel has really been solved, not shuttled off for future generation to suffer with and then we might have something to agree about.

doriangrey on September 6, 2007 at 6:26 PM

BULLETIN!! BULLETIN!! SPENT FUEL PROBLEM SOLVED (over 40 years ago)!!

The technical solution (invented in the US), is the Breeder Reactor. They work and recycling the fuel is not only safe but economical. Unfortunately, meddling and hysterical anti-nuke Luddites in Congress almost immediately outlawed this solution in order to guarantee that nuclear power in the US will always be a problem, and killed all funding for development of this kind of plant in the US.

So the ultimate solution is to replace the nuts behind these stupid, dysfunctional, petty political acts and simply embrace and begin use the same proven technology we have spread to the rest of the world.

Dusty on September 6, 2007 at 6:57 PM

Sorry to have to correct you, but Yucca Mountain Repository is in Nevada. WIPP is in New Mexico.

RightWinged on September 7, 2007 at 1:34 AM

Yes indeed.

Nearly thirty years ago (GAD! how can it have been so long ago! Seems like only a few years ago) I was working on geology and mining engineering degrees at a small (but significant) earth sciences institution when the petroleum department there started coming up with not only technology to produce significant oil from old, supposedly long ‘dry’ oil wells/fields, but that apparently ‘Mother Earth’ was still ‘creating’ oil.

My actual understanding of it was quite limited (as my area of study was ‘hardrock’ metals mining), but I was quite impressed with the results of the research and findings of some of my friends and acquaintances in the Petroleum Recovery and Research Center. To sum it up from their (now rather old, but then ‘earthshaking’) findings, we will never run out of oil…. It may get kind of scarce eventually, but Mother Earth is going to keep making a few million barrels of it every year for us.

(Nonetheless, I’m all for developing non-petroleum energy sources …. (Even when it doesn’t make short term or medium term sense economically… I just LIKE alternatives, as long as they aren’t governmentally MANDATED.)

I wrote a long essay on ‘global warming’; about how the global warming mongers might pretend to believe in Gaia , but they had no real faith in ‘her’ NOR of God.

They all see themselves as little individual gods… They believe that only they know how to manage the Earth…. They believe that neither God nor Gaia has the power to create a long-term equilibrium in in our environment. Because their vision is only self-referential, limited to their own short lives (and VERY short attention spans), they are unable to grasp the raw power of planets, Solar systems and galaxies.

They don’t believe that either God nor Gaia has a long-term plan; They believe that poor, pitiful, and weak humanity has the power to make a significant difference in the equilibrium of the planet and the universal plans of God or the planetary plans of Gaia.

They aren’t willing to concede that POSSIBLY the REGIONAL warming (and reigonal cooling, by the way) that is occurring Might all be part of God’s or Gaia’s plan… That it might be necessary, and maybe even beneficial to humanity overall.

You know (or at least SHOULD know), that if humanity put ALL of their efforts into totally destroying the Earth during the next ten years….. A few thousand years after we wiped ourselves out, a team of thousands of archaeologists from a different Galaxy would have to really search to find a clue that we even existed.

Anyone who has seen as much of the remote places of Earth as I have would know how little the actions of humanity make a difference in the overall earth environment.

One of my old sayings is; If you put ALL the works of humanity throughout our entire history, in one spot at one time, it would amount to no more than a pimple on the posterior of Gaia. Irritating for a while, but insignificant on a geologic scale.

Buzzy on September 6, 2007 at 11:54 PM

Like “global warming” the alarmism of “peak oil” has been around for the last 2 centuries… the wild predictions of when we are going to run out have come and gone every time. Part of the problem is that we’ve been told oil is a “fossil fuel” created by dead dinosaurs… but we’ve seen, in recent years, abiotic oil. The “peak oil” community tries to say these are flukes… I think I’ll say “the jury’s out” on it.

But more immediately interesting, is the fact that many drilling locations that have “tapped out” weren’t really tapped out, we just lacked the technological ability to harvest all of the oil. I actually read this in an odd place a while back, and have seen it confirmed elsewhere, that the majority of oil in many sites remains in those sites, untouched, because we simply couldn’t get to it. But there are new technologies coming online (I think some involve blasting hot air (oddly enough) in to unaccessible areas, sending the oil up to accessible areas. I wish I had the link because I’m murdering that story, but it was really interesting. BTW, I’m not even sure about the oil discussion that was being had, I just saw your comment and felt like replying.. perhaps this has already been covered.

I’ll make my own ice.

(If the reactors’ spent fuel rods’ nuclear material were powdered and scattered in minute amounts gradually throughout the seas, so that they essentially equalled the constant backround radiation, they could be dispersed harmlessly. It would be more time-consuming, but safer than trying to shoot them into the Sun.)

To borrow a rant from Dennis Miller… if we are running out of oil exactly why shouldn’t we be burning it up like crazy if for no other reason than to leave the Middle East with nothing but sand to base their economies on.

I find it disturbing that we’re basing our beliefs that we’re running out of oil on exactly the same people who are making unbelievable amounts of profit off of telling us we’re running out of oil. I have a sneaking hunch that there will always be plenty of oil and gas to buy if you can afford it.

SHOULD WE RECYCLE SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL?

The question of what to do with all the waste products from nuclear power plants has plagued government officials, industry executives, and scientists and engineers for decades. In the United States, a long-planned repository in Nevada that would store the nation’s spent nuclear fuel has been held up for years in legal and political squabbling. Now, as the U.S. considers resuming the licensing of new nuclear facilities to bolster domestic energy production and reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels, the problem of dealing with the radioactive byproducts of nuclear power generation is taking on an even greater sense of urgency. Does anyone have an alternative to simply burying the dangerous waste in the biggest, deepest hole we can dig? It turns out one country has been trying an alternative solution all along: France. In this month’s feature “Nuclear Wasteland”, Contributing Editor Peter Fairley writes that the French practice of reprocessing depleted nuclear fuel may be more successful than critics have made it out to be.

Fairley notes that the French experience clearly shows that nuclear reprocessing need not be the dangerous mess that other countries, including the U.S., have claimed in the past. France, he notes, now reprocesses well over 1000 metric tons of spent fuel every year without incident at the La Hague chemical complex, in Normandy. La Hague receives all the spent fuel rods from the country’s 59 reactors. Operated by the state-controlled nuclear giant Areva, the facility has racked up a good, if not unblemished, environmental record.

Moreover, U.S. authorities now believe they have a way of eliminating reprocessing’s other major liability: the risk of spreading a supply of raw materials for bomb making. In recent years, Department of Energy engineers have developed an approach, they claim, that is more resistant to terrorist misuse, thereby mitigating concerns about nuclear security. Hence, the government is already supplying recycled fuels to one commercial reactor and planning tests of new proliferation-resistant reprocessing technologies. However, there’s a catch (as it seems there always is with nuclear power): To do the job of recycling useful material from the spent fuel rods from nuclear plants most efficiently, we would need to construct special breeder reactors to break down the most long-lived elements in atomic waste.

And there, the politics of nuclear technology, at present, brings us to a halt. The French model is good, but it needs to be extended if it is to transform the problem of disposing a massive amount of high-level toxic waste to the problem of disposing a high-level of massively toxic waste. In the U.S., the Bush administration has begun to argue that, despite the technical and economic hurdles, it is time to give this approach another try. Early last year, President Bush singled out France’s nuclear program for a rare bit of praise, telling the American people in a radio chat that reprocessing will “allow us to produce more energy, while dramatically reducing the amount of nuclear waste.”

As one expert that Fairley spoke with notes, “Everybody is in agreement that the right system ultimately results in multiple recycles in fast [breeder] reactors, so that’s where things are going.” Let’s hope that this is a direction we can all follow safely.

Posted by Susan Hassler on February 8, 2007

but he’s right about nuclear power for more than one reason: It is cleaner than anything else that generates as much energy,
I wish I could agree with you Bryan, but having been a health physics technician in the nuclear power industry (San Onofre power station) I know just a little too much to agree at this stage in the game. Get back to me when the problem of spent fuel has really been solved, not shuttled off for future generation to suffer with and then we might have something to agree about.

doriangrey on September 6, 2007 at 6:26 PM

Hey doriangrey, honest question; does that include the newer, smaller, safer pebble reactors? I thought the waste was one of the problems pebble reactors solved.

If their predictions of Global Warming were true, it would mean the greatest humanitarian disaster in history. Their worst fears about nuclear accidents would not even compare. They would demand more nuclear power if they really thought this was going to happen…

Nosferightu on September 6, 2007 at 6:31 PM

Your point is brilliant…. I wish I would have thought of it first. So the question to Al Gore and his global warming cheerleaders becomes….

Why not nuclear power, it’s clean and could never produce the kind of cataclysmic disasters your global warming scenarios predict ?

If you truly are looking for the huge mountain of evidence for evolution, that site is not the place you should be looking.

Science grows by new evidence, and the more evidence that is found the better we understand how things went, how they work now, and how they might happen in the future. That’s not a fault, it’s the strength of science. I can assure you that evolutionary theorists do not need to pull GW types of slight of hand to find many data for changing gene frequencies in populations over time.

Which is all evolution is.

http://www.douglasjacoby.com/view_article.php?ID=5505

Bob’s Kid on September 6, 2007 at 8:54 PM

So, you’re another evolutionists who wants to attack the messenger… rather than observe that the messenger is linking you to mainstream evolutionist scientists, and simply pointing out how ridiculous their statements are… and this isn’t an isolated incident, but it’s one of the more silly ones.

TexasDan on September 6, 2007 at 6:39 PM

UW Madison has a nuclear engineering program, but I’m not sure how big it is.

Good articles Jens, thanks.

Maybe this guy foolishly bought land in the Arctic and is trying to pump and dump.

MB4 on September 6, 2007 at 8:55 PM

My ice flow, flow no mo!
Or, the incredibility shrinking igloo!

Maybe this guy foolishly bought land in the Arctic and is trying to pump and dump.

One recent example – listen to scientists admit that recent discoveries have only thrown wrenches in their already ridiculous theories of human evolution… yet somehow, a lack of evidence is still evidence to these people.

If you truly are looking for the huge mountain of evidence for evolution, that site is not the place you should be looking.

Science grows by new evidence, and the more evidence that is found the better we understand how things went, how they work now, and how they might happen in the future. That’s not a fault, it’s the strength of science. I can assure you that evolutionary theorists do not need to pull GW types of slight of hand to find many data for changing gene frequencies in populations over time.

Which is all evolution is.

http://www.douglasjacoby.com/view_article.php?ID=5505

Maxx on September 6, 2007 at 8:35 PM

I did some more reading after my post. Reagan apparently reversed the ban, but no recycling has ever been done since the ban anyway.

Here are a couple links about the issue and process:
Nuclear Chemistry Recycling Spent Reactor Fuel

and
Should we recycle spent nuclear fuel

Now that is a stock market sell signal if I ever heard one.

Maybe this guy is in cahoots with Cramer and they want to buy on a big dip.

Lovelock was full of it, but said it just to cover his initial mistake of jumping on the global warming bandwagon to begin with.

Correct.

And it won’t be long before he and his iilk water down their extreme opinions even more–when their doomsday predictions continue to NOT HAPPEN.

Really ? So what you are telling me, is that technology has already solved the problem of what to do with spend rods and for anti-nuclear political reasons we don’t do it. America really needs to wake up.

It makes perfect sense that Jimmy Carter was behind it.