Drift to nuclear power angers environmentalists

[decadnids]

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/23112005/32...entalists.html

LONDON (Reuters) - Environmentalists expressed anger on Wednesday at growing signs the government was moving towards approving the building of a new generation of nuclear power stations.

The government's chief scientist has said the need for massive investment to replace the country's ageing nuclear plants was self-evident and Prime Minister Tony Blair has signalled he is moving in the same direction.

what are peoples views on nuclear power?

[cut out]

at the moment a necessary evil. in the future i would hope it is viewed as a dangerous experiment to help bridge the gap between the bad old fossil fuel days and the new era of hydrogen/methane driven everything.

it makes me feel uneasy...but what else are we gonna do, cover every square inch of countryside with wind farms? or stop using electricity.

it's funny actually how no-one ever mentions tackling demand, it's all about supply. if we had a big cultural shift and people started thinking of electricity as a finite resource, companies would start designing products to be more efficient, switch themselves off, do the same work for less watts etc. i guess that's what will happen when the price goes up.

[TEC-HO]

Originally posted by cut out
at the moment a necessary evil. in the future i would hope it is viewed as a dangerous experiment to help bridge the gap between the bad old fossil fuel days and the new era of hydrogen/methane driven everything.

Spot on.

Nuclear power seems to be the most sensible answer to a problem that needs to be resolved as soon as posable.

nuclear power is one of the things we have at the moment to meet a 60% growth in power needs by 2030. hydrocarbons is not something we can carry on doing with 6 billion energy-hungry people to serve... but it could also destroy the planet if safety fears are realised and we have a large scale accident(s).

they need to work at the hydrogen based systems and massively educate the world on personal carbon footprints. each person cutting their use of eco-damaging energy.

My mum has a solar powered house but the cost was way beyond mortal folk.

[mdk]

thats pretty cool...a solar powered house and immortality...

[grobelaar]

Yeah, I'm the same, a neccesary evil - we gotta stop pumping out the carbon and fast....

When I saw that Horizon on Global Dimming, I was even thinking - fuck take all the C02 scrubbers off the power station. In the short term it would be better to suffer the effects of Global Dimming than the potentially irreversible effect of climate change that we are running toward...

Fact remains that the our western government aren't willing to sacrifice their economic systems in order to save the planet, so we go on making these small steps toward doom...

[grobelaar]

Long term some sort of non-centralised power generation - what if every household in the UK had solar and wind generators - we'd still have the grid - that way shortages in one area can be off-set by excesses in the other.

Trouble is once again, power generation is big business, and they won't just wind that down overnight and plough the money into something else.

something radical needs to happen, but it'll probably take some massive disasters or revolutions before the present system makes the neccesasy changes.

[Spandex]

Originally posted by mdk
thats pretty cool...a solar powered house and immortality...

a

[Spandex]

I think I subscribe to the idea that nuclear might be a necessarily evil.. a bridging solution..

But I'm not 100%... cos I think it's quite possible that viable alternatives are being dismissed (because they're not profitable for the people currently making the profit).

Also, you have to be wary giving into the idea of nuclear power.. cos you might say "yeah it's a necessarily evil and useful bridging solution".. and they edit off everything after the "yeah" and go on to fuck up huge areas of our planet for millions of years for the sake of a few quid.

[TEC-HO]

Could just be propaganda. But i was reading that innovations in nuclear waste disposal makes it quite safe and with a minimal effect to the environment.

I have an idea for the future. I think that Korean scientists have found a way of turning human waste into power. If this power could generate enough electricity to run a house, each house could be powered of off the occupants waste. Now, this would render the underground sewer systems useless. This would leave the way for a new transportation network, something similar to the things they use on the running man.
I know it's stupid, but hey, why not.

[grobelaar]

The USG are sitting on zero point power... Trouble is with zero point power, they'd have no stick with which to brow beat the rest of the planet into becoming some global democratic superstate, so they're sitting on it and using the dwindling oil reserves as an excuse to go round on some power trip...

They'll probably sort out the world over population problem while they're at it too... If humans are going to live forever (with genetic engineering) no point having 6-10 billion of them, eh?

Any way I was just listening to something and apparently some scientist says that with zero point power, 1 cubic centimetre of vacuum could provide enough power to keep every single industrial process on the planet going for a trillion, trillion, trillion years. There might have been one more trillion I'm not sure

[penciLneck]

more data please.....

sounds too sci-fi to be true, quantum uncertainty? how do you harness that exactly?

[grobelaar]

Hunt for Zero Point by Nick Cook...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076...83155&v=glance

From Publishers Weekly
For the last 15 years, Cook has been an aviation reporter and editor at Jane's Defence Weekly, a defense industry trade journal that one would expect to find Cheney and Rumsfeld discussing on the way to the briefing room. A full-length project from a high-ranking Jane's editor creates a certain confidence in the contents, yet, as Cook makes clear, most of what's in this book won't be found in Jane's, as the evidence for "zero point energy" is less concrete, even if just as scrupulously sourced here. The book begins when Cook jokingly calls the possibility of antigravity drives "the ultimate quantum leap in aircraft design" in one of his Jane's pieces more than 10 years ago. A few years later, someone anonymously slips him an article, dating to the 1950s, that shows officials at Lockheed Martin and other big contractors claiming they were close to exactly that. Intrigued, Cook takes the bait and follows the trail to the wildest territory imaginable: destroyed or pulled reports; disappearing battleships; silent, glowing flying discs; time distortion; Nazi slave labor. To simplify in the extreme: Cook has found evidence that Nazi scientists had tapped into zero point energy the quantum energy that possibly exists within vacuums in amounts that make nuclear energy look like a joke (enough energy in the space of a coffee cup, Cook explains, to boil the world's oceans six times over). When WWII ended, Nazi secrets were plundered by the U.S. Army, which spirited them, along with many of the German scientists themselves, into "black" programs not acknowledged by the government and which may have produced working aerospace technology based on zero point. Through his cover as a Jane's reporter, Cook seeks out the stealthy wonks of this top-secret world, but readers will have to wade through some opaque thumbnail descriptions of the science and arcane WWII history to understand what he and others are getting at. It is well worth it.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

[penciLneck]

thanks.

*laps it up*

[penciLneck]

but.. but... not even the ufo nuts think this is true. still sounds like a good read though.

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/.../m08-006.shtml

[grobelaar]

hahaha - well they wouldn't like it would they - it essentially rubbishes their little reality tunnel...

"First many of them left Germany before the war, >most< that were left were second rank, Nazism was not kind to physics."

Oh no, they only developed the most advanced rocket in the world, the jet-fighter, the automatic rifle etc. I think the fluffed the atom bomb by going down the heavy water route... In terms of rocket building, only one person matched Von Braun, and his rocket design is still in use the Russians to this day...

Is it any surprise that a few people have remarked that the recently announced NASA plans to return to the moon look remarkably like their previous trip in the Saturn V...

[solitary_zen]

The only long term solution is for humanity to figure out how to live with less reliance on energy production - MUCH less (i.e. to be able to live with the moderate generative capacity of solar energy alone, for example). Otherwise the future looks pretty grim. This, of course, means completely changing our lifestyles - probably not likely, unless we leave it too late and really are faced with no other option, then society implodes.