Ooh, now I want a nuclear-powered VW Rabbit with the license plate “BUN BUN”.

I’ll probably have to settle for mounting a smaller cannon than the SheVa though.

And that makes them different from us.

I’m dismayed that we apparently have not learned anything about this terrorist mindset in all these years. These are not mere “guerrilla fighters,” and comparing them to us or putting them in a favorable light is giving them more credence than they deserve to have.

Oh yeah, lest you begin to wonder, this is STILL about cars. I just offered a very good reason for not making nuclear power more freely available (or portable), that’s all. And I stand by my assertion, because it’s supported by the reality of the world we live in.

What would a terrorist do with even 20% U235? Throw is up in the air? One would need at least 80% U235 to make a bomb go boom.

http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/background.pdf

Yep, Agreed – …their planning and everything else stank, absolutely, but I believe the drop in prices and therefore revenues pushed them over the edge…

I don’t think its a factor of communism itself but more a factor if central planning which is arguably a part of communism, but not just communism.

zoom zoom
I believe the root is education. They’re being educated and indoctrinated at a very young age to hate those who are not like themselves.

I agree with this also. But is it just “them” ? One persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter.

I suspect if I went to Boston I would find quite a few instances where my definition of “terrorist” is seen in their eyes as a definition for “freedom fighter” in a particular context. That was terrorism committed on my soil, funded from the US, which killed innocent people including children.

You are correct, but we need to look at ourselves as well.

Anyway, back to cars ;-)

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have to do something about terrorism.

TaxedAndConfused Responded:

I suggest we stop funding the “freedom fighters” and perhaps the other side will stop funding the “terrorists” and we all learn how to get along with each other.

If only it were that simple. We could stop funding everything today, but it won’t stop the hate from being embraced and taught. And learned. And passed on to the next generation.

I believe the root is education. They’re being educated and indoctrinated at a very young age to hate those who are not like themselves.

Terrorism will be with us for at least a couple generations AFTER the hateful education stops. History is filled with examples here. And mind you, hate-indoctrination has shown no signs of abatement as yet. If anything, it is being exported to countries in Europe and even to the US.

So as funny and/or intriguing as the concept may be, I sincerely hope we don’t see “Mr. Fusion” in any of TTAC’s readers’ lifetimes. It would simply be too tempting for hate-filled hearts.

I did earlier but not fully – I have now. Interesting article you wrote ;-). I didn’t know about those “batteries” and storage on that scale. This is essentially the part I meant.

“Wind farms [without storage] are like a power station out of control,” says John Ward, director of Sorne Wind Energy and Tapbury Management in County Donegal, Ireland

It will be interesting to see how they scale and whether the cost predictions work out. I’ll keep an eye on that, thanks for the link. You would need a lot of these to maintain supply over an extended period for a large population though, and it still isn’t as totally reliable as being able to turn on the additional oil/gas/nuclear option and spin the generators faster/harder when the wind doesn’t blow for a while.

In times of climate change we can’t rely on wind being where we think it will be now.

Where did you get this funny idea about cheap oil being the USSR’s downfall?

I don’t dispute their planning and everything else stank, absolutely, but I believe the drop in prices and therefore revenues pushed them over the edge especially when combined with increased expeditions abroad – Afghanistan for example.

I got it from a number of articles but this is one.

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive

It also links a number of other factors, I would be interested in learning others views. But maybe thats something for email or a different forum.

re the unreliability, go reread my post, and then go to the link I provided.

California also requres utilities to buy power people feed the grid with wind and solar. It’s a great policy, encourages renewables, and reduces the need for new centralized power plants.

Re the downfall of communism, there’s an old joke which I will try to summarize. It’s the annual celebration at the collective farm, where progress has been great this year. The head tells the people, to cheers, that within five years they will all have bicycles at the current rate. And in ten years, they will all have cars. AND, in 15 years, they’ll all have airplanes. A collective farm member raises his hand. Why would we want airplanes, he asks. Well, says the head of the collective farm, if they have shoes in Moscow, you can fly there and be first in line.

Where did you get this funny idea about cheap oil being the USSR’s downfall? I happen to know a lot of the foremost US experts on the Soviet economy. Cheap oil was not the issue. Their products stank. Their planning stank. Their downfall was inevitable, as one or two particularly prescient experts predicted a couple of decades before it happened.

I suggest we stop funding the “freedom fighters” and perhaps the other side will stop funding the “terrorists” and we all learn how to get along with each other.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have to do something about terrorism.

First.

Look what they are willing to do with commercial airliners, bus bombs, car bombs, and explosive vests. Do you really think that easier-to-obtain nuclear materials would not be desirable to terrorists?

If so, you are dreaming.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but in my opinion, we can’t do “distributed nuclear” unless we first get rid of terrorism.

Getting back to economics, the rise of the Canadian dollar has a lot to do with the oil reserves in Canada. Canada also happens to have uranium reserves.

On the other hand, there is the dilemna of most nuclear capable nations on what to do with the nuclear waste. Hmmm let’s see, global warming, “nuclear waste management”. I guess there really is no free energy.

But still…crash tests anyone? A multi car pileup on the freeway will turn into a Three Mile Island!

There is an obvious joke there, must resist….

In Denmark there is a government backed campaign to encourage wind power – People got a grant or tax break to install windmills on their houses. It has caused some Danes to question this policy as almost everyone has one.

Here in the UK if your house produces more than it takes from the grid then the power companies have to pay you the cost of that energy, so some people have done the same with wind generators and solar panels. Not many though – the payback period for these is about 20 years.

Seriously however Wind and Wave power have a major issue – unpredictability. When that soap opera or football (soccer I mean) game finishes and everyone goes off to put the kettle / coffee maker on, the power grid has to respond.

If the wind isn’t blowing you can’t make it when you want it to. The tides are regular and predictable obviously but the times when the ebb and flow are taking place may not coincide with tea / coffee time.

You can’t store this energy easily until its needed without losing a load of it.

…that a major downfall of communism was that you had bureaucrats figuring out what goods to produce…

The actual downfall was caused by cheap oil – oil being Russia’s main export earner – partly caused by the US Govt’s encouragement to OPEC to keep production high and prices low, so the Russians just ran out of cash.

Now that oil and gas are expensive, well, go google stories about Putin and how he wants to rebuild the “Russian Empire”, develop new Nukes and is sending his “Bear” bombers over western europe again.

Until quite recently power generators in Europe tended to be state owned. Now they are private we have an issue getting any of them to commit to new generating capacity. The future is too unpredictable for oil and coal, nuclear too expensive and renewables limited as described above. Hence the government has to prime the system by making an energy policy – so even though we have a private system we have civil servants deciding on which system to use. In other words the worse of all worlds.

I blame Thatcher, she did invent man-made global warming after all.

Arguably the former soviet union was communist in name only, it was just really another name for an authoritarian government of the type which became “popular” in the 1930s, see Germany, Italy and Spain for other examples. It had much in common with the government of Franco in Spain and he wouldn’t have liked you to call him a communist.

Since Franco died and Spain went democratic its economy has boomed too, so maybe its not that communism is bad for business but authoritarianism instead. Who’d have thunk it.

So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be encouraging democracy in China too quickly, we may get what we wish for.

Congrats A.H., you are now the Orson Wells of TTAC.

Presently, wind power is being added to the grid worldwide six times as fast as nuclear power, in terms of absolute capacity.
Denmark gets about six percent of its electricity from wind. Massachusetts will be getting more than that soon from Cape Wind, if the NIMBYs would get out of the way (such as Senator Kennedy). Texas actually has the most wind power of any state because our pres was enlightened on energy when he was governor of that state, but a number of other states, and countries, have substantial wind power contributions. Wind is less expensive than nuclear and coal in a lot of places. PVs are coming down rapidly in cost, and ocean energy technologies will undoubtedly do so in the next ten years. As for storage, it’s not needed for wind until wind is supplying 10% of the electricity in a grid (Denmark could actually supply 20% of its own energy from its current wind turbines, but it has to send the rest to Norway, Germany, and a couple of other countries that can absorb the current surplus). But storage technology is here. go to http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2007/115-7/innovations-abs.html.

Ocean technologies are also likely to become substantial contributors pretty quickly. (Check the December issue of Environmental Health Perspectives when it comes out, at ehponline.com.)

PVs are also likely to become competitive in the next ten years or so.

One of the reasons I get annoyed about the man-made global warming thing is that we are attempting to “convince” the 3rd world that they should use them when upgrading their lives. The UN is actively encouraging african nations to purchase and accept power supplies based on wind and solar power.

But they are unreliable, expensive and inefficient compared with anything else. You can’t “store” energy once generated, only transmit it.

So people in these countries still don’t get power they need to use to prepare food or make sure medicines are kept at an appropriate temperature or to ensure hospitals are clean and equiped.

We need to invest in energy now, nuclear is a quick and easy option to get power without using oil or coal – its still produces CO2 and water vapour (also a greenhouse “gas” apparently) so its not perfect. And it does have a bad reputation despite overall safety being quite good. But it gives us time to get something else up and running.

That is of course if you believe in man made global warming and the potential scarcity of the supply of oil. There are loads more websites out there on these subjects, some of them make you want to build a bunker in the hills…

If the US government had put as much money into renewables and efficiency over the years as they’ve put into nuclear, we’d probably be getting most of our energy from renewables.

I think somehow in a lot of peoples’ minds nuclear is the John Wayne of energy sources. But the world doesn’t work like the movies.