Can someone explain the upside to additional oil drilling in US territory?

[Brutul Tarew Marr]

Originally Posted by Gaereth

Well, unless you want to take the level you are living at now and dump it down by 50% and perhaps pick up another family or 2 to live with you.

Bingo. You are living in the suburbs because you want to own a bigger house than you could afford close to your job. You are making a choice. You are not forced to live there. The price is a few hours of your free time every week and the money you spend on gas. That number is going up but you could do something about it if you wanted to, you just don't want to lower your standard of living in that way, so you will do it by having less cash on hand and buying more expensive gas.

Of course there is also a cost to society, since we all have to pay more for gas, breath dirtier air, drive on worse roads, and deal with more traffic congestion due to your desire to have your McMansion in the burbs instead of living in a condo in the city.

By "you" in this instance I am talking about the average commuter and not necessarily Gaereth in particular.

[Kaio]

Originally Posted by Tripamang

So supposedly we're good on nuclear for a few thousand years if need be.. that's really not that bad.

Yep, also something that has peaked my curiosity is our lack of breeder reactors, which isn't too surprising since we haven't had any new reactors for like 25 years.

If we were to build breeder reactors can we use our old "waste" fuel that we are trying to dump? I'm not sure about where we've been storing all our waste fuel but if the next bunch of reactors we build are breeder reactors they can probably complement what we have pretty well as we get more use out of our fuel.

Also based on my understanding of Chernobyl they were trying to create a melt-down like situation to study it and they just went too far beyond the safety threshold and blew it.

[Torrid]

I want some of these. IFRs are apparently a type of breeder reactor.

I would be all over nuclear if that article were only half true. I wouldn't desire any more traditional reactor designs though. I would also worry about nuclear dampening the drive to develop wind and solar, as I have a huge hard-on for solar tech. I'd love to not be tied to the grid.

It's nice to see that McCain at least recognizes that battery technology is holding back a lot of applications, even if I do not expect an x-prize to get us anything. However the nice thing about these prizes is that you do not have to shell out of the cash if nobody delivers, so in that sense it is not wasted.

[Erumaron]

It's a design flaw with old Russian reactors. The basic idea is as follows: In American reactors, as power goes up, the temperature of the water goes up and you're unable to slow down as many neutrons to the proper speed for more reactions...so power falls back down to the exact same level it was before. The only way to actually raise power is to shim out. In Russian reactors, power just continues to go up and up and up. You have to shim in accordingly to lower power back down. The operators really have to fuck up basically. American reactors are amazingly safe, they were engineered with the operators being dumbfucks added in to the equation.

The actual term for everything I just talked about in the nuclear power world is "Temperature coefficient of reactivity" if you want to do some googling.

edit: I just read over the wikipedia on Chernobyl...it's actually pretty good info so yea. The operaters fucked a lot up on top of the design flaw. Chernobyl disaster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Kaio]

Exciting things are already happening with solar. I think I posted an article about nanosolar last year or so (maybe someone else did, my memory is hazy) but it looks like they are doing well.

VIDEO: Nanosolar makes a one gigawatt printing press - AutoblogGreen

Video of their printing system in action. To bad the company's playing it safe and really has just been expanding slowly. They won't have enough panels for the general public till 2009. I think they could easily raise more capital with such revolutionary tech and begin massive production of these things.

Even if they are a bit less efficient the cost for their panels (maybe we should refer to them as sheets now) is just so goddamn cheap compared to everything else out there solar panel wise.


Edit: Yep found the thread from last year. We were talking about how most of us hoped this wouldn't be more vaporware but it's in production so yay.
http://www.fohguild.org/forums/gener...ight=nanosolar

[Araxen]

If you can last the entire hour of this lecture it'll give you a firm understanding on why the Russian reactors are flawed and the American ones are really, really, safe and you shouldn't be afraid of Nuclear power.

[hauwk]

O.k... Although that old dude in the video looks bat shit insane, I give him props for his phallus drawings with "Critical mass" entitled at the tip..

[AngryGerbil]

I've seen that lecture before and it is quite informative. But he doesn't rant and rave and call people names and blame the worlds problems on someone else, so I'm guessing it won't make a splash here.

[YourMom]

Originally Posted by Araxen

If you can last the entire hour of this lecture it'll give you a firm understanding on why the Russian reactors are flawed and the American ones are really, really, safe and you shouldn't be afraid of Nuclear power.

Is there a follow-up? He speaks of coming classes about the subject, and the video ends kinda abrubtly.

[Araxen]

There's like a full semester's worth of lectures on google video.

[Brutul Tarew Marr]

If that lecture is too much for you, listen to this 10 minute podcast that lays it out pretty well:

Skeptoid 4092

Or you can watch the Bullshit! episode on YouTube .





Hmm, part 3 seems to be missing :/