The Green New Deal

The Big Dog said:
1. Nukes, nukes and more nukes.
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After 11 years and almost 29,000 posts, you have finally posted something that makes sense.

I am a "green"; I support both Greenpeace and SSCS. However, I am one of a growing number of "greens" who do not agree with their official stance on nuclear power. It may come as a surprise to some, but there are a considerable number of environmentalists who are not opposed to Nuclear power. Further, IMO, most of those who are opposed are very likely ignorant of the advances in technology in recent times. The "nuclear radiation boogeyman" is a left over from the anti-nuke hippie days of the 1970s.

"Why I changed my mind about nuclear power | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxBerlin" (this YouTube video is about 20 minutes - every minute is worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak

There has in fact, not been a serious accident (level 6 or higher) attributed to human error in the last 32 years (Chernobyl was the last). Reactor design and been improved and refined dramatically over the last 30 years, along with vastly improved safety systems. Accidents like Fukushima (caused by an earthquake and a tsunami) will never be preventable; the mistake there was even siting a Nuclear Power Plant so close to the sea, in a high risk earthquake zone.

It is an undeniable fact that nuclear power saves many, many more lives than it takes. In over 60 years of nuclear power plant operations, less than 7,000 people have died due to nuclear accidents, 6000 of which probably died as a result of a badly mismanaged nuclear accident in the Mayak, Ozyorsk and Chelyabinsk Oblast regions of the USSR in 1957. That is about 116 per year. By comparison, at least 18 million people annually die world wide from the effects of air pollution, mostly caused by coal and oil fired power plants and internal combustion engines.

With modern reactor design, there is no reason why nuclear power would not be a safe, clean energy supply. Designers and engineers need to be mindful of where they are built.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHO1ebNxhVI
 
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theprestige said:
The status quo is already a better plan.
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Ziggurat said:
The status quo will produce a better result than this plan. That’s how bad it is.
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Really? This plan would result in coastal areas being flooded, food bowls turning into dust bowls, increase massive flooding, produce bigger and more powerful hurricanes and storms, destroy the coral reefs worldwide, devastate fish stocks, greatly increase the range of tropical diseases, and potentially spark the next great extinction?
 
PhantomWolf said:
Really? This plan would result in coastal areas being flooded, food bowls turning into dust bowls, increase massive flooding, produce bigger and more powerful hurricanes and storms, destroy the coral reefs worldwide, devastate fish stocks, greatly increase the range of tropical diseases, and potentially spark the next great extinction.... including humans?
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FTFY
 
Porpoise of Life said:
I don't see why this should be a left-right issue... Climate is changing and we need to act.
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Here's another thing that really annoys me... the people who argue that climate change is not being caused by human activity....

IT. DOESN'T. MATTER!!

Even if climate change was some natural phenomena unrelated to human activity, its still changing, and the rate at which it is changing will see the planet unlivable in a very short time!
 
smartcooky said:
Accidents like Fukushima (caused by an earthquake and a tsunami) will never be preventable; the mistake there was even siting a Nuclear Power Plant so close to the sea, in a high risk earthquake zone.
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The problem is that this is what has been burned into the public psyche, and so this is why it is seen as bad, bad, bad. It's hard to undo that, even if you point out how bad other forms of generation are overall.
 
Porpoise of Life said:
I don't see why this should be a left-right issue... Climate is changing and we need to act.
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It's rather amazing really. Very much head in the sand behaviour. I will admit that I was skeptical about climate change initially, but I looked at both sides and now I am firmly in the camp of if we don't do something now and do it well, this world is going to be getting a new dominate life-form once it recovers in a few million years.
 
If climate change were caused by something we could fight, we'd all band together in no time.
But changing the way we live? Not so easy to find support for.

(bit of armchair psychology here, but is that why the climate skeptic movement tends to skew conservative, and why it's rarely conservative politicians advocating action?
If they'd have to admit it's all real, there'd be too much change too fast? The opposite of conservatism)
 
Norman Alexander said:
Fine, fine, everyone have a laugh at it.

Now. If it's so bad, provide a better plan that will produce better results. Apart from Soylent Green and burning the poor to keep the rich warm, of course.
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As Terry said, give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. It could work.
 
I'd say the biggest problem with nuclear reactors is that we still don't know how to get rid of the waste.

A couple of years back the company I worked for had was tasked with setting up a party on-site in celebration of having finished their new radioactive waste containment. The engineers there were reportedly laughing and joking about the previous generation of engineers who had built the previous containment unit, which was coming to the end of its life. The key point of mockery was that they had implemented the design as a temporary measure with no plan for what to do with the waste afterwards, assuming that the next generation would come up with a solution. Of course, the problem didn't get addressed until it needed to, and the solution was just to build another temporary facility.

When one of my colleagues asked an engineer what their plan was for when the new facility became non-viable in a couple of decades, he got the answer that they didn't have one, but it didn't matter because the next generation of engineers would have solved the problem by then...

I understand the arguments for nuclear power, and I'm supportive of much of it, but someone needs to take responsibility for the nuclear waste and figure out some method of safely disposing of it.
 
The Big Dog said:
That would indeed be funny, if this thread were not about the single most idiotic plan in human history that contains such nuggets as:

Guaranteed income for people who do not want to work.
Retrofitting every ******* structure in the Untited States.

Although complaining about fundamental research to the tune of billions of dollars a year demonstrates a next level ignorance of economics. It is cool, farting cows are the REAL problem.
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To be fair, too much livestock IS a problem.
 
Last year, a fellow was making the rounds of the NPR talk shows, and Science Friday.... Touting the idea of the “Smart Grid” which sounds a whole lot more feasible than the GND...

Essentially localized power production, primarily solar and wind, with heavily computerized control systems that could direct power to use-points as needed.

One of the advantages of this is that large numbers of jobs would be created for installers and such, mostly blue-collar.

Of course, this seems to have dropped off the radar.....
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
I'd say the biggest problem with nuclear reactors is that we still don't know how to get rid of the waste.
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Sure we do: plonk them in a safe area and wait it out. It's not a problem, except a political one. Of course, were we to pursue other fission technologies, we might develop ones that produce less waste, which is great.

Is coal waste such a problem? It's a much, much, much larger, toxic forever, and ALSO radioactive volume.
 
smartcooky said:
Here's another thing that really annoys me... the people who argue that climate change is not being caused by human activity....

IT. DOESN'T. MATTER!!

Even if climate change was some natural phenomena unrelated to human activity, its still changing, and the rate at which it is changing will see the planet unlivable in a very short time!
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Shortly after I started working at my current job, the head of R&D wrote an article about anthropogenic climate change in the company newsletter. Someone made a post on the company website's anonymous forum complaining about the article on the basis that regardless of what happens to the planet, we will continue to live and thrive as long as God wants us to be here, and the idea that we can have any effect on that is incredible arrogance.
 
Armitage72 said:
Shortly after I started working at my current job, the head of R&D wrote an article about anthropogenic climate change in the company newsletter. Someone made a post on the company website's anonymous forum complaining about the article on the basis that regardless of what happens to the planet, we will continue to live and thrive as long as God wants us to be here, and the idea that we can have any effect on that is incredible arrogance.
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Clearly God wants us to **** up the planet.
 
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