The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy's Artificial Global Warming Hoax

[BenBurch]

The power plant would have to be fairly close in order for CHP to be a no-brainer....to the point where it was the center of the city.

A small nuclear reactor to provide domestic heating has already been done in Canada. I see no reason that it couldn't be replicated profitably elsewhere.

 

[Newtons Bit]

A small nuclear reactor to provide domestic heating has already been done in Canada. I see no reason that it couldn't be replicated profitably elsewhere.

Toshiba is making a 200KW micro nuke for apartment buildings. New Urbanism to the absurd.

 

[BenBurch]

Toshiba is making a 200KW micro nuke for apartment buildings. New Urbanism to the absurd.

Agreed, that is TOO small to be efficient. But there are many places where whole downtowns or whole campuses are heated by piped steam, and a urban powerplant cogenerating steam would be ideal.

I'll have to have a look at their design, though. Is it merely a re-worked TRIGA or is it something more interesting?

 

[Brainache]

Aren't you guys who are all so gung-ho for nukes, overlooking something? I'm talking about Chernobyl.

Everyone seems to think that something like that won't happen again or couldn't happen with the new generation of reactor designs and procedures etc. How can you know that? How is the risk acceptable? Who can say what the state of the US economy will be like in twenty, thirty, or fifty years? What if the wheels fall off and staff get hard to find, like what happened in the USSR? Are you happy to think that you might have thousands of reactors all over the country waiting to pop?

Maybe I'm being alarmist, but I sincerely believe that the risks with these things outweigh the benefits.

 

[Tbone]

Aren't you guys who are all so gung-ho for nukes, overlooking something? I'm talking about Chernobyl.
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/2/2f/300px-Chernobyl_Disaster.jpg

Everyone seems to think that something like that won't happen again or couldn't happen with the new generation of reactor designs and procedures etc. How can you know that? How is the risk acceptable? Who can say what the state of the US economy will be like in twenty, thirty, or fifty years? What if the wheels fall off and staff get hard to find, like what happened in the USSR? Are you happy to think that you might have thousands of reactors all over the country waiting to pop?

Maybe I'm being alarmist, but I sincerely believe that the risks with these things outweigh the benefits.

It wasn't just the USSR economy and staffing that made Chernobyl a bad reactor. The main reason was simply the design of the reactor; it was, like most things Soviet, inefficient and had few safety redundicies attached to it. Many modern reactor designs are designed so that, even in the incredibly unlikely event in which everything that could go wrong does, it will not explode and will remain inside the containment dome.

I do wonder, though, how many people have died and will die directly because of coal mining and collapses; oil drilling and fires; incidents with exploding or burning car/truck gas tanks, gas stations, propane tanks, etc. Or perhaps how much environmental devestation has been caused and will be caused by supertanker oil spills and, well, just fossil fuels in general.

Or, to use another example, how many people have been displaced and enviroments destroyed by the building of hydroelectric dams. What if those things burst? Its about as likely as nuclear reactors exploding. Do you believe they are as dangerous? Can you imagine the devestation a dam bursting would cause? The loss of life? The destruction of land?

There are many, many things just "waiting to pop" the world right now if something is done wrong or, to quote the TBS version of Forest Gump, "it happens." Countless things already have gone "pop." What has caused the greater amount of cumulative damage?

 

[Tokenconservative]

Aren't you guys who are all so gung-ho for nukes, overlooking something? I'm talking about Chernobyl.
[qimg]http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/2/2f/300px-Chernobyl_Disaster.jpg[/qimg]

Everyone seems to think that something like that won't happen again or couldn't happen with the new generation of reactor designs and procedures etc. How can you know that? How is the risk acceptable? Who can say what the state of the US economy will be like in twenty, thirty, or fifty years? What if the wheels fall off and staff get hard to find, like what happened in the USSR? Are you happy to think that you might have thousands of reactors all over the country waiting to pop?

Maybe I'm being alarmist, but I sincerely believe that the risks with these things outweigh the benefits.

You are an alarmist...but that's because you are a lib. They type of system at Chernobyl was a type of which there was only one similar station in the US, a small experimental one in Colorado, that was already on its way to being decommissioned when the Chernobyl accident occured.

Why not admit the truth: you don't want to see ANY viable alternative energy source in the US. You only want to see exisiting means shut down, as a step toward shutting down the US economy?

Why not be truthful for a change?

Tokie

 

[Tokenconservative]

Global warming........................


My private jet as it flies over the Gore/Edwards compound...

You use them lil twirly flouro tubes in the bulkhead lighting tho, right?

Tokie

 

[Tokenconservative]

Evidence of the ASSERTION? I think one example was cross-posted above.

EDIT: and you yourself just provided another...

Do you have a link to the evidence of your link to the link of your evidence?

Then how are we to believe a thing you say!?

Tokie

 

[Brainache]

It wasn't just the USSR economy and staffing that made Chernobyl a bad reactor. The main reason was simply the design of the reactor; it was, like most things Soviet, inefficient and had few safety redundicies attached to it. Many modern reactor designs are designed so that, even in the incredibly unlikely event in which everything that could go wrong does, it will not explode and will remain inside the containment dome.

I do wonder, though, how many people have died and will die directly because of coal mining and collapses; oil drilling and fires; incidents with exploding or burning car/truck gas tanks, gas stations, propane tanks, etc. Or perhaps how much environmental devestation has been caused and will be caused by supertanker oil spills and, well, just fossil fuels in general.

Or, to use another example, how many people have been displaced and enviroments destroyed by the building of hydroelectric dams. What if those things burst? Its about as likely as nuclear reactors exploding. Do you believe they are as dangerous? Can you imagine the devestation a dam bursting would cause? The loss of life? The destruction of land?

There are many, many things just "waiting to pop" the world right now if something is done wrong or, to quote the TBS version of Forest Gump, "it happens." Countless things already have gone "pop." What has caused the greater amount of cumulative damage?

Well yeah I suppose it's the whole "nukes are bad" meme that I've been living with for the last forty something years, but when a dam bursts or a refinery blows up you don't have radio-active contamination for miles around and centuries to come.

I'm still not convinced that it is possible to design a reactor knowing "everything that can possibly go wrong". People have been building dams for thousands of years, reactors have been around for about fifty years. The statement: "even in the incredibly unlikely event in which everything that could go wrong does, it will not explode and will remain inside the containment dome", just sounds a bit too much like: "This ship is unsinkable" for me.

Again, I may be jumping at shadows, but I guess I just don't have too much faith in the ability of humans to foresee every eventuality and radio active pollution is just too much of a risk for me to accept.

 

[Brainache]

You are an alarmist...but that's because you are a lib. They type of system at Chernobyl was a type of which there was only one similar station in the US, a small experimental one in Colorado, that was already on its way to being decommissioned when the Chernobyl accident occured.

Why not admit the truth: you don't want to see ANY viable alternative energy source in the US. You only want to see exisiting means shut down, as a step toward shutting down the US economy?

Why not be truthful for a change?

Tokie

Is this sarcasm?

Why would I want to shut down the US economy? I'd love to see the US continue to grow and prosper as a shining example of the power of free human beings. I would hate to see it turned into a radio-active desert populated by cancerous freaks.

 

[BenBurch]

Chernobyl was a stupidly-designed plant. No sane designer in the USA would even consider an incompetent, stupid design like that.

The reason Chernobyl was like it was boils down to it being designed to ALSO make bomb fuel. Hence it was very large, and graphite moderated. It was the graphite moderator that burned and caused the problems.

So, comparing Chernobyl to a modern nuclear power station in the USA is like comparing the Hindenberg to a 777. Both fly, but they couldn't BE more different.

 

[BenBurch]

Tokie,

You also cannot compare Chernobyl with the Ft. St. Vrain plant. Very, very different animals.

-Ben

 

[soylent]

A small nuclear reactor to provide domestic heating has already been done in Canada. I see no reason that it couldn't be replicated profitably elsewhere.

The first Swedish nuclear reactor was mainly used for district heating and produced only a small amount of electricity.

 

[Brainache]

Chernobyl was a stupidly-designed plant. No sane designer in the USA would even consider an incompetent, stupid design like that.

The reason Chernobyl was like it was boils down to it being designed to ALSO make bomb fuel. Hence it was very large, and graphite moderated. It was the graphite moderator that burned and caused the problems.

So, comparing Chernobyl to a modern nuclear power station in the USA is like comparing the Hindenberg to a 777. Both fly, but they couldn't BE more different.

To take your analogy one step further: 777s still crash though, don't they?

I accept that Chernobyl was a badly designed reactor, but my worry (possibly unfounded) is that there is no way to design a perfect fission reactor.

 

[soylent]

Chernobyl was a stupidly-designed plant. No sane designer in the USA would even consider an incompetent, stupid design like that.

The reason Chernobyl was like it was boils down to it being designed to ALSO make bomb fuel. Hence it was very large, and graphite moderated. It was the graphite moderator that burned and caused the problems.

Chernobyl had a large positive void coefficient, it took some 20 seconds to SCRAM, its control rods where tipped with graphite, there where no redundant SCRAM mechanism(e.g. inject a liquid neutron poison into the core), the layout of the control room was hap-hazzard and confusing.

That should be enough to cause anyone to recoil in horror.

 

[soylent]

To take your analogy one step further: 777s still crash though, don't they?

I accept that Chernobyl was a badly designed reactor, but my worry (possibly unfounded) is that there is no way to design a perfect fission reactor.

Does it matter? Chernobyl displaced some 100 000 people and will ultimately cause some 30 000 premature deaths(likely a overestimate as it was based on the linear dose depence in cancer rates, which has been shown to be an overestimate at small doses.)

Compared to the utter train wreck that is coal power during normal operation(in the US alone the number of people killed by coal particulates each year is on the same order of magnitude as the high end of estimates of people that will ever be killed by chernobyl) it's simply irrelevant.

 

[Corsair 115]

Aren't you guys who are all so gung-ho for nukes, overlooking something? I'm talking about Chernobyl....

Everyone seems to think that something like that won't happen again or couldn't happen with the new generation of reactor designs and procedures etc. How can you know that? How is the risk acceptable? ...

You may wish to read this thread from the Science, Mathematics, Medicine, and Technology forum: Nuclear Energy - I need to vent/rant

It has a lot of very interesting technical information and generally good discussion of nuclear power and how it operates in U.S., Russia, and other parts of the world. You may find some of your concerns or questions addressed by the thread. I know I did.

 

[Brainache]

You may wish to read this thread from the Science, Mathematics, Medicine, and Technology forum: Nuclear Energy - I need to vent/rant

It has a lot of very interesting technical information and generally good discussion of nuclear power and how it operates in U.S., Russia, and other parts of the world. You may find some of your concerns or questions addressed by the thread. I know I did.

Thanks for that. I'll stop the derail now. Sometimes I forget that there are other forums on this site. I've spent too much time in this one.

 

[BenBurch]

Chernobyl had a large positive void coefficient, it took some 20 seconds to SCRAM, its control rods where tipped with graphite, there where no redundant SCRAM mechanism(e.g. inject a liquid neutron poison into the core), the layout of the control room was hap-hazzard and confusing.

That should be enough to cause anyone to recoil in horror.

I was trying to give a simplifed answer.

If anybody wonders why the ability to SCRAM quickly and have backup SCRAM methods is important, see; SL-1^WP

 

[JimBenArm]

Coffee, agreed. There are CT nutters on both sides, though I cannot think of even one controversial issue that wouldn't be true of.

But the nutters aren't part of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, or the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Mostly they're part of the Half-Vast Conspiracy.