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Posts: 19092
Aug 27 07 3:43 AM
Proprietor
Posts: 1755
Aug 27 07 6:08 PM
http://www.archive.org/details/AtomBomb1946
Found this old video and asked myself if I really wanted to relive all this?
I don't think I do.
Are we being lied to by our governments and those who ultimately hold the power the large oil companies?
If Nuclear power is as safe as this report alleges, should we not be looking closer at it as means to reduce the burning of fossil fuels? Are we being lied to in this report?
Is the high monetary price paid for nuclear fuel as compared to fossil fuel generation justified? I wouldn't want to justify its development without the high monetary price to find out because (seriously this stuff is dangerous and with our current presidents hunger to keep us in a state of constant wartime activities those plants would need to be safe from enemy attacks.) I worry about the AZ palo-verde plant all the time
Posts: 115
Aug 27 07 6:56 PM
Aug 28 07 2:29 AM
Sorry but you need to cut and past movie url???
Aug 28 07 2:42 AM
Energy will cost you more, no matter what you do.
Posts: 638
Aug 28 07 3:37 AM
Posts: 6089
Aug 28 07 5:03 AM
Fairly Regular For His Age
Aug 28 07 6:18 AM
Before exploring for more and more oil to exploit uselessly. Would taking a look at "plastic"and "chemical" (overuse) not be a better option.
I took a survey of things around my own home and was very surprised at all the throw away objects that are made of "plastic". Plastic that seems to be filling up the nations dumps as well as our homes. Ever try to recycle plastic. It isn't easy. We usually can find recycle stations for paper products and aluminum products. But plastic???
Guess what "Petrochemicals are made by cracking oil. That's a process where hydrocarbons molecules are broken up and used as raw materials for a large number of products and materials.
Ethylene, propylene, and butadiene are the stuff that builds our modern society. These three main petrochemicals are used to make everything from disinfectants to coolants and plastic. We can't seem to get away from these oil based chemicals that become Medical science, modern technology, and a bunch of other things we find in our modern civilizations would not exist.
I made a small list of plastics I found and stopped looking for the list was becoming huge. Here is a sample of the plastics I have around my home.
Paint brushes, computer ink, computers, telephones, insecticides, clothing, tents, glue, housepaint, shoes, upholstery, lotions of all kinds, garden hoses, milk bottles, luggage, pesticides, ballpoint pens, carpet, pesticides, etc...
You get the idea, right?
Now I remember that even the biggest consumers of oil, the automobiles are being made from ...you guessed it..
Seems to me that we all need to slow down and think of alternatives to plastics or demand that all plastics become a major recycling resource. I know that alternatives exist for many of these plastic products and I also understand that many companies have started using recycled plastics. I just think that as plastic consumers we should demand that ALL products be made recyclable, organic, and of non-synthetic materials.
As consumers we should become diligent in selecting products that carry the least bad effect on our environment and our health for that too (health ) is effected by the products we use in our homes and on our highways
Aug 28 07 6:52 AM
Aug 28 07 7:24 AM
Oddly, I happen to think hydro-electric is one of the better sources of power, commercial & otherwise. But it seems to me, in the U.S. we're tearing down dams faster than we're putting them up.
The most ghastly thing about nuclear are its monumental legacy costs. The nuclear waste we generate today may remain fatally radioactive for many millennia. So what? So the electricity we consume in a nano-second carries this string attached. It is a burden that will compel safeguarding from evil-doers, & natural disasters, for hundreds of human generations. We get the (brief) benefit. THEY get stuck with the burden, virtual zero benefit to them. I'm not aware of any legitimate standard of ethics or morals that would permit such flagrant exploitation. Are you? Is anybody?
Aug 28 07 1:45 PM
"Pretty much every human activity carries a 'legacy cost'." MG
$8.9 ... http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Aug 28 07 2:47 PM
MG, You seem perfectly OK with the one generation that gets the benefit. But imagine if you were among the hundreds of generations that had to guard those hundreds and hundreds of tons of heavy toxins. .
I would welcome you explaining to me why you think that would be OK.
Aug 28 07 3:09 PM
...those plants would need to be safe from enemy attacks.
Assuming we survive the nasty little resource wars we'll be fighting.
Aug 28 07 4:34 PM
"It's not ok. But neither is the hysterical "OH MY GOD IT'S RADIOACTIVE AHHHH WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE NO MATTER WHAT WE DO!" bull" MG
Aug 28 07 8:02 PM
As I understand it, in our capitalist system, the problem is, the way you describe is the cheapest. It'll be done differently, when there's a cheaper way. Right?
Unfortunately, as wise as those words are, we should have been thinking about that a century ago. Unfortunately, I doubt that there is little that can be done, with or without nuclear power, to avoid hitting a wall, energy-wise. At that point, society is going to need to make as radical a shift as it did in the first half of the twentieth century.
My Saudi Arabian Breakfast By Chad Heeter Please join me for breakfast. It's time to fuel up again. On the table in my small Berkeley apartment this particular morning is a healthy looking little meal -- a bowl of imported McCann's Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet's Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a café in downtown Berkeley, I'd likely have to add another $6.00, plus tip for the same.) My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So, for just over a buck and half an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I'm energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I've just added a little butter, milk, and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one. Then, what you'd be likely to see -- what's really there, just hidden from our view (not to say our taste buds) -- is about four ounces of crude oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (another three ounces of crude), and don't forget those modest additions of butter, milk, and salt (another ounce), and you've got a tiny bit of the Middle East right here in my kitchen. Now, let's drill a little deeper into this breakfast. Just where does this tiny gusher of oil actually come from? (We'll let this oil represent all fossil fuels in my breakfast, including natural gas and coal.) Nearly 20% of this oil went into growing my raspberries on Chilean farms many thousands of miles away, those oats in the fields of County Kildare, Ireland, and that specially-raised coffee in Guatemala -- think tractors as well as petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. The next 40% of my breakfast fossil-fuel equation is burned up between the fields and the grocery store in processing, packaging, and shipping. Take that box of McCann's oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure, healthy goodness -- a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices. Scattered around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be four acorns, and three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a reminder that the flakes require a few steps twixt field and box. In fact, a visit to McCann's website illustrates each step in the cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting, and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes. Those five essential steps require significant energy costs. Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which is in turn inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box. Only then does my "breakfast" leave Ireland and travel over 5,000 fuel-gorging, CO2-emitting miles by ship and truck to my grocery store in California. Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood. Though packaged in a plastic bag labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps hints at a birthplace in the good old Cascade mountains of northwest Washington), the small print on the back, stamped "A Product of Chile," tells all -- and what it speaks of is a 5,800-mile journey to Northern California. If you've been adding up percentages along the way, perhaps you've noticed that a few tablespoons of crude oil in my bowl have not been accounted for. That final 40% of the fossil fuel in my breakfast is used up by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then preparing it. In home kitchens and restaurants, the chilling in refrigerators and the cooking on stoves using electricity or natural gas gobbles up more energy than you might imagine. For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, shipping, consuming, and finally disposing of it. The "caloric input" of fossil fuel is then compared to the energy available in the edible product, the "caloric output." What they've discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of over seven calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400 calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have "consumed" 2,800 calories of fossil-fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio to be as high as ten to one.) But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me only a few calories of energy, but to process just one pound of coffee requires over 8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy -- the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas, or around two and a half pounds of coal. So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food? First check out how far it traveled. The further it traveled, the more oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh apple is not processed, but Kellogg's Apple Jacks cereal requires enormous amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it required. Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food. Buy fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains, and flour if you want to reduce that packaging. By now, you're thinking that you're in the clear, because you eat strictly organically-grown foods. When it comes to fossil-fuel calculations though, the manner in which food's grown is where differences stop. Whether conventionally-grown or organically-grown, a raspberry is shipped, packed, and chilled the same way. Yes, there are some savings from growing organically, but possibly only of a slight nature. According to a study by David Pimentel at Cornell University, 30% of fossil-fuel expenditure on farms growing conventional (non-organic) crops is found in chemical fertilizer. This 30% is not consumed on organic farms, but only if the manure used as fertilizer is produced in very close proximity to the farm. Manure is a heavy, bulky product. If farms have to truck bulk manure for any distance over a few miles, the savings are eaten up in diesel-fuel consumption, according to Pimentel. One source of manure for organic farmers in California is the chicken producer Foster Farms. Organic farmers in Monterey County, for example, will have to truck tons of Foster's manure from their main plant in Livingston, Ca. to fields over one hundred miles away. So the next time we're at the grocer, do we now have to ask not only where and how this product was grown, but how far its manure was shipped? Well, if you're in New York City picking out a California-grown tomato that was fertilized with organic compost made from kelp shipped from Nova Scotia, maybe it's not such a bad question. But should we give up on organic? If you're buying organic raspberries from Chile each week, then yes. The fuel cost is too great, as is the production of the greenhouse gases along with it. Buying locally-grown foods should be the first priority when it comes to saving fossil fuel. But if there were really truth in packaging, on the back of my oatmeal box where it now tells me how many calories I get from each serving, it would also tell me how many calories of fossil fuels went into this product. On a scale from one to five -- with one being non-processed, locally-grown products and five being processed, packaged imports -- we could quickly average the numbers in our shopping cart to get a sense of the ecological footprint of our diet. From this we would gain a truer sense of the miles-per-gallon in our food. What appeared to be a simple, healthy meal of oatmeal, berries, and coffee looks different now. I thought I was essentially driving a Toyota Prius hybrid -- by having a very fuel-efficient breakfast, but by the end of the week I've still eaten the equivalent of over two quarts of Valvoline. From the perspective of fossil-fuel consumption, I now look at my breakfast as a waste of precious resources. And what about the mornings that I head to Denny's for a Grand-Slam breakfast: eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage? On those mornings -- forget about fuel efficiency -- I'm driving a Hummer. What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilized remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, as well as into its future, when these non-renewable resources will likely be in scant supply. Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, but I'm not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal traveled thousands of miles around the world to reach my plate. But then there's the rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese. They're already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and the taste of foreign flavors. What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they want their Irish oats for breakfast, topped by organic raspberries from Chile? They'll dip more and more into the planet's communal oil well. And someday soon, we'll all suck it dry. Chad Heeter grew up eating fossil fuels in Lee's Summit, Missouri. He's a freelance writer, documentary filmmaker, and a former high school science teacher. Copyright 2006 Chad Heeter
Aug 28 07 10:31 PM
I notice you refused to answer the deficit question. In this case, I think you refusal to answer is a fairly transparent position on it.
Aug 28 07 10:41 PM
I was more interested in pointing out the vast amount of oil used in producing plastic products for consumers. I was not concerned with the cost or when we needed to start changing our habits. I was trying to point out one way oil consumption can be reduced. Sorry if I was misleading.
Mein Gott ist ein' feste Burg
Aug 29 07 3:09 AM
"I was trying to point out one way oil consumption can be reduced." Druid
"A precedent embalms a principle." Benjamin Disraeli 1804 - 1881
"The question is nuclear energy/ nuclear waste disposal, not deficit spending." MG
Is Nuclear Power the way Forward?
"And I very much doubt you know a darn thing on my position on that matter. M. Graham"
"Actually, I didn't refuse to answer the question, I ignored it." MG
Aug 29 07 7:31 AM
I'm not sure that you were misleading, I think I was thinking along a different path than you. I recently read a book you might enjoy, by the way: 'Deep Economy' by Bill McKibben. It doesn't bring up anything earth shatteringly new, but it does synthesize some ideas about global warming, peak oil, globalization, etc. to make a potent argument for more local economies(one that does not involve trucking lettuce from California to Toronto in January!!!). His feeling, (and for what it's worth, mine) is that we're going to see a radical shift in how we need to do things in the next 10-40 years, and we can either get moving on making the changes with a little discomfort, or have them painfully thrust upon us. Regards, M. Graham
The science is beyond dispute.
The barrier is not scientific possibility, it's economic disincentive, and societal status quo. - "A precedent embalms a principle." Benjamin Disraeli 1804 - 1881
Perhaps we will discover other ways of generating energy and nuclear power may not be needed. There is enough energy all around us to sustain us - we need to find out how to tap into it. John
Aug 29 07 9:06 AM
"So now it is "Science that" can't be questioned???" Druid
"I agree with your assumption ..." Druid
"... but disagree that the effort should not be attempted." Druid
"We have some major dams here in Arizona and still we need to import electrical power from all over the N-west." Druid
"The bald fact is that the vast majority of hydro-electrical sites are developed." MG
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