The good thing about the Global Warming frenzy is that it detracts our attention from the Islamic Terrorists frenzy.
Prediction: In 2 years, a court will find Al Gore guilty of causing the climate change, on grounds of (a) being an American, (b) having loads of frequent flyer miles, (c) making a film that made people realize that climate change really exists.
Preferrably private 36km heated test track at back yard so that there never will be ice and facilities to restore and build any car one likes, heated and climate controlled space for few hundred cars naturally at that point I might say that f*** everybody, there won't be major changes during rest of my life and after that I would start supercharge big block and head to track for next 10 hours
Well, I might use heat of earth's core + other more environmental friendly methods for my energy consumption still, it won't require a lot actually. However isn't heat from earth's core bit of problem as it will then cool down more quickly if people start to take heating from there as seem to be fashion now?
But still there is quite lot of water in oceans too and we think today that people were stupid dumping all waste into oceans making permanent harm.
Can't see really a difference, core is not warming up any more, sure there will be plenty of energy for generations, but what about generations after those.
Few degrees air temperature rise causes lot of talk, what 1 degree of core temperature would mean?
Still I would use that as it is possible to make heating without much immediate or known harm to environment
I'm not sure what are you after anymore.You can't freeze up earth with putting some tubes running down the surface, few meters under the ground level is barely a scratch, think about the dimensions.
I think you are spot on, Blackout, not many people really have a 'feel' for the scales involved, both in physical dimensions and of timescales. We are but a tiny pimple in the history of this planet, the blinking of an irrelevant eyelid. Not that this can condone complacency in any way on our part, it's just that very few environmental activists seem able to have a true sense of scale or context. It's all emotive soundbites and mostly scientific ignorance.
The idea about earth warmth is that we currently don't have many energy sources that don't screw up our enviroment. Thus we need to get energy from somewhere so the the negative effects will take longer to kick in than what we did until now. We do so in the hope that by the time the next resource is drained we will have invented something new to either decrease the negative effects or use a different resource.
We stopped cutting down the forrests to heat our houses because we noticed that we were screwing up the forrests. So we came up with other heat sources, like coal and later natural gas. And now we noticed that we're screwing our air up and so we're switching to earth heat or whatever we come up with.
It's a process of learning how to change our enviroment. Man has always changed his enviroment to his needs. And now since the state of our atmosphere is gaining positions on our priority-list we're coming up with strategies to change the atmosphere to our needs.
So regardless of how big our influence on the atmosphere is, there is definitely room for improvement and I consider it just one more challenge to tackle.
Huh, since when has the global warming discussion resulted in new nuclear power plants popping up everywhere?
If this were the case there would be much less of a CO2 problem. I know a new one is being constructed in your country at the moment but according to the BBC "...the reactor will be the first in Western Europe since 1991, when the French authorised the construction of a new one, and the first in Finland in three decades."
There is really lot of political talk about next one, that what they are building is 5th reactor and now arm twisting is going on from 6th, some less intelligent seem to think that nuclear power is really bad thing, well it is only thing to make enough energy for our needs when looking to future as we need to reduce our rather non existent CO2 emissions 20% or so and that is either we stop our traffic completely, drive factories to China or build more nuclear power so that we can shut off those power plants permanently that use fossil fuels.
A nice thought, but we didn't stop using trees for energy because of the environmental implications. We did it purely for selfish reasons. See, trees are a pain in the ass to cut down and chop up, and they don't supply much heat for very long. Coal works much better than trees, so once we found coal we used that. Nevermind that burning coal emits much worse stuff than burning trees does. Of course, after coal we figured out how to package and transport natural gas. Natural Gas is much cleaner to use than coal, but we didn't pick it for that reason. It's less labor intensive to get to and easier to use, hence it is preferred.
Humans are motivated by money and laziness, not a love for nature.
That's kind of one thing I tried to address. We wouldn't need more energy if we could optimize our production, but since no shareholder is willing to cease their income (from shares) for few years, no reasonable investions to factory productiveness and energy efficiency is made.
Nuclear power in Finland has been very secure, but mainly because of good luck and small number of plants. They still produce waste. Burying it into ground because "our ground base is trillions years old and will remain consistent for million years to come" is pretty lame. It's just like brooming dirt under a carpet.
Naturally something has to be done to the waste. Burying it into ground seems reasonably secure if it doesn't leak into the waters-below-surface. Problem is, that with increasing amount of nuclear power plants, the amount of waste increases all the time. There will be point when there aren't anymore secure places under ground.
This is deep and I think it would be best to discuss these things in a pub with a pint (just one). Would you internationals care to come to Tampere?
If the true cost of using natural resources, including all externalities*, were passed along to the consumer, then market forces would compel both producers and consumers to move towards sources of energy that are both cheaper and, as a natural side-effect, more sustainable and more environmentally friendly. That's what's frustrating about this debate: when you try to convince people with reasoned argument, there's often a great deal of bickering based more on where people's beliefs fall in the ideological spectrum than on substantive facts; if instead you hit them in the wallet, suddenly everybody sits up and pays attention, producer and consumer alike. Pass along the true cost of resource use and market forces will solve the problem.
*an externality is a hidden cost that is not factored into a transaction e.g. the cost of cleaning up pollution produced by a manufacturing plant.
Yeah, we could have the International LFS Summit of Global Warming and Energy, we would basically solve the world issues during the pint. World peace could be the issue next friday
If i follow these discussion, i got the opinion people think nuclear power plants are so clean and its an endless rescource.
It isnt. We will run out of uranium if more and more power plants will be built. There are some other possibilities to switch to plutonium but its even more dangerous then the other variant.Other problem is nuclear power plants arent producing heat energy you have to transform the energy first.
The statement that if we would only use nuclear power plants would solve our CO2 emission problems isnt true as well. There is getting a lot of CO2 free when the Uran is extracted from their mother rocks.
By far the biggest problem with nuclear power plants is the ultimative waste disposal. There is not one of these today. There was one in the US. a few years ago, but then they realised that there is water under this cavern which is only 60 years old. Not really nice for human and enviroment if this rises and comes into contact with groundwater .
The earth will move the next million of years and so will the storage facilities.
There are effictevly only temporary storage facilities today.
The whole world should really concentrate on an energy source which is not ending in the next 100-150 years (with todays development standard). it should invest into clean energies to make them more efficient. As long as we have the time.
Tampere is so far middle in nowhere that I don't like to go there
Nuclear energy is surely not perfectly clean and not at all without problems, but it is only possibility or then we burn coal and oil. Until there is new technology that makes energy more cleanly than oil and coal nuclear power is only possibility in this country.
Industry consumes most energy, without them we would not need more power sure, but without industry we would not have jobs, I really don't like how this money worshipping is getting stronger and stronger, but also I don't like from alternative, that Industry moves to China and we have lot of people without jobs, do we make cuts to social services or do we pay more taxes then? Guess where more taxes will come? From traffic of course
World is not perfect place, it is not fair and there is nothing that says it have to be nice, it just is what we make it to be Remember that when you vote and make others think too, we don't need new Karpela/Saarela...
The problem is, there isn't much alternatives for nuclear power yet. Fusion power is next, but it's been developed the last 50 years and it hasn't come that far, it would be perfect though.
This is true, maybe after 30 years we have something else, but it is really hard to tell.
Solar power is just a joke here, not enough sunshine when most of power is needed, water power is built almost what we can, only more efficient technology helps there, wind power is gaining a bit but it still is not very much that we can gain from that, unlike some other countries we haven't chopped all our trees out so we don't have constant wind here
There is quite many new technology under works, but it takes really long time to get them ready it looks like, some may newer be ready to use.
There should also be more research and applications of new technology (along with newer, more sustainable approaches, and general energy efficiency at the local level) to clean up coal. In Australia, presently most of our energy comes from coal. China's also investing heavily in coal. There are a few things you can do to clean it up, including gasification,- which harnesses waste heat and uses it to power a steam turbine. In this way waste and pollutants are greatly decreased, and efficiencies greatly increased (more than 50%).
I hate the way that the global warming debate has played right into the hands of the nuclear advocates, and the idea that nuclear power is somehow environmentally benign. At Olympic Dam uranium mine in the South Australian desert, they're licenced to pump 42 million litres of water per day to wash uranium. The cost is the drying up of the mound springs that have helped aboriginal people survive in that area for thousands of years. Those employed in the industry are exposed to health threatening radiation. Within the last year our Prime Minister, now 'convinced' of global warming, has set up his own environmental task force, which is very obviously designed to proffer the benefits of nuclear power to an unthinking public. And of course no-one is saying where they're going to put the nuclear waste. Probably because they don't know.
That certainly is a very BIG tower! It seems like a very ambitious project and if it actually gets built.
I think that we humans need to become slightly less lazy, we have gotten use to our very confy lifestyles,
eg... go home turn light on.. walk to kitchen turn another light on, turn tv on, go upstairs to have a shower whilst leaving lights and tv on downstairs etc.. We are taking so many things for granted and we are wasting energy due to our lazyness. I for one when i am at home I turn lights off whenever i leave a room, i turn the tv off even if i go out for 10 mins as if I am not there watching the darn thing its just going to eat into my electricity bill and waste more energy. I even turn things right off so its not in standby mode which again is very pointless with stupid little leds talling me my tv is actually on, i know they waste very little electricity but if you combine it will all of the leds around the world, in tvs, videos, computers, consoles, sockets and so on it is electricity being pointlessly wasted.
It all comes down to can i actually be bothered to think about my actions every time i turn something on, can i be bothered to get up and turn that light off next door even thought i know i will be going back to the room in 15 mins after a program is finished on tv in the next room?
I personally think that there is too much electricity being wasted, in my block the lights in the lifts are on all of the time! why not have alift with a motion sensor that would turn the light off when theres no one there and it hasnt been used for x minutes, in the coridoors of my block lights are on 24/7 all year round, again electricity wasted, why not have a timer and a motion sensor set to the lights? so they turn on as soon as someone walsk into the coridoor?
In town, closed shops have all of their display windows lit up whole night! why? more wastage and it can just go on and on.
If we actually thought about how we can save energy and implented such systems then there would be less of a need for more energy.
We need a lifestyle change, we have to become more aware about our rubbish (waste) electricity usage, water usage and need to become a little bit more conservative. I know many people will not want to change but eventually we will have to.
On the nuclear power front, i agree that it is the cleanest source of energy athmospherically but the waste is very hazardours and very dangerous and needs to be stored or burried underground. I do think without nuclear power we would be living in an even more polluted environment but we should not stop investment in sustainable energy where ever possible.
Nuclear waste should be blasted off into space! ok bad idea
Btw has anyone heard about the recent proposals about capturing the gasses from powerstations and pumping them down into deep caves for storage???? they seems to be convinced that its a very good solution
I feel it's more a case of nuclear opponents thinking that the proponents think that nuclear power is as cute as kittens. Looking at the nuclear proponents this way makes it easier to attack and dismiss them.
Most nuclear proponents are well aware of the problems that do exist but the only important question is whether, overall, nuclear power is better for mankind than burning fossils or not. Of course there is hope for a much cleaner future with massive solar farms in the Sahara, much better electricity storage and transport, wind farms out on the oceans etc. But right now, at this moment in time, the only viable methods to supply the earth with energy are fossil power or nuclear power. Pick one.
What nuclear opponents seem to be saying is that burning coal is bad but since nuclear isn't absolutely perfect and once there was an explosion as well, let's continue burning coal. Then there won't be any explosions, never mind the thousands of coal miners that are killed every year...
Another question: when talking about mankind and energy and rescources why aren't issues like overpopulation and birth control ever brought up? Religious reasons? (serious question)
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Remember that when you vote and make others think too, we don't need new Karpela/Saarela...
