The climate has changed repeatedly over the last 300 million years. Humans must have some impact on that, but whether it's the major cause or merely helping it along is still up in the air. There's no way that all of the pollution caused by factories and cars can have zero impact, but at the same time the speed of this temperature increase doesn't seem to be all that much ahead of the norm for the cycle.

If you ask me, the sooner the oil runs out the better. Right now I think there are a few viable alternative fuels but nobody is pushing for them. Despite scares, I think nuclear is a very efficient and clean way to go, IF the resulting waste can be disposed of safely - is the subsequent radiation better or worse for the planet than a constant influx of carbon waste? We don't know yet.

I did have a big rant made about research getting held back because petroleum giants have the market, but I realised this thread has left the topic a bit All I'll say now is that solar panels can be made more efficient and cheaper with research. Biofuels will end up counter-productive because all available land will be used up with fields of sugar cane/beet and stuff, draining the soils too much to be sustainable. Hydro keeps getting billed as the ultimate source, but unless one river can be used to power every home near it then it's not enough.
Research and development is not an option, it is mandatory.

Quote from Dajmin :

Despite scares, I think nuclear is a very efficient and clean way to go,

These things have to be thought about in a very wide context; to my mind, nuclear energy is far messier politically and socially than it is physically. The main by-product of nuclear energy is weaponry and massively increased international security issues. Thorium holds some hope of making this aspect 'cleaner', but don't hold your breath for nuclear states to research a fuel that will consume their weapons grade plutonium stash.

Quote from Becky Rose :

So i'm pledging myself to a greener lifestyle for a few months to see how it goes, a combination of bicycle, train and where necessary taxi.

I'll post again to let you know how it went!

Best of luck.

A few tips for the bicycle part:

- Get a bicycle that fits you perfectly. Wrong size or geometry will be painful and annoying.

- Adapt your clothing or you'll end up reaching wherever you go in a sweaty mess. Very light outershell when it's chilly/drizzling and wool clothing as much as possible, it dries out quicker. Consider what sort of bags you'll use for transporting things - if you'll be using a rucksack/backpack make sure it has a firm back to it.

- Get a bicycle that fits you perfectly. Wrong size or geometry will be painful and annoying.

- Get rechargeable batteries and strong LED lights (I'd recommend "Cat-Eye" as a brand). Don't go the dynamo way if you want something efficient/dependable that will give you decent visibility as well.

- Get a bicycle that fits you perfectly. Wrong size or geometry will be painful and annoying.

Quote from Dajmin :

The climate has changed repeatedly over the last 300 million years. Humans must have some impact on that, but whether it's the major cause or merely helping it along is still up in the air. There's no way that all of the pollution caused by factories and cars can have zero impact, but at the same time the speed of this temperature increase doesn't seem to be all that much ahead of the norm for the cycle.

yes Global Warming seems to be a normal nature cycle of nature.
but it has never reaches such a critical level.

IMO global warming is reversible.
but we have to act fast.
researchs showed that there are a huge amount of methane trapped in polar ice. the same mighty methane that ended our last ice age.
once global warming starts to melt those ice and release the methane into our atmosphere, the game is over. i personally think that we only have a few decades to fix this. and at the end of it the nature is gonna survive for sure. they got a solution for everything. but can us? i highly doubt it.

i think this is not an economic issue, technology issue, but more a political issue and attitude issue. with the current technology we can easily cut carbon emission. but all these stupid politicians keep saying "ohhh this is gonna damage our economy so f**k off"
oh well. if there is no Earth, there is no human being, there is no economy.

and indeed i hope oil runs out asap.
so corporations and governments will be forced to use alternate energy resources.
and i think biofuel is absolutely ridiculous.
there are people in africa are starved to death.
Hydrogen is the way to go.
its probably the most abundant energy source we have other than the sun.

Why make a small impact over a few hundred years, when you can make a collosal impact for thousands. Nuclear is short term gain, long term epic fail.

Nothing special. Unless you love cars and you don´t mind to waste money on them, a car is one of your daily enemies.

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

Why make a small impact over a few hundred years, when you can make a collosal impact for thousands. Nuclear is short term gain, long term epic fail.

Nuclear fusion ftw!!

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

Why make a small impact over a few hundred years, when you can make a collosal impact for thousands. Nuclear is short term gain, long term epic fail.

Although the truth is the opposite when you look at the facts and the rate of improvement in handling the tiny amounts of waste not currently treatable.

Why make a huge impact over thousands of years (coal, oil, wind, wave) when you could make virtually no impact ever, or at least as little impact as is possible to make converting resources into vast amounts of heat (nuclear).

I'm prepared to accept that nuclear might have come a long way since Chernobyl, but I still haven't heard of a practical solution that deals responsibly with the leftovers, apart from the one that advocates digging holes, filling them up, and throwing away the key. There's no guarantee the stuff won't leak out and seep into the groundwater. Not exactly 'virtually no impact ever'.

Disposal surely can't be that hard though. I mean in all fairness, it must be destructible. Can't we just fire it into the sun or something?

Or use a nuclear substance that has a shorter half-life. Sure, you'll get less power from the cells and they'll need replaced far faster, but doesn't that outweigh the idea of having massive radioactive landfills all over the place?

Look at this another way. Power companies and petroleum companies are going to be shit out of luck when the resources are gone, right? But at the moment they are making massive profits (or were until the barrel price skyrocketed). It would pay off most of them in the long run if they invested in solar panels. One or two panels on each house in the UK would be a massive hit and would take a lot of strain off the grid.
That means the oil we have would last longer, the companies stay in business and don't need to buy as much oil from abroad, saving them money.
You see what I did there?

Speculate to accumulate, guys. Somebody kick a CEO's ass for me.

Quote :

doesn't that outweigh the idea of having massive radioactive landfills all over the place?

I think basically anything would outweigh the idea of having massive radioactive landfills all over the place.

Let's start a "LFS players without a car"-club.

Since I'm living in Freiburg (a city with good bicycle roads, trams and trains) I've parked my car at my parents because I really don't have much use of it here.

Quote from Dajmin :

Disposal surely can't be that hard though. I mean in all fairness, it must be destructible.

Radioactivity comes as atoms, and atoms tend to be pretty hard to destroy. Molecules you can take apart easily. But splitting atoms takes lots of energy and/or produces new radioactive atoms.

Quote :

Can't we just fire it into the sun or something?

Yes, but that would make nuclear energy much more expensive. So expensive that solar cells would probably be cheaper.

Quote :

Or use a nuclear substance that has a shorter half-life.

There is a fair amount of Uranium in the Earth's crust exactly because it has a long half-life. All stuff with a shorter half-life has fallen apart after 5 billion years. (Except for material that is the result of a man-made nuclear reaction, but that won't solve the problem.)

Quote from Electrik Kar :

There's no guarantee the stuff won't leak out and seep into the groundwater. Not exactly 'virtually no impact ever'.

wheres the difference to what it did before we took it out of the earth in the first place?

Quote from Dajmin :

Disposal surely can't be that hard though. I mean in all fairness, it must be destructible. Can't we just fire it into the sun or something?

Or use a nuclear substance that has a shorter half-life. Sure, you'll get less power from the cells and they'll need replaced far faster, but doesn't that outweigh the idea of having massive radioactive landfills all over the place?

Look at this another way. Power companies and petroleum companies are going to be shit out of luck when the resources are gone, right? But at the moment they are making massive profits (or were until the barrel price skyrocketed). It would pay off most of them in the long run if they invested in solar panels. One or two panels on each house in the UK would be a massive hit and would take a lot of strain off the grid.
That means the oil we have would last longer, the companies stay in business and don't need to buy as much oil from abroad, saving them money.
You see what I did there?

Speculate to accumulate, guys. Somebody kick a CEO's ass for me.

Hmmm... I used to process toxic and radioactive waste. I was told during training that the main reason we can't just fire off that nuclear waste into space is because of the SALT treaty. Also, it's one thing to have a few astronauts disintergrate on liftoff, it would be catastrophic if a bunch of hot material got flung everywhere.
As far as handling the end products of society goes, I preferred the radioactive stuff to the normal (?) chemical wastes. it is much easier to deal with Everyone knows what it is at the moment it's designated waste material The problem with fissile material is that it doesn't really go away and even though it's packaged all nice and put in a safe place - most of the time, you're going to run out of places to put it.

Chemical wastes though... man there's no telling with those. it's amazing that there hasn't been more disasters like Bhopal or Texas City or more illegal dumpsites than what there is.

I dunno... as far as alternative fuels and all that go. I think we need to get away from trying to simulate gas & diesel and try to get something totally different and base our social/industrial structures towards that.

Quote from Shotglass :

wheres the difference to what it did before we took it out of the earth in the first place?

It was sat about in places away from people as (realtively) harmless Uranium ore. The crap they eventually take out of the reactor is very concentrated, only a few days old and a lot more radioactive than the original material.


Fusion is the way forward. Takes in water and gives off oxygen and helium. They can use the helium to fill kids' party balloons if they want, it's that harmless.

Quote from Crashgate3 :

Fusion is the way forward. Takes in water and gives off oxygen and helium. They can use the helium to fill kids' party balloons if they want, it's that harmless.

you do realize that fusion will create rather a lot of nuclear waste as well?

No it doesn't.

Deuterium and Tritium are smashed together, giving off a non-radioactive helium nucleus and a neutron. The most radioactivity you get is the neutron which can easily be stopped by the reactior walls. Lithium is also used to obtain the Tritium, but again the raw material isn't radioactive and the by-product is more non-radioactive helium and, depending on the Lithium isotope used, another neutron.

You certainly don't get masses of waste with a half life measured in millions of years, as with fission.

Also if a fission reactor breaks, all that happens is the vacuum it operates in is compromised and the whole reaction just naturally stops, instead of ending up with Chernobyl/Three Mile Island.

yeah but after its lifetime youll be left with lots of reactor bits that cant be used for anything other than filling salt mines with

Good point actually, I hadn't considered that.

Having a quick look at Wikipedia (Hooray for Wikipedia ) yields this though:

Quote :

The large flux of high-energy neutrons in a reactor will make the structural materials radioactive. The radioactive inventory at shut-down may be comparable to that of a fission reactor, but there are important differences.
The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Furthermore, there are fewer unique species, and they tend to be non-volatile and biologically less active.[citation needed] Unlike fission reactors, whose waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, most of the radioactive material in a fusion reactor would be the reactor core itself, which would be dangerous for about 50 years, and low-level waste another 100. By 300 years the material would have the same radioactivity as coal ash. [2]. In current designs, some materials will yield waste products with long half-lives. [7]
Additionally, the materials used in a fusion reactor are more "flexible" than in a fission design, where many materials are required for their specific neutron cross-sections. This allows a fusion reactor to be designed using materials that are selected specifically to be "low activation", materials that do not easily become radioactive. Vanadium, for example, would become much less radioactive than stainless steel. Carbon fibre materials are also low-activation, as well as being strong and light, and are a promising area of study for laser-inertial reactors where a magnetic field is not required.
In general terms, fusion reactors would create far less radioactive material than a fission reactor, the material it would create is less damaging biologically, and the radioactivity "burns off" within a time period that is well within existing engineering capabilities.

hm sounds good but i wouldnt put too much faith in it until we actually have a functioning fussion reactor and know exactly what materials are required to build it

We've made a few that work and are *almost* self-sustaining.
That's the problem - getting them to steadily output enough energy so there is enough surplus to keep the reaction running. The Joint European Torus is one of these, being used to reasearch just how to do it. Fusion follows the law of Increasing Returns so if you make the reactor say, twice as big, you get more than twice the energy out, and one of the purposes of the JET was to find out just how big the rector needs to be to get the reaction self-sustaining. It definitely works, we just need to find out the best way of acheiving it.

Give it 20 or 30 years and we'll have the first succesful commercial fusion reactor. Definitely within our lifetimes.

i wouldnt exactly call a reactor that takes more power to get it going than it produces in those short bursts before it goes dead again working

and weve heard the 20 or 30 years claim for at least 20 or 30 years now

dont get me wrong the idea is quite brilliant but as with almost everything in physics and engineering its not that simple... and to paraphrase my boss... the sum of all shittiness is constant across all solutions to a problem

Jeez! She only bought a bike!

Well, riding a bike's like supporting alternative energy- in this case the energy is 'you'. Anyway, how long have you spent around this forum- surely you understand how things work around here by now?

Funny though..