Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

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moonshadow
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by moonshadow »

Grok wrote:I live in Seattle
Huh... I always thought you lived somewhere in the U.K. I'm honestly not sure why I made that assumption....
moonshadow wrote:There is much in your [Dillon's] comment I'd like to discuss, but it will have to wait until I get on the dinosaur (my old desktop) with a proper keyboard.
As promised...
dillon wrote:I’m proudly globalist because I see the multitude of ways the US, and world as a whole, benefits from mutually-affirming international relationships, and understand that a certain amount of give and take is necessary. It isn’t about one country winning and another losing; a high tide lifts all boats. And few of the isolationists I have known have had any international experience aside from military deployments, and that environment doesn’t lend itself to encouraging either human compassion or thoughtful objectivity. In other words, I don’t see shithole countries; I see shithead politicians, fawning fools, and superficial sycophants.
Yeah, that sounds nice. I'm not really well studied on much of the subject matter here, but I'm not overly concerned about any notion of "one world government" provided that government is laid in the interest of individual liberty. But mainly I'm really not concerned with it, mainly for the reason that I don't see it happening in my lifetime anyway, so I just never gave it a lot of thought. Hell, it's all we can do now just to keep the U.S. from escalating into another civil war at this point, it's no time to start planning a unified world government! :bom:
Too, the planet is in such dire straits at this time that we cannot afford to indulge inaction just because the powerful tell us that we’re supposed to be “respectful” to a petty and reckless demagogue.
Agree with the first part, not so much the second. We get nowhere by bickering. Civility and respectful behavior are always appropriate. It's the constant bickering that's destroying the fabric of our culture and making it impossible to work towards any progress whatsoever. I will admit, our current administration seems to delight in instigating this unrest, I'm not sure if it's intentional, or just his nature, the former is downright scary (why is he doing this?), the latter is easier to swallow, but it doesn't speak much for the man's character if that's the case.
I drove past hundreds of wind turbines today, slowly turning, producing electricity from the energy that God placed right in front of us, and recalled hearing our relentlessly lying POTUS claiming that these graceful giants, like slow motion ballerinas in pirouette en pointe, were unsightly, that they caused cancer and shredded birds into confetti. I marveled at how anyone who had seen mountaintop-removal strip-mining in Appalachia could find wind turbines unsightly.
I recall a push for a windfarm along some mountains in Roanoke County that were met with fierce resistance from local "environmental groups". Reasons for objecting were as you mentioned, shredding birds, cancer, and the "flicker effect" of turbines in the sun/moon light causing problems. It was at that point I realized that many environmentalist are just a bunch of damned hypocrites!

The fact is, the Roanoke valley is a hipster trendy area with thousands of New England transplants that wanted a taste of southern life without having to travel to the "deep south". Virginia is just progressive enough to pass for them. And then when someone proposed a windfarm... oh no no no... NOT IN MY BACKYARD! :roll:

Funny, you don't have to travel too far west, just a hundred miles down I81 and about 50 miles along U.S. 58 into the coal fields to see where these "environmentalist" power comes from. Of course these people don't live in far southwestern Virginia/eastern Kentucky, they can't see the big strip mine from atop Black Mountain from where they live (Kentucky's highest elevation)... so what the hell do they care...? These Tesla's running up and down the road locally are running on coal power. We tried to build renewable plants, but nooooooo!! "NOT IN MY BACKYARD!"

The joke's on them though... since we are west of central Virginia, guess which way they weather blows all those byproducts of our coal burning power plants....? :mrgreen: Enjoy your acid rain Roanoke valley hipsters! :twisted:

Now all my cynical joking aside, I wonder about the future of fusion power. I'm not a scientist or really up to date on the pros and cons, but from what few tidbits I've read here and there, I feel like it might be the future. Wind and solar have their drawbacks, fusion is basically the same type of energy generation that powers the sun. If we can figure it out without blowing a massive hole in the side of the Earth... maybe?
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by dillon »

oldsalt1 wrote:Dillion its a shame that you are unable to post a single thought without the inclusion of a derogatory comment about The president.

One more time this is not a political thread. and actions like yours are exactly why the thread was derailed.

You are entitled to your inane biased opinions just post them on a political thread not on the café

Moon's lengthy thread is also political in nature but he is trying to demonstrate a point with out having to result to direct attacks.
I didn’t attack any member here, and no matter how strongly you feel, so do I...180 degrees in opposition it appears. I have avoided the taboo subject Religion and I think this thread is the appropriate venue for any comment that deviates from fashion. I’m sorry you object to modest criticism but you might want to check the record of your favored politician and see what remarks he has for his opponents. If you condone those, then, IMHO, you have little moral/ethical standing to complain about me. Once more I ask how indulging a petulant ignoramus and belligerent liar benefits the country? Answering me, rather than scolding me, would put us on the path to a more productive discussion.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by Fred in Skirts »

Moonshadow wrote: Now all my cynical joking aside, I wonder about the future of fusion power. I'm not a scientist or really up to date on the pros and cons, but from what few tidbits I've read here and there, I feel like it might be the future. Wind and solar have their drawbacks, fusion is basically the same type of energy generation that powers the sun. If we can figure it out without blowing a massive hole in the side of the Earth... maybe?
Having spent 24 years in the nuclear business fusion is very hard to control. Fission on the other hand can be controlled very easily barring the the "idiot factor". The nuclear power plants can produce a lot of electricity very cheaply. Or it would have been cheap had not Carter and other anti nukes passed laws that have hamstrung the industry. We would have had almost 60 per cent nuke power now. Cutting way down on the need for coal and oil or gas fired generating plants. By the way nuke power is safer that all of the other means by far.

OK, there was Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Japaneses plant that was destroyed by the giant wave. Three Mile Island suffered from the IDIOT FACTOR as did the Chernobyl plant. The Japanese plant was taken out by Mother Nature.
The two IDIOT FACTOR plants had problems with tired people not following proper procedures that were in place. The Russian plant not only suffered from not following procedures but had significant design faults. The biggest was having a positive reactivity coefficient. Which means that the level of reactivity will continue to go up and it has to have reactivity poisons inserted all of the time to prevent a run away reactor. American reactors have a negative reactivity coefficient meaning they need to have the poisons removed to continue to operate. If they are not the reactor will shut itself down as it burns the uranium up.

Hope this sheds some light on the subject, probably more than you wanted to know but what the heck a little knowledge never hurt anyone.

Fred
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by moonshadow »

Dillon's does have a point, Trump's frequent crass rhetoric has drawn criticism even from people in my area. They still like him, but they do admit he can be overly fussy.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by oldsalt1 »

Dillion I will just reiterate my previous entry

Which by your last comment you just proved.

it's impossible for you to post a single comment with out resulting to derogatory comments about the president.

And you expect us to accept them as if they were manna from heaven.

I never said that you were not entitled to continually utter your vacuous comments , they just don't belong on the café.

It seems that Moon and many others can post intelligent, sometimes opiniated , informing comments without reverting to supercilious remarks why can't you.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

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If the personal vitriol continues I'll lock this thread, too -- as I did the last one, and it'll likely be the same reason. That'll be strike two.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by Dust »

Moon,

Thank you for this thread and your discussion. I'm always surprised how much we agree on. I think most of the biggest differences are in ordering which issues matter the most, and how to achieve those ends.

I found you pointing out that both sides often do the same bad things, both refreshing, and cause for a little introspection, hopefully leading to self improvement. For that I'd like to thank you.

Don't think yourself a political idiot. The fact that a complete outsider could switch parties, hop into the presidential race, and win the highest office in the land, with no prior experience in elected office or government at all, really, is proof that the career politicians aren't special either. They are human beings too, with falts and failings, just like the rest of us.

I too, used to think of myself as a libertarian (small government, etc.), until I realized that the Libertarian party was mostly about legalizing recreational drugs (which I have no interest in).

Have people ever really vandalized your property and physically assaulted you just for being different?!? Did it ever become weekly? I've lived in some backwoods type places, and not seen much, if any of that. Talk, sure. Intimidation? Absolutely there, but rare. Still, weekly stitches!? Most I saw were all bark, no bite. Granted, it was a different part of the country.

I remember hearing about the power company not sending folks who looked a certain way to jobs in particular rural areas. But they also sent extra people to certain inner city areas to hand out free cigarettes and assure everyone that they weren't turning off the power, while the actual crew did the job. This was many years ago. I hope we have moved past the necessity for both things.

I have more thoughts, and comments on others people's thoughts, but I'll stick those in additional posts.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by Dust »

dillon wrote:Politically, I am not quite as one-sided as Moon made me seem. But I am undoubtedly a Trumpie’s worst nightmare- fair-tax, small-government, social progressive who refuses to embrace either profound ignorance and/or pathological mendacity in a POTUS. If anyone can show me how indulging either benefits the Republic, I’ll be all ears.

I’m proudly globalist because I see the multitude of ways the US, and world as a whole, benefits from mutually-affirming international relationships, and understand that a certain amount of give and take is necessary. It isn’t about one country winning and another losing; a high tide lifts all boats. And few of the isolationists I have known have had any international experience aside from military deployments, and that environment doesn’t lend itself to encouraging either human compassion or thoughtful objectivity. In other words, I don’t see shithole countries; I see shithead politicians, fawning fools, and superficial sycophants.
I think we all have more in common than we think. This comment is a wonderful case-in-point. The sentence I highlighted in bold is a point Trump himself has been trying to make as an argument for his "Make America Great Again" slogan being good, not only for everyone in America, but for the world as a whole.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

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Fred in Skirts wrote: Having spent 24 years in the nuclear business fusion is very hard to control. Fission on the other hand can be controlled very easily baring the the "idiot factor". The nuclear power plants can produce a lot of electricity very cheaply. Or it would have been cheap had not Carter and other anti nukes passed laws that have hamstrung the industry. We would have had almost 60 per cent nuke power now. Cutting way down on the need for coal and oil or gas fired generating plants. By the way nuke power is safer that all of the other means by far.

OK, there was Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Japaneses plant that was destroyed by the giant wave. Three Mile Island suffered from the IDIOT FACTOR as did the Chernobyl plant. The Japanese plant was taken out by Mother Nature.
The two IDIOT FACTOR plants had problems with tired people not following proper procedures that were in place. The Russian plant not only suffered from not following procedures but had significant design faults. The biggest was having a positive reactivity coefficient. Which means that the level of reactivity will continue to go up and it has to have reactivity poisons inserted all of the time to prevent a run away reactor. American reactors have a negative reactivity coefficient meaning they need to have the poisons removed to continue to operate. If they are not the reactor will shut itself down as it burns the uranium up.

Hope this sheds some light on the subject, probably more than you wanted to know but what the heck a little knowledge never hurt anyone.

Fred
Fred's right here, I would only add that the Three Mile Island incident didn't release anything dangerous, because American reactors are designed with safety in mind, and multiple layers of shielding. Some of the workers at nuclear plants are actually exposed to less radiation than the rest of us because they are between the layers of shielding. The sheilding works both ways, and they receive less radiation from natural sources like the sun, than someone going for a walk outside.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

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I am reading Fred's comments It sheds a lot of light on the subject. I had an uncle actually it was my uncle al. He lived about 10 miles from the three mile island plant when it imploded . Talk about panic in the streets. its funny I now live less than a mile from the never fully operational Shroeham power plant I think Moons mother lived in ridge which is just one town over when all the controversy that prevented it from opening took place.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

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I didn’t negatively comment on nuclear, and I do believe it’s relatively safe. It could be part of climate change remediation except for the issues surrounding high-level waste, as the US has no permanent repository. Breeder reactor technology such as GE-Hitachi are working on could help resolve that, as many types of fuel could be reduced to virtually nothing through that process. We might already have the technology on hand if it had not been for the lobbying of Kerr-McGee and others in the fuel business who didn’t want the full reduction of fuel rods, as fewer would be needed, or to have retired weapons plutonium or submarine fuel used instead of their products.

I too lived relatively carefree in the shadow of the Shearon Harris plant near Holly Springs NC. I only considered the risks when they tested the evacuation sirens. This plant points up the other problem with nuclear: siting and construction cost. In its heyday nuclear plants had to be built for economics of scale, because they had to compete with dirt-cheap coal. That meant they had to be planned as massive ultra-high megawatt facilities. Shearon-Harris is a prime example. It was planned to be a four reactor plant at a cost of under 2.5 billion. Seven years delayed, CP&L managed to put one reactor into service at a cost of 7.5 billion.

Too, none of the spent fuel, high-level waste, has ever left the site after about 35 years of operation, as there is nowhere for it to go.

But, in that era, we were not well educated about the hidden costs of coal, including the accumulation of ash in reservoirs, like time bombs waiting to rupture and leaking into groundwater, the deleterious effect of sulfur emissions causing acid rain, and, of course, studies in climate science, then being understood as “global warming”, were in their infancy. We didn’t have the processing capacity and statistical modeling tools to make projections with the level of accuracy that we now possess, though still imperfect. But what we now understand about coal works in favor of nuclear, even at a higher cost. So the scale of nuclear projects is less critical. But we cannot dismiss cost as a factor.

The type of nuclear technology needed should have a number of capabilities not considered essential or practical in yesteryear. What’s needed to make nuclear cost effective is the ability to replace coal plants “in situ” with a minimal amount of physical expansion. There is immense value in existing infrastructure, namely water source reservoirs and transmission right of way. So a nuclear plant should be able to be situated exactly where a coal plant once stood, and safely so. That requires reactor technology that allows rapid stepping up and down of output, and will be essentially “meltdown proof” as the buffer between plant and adjacent populations will be much less. Too, policy should direct that such plants are oriented toward filling in the gaps in generating when renewables are unproductive. That could be half the day if only wind and solar are available or a much smaller fraction if ocean wave energy is developed.

So our old concept of what a nuclear plant looks like and costs has to be revised. We can’t think of these projects as we once did. That sort of facility is the reason more nuke plants are being decommissioned than built today. But there are companies working to develop appropriate nuclear technology so it’s not as hopeless for nuclear as it has looked for the last couple decades. But at the same time renewables are getting rapidly more competitive, so there is still a hill to climb for nuclear energy.

I agree with the reflections on Chernobyl. That happens when unaccountable government runs the show. The safety record of nuclear energy in the US and other western countries is due to the separation of entities, with government as regulators and public utilities as producer and distributor. But before anyone attempts to herald power companies as heroes of capitalism, I’d remind that they are government-granted monopolies, not true corporate venturers. Their profits are guaranteed in their charters.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by Big and Bashful »

There is an answer for spent fuel, the fuel can be re-processed into fresh fuel for reactors, it has been done in the past. I was surprised to hear that the British re-processing plants at Sellafield are now being decommissioned. As far as I can gather there is only one reason this is happening, economics. Currently it is more economical to mine fresh uranium out of the ground, the wholesale price for fresh uranium is lower than the cost of re-processing "spent" fuel. This is ludicrous, when I completed my nuclear course 11 years ago one statistic that stuck in my head was that at the rate of extraction and use we have maybe 50 years worth of useable known uranium stocks on the planet. So when the oil runs out, so will the uranium if we carry on the way we are going. Rather than vitrifying spent fuel we should be reprocessing and getting every last useable watt out of the fuel we have.
Of course there is a downside to reprocessing, as there is to refining and enriching fresh fuel, the processes involve nasty chemicals, waste products and cost money and energy themselves, so whatever we do there is a downside somewhere!
Then there is thorium, lots of thorium, maybe three times as much as uranium, can't be turned into plutonium, can be turned into fissile reactor fuel. From memory India is made of the stuff! Three times as much as uranium, hmmm, so 200 years then the reactors are empty of fuel, kind of glad I am not immortal!

We only have one little rock to live on, billions of us, all breeding like people (or rabbits), still the few rich people making the decisions do not need to care what the rest of us are up to as their money breeds and their air con. works!

Bitter? who me? Hell yes!

On that happy note, I have a bottle of white wine chilling, lumps of meat thawing, Sun outside (yes, even on Scotland!) and a comfortable skirt on as well as gas for the barbecue, and today's nuclear emergency (exercise) was successful. Let the cremation commence!
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by Fred in Skirts »

Big and Bashful wrote:On that happy note, I have a bottle of white wine chilling, lumps of meat thawing, Sun outside (yes, even on Scotland!) and a comfortable skirt on as well as gas for the barbecue, and today's nuclear emergency (exercise) was successful. Let the cremation commence!
Now why would you cremate good meat. It should be gently touched by the flames. until it has a nice crust on the outside and is a bright red on the inside. Now that is the ultra dinner. Serve with baked Idaho Potatoes, and cole slaw.
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Re: Some follow up thoughts on a derailed thread....

Post by Big and Bashful »

Fred in Skirts wrote:
Big and Bashful wrote:On that happy note, I have a bottle of white wine chilling, lumps of meat thawing, Sun outside (yes, even on Scotland!) and a comfortable skirt on as well as gas for the barbecue, and today's nuclear emergency (exercise) was successful. Let the cremation commence!
Now why would you cremate good meat. It should be gently touched by the flames. until it has a nice crust on the outside and is a bright red on the inside. Now that is the ultra dinner. Serve with baked Idaho Potatoes, and cole slaw.
I must admit, I am quite proud of my skills when it comes to cooking over flames, I used to get free food and wine in our bbq circles because I seem to be able to judge the cooking of meats etc. pretty well and manage to cook through without burning stuff. Probably because I cook stuff slowly. It annoys me that one thing I cannot get right is the simple art of combining a decent frying pan and a slice of cow. I can never get steak right on the stove top or under the grill, although its been a while but I think I can get it right on a bbq. Must buy a slice of cow and try it on the bbq before summer ends, 2 dry days, Scotland, Winter is coming!
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