After the West Texas fertilizer explosion

[Werehawk]

I'll grant you that on the cars. However the infrastructure to support those cars is an issue. I also think you are underestimating the length of fair percentage of peoples commutes.

Rent seeking by politically connected companies is as old as civilization. I'm pretty sure the first temple construction or palace building contracts went to relatives of highly placed functionaries.
--Werehawk--
My mom's brief take on upcoming Guatemalan Elections "In last throes of preelection activities. Much loudspeaker vote pleading."

[robkelk]

Dunno werehawk... a relatively cheap DIY conversion of a Pontiac Fiero to straight electric can yield a compact daily-driver with a range of 70 miles and will recharge completely overnight. That's enough range to get to work, run a few errands, and get back home.

As long as everybody lives within a half-hour's drive of where they work. Not impossible, but not the current state of affairs.

And really, that's all most people need. Sure, there's soccer moms out there in America that need massive people movers with enough cargo space to haul home the daily output of a small farm... But if the daily commuters would just switch to a basic electric car to get them to work and back, it would kill so many of the emission problems we're having that you'll wonder why we never did it sooner.

The electricity has to come from somewhere, and there isn't enough hydroelectric or nuclear-electric power available. There are very few rivers left in North America that can be dammed for cost-effective HE power, and the people opposed to more pipelines are also opposed to more NE plants. Wind power is as reliable as the wind, and solar power is very expensive - so we'd be moving to a smaller number of larger emissions from gas-fired, coal-fired, and oil-fired plants.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Black Aeronaut]

robkelk wrote:

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blackaeronaut wrote:

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And really, that's all most people need. Sure, there's soccer moms out there in America that need massive people movers with enough cargo space to haul home the daily output of a small farm... But if the daily commuters would just switch to a basic electric car to get them to work and back, it would kill so many of the emission problems we're having that you'll wonder why we never did it sooner.

The electricity has to come from somewhere, and there isn't enough hydroelectric or nuclear-electric power available. There are very few rivers left in North America that can be dammed for cost-effective HE power, and the people opposed to more pipelines are also opposed to more NE plants. Wind power is as reliable as the wind, and solar power is very expensive - so we'd be moving to a smaller number of larger emissions from gas-fired, coal-fired, and oil-fired plants.

This is actually better in the long run.  Point-source pollution such as the sort from cars is very difficult to manage - this is why cities like LA always have such a horrible smog problem.  However, if a good percentage of cars in a major metro got their power from a powerplant, that pollution can be much more easily managed, especially if it's a newer one.  And the Eagle Ford Shale Discovery here in Texas has made powerplants fired with natural gas a very attractive option lately.  It won't last forever, but it will be a good stop-gap until we figure out something better.

[Bluemage]

BA has the right of it.  One big pollution source is easier to manage than five million smaller ones.
Also, nuclear energy.  Most of the plants you hear about, in the US or Japan, were built something like 40 years ago... and the Fukushima one still nearly survived both an earthquake and a tsunami.  Update the plans with what we've learned from natural disasters since, throw in the last four decades' worth of materials science and physics advances, and I'd bet you could make a plant nigh-on Ragnarok-proof.
We also have the technology for safe (by comparison) nuclear waste disposal.  Between fuel reprocessing and vitrification, we can drastically cut the amount of nuclear waste produced, and trap the rest of it in glass so it can't get into the water table.  If the US ACTUALLY DID ANY OF THIS, we could cut emissions, produce enough energy to make hydrogen-fueled cars practical, and even clean up the waste we've still got sitting around from WWII and the Cold War... but we won't.  There's no political will for it.

---

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[Black Aeronaut]

Kudos to Bluemage. I just wish that everyone would pull their heads out of their asses regarding nuclear power. Like he said, most reactors are nearly or over forty years old, and then they were built so freakishly tough that even a full-blown meltdown was contained.

Yeah, don't let anyone fool you - Three Mile Island was indeed as complete of a meltdown as they come. What made it nowhere nearly as bad as it could have been was the stupidly-tough leaded-concrete containment building. The entire reactor could have been slagged and it still would have been contained. If they had these containment structures at Chernobyl and Fukushima then those disasters would never have been quite as disastrous. (Yes, there would have been meltdowns still, but the important part is that they would have been contained.)

There are all kinds of new and different ideas - things that have already been proven and things that might be effective but just need a little more practical work. One of these is pebble bed reactors. The great fear here is the neutron medium, pyrolitic graphite, my catch fire if the fuel pebble's protective coating is breached. The only time this ever happened with a test reactor was while the fuel pebble was actually being handled. Pretty sure that improved procedures can make this a non-issue.

The nice thing about PBR's is their nifty little inherent safety feature: the hotter they get, the slower they burn - to the point where if there was a catastrophic loss of coolant then the reaction in the PBR pretty much stagnates. Cycle the coolant through as quickly as you can dissipate the heat and you can get a hell of an output from these things. Oh, and they're gas cooled, too, so you can use a noble gas that carries no residual radiation with it if it does escape.

And that's just one idea of many.

[ordnance11]

blackaeronaut wrote:

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robkelk wrote:

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blackaeronaut wrote:

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And really, that's all most people need. Sure, there's soccer moms out there in America that need massive people movers with enough cargo space to haul home the daily output of a small farm... But if the daily commuters would just switch to a basic electric car to get them to work and back, it would kill so many of the emission problems we're having that you'll wonder why we never did it sooner.

The electricity has to come from somewhere, and there isn't enough hydroelectric or nuclear-electric power available. There are very few rivers left in North America that can be dammed for cost-effective HE power, and the people opposed to more pipelines are also opposed to more NE plants. Wind power is as reliable as the wind, and solar power is very expensive - so we'd be moving to a smaller number of larger emissions from gas-fired, coal-fired, and oil-fired plants.

This is actually better in the long run.  Point-source pollution such as the sort from cars is very difficult to manage - this is why cities like LA always have such a horrible smog problem.  However, if a good percentage of cars in a major metro got their power from a powerplant, that pollution can be much more easily managed, especially if it's a newer one.  And the Eagle Ford Shale Discovery here in Texas has made powerplants fired with natural gas a very attractive option lately.  It won't last forever, but it will be a good stop-gap until we figure out something better.

Actually BA, car pollution in Los Angeles has been managed fairly well in the past 2 decades. You go from it from several directions. Mandate better car engines that produce fewer emissions. Mandate better fuels that produce fewer emissions when burned. And zero emission means transportation like electric cars gets rebates. And push for public transportation like light railway, which Los Angeles has been doing for the past 2 decades. SoCal AQMD has been the main engine for that push. The result was an actual decrease in the amount of pollutants like SOx and NOx in the atmosphere that produce smog. Despite the increase of the number of cars. I grant you you're still a second class citizen in Los Angeles without a car, but there's fewer smog days than say Dallas or Houston.
It's only difficult if there's no political will to do so. Try that in Texas and which the GOP go up in arms. If they like smog, they're welcome to it. 
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[ordnance11]

Bluemage wrote:

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BA has the right of it.  One big pollution source is easier to manage than five million smaller ones.
Also, nuclear energy.  Most of the plants you hear about, in the US or Japan, were built something like 40 years ago... and the Fukushima one still nearly survived both an earthquake and a tsunami.  Update the plans with what we've learned from natural disasters since, throw in the last four decades' worth of materials science and physics advances, and I'd bet you could make a plant nigh-on Ragnarok-proof.
We also have the technology for safe (by comparison) nuclear waste disposal.  Between fuel reprocessing and vitrification, we can drastically cut the amount of nuclear waste produced, and trap the rest of it in glass so it can't get into the water table.  If the US ACTUALLY DID ANY OF THIS, we could cut emissions, produce enough energy to make hydrogen-fueled cars practical, and even clean up the waste we've still got sitting around from WWII and the Cold War... but we won't.  There's no political will for it.

We already have prototypes for nuclear power plants using "bucky balls" imbedded with U-238 that use air instead pressurized water as a medium. And they can be sized from 500 KW to 500 MW depending on what market you want. You fire an RPG into the pile and you wouldn't get a runaway reaction, since the engineering was designed to shut down automatically. And that was 25 years ago when I was in college.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Bob Schroeck]

Yes, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor]pebble-bed reactor, one of the cooler reactor designs I've come across (not that I've come across many). It avoids or ameliorates many of the problems caused by the fact that the "typical" nuclear plant is really just a more sophisticated/complicated version of Fermi's atomic pile.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[ECSNorway]

Yes. It is -much- more practical, and safer, than earlier reactor designs.

And if it were not for a lot of crackpot lobbyists fighting hard against it, we could have a LOT more of them.

France of all places uses nuclear power for 100% of their electricity generation.

Why don't we?

A combination of factors:

* Coal & oil industry lobbying
* Lots of media playing on the fears of people regarding "atomic anything == BADSCARYWRONGDANGEROUS!!!!!!111111!!!!"
* Eco-friendly lobbyists pushing other alternatives, like wind and solar, that are fine on small scale but do not scale up well
* The genuine issue of what to do with spent fuel elements

Speaking of that last point, the military has been reprocessing them into new ones for decades. A breeder reactor is more expensive than a traditional pile, true, but it can get as much as 6000% of the energy from the same quantity of fuel. Unfortunately it was banned for civilian use under Jimmy Carter and the fledgeling industry fell apart. Reagan tried rather half-heartedly to get it going again and failed miserably, and no one's really touched it since.

* And let us not forget the specter of Chernobyl and Fukushima, neither of which would have been nearly as bad if they'd happened to the more modern reactor designs.

Random thought: Coal contains notable, if small, quantities of uranium and thorium. This becomes concentrated when you burn the coal, because it doesn't combust or get vaporized. The US burned 850 million tons of coal in 2009... which left almost 4000 tons of radioactive material among the ash. Radioactivity measurements taken at coal plant ashpiles have made Three Mile Island look like a day in the park.

China is actually building factories to recover the uranium from coal ash to use as nuclear fuel. South Africa and Australia are also exploring it.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Bluemage]

* And let us not forget the specter of Chernobyl and Fukushima, neither
of which would have been nearly as bad if they'd happened to the more
modern reactor designs.

Oh, don't get me STARTED on how true this is.  Fukushima was only such a problem because they put the backup generators in the wrong part of the reactor complex.  Chernobyl was a case of unskilled operators, political directives, and experimental procedures being used on a quirky reactor design that didn't gracefully handle sudden control rod insertion.
Essentially, both disasters wouldn't have been a thing, but for design flaws.
Now, in any other industry, design flaws mean one thing- reengineering.  Your design doesn't work/does X/doesn't do X, but should?  Fine.  Take the design, figure out what needs to be changed, and change it.  For some reason, though (ECS named them off quite nicely), nuclear power is the one industry where a design flaw, even somebody else's design flaw, means that the whole field needs to be buried forever and never even contemplated again... except as something wrong and evil, which no civilized nation should ever use... except for the Europeans.  And the Japanese.  And the Iranians, because that's CLEARLY why they want enriched fissionables.
...okay, so maybe we're the only ones who aren't ideologically allowed nuclear power.  Politics!

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[nemonowan]

Bluemage wrote:

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something wrong and evil, which no civilized nation should ever use... except for the Europeans.  And the Japanese.  And the Iranians, because that's CLEARLY why they want enriched fissionables.
...okay, so maybe we're the only ones who aren't ideologically allowed nuclear power.  Politics!

I'll point out that all japanese reactors have been stopped since Fukushima, and there is massive opposition to restarting them (80% according to the last polls I heard), despite politicians wanting to restart them.

[Werehawk]

nemonowan wrote:

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I'll point out that all japanese reactors have been stopped since Fukushima, and there is massive opposition to restarting them (80% according to the last polls I heard), despite politicians wanting to restart them.

Fear can outweigh any amount of facts.
--Werehawk--
My mom's brief take on upcoming Guatemalan Elections "In last throes of preelection activities. Much loudspeaker vote pleading."

[nemonowan]

werehawk wrote:

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nemonowan wrote:

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I'll point out that all japanese reactors have been stopped since Fukushima, and there is massive opposition to restarting them (80% according to the last polls I heard), despite politicians wanting to restart them.

Fear can outweigh any amount of facts.

Given the FACT that all of Japan's aging reactors have the same design problems and are on the coastline of a very seismic country, I think that fear is a very reasonable reaction.

[Werehawk]

To a degree it is reasonable fear.
But what really did in the Fukushima reactor was the Tsunami flooding the backup diesel generators that would have kept the cooling pumps going. (TEPCO shot itself in the foot badly in its worst case scenario planning) There's also the fact that a lot of environmental activists have managed to block quite successfully the construction and development of safer reactors than the current pack of early 70s era designs which most nations still use (other than the former Soviet republics which use a far less safe designs). I suspect the only really new reactor designs in widescale use are the ones in U.S. navy Virginia class submarines and the first Ford class Carrier.
--Werehawk--
My mom's brief take on upcoming Guatemalan Elections "In last throes of preelection activities. Much loudspeaker vote pleading."

[nemonowan]

Not to mention that when designing Fukushima, they deliberately ignored historical records of tsunami heigths in the area, in order to build the plant in a lower, cheaper place (of course, still claiming that it was built in a place where no tsunami had ever reached nor would ever reach)
And that is what ultimately is the problem with every single potentially dangerous technology: no matter that with sufficient research, effort and forethought it can be made comparatively safe, if it is used by companies whose only interest is to extract every last penny from them it will be done cheaper and not safely.

[Bluemage]

nemonowan wrote:

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And that is what ultimately is the problem with every single potentially dangerous technology: no matter that with sufficient research, effort and forethought it can be made comparatively safe, if it is used by companies whose only interest is to extract every last penny from them it will be done cheaper and not safely.

...therefore we should ban every single potentially dangerous technology?  Or put it in the hands of government- the very people who gave the contract for the Hanford vitrification plant to the most incompetent pack of idiots I've ever heard of, and have turned the entire Pacific Northwest into a ticking time bomb by doing so?  I think not.
The problem there is that the companies using said technologies have no real financial responsibility for what happens if it screws up.  I'd assert that, in the long term, putting Fukushima in a safer place (or fitting the diesel generators in the hardened containment area) would've been less expensive than the current mess; the problem is that the people who make the decisions are only responsible for the short-term cost.  If you make the company/planner responsible for the long-term cost as well, suddenly it becomes in their interest to design responsibly.
tl;dr:  Don't outlaw things.  Just make the penalty for irresponsible use greater than the benefit.
EDIT:  Also, my earlier point was about how people in America wail and gnash their teeth at the thought of Americans using nuclear power, but have no problem with other countries (including countries that want to kill us) doing the same thing.  Japan deciding not to restart their reactors, whether a rational reaction or not, has nothing to do with hypocritical ideological positions in a different country.
(I think they should be evaluated for safety, reinforced (and more thoroughly prepared for weathering disasters), and then restarted until newer designs can be built in safer locations, myself.  But then, what do I know?  I'm not a politician.)

---

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[nemonowan]

Bluemage wrote:

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tl;dr:  Don't outlaw things.  Just make the penalty for irresponsible use greater than the benefit.

An excellent idea, pity that with those same companies paying politicians to make regulations lax it will never happen.That is why across-the-board-ban movements are the only first step with any chance of working: it is easier to get a critical mass of people behind a simple emotional issue (nukes bad!) than a complex, nuanced but still tough regulation.
It is the same with GMOs. There is nothing inherently wrong with the technology (it can be both as beneficial and as abused as any other) but with the current regulatory framework, even if there were NO detrimental biological effect to ANY strain in the market, they are still a vehicle for corporate expansion and forced monopolization of agriculture. Therefore a general ban pending revision of legislation and tougher regulation would not be wrong, even if fueled by irrational paranoia about frankenfoods.
By the way, back about nukes an you mentions of Iran, how about this: instead of pitching a fit over that country's legal right under internationa treaties to enrich uranium and use civilian atomic energy, make a deal for collaboration, financing and technology transfer to build and test there all these new imporved reactor designs. You kill two birds with the same stone, have a pervasive presence for inspection to make certain no are weapons built and full-scale development of these new reactors in a place that wants them.

[Bluemage]

We agree in principle on
what the optimal position would be, then.  This is actually the best Internet political discussion I've ever been in, just from that!
The frustrating bit is that we also agree on how there's no political will to get there, and that's where our positions diverge.  I cannot support the idea of 'ban it first, and then sort it out from there', for a number of reasons.
-Economic inertia.  To borrow Newton's Third Law, a business in motion will continue in motion, unless acted on by an opposing force.  If you ban nuclear power, you destroy the nuclear power industry.  This means that you lose your experts in the field, you no longer have companies around to conform to the regulation... the whole thing goes belly-up.  If the government, in its infinite wisdom, decides to lift the ban, who will be there to care?
Yes, I said 'if'.  Get the ban in place, and you change the government's current position on nuclear power.  It's always easier to get something banned than unbanned, easier to regulate than to deregulate, and easier to expand the bureaucracy than to shrink it.  Once you have nuclear power banned, to un-ban it would require political effort on a scale I doubt could be mustered; after all, there wouldn't be any nuclear power lobby any longer, and you know how politicians think with their lobbyists instead of their brains.
(And even if you did, it'd take long enough to write the new laws and set everything up to destroy the industry.  Utility companies aren't Apple; they don't have massive bankrolls of profit to sit on.  Most can't afford to operate at a loss for any length of time, much less long enough for a comprehensive regulation package to be written, passed, and implemented.)
-Unintended consequences.  To put it pithily, laws don't do exactly what you want them to do.  Even if you halted the industry in its tracks, took it apart, wrote a package of laws that looked like they'd do the job, and gave the go-ahead to start the plants back up without wrecking the industry, who's to say that the laws would function as intended?
Look at game patches, preferably for MOBAs or MMOs.  Patches break things ALL THE TIME (and which is more complex- a game, or an industry?).  What do the companies do?  Release them, watch for errors, and amend them.  To me, that suggests that the government should change things slowly, one law at a time, looking at the impact of each law over time (Is it sufficient?  Too much?  Are there unintended side effects?) and patching them before moving to the next law.
Also, when you try to do everything at once, you get comprehensive bills that nobody reads.  That's never good- too much opportunity for faulty and/or corrupt provisions to slip by, and it means the governed have to spend more on lawyers just to figure out how to be in compliance.  Better to keep things short and to the point, as much as possible.
-I can't really give this one a pithy name- it's too complex.  Part of this issue is the dishonesty involved in pitching one thing "nukes bad!" to the voters, only so you can get in and make a law based on the position of "nukes good, if used responsibly".  Sure, it might work, but if we're just going to manipulate people into voting for somebody like that, how do the people really have any say?  Why call it a democracy at all? 
Another part of it is the disconnect that said dishonesty invokes between the people and their own governance.  When you say that you need to pitch an issue one way to get support, so that you can do something different later on, you're saying that people can't understand the issue, don't care to understand the issue, or that they won't vote the right way (for you) if you do explain it to them, so you have to misdirect them to get into office and do the Right Thing (tm).  No matter how you slice it, that's some arrangement of morally/constitutionally wrong.  There is a social issue in there- we need to get people informed and
thinking about issues, rather than just accepting either side's talking
points- but I don't think such an issue is an excuse to manipulate the public like that.
Probably why I'm not a politician.
As far as Iran goes, I mentioned all those other countries as examples of the "it's wrong for the US to use nuclear power, but we don't care about them having it' hypocrisy; any 'fit' I threw was over that, and not what's actually happening in Europe or Japan or Iran... though I'll admit to some sarcasm about their motives.
It's a totally different issue, but I do think Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons, that their leadership doesn't actually care about having civilian nuclear power as anything more than a smokescreen for the weapons development, and that, if they get the bomb, it will get used on Israel within the decade.  I have no problem with them having nuclear power; I have a MASSIVE problem with letting ANY nation still willing to use nukes as anything but a deterrent or retaliation (specifically against nuclear attacks) have the bomb.  If somebody came up with a deal which could ENSURE that Iran got power and not the bomb, I'd be thrilled to support it, and your points about what to put in it are a good conceptual start.
The devil is in the details, of course.  Always is.
I think we're at a point where our respective fundamental assumptions about the issues are irreconcilably different, so I think I'll bow out of the discussion before it gets acrimonious.  It's been a pleasure on my end- I hope you can say the same.
Intelligent, civilized discussions are a wonderful thing.  Thanks for this one.

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.