President Neelix threatens to pull California wildfire money

[Admiral X]

I'd go solar before I went wind. The only real downsides are that production cannot be constant, and the toxic nature of the materials used in constructing the panels. Wind turbines need a lot more maintenance and have a tendency to kill birds as well as causing localized warming. Personally I favor nuclear, though, particularly with Thorium reactors, which produce much less radioactive waste and has much better safety.

[Yukaphile]

Nuclear makes me uneasy. Look what happened in Japan in... was it 2011 or so? When that big tsunami hit.

[TGLS]

The reactor was underrated for the kinds of earthquakes Japan gets, and the tsunami led to flooding and a perfect storm on consequences hit. On the other hand, the other fifty reactors in Japan were just fine.

[Madner Kami]

I'd go solar before I went wind. The only real downsides are that production cannot be constant, and the toxic nature of the materials used in constructing the panels. Wind turbines need a lot more maintenance and have a tendency to kill birds as well as causing localized warming. Personally I favor nuclear, though, particularly with Thorium reactors, which produce much less radioactive waste and has much better safety.

The bird-arguement is none. I have tons of wind turbines in my area and guess what there's not. Correct, there are no bird-corpses. I can go over to a turbine farm of 20 turbines right now and tape it, if you don't believe it. This is the single most silly arguement in this debate to ever be brought up. I literally killed more birds by hitting them with my car this year (two, to be precise), than I ever saw bird corpses underneath a wind turbine.

Similar to "the toxic nature of production". Have you seen what coal mining and oil drilling does? Fracking? Come on, be serious now. Any sort of energy production will pollute the environment and plastics and electronics are not just used in wind turbines or solar panels. Simple steel also isn't exactly an environmental-friendly product, not to even think about current nuclear waste products.

And localized warming? WTF man. True, this does happen, but at most it's a temporary effect heating the immediate ground around the turbine up by 0.5°C. You know why France constantly has to switch off it's reactors in the summer? Because they heat up the water they use to cool themselves by several degrees.

Now mind you, I don't have anything in particular against nuclear power generation and research in that area in special, my beef is almost solely with the lack of security about the existing technology (just look at how old our reactors are and what little investments are done to secure their safe operations; Hello Tihange, you poster-child of irresponsible behaviour, for example) and long-term solutions to current waste products. But treating wind turbines and solar panels as "just as bad or worse" than coal, oil or current nuclear power production is, at best, misguided.

The reactor was underrated for the kinds of earthquakes Japan gets, and the tsunami led to flooding and a perfect storm on consequences hit. On the other hand, the other fifty reactors in Japan were just fine.

One has to wonder whether it's wise to place such a structure in such an area though. True, this was a freak accident, but, for example, placing your backup generators and pumps below the waterline directly on the coast is something you should think twice about in the first place, tsunami or not. Oh and the Fukushima plant wasn't the only one that ran into troubles on that fateful day. Several other reactors went into emergency shutdown as well. Tokai near Tokyo for example, or Onagawa or the reprocessing plant in Rokkasho.

And this isn't even the first time that a major earthquake managed to take out nuclear power plants in Japan. Just think about the not as poplarly known incident at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in 2007.

[Darth Wedgius]

A massive crater was discovered under Greenland recently, and I wonder if that has anything to do with all the geothermal energy available there.

The conclusion is obvious- hit the Earth with enough comets and asteroids and we might be able to get all the clean energy we need.

On the other hand, if we want to go a different (and, I should point out, far less exciting) route for some reason, I would prefer solar or wind over petroleum for both climate and national security reasons. Some of the world's petrodollars end up in a very politically unstable region, and some of that into the hands of people who want to kill us.

I'd like more research into subcritical reactors (e.g., traveling wave, energy amplifiers, etc.) which, while they have a high startup cost, AFAIK don't have the technological cutting edge requirements of fusion reactors. They don't eliminate the threat of a meltdown, but they reduce it, and they produce less long-term waste (and, in some designs, can be used to make some of the worst nuclear waste we already have much less dangerous). People who know a lot more about thermonuclear fusion than I ever will say that we'll have commercial reactors in decades, but people who knew a lot more about thermonuclear fusion than I ever will have been wrong about that before.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

https://www.theonion.com/scientists-pol ... 1819576507

[Yukaphile]

Hmmm... guess nuclear would be a good supplement to the flaws of clean, natural energy, sure. I still hope someday our tech level grows past that. Assuming we survive the next thousand years, of course. Though I still think people who believe you get cancer from solar panels are taking it the wrong direction. Seriously, just take a full leap of faith into fiction and try jumping off a building in your attempt to propel yourself at an excess of speed in order to take flight, because clearly they're all wrong - they just give the special religiously gifted superpowers from the light of our yellow sun, and when they die the world is better off without them, lol.

[TGLS]

One has to wonder whether it's wise to place such a structure in such an area though. True, this was a freak accident, but, for example, placing your backup generators and pumps below the waterline directly on the coast is something you should think twice about in the first place, tsunami or not. Oh and the Fukushima plant wasn't the only one that ran into troubles on that fateful day. Several other reactors went into emergency shutdown as well. Tokai near Tokyo for example, or Onagawa or the reprocessing plant in Rokkasho.

And this isn't even the first time that a major earthquake managed to take out nuclear power plants in Japan. Just think about the not as poplarly known incident at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in 2007.

I'll grant that Fukushima Daiichi was badly thought out. A study about 10 meter sea waves was ignored among other things. The other three reactors were shutdown in accordance with safety protocols (Onagawa was shutdown for too high radiation levels, which is believed to be because of Fukushima Daiichi). Rokkasho was cut off from the grid for too long, and they hadn't planned for that. In other words, disaster management, in general, is hard.

Hmmm... guess nuclear would be a good supplement to the flaws of clean, natural energy, sure.

It really isn't. Nuclear power can't be adjusted well. It produces X MWs, and that's the end of that. Solar and Wind (not Hydro, Hydro works like Nuclear), a variable amount of energy, relying on the rest of the grid to provide power in leaner times. Unless we find big freakin' batteries or something, Solar and Wind are going to rely on natural gas or coal to pick up the slack, because having Solar/Wind add gravy on top of nuclear is just daft.

[Yukaphile]

Well, I'm not an engineer, so this is just gibberish to me. I do know antiboyscout's arguments were laughable, though. Really wish I could have found that Lewis Black segment where he roasted talking points just like his in "Red, White and Screwed." Solar energy can't work because the sun goes down at night. Next you'll say wind can't work because sometimes the wind doesn't blow. Or water can't work because some places on Earth don't have water. It seems simplistic. Why the heck is he even anti boy scout anyway? I'm more anti Chuck Norris than anti boy scout.

[Admiral X]

If you look into Thorium reactors, you'd find them to be much safer than the kind the US is currently stuck with thanks to fear-mongering. Theoretically they could be built in a way to make melt-downs impossible, so we'd never have to worry about anything like Fukushima happening again (which you'll note was no where near as bad as Chernobyl).

The bird-arguement is none. I have tons of wind turbines in my area and guess what there's not. Correct, there are no bird-corpses. I can go over to a turbine farm of 20 turbines right now and tape it, if you don't believe it. This is the single most silly arguement in this debate to ever be brought up. I literally killed more birds by hitting them with my car this year (two, to be precise), than I ever saw bird corpses underneath a wind turbine.

Which is why the government felt the need to make sure the companies operating these turbines are exempt from any penalties from killing endangered birds. Which incidentally, are horribly inefficient and are swimming in oil for lubrication (oh, the irony), and even occasionally light up and burn.


youtu.be/cRVB2i6ZWOU

Also they occasioanlly manage to do so while some poor unfortunate souls are on them trying to maintain them or to try to put out a fire that's started on them, so they are hardly exempt from the poor safety often used as arguments against other forms of energy.

Similar to "the toxic nature of production". Have you seen what coal mining and oil drilling does? Fracking?

You realize ND has a great deal of fracking going on right now and has for a number of years, right? That would be where I am from. So, yeah, I'm aware. This doesn't make the production and disposal of solar panels any less toxic, though. Incidentally this isn't a complete deal-breaker for me, as you might expect of someone who's willing to take the risk with Thorium reactors.

Now mind you, I don't have anything in particular against nuclear power generation and research in that area in special, my beef is almost solely with the lack of security about the existing technology (just look at how old our reactors are and what little investments are done to secure their safe operations; Hello Tihange, you poster-child of irresponsible behaviour, for example) and long-term solutions to current waste products.

Which would all be greatly mitigated by using Thorium.

But treating wind turbines and solar panels as "just as bad or worse" than coal, oil or current nuclear power production is, at best, misguided.

Not really. There are pros and cons for everything. The largest difficulty is finding an alternative that has anywhere near as much "bang for the buck" as fossil fuels. Gas and diesel in particular have a lot of energy potential stored in them. Electric is also a pretty tough sell considering how much additional weight batteries add to any vehicle (not to mention volatility), and the time needed to recharge those batteries in comparison to refueling a regular car or truck.