An argument that ethanol is not as rosy as solution as the media think it is.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/05/the_many_myths_of_ethanol.html

I think the problem is in this issue that there cant be both ways in politics,
(for some reason, heh) its always like oil vs ethanol and so on,
ethanol can be good choice in small scale, some industries byproducts ethanol.
Frikin politicians always willing to gain popularity in one way or another,
never working together to solve something in the name of common sense.

From post 1 link:

"...without subsidies, ethanol would cost much more than gasoline. ...Studies show that the amount of energy ethanol produces and the amount needed to make it are roughly the same. "It takes a lot of fossil fuels to make the fertilizer, to run the tractor, to build the silo, to get that corn to a processing plant, to run the processing plant," Taylor says.

And because ethanol degrades, it can't be moved in pipelines the way that gasoline is. So many more big, polluting trucks will be needed to haul it.

...already led to a sharp increase in corn growing -- which means much more land must be plowed. That means much more fertilizer, more water used on farms and more pesticides. ..."

Billy T note: And this land was out of production as it is less productive so these fertilizer etc requirments are greater (to produce same yield.) As soybean field switch to corn, Brazil will be permanently the worlds leading exporter of soybeans. Most go to China, so another adverse effect is that US will ship less to China, making dollar collase occur a little sooner as the US/China BoT shifts even more in China's favor.

Many more disadvantages of Alcohol from corn discussed at:

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1076237&postcount=15
From thread "How DUMB can US Voters BE?"

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=937774&postcount=1
From thread "Alcohol, the obvious answer - Yes or No?"

Ethanol is a bunch of rubbish, as it is now produced from CORN! The amount of alchohol producing fibers in corn is nonsense compared to other crops, like say, hemp, or sugar cane. You won't see either of those take place though, because the corn camp has government funding in its pockets.

~String

A small scientific criticism, I think the alcohol comes from sugars, not fiber. That's why the Brazilian sugar cane industry is able to produce alcohol cheaply.

Still, I think String's point stands on its other merits.

It's a subsidy to agribusiness, a powerful lobby of multinational corporations.

It hurts the small farmer, the organic farmer, and the independent farmer.

Degrading one's agricultural land to power cars is obviously foolish - from the point of view of wise government and sound policy only, of course, however relevant that may be.

Ethanol is a bunch of rubbish, as it is now produced from CORN! The amount of alchohol producing fibers in corn is nonsense compared to other crops, like say, hemp, or sugar cane. You won't see either of those take place though, because the corn camp has government funding in its pockets.

Where does "corn syrup" come from? ...beans??

Baron Max

Where does "corn syrup" come from? ...beans??

Baron Max

Baron, the amount of corn syrup that comes from corn is extremely insignificant when you realize JUST how much corn it takes to make corn syrup.

The previous poster (forget the name) who pointed out my mistake, was indeed correct. I should have said carbohydrates or sugars and not fibers (though, some bacteria can break down fibers into ethanol, I cannot say for sure if they are using a mixture or just one strain.

I believe the amount of "usable" sugars in corn is something like 18% whereas in sugar cane it's like 40% and hemp (especially the high glucos / sucrose varieties) is like 50%. Even sugar beats would be a better bet than corn because they produce almost double the amount of sugar. Again, the issue here is that the corn lobby has the funding locked up.

That said, however, even in Brazil, (the country with the highest green-fuel production: sugar cane) the realizations are still poor as the industry is still in its infancy. Is it a good bet? Not sure. Is it worth developing? Yes... but certainly not from pathetic corn.

(in corn's defense, it's pretty hardy and can be grown anywhere... plus with gene splicing around the corner [and from what I've been reading a 40% fermentable variety is less than five years away], these issues may change)

Also-- in order for biofuels to subplant our CURRENT (not the "projected" consumption 20 years from now), the USA would have to go totally vegitarian because the majority of our farmland goes to feed livestock, which in turn goes to feed us. Pound for pound, it takes something like 15 times more plant growing farmland to feed an animal which will in turn feed us than it does to feed us directly off of that same piece of plant growing farmland. Since our current consumption of petrol is so great that it would force much of the usable farmland to switch to biofuels AT CURRENT consumption levels, we would all have to do without our merry Thanksgiving turkeys... or whatever comparable animal you may or may not eat in your culture/country.

~String

Baron, the amount of corn syrup that comes from corn is extremely insignificant when you realize JUST how much corn it takes to make corn syrup.

The previous poster (forget the name) who pointed out my mistake, was indeed correct.

I believe the amount of "usable" sugars in corn is something like 18%...

I don't disagree with your facts, but with corn, the byproducts of taking the sugars can still be used to feed pigs and cattle and chickens. With sugar cane or beets, that ain't possible. So corn can provide both with just the one plant ...pretty neat, huh?

And let's not forget that in the midwest, we can grow so freakin' much corn that it'll blot out the sun! Where in America can we grow sugar cane or sugar beets? Pretty limited, ain't it? Or is it that you want to give all that business to the South Americans instead of Americans?

But, really, I think it's all a bunch of political bullshit. If we don't hurry up and start building nuclear power plants, we're gonna' be left in the dust. We can use the oil for lubricants, etc, and electric for most everything else. Nukes are the way to go .....both in war and in peace!

Baron Max

I don't disagree with your facts, but with corn, the byproducts of taking the sugars can still be used to feed pigs and cattle and chickens. With sugar cane or beets, that ain't possible. So corn can provide both with just the one plant ...pretty neat, huh?

You are right. There is useful byproducts, but NOT enough to justify a "corn only" approach.

Where in America can we grow sugar cane or sugar beets? Pretty limited, ain't it?

Sugar cane can only be growing in the southern states... and the wet ones at that. Sugar beats, however, are as hardy as potatoes and corn and can be grown anywhere. That said, however, there are "other" crops that grow quickly and readily. Hemp, for example. If not hemp, believe it or not, there is a fast growing spruce tree (two year growing cycle to get to about ten feet) that produces sap like a maple tree and is about 30% fermentable... and the biproducts are also very useful-- paper and wood pulp. I can't rememer why that one lost out so totally... but more than likely it's because the corn loby had more sway with state and federal legislatures.

But, really, I think it's all a bunch of political bullshit. If we don't hurry up and start building nuclear power plants, we're gonna' be left in the dust. We can use the oil for lubricants, etc, and electric for most everything else. Nukes are the way to go .....both in war and in peace!

Agreed, the USA should be on an all nuclear/solar/hydro electric power track by the year 2025. No more coal or oil... and only a few natural gas power plants to jocky production during peak times (gas powerd turbines can power up and down very quickly to provide power to big cities "on the fly").

~String

Agreed, the USA should be on an all nuclear/solar/hydro electric power track by the year 2025. No more coal or oil... and only a few natural gas power plants to jocky production during peak times (gas powerd turbines can power up and down very quickly to provide power to big cities "on the fly").

As stupid and ignorant as I am, if I can see that, why can't everyone else?

Baron Max

You're not supid... and obviously not ignorant. Just closed minded. But on this issue, I can't see anybody disagreeing with you. Again, the only thing that stops this change is the fact that "big oil" keeps Congress sufficiently in its pockets that you aren't going to see any drastic changes any time soon.

~String

superstring99

Actually String, it is the environmentalist that have killed Nuclear Energy, Big Oil wouldn't care about Nuclear Power for the energy needs, as most of the oil is used in transportation and heating, and even taking heating out of the realm of big oil and moving it to electric, from nuclear power there would end up being a benefit to big oil, as they wouldn't have to worry about the chance from auto fuels to heating fuels, this alone would save them tremendous amounts of money every year.

Actually String, it is the environmentalist that have killed Nuclear Energy, ....

Yep, the damned environmentalist just killed some new nuke power plants here in Texas just a few months ago! And now we're building a couple of new coal-fired plants, plus refurbishing two other coal-fired plants. The coal-fired plants are much, much worse for the environment, but.... Well, we need more power, so.... Default to coal-fired. Sad, huh?

Baron Max

Yes I wonder were we would be with our energy problems but for the environmentalist, I don't want to go back to the 50's but the drilling for oil is so much safer than it was in the 50's and 60's, that I don't remember the last time there was blow out on a rig.
The same can be said for Nuclear Power, our designs are used all over the world, and no problems in over 28 years, and at that the accident at Three Mile was so minor that out side of the plant the rise in radiation barely rose above the back ground levels, and the new systems are quantum's of levels safer than the old systems.

The day when a private company will insure a nuclear power plant against mishap, no special regulations needed, we can take another look.

The day when the very first batch of nuke waste finds a safe home, would be another milestone.

Until then, nuclear power is too expensive, too vulnerable, and too dangerous to bother with. The current flap in Iran is jsut the latest example of one of the many serious negatives of nuclear power.

Uranium, btw, is not a renewable resource.

The day when a private company will insure a nuclear power plant against mishap, no special regulations needed, we can take another look.

The day when the very first batch of nuke waste finds a safe home, would be another milestone.

Until then, nuclear power is too expensive, too vulnerable, and too dangerous to bother with. The current flap in Iran is jsut the latest example of one of the many serious negatives of nuclear power.

Uranium, btw, is not a renewable resource.

No... Uranium is not a renewable resource... but there is enough of it to last a long while... until something else NON fossil fuel-ish arrives. Moreover, if you can name on nuclear accident that has happened in an industrialized nation within the last 30 years I might reconsider. But, nuclear energy is perfectly safe and what little waste is left can be disposed of in such a way as to make it the most effective resourse that does the least damage to the environment. Wind energy, hydroelectric and solar energy just aren't reliable enough at this time to provide the electricity needs of the planet. Nuclear fuel is.

~String

I agree with String's comments above.

As usual, environmentalists, with their misguided zealotry, are doing more to harm to this country's environment by keeping it addicted to coal and foreign oil than any other group out there.

Moreover, if you can name on nuclear accident that has happened in an industrialized nation within the last 30 years I might reconsider. Reconsider what, your assumptions of safety in the construction of hundreds of new nuclear power plants worldwide

when even one little processing facility in Iran is some kind of emergency?

But, nuclear energy is perfectly safe and what little waste is left can be disposed of in such a way as to make it the most effective resourse that does the least damage to the environment. There are hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste currently without a permanent home. Got any ideas? Cheap, safe ones?

A few miles from my house the nuke plant - a fine, well-run, emergency free, productive facility with years of operation experience behind it - was shut down for a while recently when a control box fell off an inside wall unexpectedly, triggering automatic safety devices.

It landed on a section of steam pipes, fortunately doing no emergency damage. Nobody was hurt. The impact did not, for example, itself interfere with the shutdown response, as could have happened. But luck is not something that we should depend on, even at long odds, when the possible consequences are so very bad.

This plant is one of a couple whose meltdown could take out the Mississippi River.

Humans have a built in difficulty in handling small probabilities of disastrous events, when multiple opporunities for those probabilities are present. Our intuitions don't work.

Again: no insurance company will cover a nuclear power plant. They are just about the only business in America right now that can operate without insurance - the government has pledged coverage, apparently.

And we don't have as much uranium as people think - especially if demand rises.

Some forms of wind, and especially solar (not the photovoltaic, the heat engine stuff) are available now at costs comparable to large nuclear projects - at current tech levels, with large allowances for duplication and inefficient installation, far less than a hundred square miles of Arizona desert farmed with heat-engine solar generators would meet the electrical power demand of the entire US. Sure, that's a big project - so is nuclear proliferation. And the lack of downside is attrractive, no?

Reconsider what, your assumptions of safety in the construction of hundreds of new nuclear power plants worldwide

when even one little processing facility in Iran is some kind of emergency?

Your comparisons are preposterous since one is for weapons and the other is for electricity. Second, I could not care less what "other" nations use. I'm talking about the USA only and it's reliance on oil. If the mideast uses fossil fuels 'till the cows come home, good for them.

There are hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste currently without a permanent home. Got any ideas? Cheap, safe ones?

1)underground for now. 2) once space-vehicles become safer, then it could be jetisoned into the sun... what, within 50 years?

A few miles from my house the nuke plant - a fine, well-run, emergency free, productive facility with years of operation experience behind it - was shut down for a while recently when a control box fell off an inside wall unexpectedly, triggering automatic safety devices.

It landed on a section of steam pipes, fortunately doing no emergency damage. Nobody was hurt. The impact did not, for example, itself interfere with the shutdown response, as could have happened. But luck is not something that we should depend on, even at long odds, when the possible consequences are so very bad.

It doesn't sound like luck had anything to do with it-- it sounds more like the safety precautions taken to ensure nothing SERIOUSLY went wrong did their job, and everything turned out alright.

Again: no insurance company will cover a nuclear power plant. They are just about the only business in America right now that can operate without insurance - the government has pledged coverage, apparently.

HA! I love this one. Some other things NO insurance company will touch: insuring a "big box" retail store like Wal-Mart or Target. Why? Because there is no forseeable profit in it. Other things? The Hoover dam is uninsured. Oil tankers cannot be insured, even under Lloyds or AIG. Most skyscrapers in big cities sit, "uninsured" (though the owner is required to show proof of financial responsibility to cover emergency costs). The fact that nuclear plants site is uninsured isn't a sign that "it's sure to melt down!" rather its a sign that no insurance company has the ability to cover the cost if it should ever happen (as required by law).

Some forms of wind, and especially solar (not the photovoltaic, the heat engine stuff) are available now at costs comparable to large nuclear projects - at current tech levels, with large allowances for duplication and inefficient installation, far less than a hundred square miles of Arizona desert farmed with heat-engine solar generators would meet the electrical power demand of the entire US. Sure, that's a big project - so is nuclear proliferation. And the lack of downside is attrractive, no?

I'm not saying that those aren't good investments... just, in the USA, I think we need to invest more heavily in nuclear power as well.

~String

iceaura

Some forms of wind, and especially solar (not the photovoltaic, the heat engine stuff) are available now at costs comparable to large nuclear projects - at current tech levels, with large allowances for duplication and inefficient installation, far less than a hundred square miles of Arizona desert farmed with heat-engine solar generators would meet the electrical power demand of the entire US. Sure, that's a big project - so is nuclear proliferation. And the lack of downside is attrractive, no?

If this was so simple and reliable a source of energy it would have been already developed.
Now what is the major down side to this? there must be some big one as no one has tried to put this into a full scale working project. One thing I can think of is that there isn't a proper infrastructure to utilize these sources, and that there isn't a large enough manufacturing capability to build the size of the systems to make a difference in the power levels needed for the nations industrial needs.
And maybe they can't find insurers to back the projects?
One other thing that I know of why many of these project aren't done is People like the Kennedy's who have the NIMBY attitude, and the environmentalist who have shut down wind farms because they endanger birds with the blades of the wind turbines.

Your comparisons are preposterous since one is for weapons and the other is for electricity. That's what the Iranians keep pointing out. It doesn't seem to settle the matter, though.
1)underground for now. 2) once space-vehicles become safer, then it could be jetisoned into the sun... what, within 50 years? I hate to break it to you, but Star Trek is a dramatic TV show made up of fictional events and including much fictional technology. We can't actually do any of that stuff. And 50 years will be a little late - the huge unsolved problem we have now is less than fifty years old, and from the small early stages. Quadrupling it before a solution is even in sight would be rank idiocy.
It doesn't sound like luck had anything to do with it-- it sounds more like the safety precautions taken to ensure nothing SERIOUSLY went wrong did their job, and everything turned out alright. There were no safety precautions taken to handle the event of that control box falling fifteen feet off the wall and landing on major steam pipes. No one had foreseen that possibility. They were saved by sheer, dumb, luck - nothing vital was taken out except the main plant controls themselves, and the plant was able to shut down on backup systems in good order. If structures or controls vital to the safety shutdown had been damaged, say by chance installed under that box instead of across the room, or if the pipes it landed on had been seriously damaged by this event they had not been designed to handle, the results would have entered the realm perhaps best described by the engineer testifying in the Three Mile Island near-miss: "We were seeing modes of behavior that we had never anticipated, even in training". HA! I love this one. Some other things NO insurance company will touch: insuring a "big box" retail store like Wal-Mart or Target. Why? Because there is no forseeable profit in it. Other things? The Hoover dam is uninsured. Oil tankers cannot be insured, even under Lloyds or AIG. Most skyscrapers in big cities sit, "uninsured" (though the owner is required to show proof of financial responsibility to cover emergency costs). The Hoover Dam is not a private business - dam disasters are covered by the government. Oil tankers are not "businesses in America", and even so they are insured against the damage they do to other ships, docks and ports, etc. The unwillingness of insurance companies to cover the scale of risks an ocean oil spill represents is indeed interesting - that is exactly the reason no one will insure a nuke plant. The owners of skyscrapers are covered by various insurance policies - as the WTC lawsuits show - and their owners must demonstrate ability to cover emergency costs (impossible, with nukes). Big box retail stores are insured against harm to the community - if they catch fire, say, and the fire spreads to someone's house, that person can recover damages in court.
Do you have any actually relevant examples ? The reason no insurance company will cover a nuke plant is that the risk is too great - even minor accidents can do so much damage to the community that the small odds of them do not reassure anyone with money on the line. The odds are not zero, or anything close to zero, and everyone knows that. I'm not saying that those aren't good investments... just, in the USA, I think we need to invest more heavily in nuclear power as well. Unfortunately, those alternatives probably exclude. If we put our money into nukes and the necessary grid, waste disposal, etc, we aren't going to have enough to go heavy on the solar. Nukes are extremely expensive, in addition to their extreme risk, concentrated political control, and limited lifespan.
If this was so simple and reliable a source of energy it would have been already developed.
Now what is the major down side to this? It would be very expensive up front, be probably less profitable than current setups (especially at first with the startup probems of brand new technology that might not work), and would benefit mostly people other than the ones incurring the costs, while costing mostly the people who would be in position to invest - so it's a government project.

This government is not interested. This government is interested in fusion, nukes, coal subsidies, and securing oil fields. We won't be seeing this in the US first.

...once space-vehicles become safer, then it could be jetisoned into the sun...You suffer from the common mis conception that it is relatively easy to "jetisoned into the sun." A much smaller and cheaper rocket could be used to jetisoned into "deep space." Small point but I try to correct errors / misconceptions when I notice them.

Another point in need of correction is that wind power kills a significant number of birds. It rarely kills any and when it does, the were probably sick or defective. Birds, especially those that can do any "soaring" and almost all, except humming birds, can to some extent have highly developed ability to sense very slight wind currents, like the "up drafts" they soar on. All wind machines make enormous changes in the wind current both ahead of them and behind them even making the latter full of turbelance. No normal bird would fail to sense these changes. - I ran a small wind power experiment for US coast guard at station near Norfolk VA. the only dead seagulls I ever saw wer under the building windows, not the wind machine. If you are concerned about birds being killed, paint you windows black Window per square foot of surface kill at least 10,000 birds for every one a wind mill kills.

One final point about photo-cell power: The cost of it would not fall even 50% if the solar cells were free. The other components needed to collect the energy (installation, copper wires, land, cleaning and repair)* and to convert the DC into high voltage AC for transmission from where land is cheap and sunny to the city are called the BoS cost (Balance of System) by those who actually know about the economics of this. The BoS cost is more than 50% of the total.

And just to close "on thread" - Alcohol is about half the price of gasoline here in Brazil and nearly all non-imported cars use it.
------------------------
*First three are one time capital costs. Even with the verylow interest rates of last decade, probably never to return again as allnow recognized that "liquidity" has caused great and current problems, solarcell power was sevaral times more expensive than grid power, even the most expensive form of the grid power and at least 10 times more than the cheaper forms. -Few will accept a five fold increase in their electric bills.)

That's what the Iranians keep pointing out. It doesn't seem to settle the matter, though.

Again, Ice... I don't give two shits what people outside the USA do with their power development. Beyond that, Iran IS lying, so this only serves to provce
my point, that Iran should not be allowed to develop nuclear reactors for ANY reason.

I hate to break it to you, but Star Trek is a dramatic TV show made up of fictional events and including much fictional technology. We can't actually do any of that stuff. And 50 years will be a little late - the huge unsolved problem we have now is less than fifty years old, and from the small early stages. Quadrupling it before a solution is even in sight would be rank idiocy.

No shit Sherlock. And your typical agitprop coupled with this ridiculous hyperbole only serves to prove your cluelessness. OH, WOW, you brought up Star Trek because I included the actual development of space technology over the next fifty years. Because... you know... that technology will just stagnate. Furthermore, storing the waste right here on Earth is totally safe even if the USA DOUBLES its production over the next 50 years (whcih it won't) the storage capacity under Yucca Mtn. alone has enough room RIGHT NOW for ever single canister of nuclear sludge produced in every nuclear reactor in the USA since nuclear reactors first started producing sludge... AND enough room for decades more. Then, of course, you have the geologically stable ridges currently being explored by the federal governemtn in the Upper Peninsula which will effectively double our disposal capacity at a safe mile to a mile and a half beneath the surface. Even better, the British are close to exhausting the coal veins they've been digging (for almost 50 years) under the North Sea, located ten miles out and about three miles underground. So deep and SO far, in fact, that they are considered to be the most impregnable places on Earth. Sounds like a great storage place to me. And it must to the British, because they are considering the same thing for European sludge disposal (at a hefty, HEFTY price)

There were no safety precautions taken to handle the event of that control box falling fifteen feet off the wall and landing on major steam pipes. No one had foreseen that possibility. They were saved by sheer, dumb, luck - nothing vital was taken out except the main plant controls themselves, and the plant was able to shut down on backup systems in good order. If structures or controls vital to the safety shutdown had been damaged, say by chance installed under that box instead of across the room, or if the pipes it landed on had been seriously damaged by this event they had not been designed to handle, the results would have entered the realm perhaps best described by the engineer testifying in the Three Mile Island near-miss: "We were seeing modes of behavior that we had never anticipated, even in training".

Again... how many disasters have occurred in the western world's nuclear reactors? Just checking.

The Hoover Dam is not a private business - dam disasters are covered by the government.

Hrrrr? What? The Hoover Dam is owned by the federal goverment, but operated by private consortiums. Same thing with many of the nuclear reactors. And, NO natural or unnatural disasters are covered by insurance companies, they are, indeed, covered under the typical Federal Disaster Relief Program. Your comparisons continue to be ridiculous. The reason, and here it is again, that they can't be insured because the insurance company MUST show financial solvency to cover such disasters. It has nothing to do with, "MY GOD, THEY WON'T TOUCH IT!" But more to do with, "Where's the profit?" It's the same reason why auto insurance companies won't operate in New Jersey without state support-- there's just no profit in it (I worked for Liberty Mutual for four years)

Oil tankers are not "businesses in America", and even so they are insured against the damage they do to other ships, docks and ports, etc.

Actually, you are wrong. They aren't covered. They are "self insured" meaning, that the company has demonstrated sufficient assets that can be liquidated in the event of a tradgedy to repair whatever damage a "set number" of ships can cause. They do not, for example, have to be able to cover the damage that ALL of them would cause if ALL of them crashed at the same time-- no one has that cash. What they do is have to cover the reasonable expectation of loss (using trends, generally over the last decade) then exagerated to cover most "what if" scenarios (usually double or tripple). IN the case of shipping its the ability to cover one crash every two years (if memory holds), since most of the time a large shipping company won't crash more than one every six years. Thus, they aren't insured-- they are guarenteed financial responsibilty in bonds taken out on company assets that are "liquidatable". Sorry Charlie... no insurance.

The unwillingness of insurance companies to cover the scale of risks an ocean oil spill represents is indeed interesting - that is exactly the reason no one will insure a nuke plant.

Which proves nothing because of the multitude of "other" business both smaller and larger that ARE NOT covered because no company can prove the ability to cover such a loss no matter HOW implausable such a loss might be.

The owners of skyscrapers are covered by various insurance policies - as the WTC lawsuits show - and their owners must demonstrate ability to cover emergency costs

Thus, most large insurers no longer cover skyscrapers in the USA because several when belly up after 9/11. Again, most are "self insured".

Big box retail stores are insured against harm to the community - if they catch fire, say, and the fire spreads to someone's house, that person can recover damages in court.

Negative. My current employer is a 20 billion retail corporation a pittence compared to Costco's 60 billion, Home Depots 70 billion and Wal-Mart's mamoth 300 billion-- all of them, of course, are totally self insured. I previously worked in retail for Wal-Mart, Target and Costco, all of whome carried ZERO insurance. They "self insured". Don't know if you remember that whole "Katrina" thing-- Home Depot, Lowes, Kohls, Wal-Mart, Sears/K-Mart, Costco and Target all reported significant losses that year because they had to replace ALL of their lost property ON THEIR OWN (and big-evil Wal-Mart was the only one who continued paying it's associates for six months afterwords, and placed them at any other store they wanted to go to... those bastards). Big box retailers cannot get insured. THERE'S NO PROFIT IN IT. They "self insure". But, I already explained that.

And the reason, plain and simple, that the USA currently does not invest in nuclear power has nothing to do with the "danger" but has to do with Republicans getting whipped by big oil/coal companies and the Democrats getting smacked by the green lobby which has shown absolutly NO empirical evidence demostrating the dangers of nuclear power... only the "what if's" based upon speculation and few facts.

~String

String seems to have Ice's normal chum and nonsense well in hand, so all that I would add is that the "no-insurance" claim of his is totally bogus.

Having just returned from there and looked at property, I know people in Florida right now can't get Hurricane insurance, flood insurance, etc. So using Ice's logic that would mean owning a home in Florida is so dangerous it should be undertaken no matter what the safeguards and circumstances. Now obviously that's not the case, and what is the case is more in step with String's comments: IE, the insurance in Florida has all dried up because there is no profit to be made there for the insurance companies...

Furthermore, storing the waste right here on Earth is totally safe even if the USA DOUBLES its production over the next 50 years (whcih it won't) the storage capacity under Yucca Mtn. alone has enough room RIGHT NOW for ever single canister of nuclear sludge produced in every nuclear reactor in the USA since nuclear reactors first started producing sludge... Yucca Mt is not all that safe - let alone getting the stuff there, which is not safe at all. And the upper peninsula of Michigan ! ? Please tell me they aren't going to ship the stuff on the Great Lakes.

btw: the fission byproducts are not the only, or even the worst, part of the waste stream, right? There are the decommissioned reactors to consider - dozens of them, coming up any day now - - -
Hrrrr? What? The Hoover Dam is owned by the federal goverment, but operated by private consortiums. Same thing with many of the nuclear reactors. And, NO natural or unnatural disasters are covered by insurance companies, they are, indeed, covered under the typical Federal Disaster Relief Program. Your comparisons continue to be ridiculous. As far as I can tell, your comments continue to support my point, which is that nuclear power plants are not insurable for the harms they might cause the community due to the scale of those harms. The taxpayer is on the hook - which will be a minor point, if the next control box lands kittycorner the other way instead of flat side square, and a single step of the scram procedure hits a snag.
Again... how many disasters have occurred in the western world's nuclear reactors? Just checking. So far so good. Must mean we're safe !
Feynman, the physicist, had a comment on that kind of reasoning as applied to the Space Shuttle - as he pointed out with respect to the O ring engineering reports, if things are going wrong that should not be going wrong, that were not anticipated, that are not understood or predicted in advance, the fact that disaster has been avoided so far is not a reason to think that safety has been demonstrated by its avoidance. When you have near misses, the "near" part is more significant than the "miss" part, for assessing risk of disaster.

Again: human intuition is not good at evaluating the risk of infrequent catastrophes. We need to use stone cold sober reasoning. Nuclear power involves a small risk of enormous, irreparable disaster. It's worth quite a bit to not run that risk If solar power and conservation, for example, is only twice as expensive as nukes, it's probably well worth the money.
Actually, you are wrong. They aren't covered. They are "self insured" meaning, that the company has demonstrated sufficient assets that can be liquidated in the event of a tradgedy to repair whatever damage a "set number" of ships can cause.
- - -
IN the case of shipping its the ability to cover one crash every two years (if memory holds), since most of the time a large shipping company won't crash more than one every six years. Thus, they aren't insured-- they are guarenteed financial responsibilty in bonds taken out on company assets that are "liquidatable". Sorry Charlie... no insurance..
- - -
Big box retailers cannot get insured. THERE'S NO PROFIT IN IT. They "self insure". But, I already explained that. Having just returned from there and looked at property, I know people in Florida right now can't get Hurricane insurance, flood insurance, etc. So using Ice's logic that would mean owning a home in Florida is so dangerous it should be undertaken no matter what the safeguards and circumstances. Uh, you guys really that stupid, or are you playing games to avoid the argument ?

You may be fascinated by the technical differences between "insured" and "self insured" and "guaranteed financial responsibility", but they are irrelevant to my point. They're covered, if they do harm to the community. There is a responsible party. The damage from any given oil tanker that plows into somebody's fishing boat is covered. The Exxon Valdez spill was the legal financial responsibility of Exxon (not that they paid). Nuclear power plants are not covered, even technically, and would not be operating today if they had to be. The kinds of damage they can do - just one, all by itself - are simply impossible for anyone to cover - their owners, Lloyds of London, anyone.

They're too hazardous, and everyone knows it. No one is legally responsible for the damages from a nuke plant accident, and if anyone was they would shut the plant down ASAP.

No one is talking about insuring the plant itself - which of course no one will do either, but that's another issue involving the extremely high cost of nuke power.
which has shown absolutly NO empirical evidence demostrating the dangers of nuclear power... only the "what if's" based upon speculation and few facts. Near accidents are facts, in the safety analysis business. There have been quite a few of those. And speculation - informed speculation - is absolutely key to estimating risk, especially with something so bad that it cannot be allowed to happen even once. If we have to have a string of accidents to teach us not to build nukes, it's too fucking late.

The Navy procedure for dealing with onboard nukes includes the following rule: any discovered violation of precaution is treated as a disaster event, with the same legal and career consequences as an actual mishap from negligence. And even that kind of rigid seriousness does not prevent all accidents. Nor does it help in the unsolved problem of waste. And the reason, plain and simple, that the USA currently does not invest in nuclear power has nothing to do with the "danger" It should.

Yucca Mt is not all that safe - let alone getting the stuff there, which is not safe at all. And the upper peninsula of Michigan ! ? Please tell me they aren't going to ship the stuff on the Great Lakes.

Notice how I provided specifics to my point. Would you care to back up your claims with something more than rash statements? You're going to have to do better than just say, "Yucca isn't safe." Because both the independent inspections and government inspections all say something different. The ONLY thing that has stopped the utilization of Yucca Mountain has been the green lobbies' in Nevada and within the Democratic party that has forced the moritorium on the moving of nuclear waste to that location. Yucca is perfectly safe. In fact it's so totally and overwhelmingly safe that (and here's the clincher) THERE'S ALREADY BIOWASTE AND NUCLEAR WASTE THERE! It's located totally outside of the water table, and has a spectacular crystiline growth that, within a few decades of a section being closed up, literally grows to surround and encyst all containers contained therein. WHAT'S MORE is the fact that each and every container within Yucca Mountain has to be tripple enclosed in tanks. So, let's assume that, in the rare case something "leaks", then it's sealed in by salt and mineral crystials, and if that doesn't work, guess what? It's located almost a mile underground in one of the most arrid places on Earth with zero ground water access because it's sealed under nearly a thousand meters of granite. You don't get much safer than that.

So, I'm just curious... can you back up your ridiculous claim that it's somehow, unsafe, or is this just typical green nonsense.

the fission byproducts are not the only, or even the worst, part of the waste stream, right? There are the decommissioned reactors to consider - dozens of them, coming up any day now

My point exactly! And, thus, the generous size of these underground holds. There is enough room for pretty much all the nuclear (and bio) waste currently in the USA-- that includes the spare parts too.

You really have NO idea just how much space is down there, do you?

And, yes, there is a similar site about a mile and a half under the ground (so far down, in fact, that it's temperature registers at about 100 degrees F.), is surrounded by solid granite, has zero water table access and has a plethora of salt and mineral crystal growth.

~String

String, you can't go and get all specific like that. Arguing with Ice is all about opinions, unsubstantiated correlations and gross semantics with little or no detail to back any of them up...

My bad.

~String

So, I'm just curious... can you back up your ridiculous claim that it's somehow, unsafe, or is this just typical green nonsense. I notice you ignore the transportation factor - which was the point of noting the sheer amount of material that has to be stored, even now before the new investments. One reason I notice the transport factors is that a nuke waste train was sent right past my back yard once, and the safety feature that was to guarantee no bad person could steal and misuse that waste was to encase it in 500 pound cement blocks. They were on flatbed rail cars, not even chained down let alone alarmed or secured, and the train was to move very slowly (another precaution). According to the experts, it would take heavy moving equipment to handle the waste blocks, and the guards front and back plus the moving train prevented such a deed.

I could have stolen on of those waste blocks in fifteen seconds, by myself, with my own pickup, on the dark curve a half mile from my house, and been over the river into the next city before they even missed it. Sometimes I wish I had, just to make the point.

But you probably want more than personal anecdote, to back my "ridiculous assertions". Here's the very first hit on Google. It's just one set of findings, and all are controversial of course, but it isn't "ridiculous". ( Google is a search engine, by which if you are curious about something like "water table of Yucca Mountain" or "geological hazards of the Yucca Mountain waste repository" you can call up many dozens of articles of various credibilities - even DOE publications, if your standards are low enough to accept them in a matter involving nuclear power. )

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/trac/trac01.htm
Collectively, the TRAC-NA findings constitute strong evidence that the area of Yucca Mountain has experienced burst-like eruptions of hydrothermal and gaseous plumes in the vadose zone and at the topographic surface. The eruptions are found to have occurred intermittently over a considerable period from about 8-9 Ma ago up to, essentially, the present. We conclude that the eruptions were triggered by tectonic events, such as earthquakes and/or volcanic intrusions. Given the tectonic setting of Yucca Mountain, which is characterized by recently (geologically speaking) active volcanic centers and by many active faults with an associated geophysical environment that is quite anomalous, there is little doubt that the eruptions will continue to occur and, in fact, could occur at any time in the future.

Specifically, during future local tectonic activity that would include intruding hydrothermal fluids and gases rising along faults and fractures, we conclude that such fluids could inundate the repository and, because the host rock would be at an elevated temperature (above 100°C), steam and super-heated water would be produced and fill the repository, with steam and other gases (particularly carbon dioxide and methane) escaping into the atmosphere. Under these conditions, and in the presence of highly saline fluids, there is little doubt that the waste packages would undergo very rapid corrosive breakdown resulting in the release of radionuclides into the biosphere. The sequence of events to be expected at Yucca Mountain as a consequence of this local tectonic activity are summarized in Figure 4. Thus, a release of radionuclides would be carried into the atmosphere, as well as into the hydrosphere, and spread rapidly. Should this occur, there is little doubt that the effects would be disastrous, both regionally and worldwide.

But you don't really need something like that to set off the alarm bells. You have this: It's located totally outside of the water table, and has a spectacular crystiline growth that, within a few decades of a section being closed up, literally grows to surround and encyst all containers contained therein. Crystals don't just grow, usually - they usually involve a solvent, and transport. If you have "spectacular crystalline growth" you had better check your assumptions of no water access very carefully.

btw: about all that space "down there" http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/info_library/program_docs/annualreports/00ar/00ar-ac.htm
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982 provides that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) may approve the emplacement in the first repository of a quantity of spent fuel containing no more than 70,000 metric tons of heavy metal (MTHM) or a quantity of solidified high-level waste (HLW) resulting from the reprocessing of such quantity of spent fuel. The 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act requires the Secretary to report to the President and to Congress on or after January 1, 2007, but not later than January 1, 2010, on the need for a second repository. The total inventory of commercial SNF and DOE-managed nuclear materials requiring geologic disposal, projected through 2035, exceeds 70,000 MTHM. Due to projected nuclear power reactor license renewals, the total may reach approximately 105,000 MTHM. That's just fuel waste and processed bomb stuff, assuming serious processing to reduce mass and volume. The decommissioned plants are to remain where they are, sealed on site - there's no room in Yucca for them.

...I could have stolen on of those waste {500lbs} blocks in fifteen seconds, by myself, with my own pickup, {from the moving train}...do tell how.

do tell how. Method #1: The access road on the iinside of the track curve was unmonitored (observation) and allows a pickup to back as close to the tracks as one would want to. It takes me about 2.5 seconds to upend a 500 pound block, and a maximum of three such flips to get the block into the pickup (two if I get the truck very close, and flip directly into it, but that would take very precise timing). Figuring two seconds to get on the car and another two to pry up a finger hold with my prybar and a chock, and I have more than three seconds to get into the pickup (door left open, engine running) and take off.

The first turn is two blocks away, and the tarp, mattress and box spring (disguise and cover) wait in a dirt pulloff jsut around it. This is not visible from on the tracks. Assuming the theft is noticed as soon as the train straightens out (and identified as a theft, rather than an accident) I have about a half a minute to drive to and load this stuff - so it's carefully set up, and the rope ties are preknotted with trucker's hitches in a diamond pattern that doesn't look quick to rig. Using the immediately available side road, that leads past several apartment building complexes and is not the direct exit, to leave, I can hope to be mistaken for someone moving furniture if any alerted police approaching the emergency scene by an indirect route for some reason do see me - even at 3 AM, this is common in that neighborhood.

The road leads to a park access road, that is chained at night. I have a duplicate key for the padlock, obtained by picking the lock last winter when the road was unused (temporarily replacing it with another lock for appearances) and taking it to a locksmith in a nearby town to get a key made. The road leads to a boat launch on the Mississippi, and there is an undercut cottonwood fallen into the river just downstream. The cement block goes under that tree, in about four feet of moving, muddy water and obscured from above, using a mover's fourwheel dolly on the class five parking gravel and a mover's hump strap to lever the dolly and walk it on end to drop position, as well as make any final adjustments under water.

Then it's around about and home with my box spring and mattress and tarp.

Of course things can go wrong in there. But I should have done it anyway.

The point is: the people who reassure us about the safety of nuclear power and so forth need a little more humility. They haven't thought of everything, they never will have, and the possible consequences of the unexpected are just too severe.

Ice, you're such a rebel...on the internet...

Ice, you're such a rebel...on the internet... Hey, not everyone can have an actual life - - -

To iceaura:

your "method 1" plan seems well though out, perhaps may work, but here is a tip for you:
Remove the license plates and use acid to remover any stamped numbers on engine block etc. as there is certainly a non zero chance (assuming you can get block off train) that you will drop it on your truck too hard, disabling the truck (busted springs etc.)
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Might be a useful public service, if you are willing to run the risk of going to jail.* I doubt that one block placed in the river at water edge would do much harm to even to most of the crayfish it falls on. Surely it would be found before the concrete is erroded away by the stream - go for it, just don't name me as "co-conspiritor" if caught, ok. After all, I am only suggesting how to lessen your chance of being caught, don't even know this bend, train, block, etc. even exist.:D
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* authorities rarely like to look like the fools they often are.