"The shot heard round the world for American clean energy."

Wind sucks (or blows to be more accurate). I'm on board for solar power. And not that pussy photovoltaic shit that hippies put on their roofs and Arizona wants to have the illegals put in the desert before they deport them, I'm talking about a massive ass solar collector that we slingshot as close to the sun as we possibly can and soak up twenty years worth of sunlight in one go. Fuck yeah!

 

I'm not convinced that we are contributing to global warming on the scale that we are trying to be convinced that we are. Weather works on such a large scale cycle that nobody could be around long enough to truly understand it. Hell, there was a mini ice age from the 1500's to the 1800's.

With that said, we're still fucking this planet up nicely. You can't convince me that burning millions of years worth of fossil fuels in a few centuries is smart and there is no way that dumping huge amounts of pollution into our atmosphere isn't fucking with it's chemical composition. So I'm all for trying out alternative sources of energy, really there isn't much to lose and every little bit helps.

But then again I work in oil and gas and shit needs to pick up soon so we can hire some more staff around here. I'm doing the duties that 3 people were doing 2 years ago... so everybody please go buy an SUV before I go crazy, and not one of them hybrid ones neither!

 

I don't have a problem with wind power, but like others have mentioned it won't ever produce more than a small percentage of our required power.

As others have said, nuclear is probably the most viable option that we have right now. According to a couple of sources I've seen (or multiple people quoting the same sources without giving credit) air pollution from burning coal kills on the order of 24,000 people per year and mining coal kills 3,000 people per year (mostly in China). Nuclear power, on the other hand, has only killed 16,000 people since it's invention. This number includes people who lived near Chernobyl and got cancer years later that may or may not be attributable to the accident. Here's a blog post with some source links

Solar power may also be a good option, but probably not photovoltaic cells. The more promising technology is large mirror farms that focus sunlight on a boiler to produce steam to run conventional turbines. Some of the more recent ones, heat salt to high temperatures which can be stored and used to make steam at night. The efficiencies of some of these are pretty impressive.

Some one mentioned a solar collector stationed near the sun. If you going to do that, you might as well go all out and make a Dyson sphere.

 

Dyson Sphere has the classic problem of "any civilization advanced enough to build one is advanced enough not to need one." What I was (somewhat glibly) proposing would be more like the first satellite in a Dyson swarm.

 

Pebble bed Reactors could well be the way forward. Sadly, the development by PBDR in S.A. has come to an end - the only working program now is being undertaken by the Chinese.

I cannot describe how stupid a move closing pebble bed reactor development was by the S.A. Government. The idiots they have employed at Eskom aren't fit for tying their shoelaces, let alone maintaining a light water reactor, as they have proven time and again. Useless fuckwits.

 

Chernobyl did a LOT to scare people off nuclear power when the country was so gun-ho about it around that time.

Chernobyl, however, should not be taken as an example of the dangers in nuclear power. Chernobyl was a long series of terrible decisions; mostly influenced by the then common practice of making sure preposterous quotas were met. Chernobyl was:

-Badly made, cause the USSR was desperate to edge out the United States when it came to nuclear power.
-Countermeasures ignored, because the personnel were pressured to make sure the plant would be working as soon as possible. So when an early warning system happened, they didn't really stop everything.
-Terrible disaster containment. What would you do if just committed a huge mistake that might potentially hurt millions of people? If you're the USSR you shut up for a couple of days before you say, "Oh shit, and by the way, that huge cloud of radiation? Totally our fault, it's cool."

So you see, that's not an accurate representation of a nuclear disaster. If you got into a badly manufactured car, drove it around for a bit, see the warning lights turn on and ignore them, feel the car going bad and ignore THAT, lose control and crash, set a forest on fire, then don't call the firefighters until an hour later; THAT wouldn't be an accurate representation of a car crash.

So yeah, I support nuclear. It's still hella expensive to make, but hey, what are you gonna do? All the other stuff like wind, solar or, god forbid, ethanol will never reach the energy efficiency of nuclear power anytime soon. Not to mention the deaths, oh GOD the deaths. I only need one source, the GENIUS Neil de Grasse Tyson (via his twitter, which is awesome):

I still think we would need to immediately decide what we would do with all that nuclear waste, cause we have a long history of terrible decisions when it comes to disposing waste(Hmm, I guess the ocean is MOSTLY empty...). Nuclear waste should not be treated lightly, radiation is still one evil motherfucker. Maybe we should shoot the waste into space thus increasing the NASA budget, creating jobs, and killing two birds with one stone? Might make an effective anti-alien-invasion weapon in the future.

 

I was walking the dog on a trail one day when he decided to take a shit in the woods.

A good samaratan jogged by and scoffed at the fact I didn't pick it up..... In the middle of the woods.

Makes sense, I'll store this dog shit in a plastic bag that will delay the shit's decomposition rate a few hundred years so you won't take a whiff of my dog's meatloaf.

 

You will refer to that that Lecherous Businessman making incredible amounts of money off of this Green Fad as Mr. Ex-Vice President, Al Gore. Besides, how can he buy his multi-million dollar Ocean Front Mansions if we don't all go green? He just bought one energy sucking, anti-green mansion on the shore, he deserves another!

As for why there is a Wind Farm going in on Cape Cod only now? It's because Ted Kennedy is dead. They wanted and were ready to put one in there YEARS ago but the Kennedy's revolted. They were outraged that they, the Oligarchy, would have to see the Wind Farms ruin their pristine vacation home shores. Now that Chappaquidick Ted is dead, no one has the political power / pull to stop it.


We could dump every single toxin and article of trash into the oceans as well as simultaneously setting off every nuke everyone owns and the Earth will be back to normal in a relatively short span.

Me? I'll be suspicious about the men and women making spectacular amounts of money preaching that we should be doing things a certain way, when in fact they aren't practicing it themselves.

 

I realize I'm going to be on the outer fringes with this next statement, but -

every president for the last 40 years should be imprisoned/villified for doing absolutely nothing to prevent our country from being held in thrall by some Middle Eastern countries that don't fucking know what toilet paper is. There is only one reason we even give one iota of a fuck about the Middle East, and that reason is oil.

 

Dude, if every single nuke on the planet went off Earth would not go back to normal. It would look more like that scene from Star Wars when the death star blows up a planet.

What is just as important as utilizing less pollutive forms of energy, if we want to lessen adverse impacts on the Earth, is finding ways to use less energy. Just as a random example, I think it would be awesome if the technology that makes lights turn on and off when people are not present in a room could be standardized. Think about how much energy that would save.

 

Ahh, the people who thinks nuclear bombs are magical death star bombs and not just a large amount of energy put into a smaller square footage. Aren't they just so cute? Their naivete is adorable. Just like a kitty.

Oh, you think a 100 watt bulb uses soooo much electricity that if everyone didn't use electricity when they weren't in the room it would solve everything.

I hope you get hit by an electric car because you can't hear it.

 

Since I'm not any kind of scientist, or particularly smart...I've got the answer.
We take all the jailed prisoners from this thread:http://www.theidiotboard.com/messageboard/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1077
Then put them on stationary bikes in their cells. Hook them all into the power grid somehow and presto! Instant, cheap, semi-reliable power.

The best part? We tell all of them if they produce x-amount of power they'll get time off their sentence.
The really best part? We fucking lie to them and have them pedal their asses off until their sentence is up.
If they don't feel up to taking a spin today? Well, they don't feel like eating any food or seeing the goddamn sun anytime soon.

Then, America can go on and win the Tour De France with some raggedy-ass looking criminals and let Lance Armstrong take a break.
Let that asshole Contador try and outrun a peloton with some serious motivation like those guys would have.

 

Of course. And the energy of a 9 foot x 3 foot x 3 foot warhead will be confined to that small area. Honestly, are you being intentionally stupid here?

 

I believe the issue is photosynthesis being interrupted which would interrupt the food chain is the biggest problem that would result from all out nuclear war.

Focus: I don't give a damn how "clean" the energy is, if it's not cheap enough or practical enough to replace what is currently being used, then I'm waiting until it is until I jump on the bandwagon. I'm all for continuing research and development on the technology, but I feel that subsidizing the use of subpar technology rather than pumping that money into development is a waste.

 

Bill Gates weighs in with really an excellent talk. I was a geoegineering guy, buut he's converted me to a neo-nuclear guy. This terra-power business he discusses seems pretty damn good.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html</a>

 

I said Earth would return to normal in a relatively short time, but I intentionally didn't say relative to what. I meant relative to the Earth's Life Span.

We could light off every single nuke, and the radiation would be cleared in (at most) a thousand years? 1000 Years is the span of an eye blink compared to the length of time earth has been around. Life would eventually return and begin evolving again. It's happened before. Several times.


It's very foolish to think we could affect something that is so big and has been around 450 thousand times longer than us on such a massive scale. Sure, we could pollute the hell out of our lakes and rivers, and dump billions of tons of smog into the atmosphere. While seeing a coke bottle float down your local river with an Indian Crying in the background may outrage you, in the grand scheme of things it is pretty insignificant. The earth has dealt with much worse catastrophes both home-brewed and foreign, and is still here. It will still be here after humans have moved on, or died from some strange and humorous STD, or killed each and every single one of us in the Great Internet Wars of 2023.

 

I think some people are confusing the surivival of the earth with the survival of the human species. In the end everyone knows you can't fuck up the earth all that much, but humans, like any other species could be eradicated.