CBS240 said:
Fly ash is only mildly radioactive. Here in South Australia our main power generation plant is coal fired at a place called Port Augusta.
The left over fly ash is used as a filler in concrete sold in Adelaide.
Consequently, Adeliade concrete is radioactive to a small degree.
Where I work we have calibration pits (shallow bore holes lined with sections of uranium enriched concrete) which are used as a calibration reference for nuclear bore hole logging tools.
A while back one of the pits required concrete renovation in a beign region, so one of the guys was sent off to the hardware store with a geiger counter to select the least hot bags of concrete for the job. He attracted a bit of attention.
Compared to the radiation leakage of a properly operated modern nuclear facility it is measurably higher. This point is just to counter the part of the fallacious argument that most people have against nuclear power. However, I agree that the ash is quite low level and not really that dangerous. Stand out in direct sunlight for an entire day and compare the average amount of absorbed radiation. Don't know about you but this would flat out cook my skinny fair skinned as$.
Check out these links.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/03/lindzen-vs-rahmstorf-exchange.html
http://ephysics.fileave.com/energy/HeavyOil.pdf
http://www.conservative.org/pressroom/2008/080527wsj.asp
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.co...lindzen-on-statistically-significant-warming/
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n2/reg15n2g.html
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/03/lindzen-vs-rahmstorf-exchange.html
http://ephysics.fileave.com/energy/HeavyOil.pdf
http://www.conservative.org/pressroom/2008/080527wsj.asp
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.co...lindzen-on-statistically-significant-warming/
Consensus Shattered As Major Scientific Study Says Global Warming Is Natural
Attempts to reduce CO2 emissions "pointless" as sun is cited as climate change culprit
by Paul Joseph Watson
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2007/121107_global_warming.htm
Attempts to reduce CO2 emissions "pointless" as sun is cited as climate change culprit
by Paul Joseph Watson
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2007/121107_global_warming.htm
Check out Senator Inofe's blog here
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index....5c3c93f-802a-23ad-4f29-fe59494b48a6&Issue_id=
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index....5c3c93f-802a-23ad-4f29-fe59494b48a6&Issue_id=
High gasoline prices changing lawn-mowing habits
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080620/ap_on_bi_ge/gas_prices_mowing
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080620/ap_on_bi_ge/gas_prices_mowing
CBS240 said:Compared to the radiation leakage of a properly operated modern nuclear facility it is measurably higher. This point is just to counter the part of the fallacious argument that most people have against nuclear power. However, I agree that the ash is quite low level and not really that dangerous. Stand out in direct sunlight for an entire day and compare the average amount of absorbed radiation. Don't know about you but this would flat out cook my skinny fair skinned as$.
Yes, But I’ll just avoid that controversial can of worms. I just passed on an amusing ( to me anyway) anecdote. Have you ever entered a hardware shop to find a guy scanning product with a geiger counter (click*click*click*click) before?
Being more on topic I recall reading recently (can’t remember where) the words of a distinguished authority (can’t remember who) on this stuff that if the world were to convert tomorrow to a nuclear-hydrogen economy (hydrogen via water split with the electrons from the power plants) to completely replace our fossil fuel requirement, there would only be enough of the fissile stuff in the earths crust to keep the machine rolling for about 30 years.
Some of the claims made for the potential of this thingie sound pretty damn amazing:
http://www.iter.org/
Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
July 1, 2008; Page A15
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?
As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121486841811817591.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
July 1, 2008; Page A15
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?
As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121486841811817591.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
I'm a little skeptical of any bandwagon that politicians jump on, but when you see glaciers that had been stable for 100's of years suddenly melting back, you start to wonder.
Google "methanol economy"... some smart scientists think it's high time oil and gasoline were dumped in favour of methanol. Unlike ethanol, you can make it from lots of things that aren't food. It's a liquid, so only modest changes are required to deliver dispense it. There's flex fuel vehicles on the roads and in showrooms now that will burn it as M85 (85% methanol, 15% gasoline). I suspect that it wouldn't be rocket surgery to come out with conversion packages to retrofit other common vehicles.
If I was the beloved dictator of my country, after banning Kenning G and process cheese, I'd promote a lot more research into alternative fuel options and energy sources. While it seems reasonable that the free market should come up with such things on it's own, there's a chicken and egg problem with trying to introduce any new fuel source.
Google "methanol economy"... some smart scientists think it's high time oil and gasoline were dumped in favour of methanol. Unlike ethanol, you can make it from lots of things that aren't food. It's a liquid, so only modest changes are required to deliver dispense it. There's flex fuel vehicles on the roads and in showrooms now that will burn it as M85 (85% methanol, 15% gasoline). I suspect that it wouldn't be rocket surgery to come out with conversion packages to retrofit other common vehicles.
If I was the beloved dictator of my country, after banning Kenning G and process cheese, I'd promote a lot more research into alternative fuel options and energy sources. While it seems reasonable that the free market should come up with such things on it's own, there's a chicken and egg problem with trying to introduce any new fuel source.
There's more than twice as much heavy oil in the world as there is conventional oil. Check out this forum.
http://www.heavyoilinfo.com/IPB/
and
http://www.slb.com/content/services/solutions/reservoir/heavy_oil.asp
http://www.heavyoilinfo.com/IPB/
and
http://www.slb.com/content/services/solutions/reservoir/heavy_oil.asp
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.