Al Bore Blather

barfo,

It sure seems to me that there are a lot of people who just hate people. Too many of them. LA sucks because the freeways are busy. Too many illegal immigrants. And all that jazz.

Yet we literally can fit and feed the entire planet's population in the state of Texas. Really.

 

Ever put too many rats in a cage? Neither have I but you get my point.
Yes, if much of the state of Texas had the population density of Manhattan, you could fit 6 billion people there.
Who is going to pay for all that infrastructure?

barfo

 

It's the increase, not the total amount, that is important. The 550 is the baseline amount that has existed for the past several millenia, during which time the climate was relatively stable. The earth can handle 550, at least for the timescale we humans are interested in. The question is whether it can handle a 5% increase.

At least that's how I read it.

barfo

 

The graphic was meant to show that the guys promoting the scam are making predictions that don't match the measured results.

I've consistently pointed out there is global warming going on and has been for 10,000 years. I've posted graphs showing that it's normal and natural and we've been through several other cycles of warming / cooling in history.

I've pointed out that there are numerous plausible reasons for for the earth's temperature rising, from volcanism to sun activity to the earth's albedo to the ozone hole.

If I've left out the words "man made" when talking about "man made global warming" being bogus, it's an omission on my part and I apologize for that.

 

So why do you think man doesn't contribute to global warming? It seems obvious that our activities - burning fossil fuel - add CO2.

barfo

 

Spit in the ocean.

CO2 isn't a bad thing. Every animal exhales it. Without it, we'd die and the Earth would be a frozen ball of ice.

 

Sure, and water isn't a bad thing either, and without it we'd die, but drowning isn't a good thing.
A 5% increase (your man's figure) isn't a spit in the ocean.

barfo

 

It is spit in the ocean.

550 Gigatonnes per year, 30 of which is from us (supposedly).

5.5 trillion tonnes in 10 years.

But it isn't 5% increase, it's 5% of what's being added to the atmosphere which already has a lot of CO2 (the ocean). 5% is roughly 30/550 Gigatonnes. What goes into the atmosphere doesn't stay there. Trees and other plants convert CO2 back to O2.

5% increase is 5 degrees over 20,000 year period, according to "my" man's figures.

IPCC is projecting that (5 degrees) over 100 years.

Gore is projecting even worse.

The sky is falling, oh no.

 

90% of human population will die in the next century, oh no.
You can't promote some guy who thinks that and then accuse others of claiming the sky is falling.

barfo

 

On that I disagree with him. It would take a real catastrophe like an asteroid hit or some incurable disease epidemic to kill that many humans.

 

This may be a thread hijack, but I've seen it a couple times in this thread.

I'm a trained Nuclear engineer, and no one seems to answer my question:

Uranium comes from the ground. We use it in nuclear reactors until it can no longer reach criticality at a certain set of circumstances. Then we'd like to put it back into the ground in a place that's far away from population. What, exactly, is wasteful/toxic/dangerous about that? The water that runs through the reactor is used as coolant for a large portion of the reactor life...it's not like they're pumping millions of gallons of glowing liquid down the Willamette river.

Chernobyl happened due to the stupidity of two workers (who removed just about every safety in the system in preparation for a test and didn't tell anyone) and a poor Soviet design. Chernobyl would be physically impossible in the US (and by physically impossible, I literally mean against the laws of physics). Yet the massive majority of Americans think nuclear power is bad b/c Homer plays with green tubes on the Simpsons.

 

My understanding is that Chernobyl was a military grade sort of reactor that didn't have many of the safety features you'd find in US or French or other nations' reactors.

I believe in nuclear power. Kids who passed freshman physics at UofI when I went back in the 1970s were quite qualified to run or work at reactors. I've seen several videos of glass casing they store the waste in being dropped from airplanes, crashed into walls on back of semi trucks at high speeds, set on fire, etc. - and they are perfectly safe. I lived in Las Vegas and would have ZERO problem with them storing all the waste they could at Yucca Mountain, there's nothing to fear.

What I don't get is why the US has laws against reprocessing the spent fuel to get more power and to make the waste less harmful. You know why?

 

I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I'm pretty sure nuclear waste is not the same thing as uranium ore. So talking about 'putting it back into the ground' is a bit misleading.

barfo

 

Isn't it because the reprocessing involves separating plutonium from the waste? And the US doesn't want anyone running around with plutonium.

barfo

 

I'll back up a bit...in naval reactors no plutonium is used or produced. I can't be sure of what civilian reactors have, though I'm 98% positive that plutonium cannot be produced by most US reactors, for the reasons barfo stated. In military reactors, the spent cores are wholly Uranium Oxide, which is what it came out of the ground as. Sure, it has been "enriched" (purifying down to a higher percentage of one naturally occurring isotope over another--I can't give the percentages) but it's not like when Uranium oxide is used up, it becomes Plutonium or something "really bad". The cores are Uranium oxide coming from the ground, and uranium oxide going back in.

Chernobyl was a fundamentally different type of reactor than ours. We used pressurized water reactors in the west, while the Soviets used liquid graphite. In our reactors, if something bad happens and the core starts heating up, the power actually goes down, preventing a meltdown. In the Soviet ones, power goes up, so heat produced goes up, so core temperature goes up, which causes power to go up, etc. in an increasing death spiral. All reactors have "scram" controls put in to shut down the reactor if a certain power level or temperature is reached. In Chernobyl's case, those controls were disabled b/c the operators were preparing to perform a test.

The parts to worry about in disassembly of spent cores is the coolant and Ion Exchanger resin. But as with just about everything, dangerous things are highly mitigated through proper procedural compliance. In over 50 years of having every submarine in the Navy being powered by nuclear reactors there hasn't been one accident, meltdown, etc.

 

I don't think that is correct. Nuclear reactors work via fission; splitting uranium atoms into lighter elements. If all that happened was converting one isotope of uranium to another, very little power would be produced.

barfo

 

I understand that it's fission that produces the energy...I'm talking about the disposal. about 97% of the spent fission core (by mass) remains uranium of various isotopes. 3% or so is fission product mass. The "danger" comes from the radioactivity--specifically particle decay. My point was just that, whether 100 lbs of uranium has been used in a reactor or sat in the earth, it'll still be decaying. (BTW: Plutonium is a part of the fission product, but not weapons-useful plutonium. It's a different isotope)

 

That's rather different from what you were claiming before:

Yes.

Yes. But which would you rather hold in your hand? 5 lbs of uranium ore, or 5 lbs of used reactor fuel?
The uranium isn't the only thing decaying in reactor waste - the difference between "wholly uranium oxide" and "97% uranium" is important, because the strontium and cesium will certainly kill you.

I don't think that is strictly true either. Pu239 is what's used for weapons, and it is produced in reactors. However, other isotopes are produced in greater amounts, so reactor waste would need to be processed to separate/enrich the Pu239 in order to make weapons. But that is possible to do.

barfo