Gobal Warming would this work to fix it?

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bjornredtail
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Post by bjornredtail »

Oh btw Nev. We don't actually have the right to pollute the planet, because it violates the moral principle of live and let live. If country A wants to outlaw smiling, fine, people can emigrate. If country A pollutes the air, country B will know too, even if it is strongly opposed to a polluted environment.
We have the same problem with various other reasources that are shared internationally, like fisheries. Though it would be worse regulateing the acceptable amount of poulation that a nation's industry can output and in what form. For one there would be an agreement over what exactly is toxic and how to measure output.
Question: Is there a functioning version of this yet?
Errr... Sortof. If you look at those RAM chips in your computer...

Okay, not really. Still there is some inital reacerch into capisitor powered cars going on out there. The neat thing is the capisitors can be recharged far, far faster than batteries can be safely charged.
But they do require that initial capital investement, which is quite large, I agree that they are a great technology, so my only thought is cost. How many people can afford one? And do they pay for themselves before maintenance costs start stacking up? Also, are they as good at heating and cooling as an air-conditioner and heater? Especially in climates like mine, which range from 100 in the summer to 20 below 0 in the winter.
My former Physics teacher had one. He says that it costs around 30-40% more than a standard heating and airconditioning system and that it will pay for itself in 2-4 years. Similarly, a number of resorts up at Tahoe use geoexchange systems to cut their heating and cooling costs.
You do realize that in order to get the necessary amount of electricity to run the country, we'd have to install geothermal plants at every geothermal site in the continental United States? Yellowstone would suddenly become some of the most valuable real estate on Earth. Fully 75%(The numbers vary depending on who's doing the counting) of our power generation comes from fossil fuels. The rest is from nukes and hydroelectric. I like Geothermal power, it's a good idea, and before I talked to my friend's dad, who is a physics professor at Notre Dame University, I thought geothermal might be the answer as well. Then two friends of mine, the one guys dad, and me, had a long discussion on this very topic, and I became convinced that the solution was nuclear power. Besides, I just don't want to see Old Faithful dissapear under a geothermal plant.
Why must it replace ALL the power? There are dozens of other power sources. Hydroeletric, Wind, Solar, Tideal, perhaps even various types of biomass (charcoal or wood anyone?). This in addation to our existing fossil fuel generateing capacity (at least for the time being). There is no reason we have to decomission every coal plant at once.

Back in Nevada, around 10% of power is generated by Geothermal plants, like the two I described.
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Post by Tetigustas shadowson »

The biggest problem with all this is; most of the kina pollution that threatens us
is from 'industry' and 'combustion transportation'

The two main focuses should be on them, not set astray by an overwhelming list of all that pollutes.
If we all scream and run into sand holes, the world and the humans, as well as; every other beautiful creature, will eventually fade away.

The Sumerians wrote of it, why cannot it happen again?

Leaving the beginnings of a new world, when the clouds breakup and the sun shines again.
The crap that is left ‘primordial ooze’ (for lack of a better term) will swirl in the liquid that remained of the oceans and create all the critters again.
Otc:
(Silhouetted shadows rise from the sea in a full moon, harvest yellow on the horizon. Horrid images creeping forth from the blackened waters, invading the land once more. )
/
Bot:
The ultimate fact remains, we must deal with it and if creating millions of tinny ships, to remove solids from the air dose it for you, then so be it.
We must be open about making some areas hydro and other areas wind maybe even a few nuke silos, ‘fantastic’ the point is we must decide what we are going to do about it and do it.

A rural village in the united states ran out of fuel to make electricity, they are huddled up in one building with back up generators. The rest of the town is in deep freeze, their homes have no electric power.

Environment over greed must become the way of the future, be careful big business inviro-cops are watching you.

I heard a commercial today and I kid you not! this is what I heard: “come into a Tesoro, you have to buy gas anyway!� the mere fact that they would put out a commercial like that says: they know they have us over their oil barrel and they are gonna squeeze us, for every dime they can!.
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Post by Gen. Volkov »

Errr... Sortof. If you look at those RAM chips in your computer...

Okay, not really. Still there is some inital reacerch into capisitor powered cars going on out there. The neat thing is the capisitors can be recharged far, far faster than batteries can be safely charged.
Capacitors also run dry alot quicker than batteries, so there's a trade off. But I like the idea of a capacitor powered car. The only thing is, say the entire country converts to electric cars of some sort. Capacitor, battery, doesn't matter. Where's the electricity to power them going to come from? The electricity demands of our country would jump tenfold or more.
My former Physics teacher had one. He says that it costs around 30-40% more than a standard heating and airconditioning system and that it will pay for itself in 2-4 years. Similarly, a number of resorts up at Tahoe use geoexchange systems to cut their heating and cooling costs.
Hmm. I like this. I dunno how many can afford one, but I do like it. Do you know how it compares to a standard heating/cooling system in terms of temperature regulation? I was just thinking, we could see a substantial decrease in electricity demands if more people used this system. That is of course, provided it works well in all climates and has no adverse, but so far unseen effects.
Why must it replace ALL the power? There are dozens of other power sources. Hydroeletric, Wind, Solar, Tideal, perhaps even various types of biomass (charcoal or wood anyone?). This in addation to our existing fossil fuel generateing capacity (at least for the time being). There is no reason we have to decomission every coal plant at once.

Back in Nevada, around 10% of power is generated by Geothermal plants, like the two I described.
Not all the power, but a very large percentage. There has to be one main source, and then everything else can supplement it. Because everything else you mention is only good as a supplementary techinology, none of it, nor all of it put together can meet the power demands of the world or the US. Biomass has the same basic problem that ethanol has. Plus, do you really want to cut down all the trees to power your home? The ocean takes care of most of the carbon, but about 15% is scrubbed by the world's trees. And charcaol is just coal I believe. I don't think we should suddenly just shut down all the fossil fuel plants, but we need to start shutting them down and replacing them with clean technologies. Especially the old ones that haven't been retrofitted with scrubbers. And tidal power has yet to be made work efficiently. Anyway, that's why I support nukes, because they are the only technology that can meet our growing energy demands, they would be the main power source, and the other technologies, like wind and solar and biomass and everything else would supplement them.

In Indiana, we aren't so lucky as Nevada, 95% of our power is still generated by coal plants, we have some of the worst air quality in the country.

The biggest problem with all this is; most of the kina pollution that threatens us
is from 'industry' and 'combustion transportation'

The two main focuses should be on them, not set astray by an overwhelming list of all that pollutes.
If we all scream and run into sand holes, the world and the humans, as well as; every other beautiful creature, will eventually fade away.

The Sumerians wrote of it, why cannot it happen again?

Leaving the beginnings of a new world, when the clouds breakup and the sun shines again.
The crap that is left ‘primordial ooze’ (for lack of a better term) will swirl in the liquid that remained of the oceans and create all the critters again.
Otc:
(Silhouetted shadows rise from the sea in a full moon, harvest yellow on the horizon. Horrid images creeping forth from the blackened waters, invading the land once more. )
/
Bot:
The ultimate fact remains, we must deal with it and if creating millions of tinny ships, to remove solids from the air dose it for you, then so be it.
We must be open about making some areas hydro and other areas wind maybe even a few nuke silos, ‘fantastic’ the point is we must decide what we are going to do about it and do it.

A rural village in the united states ran out of fuel to make electricity, they are huddled up in one building with back up generators. The rest of the town is in deep freeze, their homes have no electric power.

Environment over greed must become the way of the future, be careful big business inviro-cops are watching you.

I heard a commercial today and I kid you not! this is what I heard: “come into a Tesoro, you have to buy gas anyway!� the mere fact that they would put out a commercial like that says: they know they have us over their oil barrel and they are gonna squeeze us, for every dime they can!.
What do you think we are talking about here? Bunny rabbits? We are discussing "industry" and "combustion transportation". Not that industry is the real problem, the problem is how we generate the electricity that powers industry. And there's combustion transportation, then there's gas powered vehicles. One is a problem, the other is not necessarily so. For example, you could have a car that burns hydrogen for its fuel. The only products of that would be water. I see no overwhelming list of all that pollutes, I see a discussion of how to solve our energy and transportation problems. Also, the world will be fine. It survived 4 billion years before humans got here, and will around for along time after we are all dead. All that we are talking about is what SORT of world we want to live in. The animals will survive. Even if we all kill each other tomorrow, there will still be plenty of animals left to repopulate the world. Also, a nuke silo is where a nuclear ballistic missile is kept until it is ready to be launched. A nuclear plant is where they generate electricity.

ABout the town, that's BS, they get power off the national grid just like everyone else, besides it's SUMMER. How exactly is a town in deep freeze in SUMMER?

I've tried to be nice to you, but it's getting very hard. You are in way over your head, so how about you go to the shallow end of the pool and talk about bunnies or something else disgustingly cute. Or better yet, research before you talk. I'm sure you've got more than empty space between your ears, so stop being the puppet of the media and go out to learn for yourself. The only thing you said that was a real contribution was "point is we must decide what we are going to do about it and do it." This is true, and I agree, but we can't afford to go off half-cocked on some scheme that may not even work when there are other much easier and more practical solutions. Deciding what we are going to do about it is at least as important as doing it. Whatever we do will be a major investment and probably a large scale change in the system.

And to everyone else, I'm sorry for my harsh words to this person, but at some point I just lose my patience.
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Post by The Beatles »

What's wrong with the concept of nuclear power, anyway? There's plenty of uranium, and plenty of places to dump it for a thousand years. Hell, in a more advanced world you could even eject it from Earth, towards the sun.

And in due course we would learn to extract energy from different elements, not just the currently-known fissionable ones, as all matter is energy. Goodness knows the Earth receives a lot of matter from meteorites.

This is an honest question, not a flame. I do believe nuclear power is the future of our energy situation, once the public accepts it (and all that takes, IMHO, is for the oil to run out.)
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Post by Freenhult »

You can't send it to the sun...That would be bad. You'd be reducing the amount of material on the planet...not to mention, I don't think plutonium in the sun would be good for it. I mean, wouldn't all the heat and pressure cause it to fission, and explode?

And if anything, we should mine out the asteroid belt...who knows what kind of metals are in there.

I think Michigan has most of its power made from Nuclear Power. They are mostly on the great lakes here, and they are safe. Very safe as Volkov says. If they weren't, we wouldn't let them raditate the lakes. They did a test on all of them in 2004 I think.

Why do we have to have a primary source of power? That sounds sorta faliable. If you were to run out of primary resourses, then the majority of people would be out of power. If you can have Nuclear, Coal, Wind, and Geothermal all near equal levels, that sounds alot "safer" (Not like we are going to spam coal plants and then run out of coal, but something random might happen that cuts production. Or you have a landslide that destroyes the wind plants on a hillside.)

I'll let you gents get back to it now. :)
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Post by The Beatles »

1. I've just mentioned how much matter strikes Earth. I believe the current estimate is 6 tonnes per day. Not much matter leaving.
2. The Sun is quite large. I'm sure a few tons of waste uranium/plutonium would have absolutely zilch impact on it. Plus it would be more than trivial to release the material on a course which would have it strike the surface of the Sun on the opposite side to the one facing Earth at the time.

Sure, we can have multiple sources of fuel, but the undeniable fact is that once we move to multiple planets, all but two sources of power will be practically neglibible, and the two sources will be:
1. Fission of elements ("nuclear power")
2. Collection of radiation ("solar power")
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Post by Gen. Volkov »

Well the reason for a primary source is not only what Beatles said, which is a very good point, but also the fact that the world's energy demands are going to increase geometrically in the coming years as more nations industrialize and the population increases. The simple fact is, nuclear power is the only power source capable of the same amount of power generation as fossil fuels currently provide. Wind just cannot generate as much electricity as a nuclear plant. Unless very large tracts of land are covered in wind farms. Wind is also variable. So it's great as a supplement, but I don't think you can ever get it to account for more than 10% of the nations energy needs. The same holds true for solar power. Geothermal has possibilities, but the number of sites is a limiting factor. You need a primary source, that provides most of the power, like 50 or 60% and then everything else can take up the slack to provide the rest of the power. Also, there is ALOT of Uranium. Over 100 years worth. More when you start using plutonium as well. Also, nuclear power would be a great way to get rid of our vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and nuclear cores waiting to become weapons all over the world. Fully half the uranium that power's the US' nuclear power industry currently comes from decommissioned Russian nuckes.

Most of Michigan's power comes from coal BTW. Half of the entire nations power comes from coal. Other fossil fuels make up another 25 to 30%, nukes account for 15-20% and the rest is assorted stuff like Geothermal, hydroelectric (5-7%) what have you.

Oh and Beatles, I know it's still in the protoype stage, but there is one more power source to add to your list. Fusion.

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Post by Devari »

Obviously, hydro isn't a solution for everywhere. But, for some places, it is a relatively green way to produce powers without producing the toxic waste.

From Wikipedia:

"Norway produces virtually all of its electricity from hydro, while Iceland produces 83% of its requirements (2004), Austria produces 67% of all electricity generated in the country from hydro (over 70% of its requirements). Canada is the world's largest producer of hydro power and produces over 70% of its electricity from hydroelectric sources."

Wikipedia may not be the authoritative source, but the Canadian figure certainly matches what I know...
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Post by Gen. Volkov »

Yeah, I like hydro, but it plays havoc with the enviroment when you dam a river to generate hydro power. Part of the reason for the huge decline in pacific salmon is that they can't get to their spawning grounds anymore because of dams. There's a dam on the Niagara river that has changed the water flow so much that Niagara Falls isn't retreating like it should. (It used to move backwards towards it's source at about 6-8 inches a year, that has now slowed to 1/2 and inch to an inch per year) Not a major calamity, but still dams have big effects. The Hoover dam has changed how the Colorado River works so much that it's affecting the ecosystem at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But I do like it, as long as it isn't used so widely that bad things start to happen. It's a good thing Canada has a relatively small population.
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Post by Devari »

Certainly. Hydro is not truly green power, as it is actually quite obtrusive in the initial construction and subsequent fallout. Still, it is better than a lot of combustion-produced power.
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Post by Freenhult »

Yeah...I didn't know for sure, but I know we have 3 reactors running atleast. Wind is true, highly unreliable to have, but no one is going to live on mountains so thats atleast a start.

Solar isn't ready to be implimented yet. The amount of area you need to power a house is large, but for anything else...Nuclear is cool. But would it even be practical to have nuke power'd cars? Or would that be an accident waiting to happen?



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Post by Devari »

One thing that may be smart is to move to small-scale local power. Not a nuclear reactor in your background, but perhaps city governments should move towards encouraging and possibly subsidising the addition of solar-style power to one's house, to power some of one's own personal needs. One of the problems with traditional centralised power is loss in transmission and distribution - 7.2% in the US (1995) and 7.4% in the UK (1998). That's of total electricity produced (well, converted from energy).

But, obviously, that won't supply near enough power, especially given the issues with solar heating. Still, it could help considerably, and reduce the need for centralised power plants.

Something that actually comes up with "local" solar power is the ugliness factor - generally, solar panels are considered to be eyesores. HOWEVER, I've found some buildings around here where they are not noticeable or actually look good. The main key is for the panels not to be simply slapped down or, better yet, for the initial house design to incorporate solar panels directly into the design.

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Post by Tetigustas shadowson »

GV
Not the entire world lives near you, the fact that some places are in winter may elude you, It may be chillingly obvious to another.
Next time I take some of your forum land with my footmen post, let me hold it for more than a couple hours before you attack me back for it. And slam me to hell with in-game nasty grams.

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Winds and wintry weather alive and well on one side of the world, can produce a considerable amount of high energy to the other side where a 150-degree summer storm is killing dozens of people. As well while the heat zone would produce massive amounts of solar power from the intense sunlight. The production of wind-generated electricity from a spring storm, is not an unreasonable substitution for a given percentage of the worlds needs either, other than the manufacturing of the parts and pieces, Solar and wind electric generation the only true GREEN options.

They say that nuclear power is emission-free, let me tell you the truth is very different.

At present there are some 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 massive, 1000-megawatt reactors. Even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear fusion, there would only be enough ‘economically viable’ uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years.

The US government subsidizes the cost of uranium enrichment. The true cost of the industry's
liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $560billion, but the industry
pays only $9.1billion - 98% of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government.
On the same subject The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactors is estimated to be $33billion. These costs - plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a million years are not included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity.

More propaganda? naw they wouldn’t…!

In the US, much of the world's uranium is enriched. The us has several facilities they all produce horrendous quantities of pollutants into the atmosphere, including Australian owned, enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, each facility requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired electricity plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, released in 2002 from leaky pipes 93% of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted annually in the US.
Believe it….!
These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and argon. To make matters worse, a study released in 2005 by the National Academy of Sciences shows that cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which store up to 30 times more radioactive material than that of the core, all are subject to attacks by terrorists, which would unleash an inferno of massive clouds of deadly radiation
Let me remind you this would be significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, if only 5 of these facilities were to be strategically attacked semi successfully, it is suggested that nearly 2/3rds of the us would suffer fallout.

nuclear waste contained in the cooling pools includes hundreds of radioactive elements that have different biological impacts in the human body, the most important being cancer and genetic diseases, that will pass on through your children forever. Contrary to the nuclear industry's propaganda, nuclear power is therefore not green and it is certainly not clean. Nuclear reactors consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the air and water each year. These releases are unregulated because the nuclear industry considers these particular radioactive elements to be biologically inconsequential.

On another side; you can now paint on a solar electric coating to any surface, think of it every building in town painted with solar reactive paint, just the fact you paint it, your house generates power from its own walls and roof.

think green and think clean


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Post by The Beatles »

Devari -- about your "local" idea -- you may be interested in this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_energy_building
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BedZED

:)
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Post by Devari »

Beatles - that is exactly what I'm talking about. Zero or only slightly negative energy buildings are quite achievable in many areas, and that would greatly reduce the need for centralised power of any sort. Plus, large-scale blackouts simply aren't as much of an issue!

BedZED is quite interesting. While zero energy buildings are obviously easier in equatorial regions, a functioning one in the UK shows how plausible such a concept really is.
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It's a lovely day in the woods today, but safer to stay at home
BECAUSE EVIL FREEN IS KILLING ALL THE TEDDY BEARS AT THEIR PICNIC
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