[Rezwan]

Thanks for drawing this to our attention. We’ll be adding this journalist to the press list for future contact.

Dan619 wrote: Hopefully there are enough followers here to get someones attention!

Yes! We need more followers, more active people posting and telling their friends. We can’t afford a PR person, so we’re only as strong as our network of members and volunteers.

[Rezwan]

Thanks Dan! Great catch. I’ve reposted on the website. Now to Facebook and tweet. Cool news!

[Rezwan]

Ah. Public Service Announcement. My problem is that I’m paranoid, so when I hear about these filters I think they may be a suspicious device themselves. I’ve met Austin Heap, though. He seems like an up and up fellow.

[Rezwan]

And you mention this because…?

[Rezwan]

rashidas wrote: In order to develop aneutronic fusion in a timely manner, has Eric Lerner and the FF community considered enlisting the help of a strategic partner with deep pockets?

The answer is “Yes”! They’re working on it. Industries and utilities have been and are being approached. As Henning notes, it helps if you have a warm connection. Persuasion is an art.

An energy intensive industry like Intuit, Google, Boeing or a forward looking utility might be persuaded to collaborate with Lerner and the FF team in return for being on the ground floor of a new, sustainable technology. What do you all think of this idea?

Great idea! Executing it is the hard part.

[Rezwan]

At least that was not entirely unclear.

Thanks!

Henning wrote:

Ironically, I actually spent an hour writing a second post on this subject Friday night, then went to preview the post, made a booboo of opening another tab in IE, went back to the original tab, thinking I was still on the new tab, and lost everything! The “back” button took me to an *empty* reply window, and I couldn’t find any way to get back to my original text! Argh! If I’m smart, I’ll do all my creative writing in another text editor first, and then paste it in here. Webmaster, is there any hope of avoiding this problem otherwise?!

I often edit my articles in a text-editor, before pasting it to the browser’s input field. But this forward-and-back thing I just did myself a few minutes ago with a different article, but luckily Firefox remembered it. So one way of getting around this problem is using Firefox and/or an external text-editor.

Yes, I use firefox, too. My stuff is always there when I go back. I wouldn’t know what to begin to do to fix it for explorer. So sorry for the inconvenience!

[Rezwan]

shawn wrote: Looking at the incident in Japan, we can count the cost of what will occur in many ways:
1)life experience for many people will be drastically affected……..How can one estimate the value of that?
2)The costs of clean-up and containment……… Very large numbers of dollars.
3)The loss of lives…….How can one place a dollar value on such a loss?
4)The loss of land…….The ongoing costs which increase yearly.

Hi Shawn: I’m not sure I understand your question. Is this about the tsunami itself? For example #1 – think of the PTSD of many people in the tsunami, the kid who got out of a car but his parents were in there and are now missing, probably dead – so many awful stories like that. I can’t even begin to imagine how that would crush your spirit and mess you up for life.

Or are you talking about the nuclear emergency effects and losses? Those are easier to calculate. You just need things that you can compare. A person who gets cancer from smoking vs. from radiation vs. from breathing coal dust – they all have cancer. So, the question is, what are we willing to tolerate? We pass laws to reduce smoking, and we suffer coal plants to continue with no problem. Does nuclear power cause more damage than these, or less? If less, it seems that you would need to go after the coal plants first, and then after nuclear power. If more, then nuclear would be your first stop. Per these stats, nuclear is far down on the problem list. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

[Rezwan]

Breakable wrote: I think a selection of energy sources and research directions could be provided with various prices, chances of success and outcomes. Where aneutronic fusion would have least probability, but would have the greatest impact, followed by other sources with less positive outcomes.

If this information is made dynamic based on changes in status having to do with breakthroughs in technology and in the price of things, and there is a way to link it to actual events in the real world it could be really amazing.

[Rezwan]

😆 Lovely. I must learn how to play this one.

[Rezwan]

Does it have a way to insert your own assumption? If you have x coal plants running with certain parameters, that’s going into the calculation for emissions. so if you have a template to fill out with a different physics surprise (like working aneutronic fusion reactors by 2015), that would affect those emissions or what have you. But you won’t know the effect on population. That has more to do with women’s education, anyway.

Is it compelling to play? Do you find it absorbing? It seems like an earnest game that’s trying to be constructive and get you to think about global issues.

Is it a good representation of reality and is it fun – the two key questions.

Of course, it’s strange what passes for fun these days. Have you guys seen this game trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqrG1bdGtg For Dead Island, in which you are a vacationing family attacked by zombies.

I think our culture’s current obsession with zombies is a metaphor for class war and dealing with global poverty. A happy vacationing family in a far off land is attacked by needy ravenous mobs of subhumans. Unfortunately, it’s not a very useful metaphor. Very zero sum. Once you’re a zombie, death is the only solution non-zombies can imagine. Like poverty and unemployment – those who have just want those who don’t to “go away.”

It’s this particular video that made me think of class warfare. All the expensive resorts going up in places and tourist economies that don’t really trickle much down to the poor.

My friend says zombies are about the overpopulation thing, but “overpopulation thing” is really “too many people of the class, race, ethnicity we don’t want” – or at least don’t want to share with. Have you read Amy Chua’s “World on Fire”? http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385721862/ajaban-20

I wouldn’t play the zombie game (too depressing), but yearn for a post-disaster game like a post katrina where you have to fix up the ravaged city. Multi player. Triage. Trucks with ice. Incarcerating looters. Getting trapped people off of roofs. Securing hospitals, rebuilding homes. It would be a useful game in that it gets people to develop a checklist of things to do in an emergency. Good preparation.

I had a dentist in LA (Toluca lake – Dr. Ricci – great guy!). A few weeks after Katrina, he took his whole office down to N. Orleans for a week and they went around fixing people’s teeth. I don’t suppose there are many dental post-apocalyptic video games. I think I’ve heard of some medical emergency games. First person healer stuff.

[Rezwan]

Hello! I just merged these posts. This looks interesting! Thanks for pointing it out.

[Rezwan]

rashidas wrote: Death Knell for the Nuclear Power Industry:

The recent disaster in Japan will be very bad for the nuclear power industry around the world. Just as Chernobyl did 25 years ago, this disaster will brand fission power as dangerous and unreliable in the public mind…

This is mostly because people calculate risk as a function of actual risk multiplied by outrage.

Perceived Risk = (Actual Risk)*(outrage)

Take being killed by toxins while working in energy when the energy is coal, vs. nuclear. The death toll is much higher, and quite horrible with coal, but we’re used to it. Nuclear energy, is nuclear! And even one extra cancer is unacceptable.

It seems they still have a chance to contain this. Some amazingly brave people are working on it. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42101198/ns/world_news-asia-pacific/ As long as they can contain this it’s not that bad. Impressive even, considering it was an 8.9 quake and a tsunami.

Ah, some numbers. Compare: Even without unprecedented global geo-catastrophes to trigger them, coal mines routinely kill and poison a lot of people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining#Safety Over 6000 miners in one year in China. 10,000 new cases of black lung every year in China, 4000 in the US. Over 100,000 people have died in America from coal mining since that industry started (average of 1000 a year. Much less recently). I don’t think the history of nuclear energy has anywhere near that many deaths or cancers behind it. Re Chernobyl:

# Two Chernobyl plant workers died on the night of the accident, and a further 28 people died within a few weeks as a result of acute radiation poisoning.
# UNSCEAR says that apart from increased thyroid cancers, “there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident.”

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html

Nuclear energy is a pretty useful thing. Nuclear weapons, in contrast…We spend hundreds of billions nursing those weapons so that one day we can rain down destruction. The outrage against nuclear energy might really be misplaced frustration about weapons.

[Rezwan]

jamesr wrote:

That’s probably true for building an actual nuke, but dirty bombs are very easy to make, and if you’re not worried about eventually dying from radiation poisoning, the handling techniques don’t even need to be very fancy.

The main risk for dirty bombs as I see it is raw uranium, unused fuel, and radioisotopes prepared for medical uses. ie. stuff that is safe to handle as long as it isn’t ingested or inhaled, and is transported all over the place without much security.

Guys, could we stop short of giving directions on how to make a dirty bomb on this forum? That would be nice.

[Rezwan]

Thanks!

So they’re OK with earthquakes and disgruntled employees with hammers. What is their stand on proliferation risks? Per ASP paper:

The second, and very strong, reason for rapid action is based on a recent analysis from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory of the consequences of increasing dependence on traditional nuclear power on worldwide stocks of plutonium. Increasing energy demand, and the relative cheapness of nuclear power, even compared to coal, will drive nations toward uranium and fission. Experience shows that countries with such reactors will tend toward reprocessing fuel and purifying plutonium. According to the report, a ten-year delay in commercialization of fusion power, from first implementation in the 2030s to the 2040s, would result in the additional world-wide availability of from 800,000 to 4,000,000 kilograms of plutonium by the year 2100. Just 8 Kg is enough to make a bomb. “Leakage” of just one one-hundredth of one percent of this plutonium will create an unacceptable added risk of nuclear terrorism. The major implications for national security need no emphasis.

[Rezwan]

jamesr wrote: The proposed new build in the UK by EDF and Horizon (aka EON/RWE) will have no government subsidy, and will have all the eventual decommissioning costs paid for upfront by putting aside money from each kWh into a separate fund. Any yet they are still the most cost effective large scale sources of power.

Both the EPR and AP1000 PWR designs have passive cooling systems and so need no power after shutdown, and have much stronger containment structures. and human proof safety systems – ie if a terrorist, or even a knowledgeable disgruntled worker, took an axe to the plant and started hacking away at things it would still be safe.

Sounds great! Do you have links to this? What’s the time scale on this, and does it mean that the other plants have to retrofit? Also, how does this compare to the thorium reactors and other fission advancements proposed? I’d love to play up the fission race as well.

We need new fission plants now, and for at least 50years. It would be great if Focus Fusion works, but in the mean time we need to stick to technology that works. Regular tokamak or inertial fusion is at least that far away that a new generation of fission plants can have a full (ie long enough to payback capital investment) life.

The problem is that the Energy industry is happy to stick with things that work and does not aggressively pursue research into new frontiers. A different meaning of “inertial”. More energy spent defending the status quo is less energy spent pushing for research. We can’t be satisfied or complacent here. We need to demand more options and stand for a pro-research ethic.

[Author]

Posts