The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

I hate TTIP, but I also hate the anti-EU, anti-US climate the UK papers are currently cultivating.

I also hate Greenpeace. They're not quite PETA, but I think they've been known for doing bad stuff in the name of "green".

Urgh, a complicated subject. I'll wait and see what the news on TTIP brings as usual (though I'm betting nothing good ).

You're such a hateful person

The US defense budget is what were really discussing here. To some extent, the US is in the 20th century. Its economy revolves around the military, which is run by government contracts so it can be perceived as free market capitalism. This is in contrast with many other countries that openly support and invest in companies based in their country.

The whole premise is silly for most accounts. An excellent example would be US government's slow support for alternative energies. Initiatives to support green energy have failed on many accounts solely because former fossil fuel companies already had their hand on the money.

Like alternative energy, the defense budget is an indication that many companies have their hand in money. Stopping "corruption" in the government is supposed to fix this issue.

Its ashame that the US economy runs on war. Frankly, there is no other way to spur the economy like war. The amount of R&D that goes into the military is astonishing. Sure, the US could transition to other institutions, which they are. The trends now are showing education and medicine. To some extent, I should feel that its my obligation as a citizen to go to college so I can inject government money into my local economy. Better than leaving it on foreign soil.... As long as you go to community college and a local university, you won't go into debt. Too bad the majority of students didn't catch on to this little trick.

Alternative energy initiatives didn't fail because the money was being shifted around. They failed because alternative renewables (not nuclear) sucked then and sucks now. Go nuclear or go home, scrubs.

Wait they failed? When did that happen? They're on a constant rise. I actually have a pure water-power based electricity subscription since years.

I guess I do go home instead of nuclear

EDIT:
Oh also, not sure how it is in the US, but around here solar panels are a very very common sight on top of many privates homes. A farmer in the neighbourhood of my parents also has build a gigantic solar panel-construction that is kind of like a landmark.

EDIT 2:
"Landmark" made me wonder how visible the thing is on google maps. There it is:

Like 30 x 10 meters. Quite impressive.

I disagree with your premise mered4. Of course any technology in its infancy is insufficient, but renewable energy has come a long way. While I dont expect fossil fuels to ever disappear from the picture, a large percentage can be eliminated through renewable energy.

Nuclear always has its advantages, but its extremely costly to operate and maintain. Safety is always a concern too. Look at Japan.....

GreenPeace is in my bad books.

They no longer define ecology nor animal protection to me.

ever since some idiot members of their's somehow deemed trustworthy sacked NASCA

http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/

My dad works in a nuclear power plant. I've lived and breathed nuclear since i was a wee boy. Hell, I worked at one for a few months last year. It's cheaper than renewables, it's more efficient, and it's safer. Japan has completely different safety protocols then the US, and that's partly why they had problems. Their plants were not built with tsunamis in mind, thus they failed when they went under 16 feet of water (or was it 1.6? cant remember).
And if we get Fusion soon? Holy ****. There will be literally no reason to use any other power source on this planet if you can use fusion. It will be amazing. Unlimited energy. Low cost, low risk. Just feed it small bits of the ocean.

The only issue with fission is the nuclear waste, and the storage we use is so safe right now as to be idiot proof. Now, the storage we have isn't permanent, but that's along the lines of decades or centuries.

Nuclear isn't any more expensive than any other energy source to operate and maintain per KW/h.

Over budget projects don't really count. Sorry.


The point remains. You truly want clean energy? Go. Nuclear. It's cheap, has great potential in our society going forward (space applications and miniaturization), and its environmental impact is minimal when safety is done right.

The argument against nuclear is philosophical, not logical.

Greenpeace was a legit party? Thought they were just hippies on a power trip.

Thorium reactors seem to be hot stuff. It produces much shorter half-life radiactive waste, and the products are much harder to use as fissible material for nuclear weapons. Unfortunately it has had less research than its uranium counter-parts.

Fusion on the other hand is far, far from being economical. The numbers sure say that there is way more energy release in the binding enery of fusion, but it is not cost effective right now. In fact, the best fusion reactors we have right now are hardly getting close to breaking even.

But if you have a military for the sake of having a military ("as big as possible") isn't that stealth welfare? Keeping people busy is what the communists did, and the last time i checked you hated that. Massive armies cost tax money, and the last time i checked, you hated that.

I'm just wondering where this fits in.

There are plenty of logical arguments to be made against it. But i don't see a point in discussion this endlessly. Ideally we do both renewable and nuclear.

Renewable energy has plenty of advantages (being environmentally friendly -if done properly- is one of them, locally produced, very limited effects of failure, etc) but it's dependent on environmental conditions. It's also not ideal for powering the heaviest industries.

Nuclear has plenty of advantages but i would rather minimize the amount of nuclear reactors. Effects of failure are immense, they're potential terrorist targets and though in theory it's electricity is super-cheap, nuclear energy is expensive because it requires a ridiculously reinforced and protected building.

So it's likely that in the not-too-distant future, we'll be powering homes and offices with renewable energy, heating them with "recycled" heat and industrial waste heat, and fuelling up our cars with green energy.

Meanwhile, we run actually modern nuclear reactors to power most of the industry plus for major (seasonal?) peaks.

Fusion is still a faraway dream. It's similar to fission in that a big enough heap of pure enough material causes both fission and fusion, but there's a small difference between fission (a few kilograms of uranium) and fusion (a red dwarf star's worth of hydrogen). And it turns out that trying to cheat this condition is pretty damn hard, and we won't be building engineering-grade fusion reactors if we can't figure out the best method for science-grade reactors.

A small addendum: Tsjernobyl was an older model reactor and it failed because of an endless list of human failure. Fukushima was a plant that otherwise withstood everything thrown at it. They just forgot that a tsunami actually could flood the basement and kill off the backup power. If they had chosen their backup power to be actually resistant to that water, nothing would've happened. Many still running reactors were built ages ago. If we build them today, they would be much better.

An addendum to that addendum: certain nuclear reactors are used to produce medical isotopes, so it's also not like we can completely abolish them.

As to oil, i hope we stop burning it as soon as possible. World's resources are finite and while finding alternate power sources is fairly easy, last time i checked the world's chemical industry has no alternatives. I'd rather have us use the remaining oil for stuff like plastics and fertilizer than burning it and running out anywhere between halfway this century and the next.

(double post)

Having a large standing army is something the founders argued against often. Thankfully, we dont have a large army - China and Russia both have more men. It's mostly technology designed to fight another nation with a similar level of advancement.

Having a large military doesn't waste taxpayer money. It doesn't sit around like welfare checks do.

I'll get back to you on the nuke stuff. Gotta make sure I fact check what I'm saying.
I can say that all the reinforced building being expensive is kinda baloney. I mean, yes, it is expensive, but it's generally offset by the low operating costs and shittons of jobs outages provide.

Thorium reactors are the future I think, but we need more testing.

Everyone goes how they hate Greenpeace, let's just be greatful to them for getting their hands on this information and finally letting the public see what is going on with TTIP. xD

That blog looks like a very objective source of information just like your familiy circumstances clearly influenced you on the topic as well.

I do agree that nuclear may have some place in the future. That stuff with reactors that can run for hundreds of years just from the waste we already have is good stuff, especially if they manage to throw in so much security that nothing can go wrong. Reactors that produce even more waste however are something I am against. That waste is waste that even in 1000 years will still be a problem. Producing tons of it is simply irresponsible to all our grand-grand-grand-grand-grand children. If you'd sum in the costs to store the waste in a secure way until the waste becomes harmless than I am afraid currently nuclear power would suddenly look really really bad compared to even the worst solar panel. And not summing in that cost is basically stealing from the future.

And as we all know "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong." so I am very doubtful towards the safety of nuclear power and right now it isn't on acceptable levels. Not because of the technology behind it, but because of the people who run it. Greedy companies with unresponsible employees. There currently is a bit of drama about rather old reactors on the border to Germany that really need to be shut down, but the operators rather fake security reports to keep them running. Their reactors are so broken that they could not withstand cold emergency cooling water so they have changed their emergency plans to inject pre-warmed emergency cooling water.... That's the kind of nuclear I am against and it seems to be the standard in many plants as of today.
A working fusion reactor that is cheap and reliable sure is a dream I'd like to come see true some day.

I'm a huge nuclear proponent, but discounting renewables as some kind of dead-end is incredibly short-sighted. While most energy plants (wind, solar, nuclear, you name it) are mostly locale-dependent this dependency is what means you need to combine them for effective coverage. Nuclear throughput is fantastic but you can't get anywhere near 100% coverage on the main electrical grid alone. Our existing infrastructure proves that.

Also, nuclear batteries can't run your phone At least, in the near-future / without potentially catastrophic side-effects. Solar is actually making some strides in that kind of area (we've finally got transparent solar panels that widely extend the range of application; could be used in stuff like mobile phones in the future).

My main concerns are around the impact of larger wind farms on the environment (placing them out at sea is a great compromise, but then you sacrifice accessibility) and stuff like tidal power. Hydroelectric is fantastic in terms of renewable energy sources, but it's extremely locale-dependent and you dam up a mouth of a river just to get the baseline (for tidal, at least).

A lot of the good locations for water power in the US interfere with wildlife, specifically fish migration but that influences other things that feed on said fish like bears and humans.

The US isn't allowed to use the waste for refining till the ban on it is lifted by our inept congress. And we aren't allowed to re-purpose the nuclear materials in out weapons because of a treaty with Russia. I want a president to get on that, but no candidate wants to touch the issue on either side. It's extremely frustrating.

it´s almost like with videogame development give more money to a company, they may be able to do more, get better staff and create better products .. being able to work more efficiently!

Granted, the majority of oil is used for producing gasoline. As for finding another combustible liquid, there are alternatives.

As much as I hate fossil fuels, they are extremely useful for too many reasons. Having a combustible liquid is extremely important because liquids in general are easy to transport. There may be a 1000 different ways to produce electricity, but being able to deliver it to the right location is a completely different problem.

One liquid combustible that looks promising that could replace gasoline as a fuel source is methanol. Not only can it effectively replace gasoline at various filling stations, its a chemical that has tremendous potential to scale in production. Methane-> methanol.

Methanol could also be considered important too purely on the "hydrogen economy" that could come to fruition soon. hydrgoen gas is extremely difficult to store, but it can readily be converted to methanol for safer transportation and storage.

The only caveat behind this is that its still technically a fossil fuel. If methanol was made from hydrogen that was derived from renewable energy, there could be sustainable source of energy.

Energy density too. Hummers may not be able to drive 80mph on the highway.

There's big strides being made in the area of batteries over the last years I think. Sure it's still not as good as we'd like it to be, but it starts to become viable to run cars with them at least. If the trend continues and batteries (of whatever type) are further improved they'll be an alternative I think?

who in this thread even said they were a party? noone. they're an organisation. and a seemily loosely bundled one at that.