Women's Institute Consulted on Nuclear Waste 366
Leon Stringer writes "The Guardian is reporting that the Womens' Institute is being asked for their views on the disposal of nuclear waste while senior scientists resign in protest of being ignored. What members of the public would you like to design nuclear waste storage facilities?"
Selective Nit-pickery (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd expect this from The Mirror, Sun or News Of The World
The article author should point out that this is in Great Britain (United Kingdom) and is an effort by the government (The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) to get a broad range of opinion, unlike George W. Bush's White House in the USA, which is just fine with it's own set of selective facts and could care less what polls say.
I think this could be an issue of overreation. The public is being involved. Maybe the government plans all along to just ditch the input, but if it all comes a cropper then they do have the minor leg to stand on that they did consult with the public, so the public ought to just shaddup about their NIMBYism*.Interesting that the House of Lords has a Science and Technology Select Committee which is highly critical of the project. Ironically it's the Lords which are often derrided for membership qualified by title and/or heredity that are no stranger to bombast.
* Not In My Back Yard
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:5, Informative)
Which is 100% wrong on how our National Nuclear Waste Facility and local facilities are figured out.
Yucca Mountain is a ridge-line in Nye County, Nevada; composed of volcanic material (mostly tuff) ejected from a now-extinct caldera-forming supervolcano. The "mountain" is most notable as the site of the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository, a U.S. Department of Energy terminal storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste.
The US has been discussing and debating this since 1957 at the Local, State and National level for national sites, local sites and transportation.
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:2, Insightful)
No it isn't. Bush hasn't even pursued this in public. The last time I even saw this issue in print was while Clinton was still president. If the current party in control of the House, Senate and Presidency want to attach it to an energy bill and get it signed into law there's probably not much stopping them.
Pegging Yucca Mountain to anything Bush has pursued lately is absurd.
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:5, Informative)
Try a Google News for Yucca Mountain
Results 1 - 20 of about 384 for yucca mountain.
Theres tons out there in print in this issue, and there has been all through the Bush Administration.
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:5, Insightful)
It *also* had the same sort of sensationalistic criticism, as people are now attributing only to Bush.
Every administration that tries to do anything about getting rid of nuclear waste is going to hit resistence by the public, who are going to detest whoever is in charge, whether they ask them nicely or not.
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:4, Funny)
1.8026175 × 10^12 furlongs per fortnight
Shouldn't that be 1.8026139 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight? Or are your furlongs slightly shorter than mine, or your fortnights longer? Or are you referring to something that is slightly faster than light in a vacuum?
Also, why bother with the scientific notation? I prefer:
1,802,613,894,550 furlongs per fortnight
That's not exact, of course.
Inventing the internets. (Score:3)
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Funny)
The "scientists" in question are probably Intelligent Design GOONs.
Stop Bush now! Support a Womans Right to Choose nuclear waste disposal...
Depleted Uranium -- a few facts (Score:5, Interesting)
"Highly toxic and radioactive" implies both highly toxic and highly radioactive. That is absolutely not the case. While uranium, like any heavy metal, is toxic if ingested, it's not only not highly radioactive, it's bordering on inert. Because almost all the U-235, the active isotope, is gone, it's far less radioactive than uranium in its unrefined form.
Half-life and radioactivity are inversely related. The more radioactive an element is, the shorter its half-life is. For those who don't remember the definition, half-life is the time it takes for half of the atoms in a substance to undergo radioactive decay. Therefore, something that is emitting radiation at a high rate -- that is, undergoing a lot of atomic decay -- is necessarily going to have a short half-life; something with a long half-life is mostly sitting there, and once in a while a nucleus decays. In the case of U-238 (which constitutes 99.8%+ of depleted uranium) in four and a half billion years, roughly half the atoms in your sample will have ejected an alpha particle and turned into lead. The other half have just been sitting there, doing nothing, being inert, for four and a half billion years. As radioactive materials go, that's pushing pretty close to not radioactive at all. In fact, depleted uranium is used for radiation shielding to block gamma rays!
Now, with regard to those alpha particles: they're flying helium nuclei. They're not very good at penetrating things. Like, oh, skin. Paper. Substantial amounts of air. Try it yourself sometime: get your hands on an alpha source (your local antique shop can probably supply you with a piece of red Fiesta Ware pottery) and a Geiger counter (surplus stores often have them). Put the Geiger counter's tube by the Fiesta Ware, listen to the nice clicking. Now put a sheet of notebook paper between them. The clicking stops.
He'd have had to be eating the depleted uranium to get anywhere close to that level of exposure. At which point, he'd be dead from heavy metal poisoning already, so any radiation wouldn't be an issue. Remember, something doesn't become radioactive from being exposed to alpha particles. You need slow neutrons for that, and U-238 is not a good slow neutron source. Enough slow neutrons to make a human being radioactive will also make him dead. Enough depleted uranium in the body to produce measurable radioactivity will kill him just like a large amount of lead, mercury, or other heavy metal.
As for "5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation"
Too much scary writing, too many misstatements, and too many numbers that just don't add up.
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:5, Interesting)
And in the USA the public has been the roadblock to decisions on matters of this sort. You might like to see what a total mess Hanford in eastern Washington became while waiting for another site to open up to take in waste. Hanford was only intended for so much capacity for so much time.
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:4, Interesting)
Problem is, who do you trust matters like this to. I understand and agree with your comment, but I don't know what the right answer is. I'm not willing to let the government just decide everything for me because 'they know best'. If we started excluding any particular group from voting there would be cries of discrimination. How to we come up with a better way to make decisions without losing our freedoms completely?
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:2)
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:3, Funny)
Damn right! The public is the absolute worst group to rely upon for such a long term (epochal) issue as high level radioactive storage. All you get from them is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).
A far better group to rely upon: a religious fundamentalist organization that has an innate faith in a higher being that will come to their rescue when things go badly, and several millenia of longevity since plutonium has a half-life of 20,000 ye
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the public won't be able to bring technical expertise to teh table but they are, at the end of the day, the people that are bank rolling the project so don't you think they should have a say? Government is supposed to be answerable to the people. Yes we should give them the power to make most decisions without consulting us (the people) but large projects like this that have long term implications should include the views of the people. Much like a Government shouldn't wage war on another state with
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:2, Insightful)
You know how Nuclear Waste Disposal works...
You can ask the public before hand or watch them bring your plans down later for not asking them.
I grew up in Midland, Michigan, where a battle raged for years to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant. Everyone was sold on it and fine with the plans of Consumers Power and Dow Chemical Company, but the woman at the end of the street, Rosemary Sinclair, a promiment local attorne
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:2)
couldn't care less
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:5, Insightful)
Could be worse: Italy recently restored an electoral method that an overwhelming majority of people had voted to get rid of, back in 92: so we have three kind of governments, UK that asks people about their opinion, USA that ignores em, Italia that does the exact opposite of what people wanted.
But did anybody ask the people before going to war in Iraq in any of the three "democracies"?
Italy never went to war in Iraq (Score:2)
Re:Italy never went to war in Iraq (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Italy never went to war in Iraq (Score:3, Informative)
I can't speak for Australia, but up until war was declared, the majority of British people opposed the war.
There's also the small matter of the largest popular demonstration against government policy ever recorded.
Re:Selective Nit-pickery (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lies? (Score:3, Informative)
You mean the tons of yellow-cake discovered in Iraq?
Which tons of yellow-cake? where are the news items on this from verifiable and independent sources?
Or the sarin-filled artillery shells the terrorists were using against the Iraqi people?
First of all they were the legal and recognized government of the country (helped to power and supported by the USA for a long time)
Seconmd, that is about 1 1/2 decade ago
Third, the ingredients for this were provided by the west.
This does not change that it was
Re:So they should ignore the story? (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of exaggeration by picking out one institute which has done one unusual thing for publicity (which is really nothing worse than the Page 2 women in some newspapers) they could have simply headed it "1700 forms distributed to broad cross-section of community seeking public input", but that would probably not pique interest, would it?
Consider the source, mate.
Re:So they should ignore the story? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps you mean page 3
This is sexist! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is sexist! (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe it's because women like Florrie Capp are more responsible than their mates.
Re:This is sexist! (Score:2, Funny)
Who should decide? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who should decide? (Score:2)
Excellent plan, then we just move to wherever they are living since the storage obviously won't be in their back yards!
Re:Who should decide? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this view really odd, you know the "not in my back yard view". People are perfectly comfortable living in a place with continual toxic waste emissions. Car exhaust, toxins in everyday objects (paints, walls, toys, you name it), but the moment the word "nuclear" comes into play, all of a sudden images of toxic waste man comes to mind and superstition overrides reality. The fact of the matter is, as far as overall envriomental damage, nuclear is FAR clearer than how we typically power our cars and cities. It is a solvable problem and quite frankly people just need to realize it's less dangerous to live near a nuclear reactor or permant nuclear waste facility than it is to live near a coal powerplant or coal mining facility.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is it then that the owners of nuclear facilities don't have to fully insure them, and they need laws limiting their liability?
Re:Who should decide? (Score:2)
Re:Who should decide? (Score:2)
Their owners are liable for that damage, so it would be a good idea to insure against a claim.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Who should decide? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, an accident like Chernobyl is probably impossible, but nevertheless, the Three Mile Island cleanup has cost roughly a billion dollars so far, and will cost a couple of hundred million more when the other reactor there is shut down and the whole facility is decommissioned. This wasn't paid for by the owner or the owner's insurers, it was mainly paid for by the ratepayers in that region. Under the Price-Anderson Act in the US, and similar legislation in other countries, the owner's liability is limited.
If owners of reactors were required to carry sufficient insurance to cover an accident like that, then electric rates would be higher and profits would be lower, but the cost of the electricity they produce would better reflect the reality of the danger they pose.
This thread started with a claim that nuclear plants are safer than coal, and that is probably true during normal operation, but coal fired plants don't have catastrophic accidents that cost so much to clean up. Coal plant operators should be required to clean up their emissions, but nuclear plant operators should be required to clean up after their accidents.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:3, Insightful)
They might not have "catastropic accidents", as in blowing up, but they are catastrophy regardless. They spout humungous amounts of pollution, and they spread lots of radioactivity to the atmoshpere and surrounding areas (more so than nuclear power-plants do).
There has been... what, two major nuclear
Re:Who should decide? (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear Industries Indemnity ACT [wikipedia.org].
HTH. HAND. DFRNA.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:3, Informative)
The Price-Anderson Act that limits the liability of nuclear operators to around $400M per plant was last renewed in 2002. What's changed since then?
Re:Who should decide? (Score:4, Insightful)
Design is creating a solution to a specified problem with a specified set of constraints.
Engineers don't get any more say than anybody else what the problem or constraints should be.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:5, Informative)
You're confusing this with the actions of power hungry politicians.
Not at all. As an engineer it is my business to say that if such and so is important to you than it will cost so much and have the following additional implications which it is up to you to weigh. Granted, politicians (and managers of every stripe) often fail to take this advance into account and choose to operate on wishful thinking... But that's not my point. Gathering input is a legitimate job for politicians to do in a democracy. It's what they ideally do.
Now if the Women's Institute says the breakdown rate of vitrified waste is such and so, and the engineers you hire say something else, then the engineers are more credible. But if the engineers say 1000 years containment is sufficient, and the Women's Institute says it is not, they are on equal footing.
Furthermore, you're ignoring the nature of engineering -- different engineers have different opinions and engineers hired by one position tend to support that position. So the XYZ Corp.'s engineers say a site is good for 10,000 years, but the Women's Institute hires engineers equally qualified who disagree, we're on equal footing again until the claims can be examined.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:2)
Re:Who should decide? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fatal problem with the kind of elitist solution you're describing is that all the non engineers and scientists feel that things are being done behind their backs and start to complain about it afterwards. This is exactly what happened with GM food - their was a wide spread, and as far as I can tell completely baseless, belief that the technology was inherently unsafe. The Guardian was one of the cheer leaders for this oddly enough - look at any of the columns by George Monbiot on GM, or anything technical. Lots of other people grumbled about a lack of consultation. So after that the Labour government has realised that you need to keep non technical people in the loop for this stuff, hence this sort of thing.
Oddly enough, in consultancy jobs, this is a very good technique - before you make a big change, you need to give the people that own the company a reason for the change, and a list of options and get them to pick one. In fact, it's almost exactly the same situation, since the people that you're trying to get in loop aren't particularly technical - and you're trying to avoid a situation where something breaks because of a change to their code which they haven't agreed on, which tends to be expensive for everyone.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who should decide? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your use of superlatives here is troubling. A few issues to consider here:
* Monsanto's development of genetically-modified Bt Corn and significant potential problems with certain bug populations.
* The use of GMOs to create "pharmafoods"--foods with pharmaceutical-levels of drugs, and issues with these foods intermingling with other crops via po
Re:Who should decide? (Score:3, Interesting)
They have just desolated huge areas of Washington State (Hanford) in the US and Cumberland (Sellafield) in the UK. Thus the polititians are looking for alternatives. My own sugestion is to drill a hole into the ground as far as is possible i.e. several kilometres, let off an appropriate nuke to create an underground chamber. Drill again to make an entrace to the chamber. Drop waste down hole, repeat exercise as needed. Do this in a uni
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Who should decide? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure the rest of the world would enjoy hearing about such a violation of the Test Ban Treaty.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who should decide? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who should decide? (Score:2)
True, but by how much do non-nuclear trained people outnumber the experts? You can have the greatest plan in the world, but if the public is against it, it
Re:Who should decide? (Score:2)
Tell me where you find a qualified engineer whose opinions won't be colored by decades of work for the nuclear power industry or the military.
Re:Who should decide? (Score:3, Insightful)
You wouldn't, for example, let the corporations that want to build the reactor offer their engineers for the task. Well, unless you're a damned fool, that is.
Well, duh. (Score:3, Funny)
I suspect there may be a number of Garbage Women, too, and their input is more than welcome in the design of the nuclear waste disposal facility restrooms.
I Have It !!!. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Have It !!!. (Score:2)
I am not sure this is a troll...here's a few valid moderations, take your pick.
Re:I Have It !!!. (Score:2)
I agree, that's what overrated is for. Watch, someone will mod this down as overrated even though it's not even rated. It's a two because my karma is rockin, not because someone modded it up.
But I never worry about the mods. I'm a virtual fountain of insightfulness and funny. They may get one or two, but I come back swinging.
Re:I Have It !!!. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, the Bush administration got what it wanted, speaking the war. But they also got more than they wanted, speaking still the war and no sign of it stopping anytime soon. How long is Israel bantering with the
Mayhaps a bit of common sense here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Engineers.
Not nearly specific enough. (Score:2)
I don't think that "Engineers" is nearly good enough.
How about "Nuclear Waste Disposal and Storage Engineers"?
Re:Not nearly specific enough. (Score:2)
What does Microsoft call the people who pass through its program? Microsoft Certified Engineers...
And they aren't Engineers. Engineer generally means that someone has been certified as such by a recognized body, as opposed to a corporation. In some places (like Texas), it is illegal to call yourself an Engineer without the cert to back it up.
What about the Men's Institute? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about the Men's Institute? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What about the Men's Institute? (Score:3, Funny)
A Monty Python moment (Score:3, Funny)
As a senior member of the Lufthansa-pudding party, I advocate putting all matters regarding nuclear waste in the hands of mustachioed women.
Re:A Monty Python moment (Score:2)
bah (Score:4, Insightful)
Hrmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Hopefully engineers, sadly... (Score:2)
Ask Slashdot: (Score:5, Funny)
Ask Slashdot: Where would YOU put the UK's store of lethal radioactive waste?
Yucca Mountain
Loch Ness
Orbit
The basement of The Women's Institute
CowboyNeal
Breasts!
CowboyNeal's Breasts!
Re:Ask Slashdot: (Score:2)
recycle (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:recycle (Score:2)
Maybe it is impolitic to put into practice?
Oh crap. pollies solutions sux worse than pollies (Score:4, Insightful)
If the waste is from light water pressurized reactors then the next best thing is to ship it to Canada where we have Candu reactors and we'll burn it for them. Waste from light water reactors is still more radioactive than what the Candu system is designed to run on (natural uranium - 0.7% U235, 99.3% U238) So a Candu can make very good use of it. But it should be reprocessed to remove some of the undesirables.
We need about 75 BIG 1GWe Candu's to support Tar Sands operations but it seems only Total SA has caught on. Why waste 25% or more of the carbon mined producing CO+CO2 as a byproduct of generating the Hydrogen we are desperatly short of when you can just electrolize water? The difference is that by 2015 Tar Sands will be ramping up to about 3.3 million Barrels of Synthetic crude per day. With Nuclear assitance that can be closer to 5 million. By 2015 I expect the world will be in a HUGE energy crisis because I expect world oil production to peak by 2007 and then go into decline. If we have 8 years decline of 3% per year that is a loss of about 20 million barrles per day of world production. (World production is about 82 million barrels per day. USA consumption is about 20 million barrels per day. China is about 7 million and India about 2.5 million barrels per day. Yet I see the press blames China and India for high oil demand and hense high oil prices. Thats the press for you - just a source of distortion.)
If anyone things the oil crisis of the 70's was bad I can say right now that is was a picnic compared to what is comming!
Next, we should be building the advanced Integral Fast Reactors (IFR's) which Argonne Labs designed by about 1994. The program was shut down by Clinton.
The wisdom of this will be very clear long before 2014. By then the short sightness will be felt every summer when the electricty is out and also every winter when the heating oil is short.
IFR technology is proven and it burns all actinides leaving only short lived waste which has industrial uses such as gamma sources and atomic batteries.
In short - none of the so called waste is really waste. It is actually very valuable if used intelligently.
Furthermore it can solve our energy needs for at least 100's if not 1000's of years.
Re:Oh crap. pollies solutions sux worse than polli (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for developing new energy sources, just not into the scare-mongering "peak oil" crap that isn't close in the near(50 to 100 years) future.
Re:Oh crap. pollies solutions sux worse than polli (Score:5, Informative)
Mexican oil companies don't because Canatarell production is expected to go into terminal decline in 2006 and Pemex has some prospects but not much. Indoneasia doesn't seem to know where to drill because Indoneasia became an oil importer this year as did Britian. Indoneasia use to supply Australia.
Iran doesn't know where to drill. The Saudis say they can up production but they have been saying this for years and so far no real joy. The USA doesn't know where to drill because their production peaked about 1970. Two years ago the largest geophysical field operations company in the world shut down North American operations. It seems there was not enough exploration work to keep them going. They were a client of mine.
Ok. More research.
1) Saudi Ghawar field 5 MBOPD
2) Mexico Canatarell 2.1 MBOPD less 14% per year starting 2006
3) Kuwait Bergan 1 MBOPD
4) China DaQing 1 MBOPD less 7% per year starting 2004
These are the 4 largest sorted by production. Ghawar is running over 55% water cut with over 7 million barrels of water injected per day. 65% comes from North Ghawar. Original reserves were estimated to be about 65 billion barrels and 55 billion have been produced to date. Most of the flank wells on the anticline have become injector wells. With the remaining reserves clearly dropping (but no acknowledgment from the house of Saud) the arial extent of that feild is significantly smaller today than it was say in the 70's. It is about 1/4 or less in fact. The writing is on the wall and the Saudi's can lose 2 MBOPD production at the drop of a hat.
So I don't know where you get your information from. I get my information from industry sources including the Geological Survey of Canada. I do consider myself informed. Now if you want to beleive the DOE be my guest.
As for the Tar Sands. Yup - it will last a good long while because there is something like 1.8 trillion barrels in them. However with over $1 billion per year being invested in production facilities we are going to be lucky to get production up to 3.3 MBOPD by 2015.
So if you feel you are up to it I guess we can go head to head and compare each and every oil project in the world. When we do this the numbers come out to 2007 as being the most optimistic realistic estimate for the world peak.
But yes - you are correct there is lots of oil adn lots more to be found. We just cannot find it fast enough to replace our consumption.
A MASSIVE building program to tap every renewable and alternative energy source should have been underway 10 years ago. In addition we should re-engineer our homes to capture as much solar energy as possible, probably via more insulation - over R50 and passive solar designs.
There is no reason that all new housing should not be energy self sufficient in fact. It can be done. I know how to do it. I've been in houses in Calgary that demonstrate the principals - houses without a furnance.
Since North American Natural Gas production peaked in 2001 we have lost a large percentage of the North American Fertilizer industry and now we'll be losing the plastics industry. The president of DOW Chemicals has already announced possible plastics shortages. This is due more to hurricane damage - but declining production is in the picture as well.
The way I see it - North America does not have a workable energy program in place. The world does not have a workable energy program in place. The political administrations are dreaming and are proposing solutions like wars.
As I see it - the only reason the UK and USA are in Iraq right now is control over oil and a desire to liberate Iraqii oil. I would prefer to see engineering solutions instead.
If people think nuclear waste is difficult to handle then I will suggest it is a lot better to handle than 1000's of body bags filled with dead kids.
Re:Oh crap. pollies solutions sux worse than polli (Score:5, Informative)
1) Thermal decomposition.
Put some hydrocarbons in a bucket - put the lid on - heat it up under pressure and we get oil. There is a plant near a butterball turkey plant that is doing this. We can use thermal decomposition for any organic wastes including sewage. However we might be better off turning sewage into organic fertilizers.
2) Fischer Tropshe.
Put some carbon (or hydrocarbon) in a bucket. put on the lid - heat it up under pressure and inject water. Depending on how you do this you can get liquid fuels or gas such as methane. The Germans did this int he 2nd world war from Coal and South Africa has been doing this as well. Its tried and proven. This will be the basis for the Hydrogen plants Suncor is building at a billion a pop for their tar sands expansion. They decided to not go nuclear. Their pres doesn't want to hear the word used in fact. The next pres may feel different.
3) Passive and active Solar.
I know this will work. Photons arrive with high energy which is typically not captured. If you take a glass tube and evaccuate it and put a collector then without cooling the collector will melt. So this has a lot of potential. The energy per meter is max about 1 KWatt. That is a considerable amount of energy that can be captured. Our houses were designed to discard almost all incomming solar energy and then replace this with energy from a "cheaper" source. This IMHO is a very short sighted plan. A well designed solar house can be cheaper to build because you can leave out the furnace. If you check Fiberglass insulation - then you'll note that the R50 insulation costs about $1 buk per square foot. Wall construction labor and other materials are not changed - its just the wall thickness needs to be about a foot. A 2000 sq ft home might be 30x40 so that is about 1400 square feet of wall surface plus another 2000 for the ceiling. Upping the insulation in the building envelope to R50+ would cost only $3500 or so extra. This will _really_ cut down heating and cooling bills and has a pay back of only a couple years because you can probably subtract out the HVAC.
4) Vaccume panels.
Europe has these in testing now. They can do R40 per inch. The ones they are testing are a passive system. The factory builds the vaccume into the panel and once installed they are expected to last several decades. I figure one can use an active system. A vaccume pump can be purchased for $250 bux (maybe too small - but it only needs to top up the vaccume). Or a serviceman could come by once a year to pump down your walls. R 40 - R70 is in the range we need. Replaceable panels are also an option. IE - they can look like siding.
5) Geothermal coupling with radiant heating.
Currently quotes in Calgary are $20,000 for a contractor to install a soil coupled heat pump. Water Furnace International has systems running as well.
To couple your HVAC to an air source which has low thermal coupling and a delta-Temp that wanders all over the graph is just stupid. Soil or water coupling is far more efficient and the temperature gradients are much much smaller.
For that $20,000 an active solar system with more insulation will probably eliminate about 90% of the energy costs so I really think the Geothermal coupled heat pump is probably not the way to go.
6) Fiber Optics and the virtual office
Most people are now doing Intellectual service work which typically can be done from a home office. A virtual commute will add 2-3 hours per day of free time. Why sit in a traffic jam with 6 lane stop and go listening to the radio with the A/C on max when you can just walk across the hallway to an office which is far more comfortable than any cubical employers want to provide? I have been doing this since 1980. I made more money and had time to spend with my kids. I
Technical or political? (Score:5, Insightful)
But if they're asking for political opinions, then this is probably a good idea. No matter how good the technical decision, the choice still needs to survive a political process on the way to implementation. Soliciting diverse opinions up front will be helpful in getting the product through that painful phase. It beats pressing blindly forward and hoping for the best, anyway.
It was my understanding.. (Score:2)
School children (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I realize this will piss off the scientists. Think of it this way: these adult politicians and scientists are suggesting handing over the responsibility for extremely toxic and long-lasting waste to future generations. It's a persistent reminder of our failure to use cleaner alternatives, and we should be made to account for this.
Although we can't ask the 7th generation what their wishes are, we can ask the next. Does this infuriate you? Do you think they're not responsible enough? Think this through: they will be handling that waste when you're wearing diapers.
Not in my backyard (Score:2, Interesting)
Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
The bastard who designed the shrink wrap on CD-Rs. You know the one, where you pull the little tape that splits the plastic coating except it snaps so you run your nail along it except it's so bloody flexible that it won't tear. Then you have to get a really sharp knife and cut it scoring the jewel case. I mean for f***s sake, if getting a CD out of a wrapper can be made such a pain in the arse by a thin bit of plastic just think the container he/she could make if given enough steel, lead and time.....
And another thing.. F***king blister packs that need a friggin scalpel to open... NNNNNNNRRRRGGGHHHHHHHH,.,..... World turning red..... can't think...... I think I'm lapsing into unconciou
Radioactive Man! (Score:2)
WI is powerful (Score:2)
TWW
Bingo (Score:2)
And turn it into a reality show.
Recycle it (Score:2)
Breeder reactors, folks. Know them, use them, love them.
IFRs are good, too.
Plus Ca Change (Score:2)
Excluding scientists, though, has nothing to do with including the public. Except when government
Scientists get upset and go eat worms... (Score:2)
Good lord! If uneducated baboons, sorry I mean politicians and lobbyists, can manipulate the general public then why can't all the highly educated people in the world get with the program?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to read what marketers are doing to influence and create our thoughts about what we think we want and need every day.
But instead of figuring out how to win, the scientists comp
ATTENTION Wal*Mart shoppers! (Score:2)
Organized Crime (Score:3, Funny)
Why, the church of course (Score:2)
If we're going to have faith based science, why not faith based nuclear waste disposal?
Oh, wait. You mean it has to be something different than the way we do it now.
Suggestions from the WI (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Here's a question (Score:2)
'Women's Institute' is a euphemism for 'bored pseudo-intellectual activist housewives with no particular expertise'. I'm not sure what the male equivelent is. Maybe the Elk's club?
Re:Here's a question (Score:4, Funny)
Congress? Or, in the UK, Parliament?
Re:Here's a question (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot should know: Its a womans right to cho (Score:5, Funny)
It's their right to change their minds.....
Re:and the answer is ... (Score:2)
How ironic if the nuclear waste disposal industry were the major player in funding, designing and building the first space elevator. Well, maybe not ironic, but interesting.