As The Planet Warms, We'll Be Having Rice With A Side Of CO2 (npr.org) 275
Grains are the bedrock of civilization. They led humans from hunting and gathering to city-building. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the fruits of three grasses provide the world with 60 percent of its total food: corn, wheat and rice. Aside from energy-rich carbohydrates, grains feed us protein, zinc, iron and essential B vitamins. But rice as we know it is at risk. An anonymous reader shares a report: As humans expel billions of metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere and raze vast swaths of forests, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our air hurries ever higher. That has the potential to severely diminish the nutritional value of rice, according to a new study published this week in Science Advances. For people who depend heavily on rice as a staple in their diets, such a nutritional loss would be devastating, says Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington and an author on the study.
Fiddly Di Fiddly Do Potatos (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure some "nice" company will create strains of GMO rice which will replace all the older strains with only slightly more cost, contractual limits and higher levels of herbicides. /s
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I'd be strongly in favor of banning all gene patents: lets get the direct profit motive out of developing GMOs, so that the ones we do get are at least mostly driven by less thoroughly corrupting impulses. Lots of good work has been done in academia - sometimes misguided, but at least they're generally aiming to improve the human condition.
The stuff coming out of corporations on the other hand tends to be entirely focused on improving their own profit margins, with no regard for the consequences.
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I'd be strongly in favor of banning all gene patents: lets get the direct profit motive out of developing GMOs, so that the ones we do get are at least mostly driven by less thoroughly corrupting impulses. Lots of good work has been done in academia - sometimes misguided, but at least they're generally aiming to improve the human condition.
I work in academia, and I have to ask - what century are you living in? Nowadays academics are all about getting rich (both themselves, and their schools) by coming up with patentable ideas and then monetizing them - often by spinning off their own for-profit companies.
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Oh, there's certainly a lot of that, but it doesn't completely dominate the field, especially as you venture further outside the U.S.
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The US supreme court ruled in 2012 that you can't patent a naturally occurring gene sequence. You can patent a purely synthetic one.
So I guess you got half your wish? Or maybe more... I'm not sure there are any synthetic gene sequences used in GMOs.
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Don't forget patented too!
Population (Score:2)
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The US topsoil is getting thin, and aquifers are being depleted.
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And the US is dealing with it like a functioning society does: we take appropriate countermeasures. That's why output still keeps growing.
Re: Population (Score:3)
No, output keeps growing because the aquifers are being drained. When they are fully drained, there's going to be a hard agricultural collapse.
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Oh spare me the disaster movie scenarios. There is going to be no "collapse". There is going to be a soft landing as some regions that never should have been used for agriculture will be moved out of production because they are not competitive anymore. That's how the economics of finite resources like water and oil work. Only economically ignorant people believe this
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And the US is dealing with it like a functioning society does: we take appropriate countermeasures. That's why output still keeps growing.
What countermeasures? By drilling deeper to get to the last more meager ground water? By using more fertilizer (which causes its own problems) to try and get output out of a more barren soil?
There's a hole in the roof and it's patched with several layers of duck-tape.
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Sure, Russia and Canada look to see some serious long-term improvements in real estate values. Most of the rest of the world though will be losers. And *everyone* is liable to be short-term losers during the transition as weather becomes more unpredictable and climate lines shift faster than ecosystems and the farming industry can adapt.
We're already in the middle of one of the largest mass-extinctions the planet has ever seen (directly human driven, via hunting and habitat destruction), do you really wan
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No, the fact that it's one of the largest extinction events in the geologic record make it one of the largest.
And such extinction events are generally pretty bad for everyone involved, even if they do open the field for interesting new evolutionary branches after several thousand years of ecosystem recovery.
Europe maybe, they're pretty far north and have a lot of large water bodies in a fairly dense area. The US is much less certain - the "Breadbasket" of inner America may very well suffer severe droughts
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Would be heartening to see refugees and migrants swarming into Africa for a change.
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The world could have much more arable land thanks to climate change in the future. Rumors of the demise of human beings or the universally negative consequences of climate change have been greatly exaggerated.
Rumors of the demise of human beings or the universally negative consequences of WAR have been greatly exaggerated.
When I discuss the topic with friends, I generally refer to it as anthropogenic climate improvement.
When I discuss the topic with friends, I generally refer to it as defense industry stock improvement.
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The interesting word is could.
And if you think about it: in which areas would it? And how long would go that on?
Where would we lose arable land? And would that outweigh it?
A benevolent dictator probably could push a master plan that the whole world somehow shares the food/arable land.
But most likely you come from a country that will lose most of its arable land due to global warming and rather wages a war to get "food" from the "lucky winners", or force them that the world trade of food is only done in your
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Right! There is really really simple solution to this and that is frigging BOARDERS.
The US population could be perfect stable if we stopped allowing immigrants to enter. We don't want our population to shrink so we'd actually need to nudge the birth rate up a bit. Stability can work economically though. Existing assets can be conveyed to the next generation without major depreciation.
As to the rest of the world; well the developed world does not have a population problem - if they have the since to stop
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What about the immigrants who don't arrive by boat?
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That argument makes no sense. Africans probably have the lowest CO2 emissions on the planet.
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That is because of the generations that got hit by severe hunger during the critical phases of brain development. Hunger has in fact damaged brains and degraded their intellectual development.
This damage is not inheritable, and their children already are much higher on IQ scale than their parents now that world hunger has been all but eliminated.
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It's well documented that they are still below European average just like European average is below Jewish average and Chinese average.
What they are not however, is around 70 points on average. And it makes a whole lot of difference if population on average is is barely on the edge of being classified as mentally retarded, and someone who actually needs help just to cope with everyday life, or if you are on average a bit worse at learning new tasks quickly and otherwise a mentally functional adult.
Hint: Sub
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Hint: Sub saharan kids adopted to US don't need help just to manage their everyday lives throughout their adulthood. People below 70 points of IQ generally do. When you're around 70 on average, that literally means that half of your population is below 70, and meaningfully many of them a lot below that. That's horrifying, and that is what hunger crisis a few decades did to some of the populations in the world.
Hint: it is more likely that they fail performing in your IQ tests. Likewise you would fail in thei
Hard to lower the nutrition of plain white rice (Score:5, Informative)
Plain white rice has very little nutritional value. Only if you leave the hull on and make it hard to chew does rice have decent nutrients.
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Rice is almost entirely carbohydrate. Great for starving people who need a quick sugar fix to get through a hard workday, but deadly for people who eat it in addition to other foods and do not burn calories. The best-selling book 'Grain Brain' is one expose of the damage that grains cause. 60,000,000 Atkins dieters agree but I expect some Slashdotters have their own studies that disagree. Please elucidate!
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So...rice remains great until a society is too modern and cheap, energetic food becomes a liability rather than a scarce necessity?
Sounds like a situation decreasing the energy of rice is arriving hand in hand with its need.
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Starving people need proteins, not sugar.
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Plain white rice has very little nutritional value. Only if you leave the hull on and make it hard to chew does rice have decent nutrients.
But it's arguably better for you without the hull. Check out Lectins [mindbodygreen.com]. People are all worked up over gluten, but it's just one of a family of inflammatory proteins. Sub clinical inflammation is a genuinely Bad Thing and the root of many health problems.
Gundry is promoting this for a living, but the science seems to make sense.
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Rice does not contain gluten.
But it's arguably better for you without the hull. ... it strips it from everything except hydrocarbons.
Indeed (facepalm), and that is why most Asian and European rice is eaten with the hull. Barboiled (sp?) is nothing that improves rice
Re:Hard to lower the nutrition of plain white rice (Score:5, Interesting)
Americans are so overfed that they tend to regard carbs as some kind of poison. In fact, for most of the world, it is the most important foodstuff, providing basic energy for life.
The article even acknowledges this fact, and even admits that CO2 doesn't lower the absolute amount of vitamins and other nutrients in rice, but (because it is a basic food for plants) actually causes a substantial increase in the rice carb content. The extra C,H and O needed come directly from CO2. Virtually all of the carbon in plants is derived from the CO2 they breathe in. More CO2 means more growth and carb content.
But, instead of celebrating the larger rice plants and increased rice crop yields caused by CO2, it condemns this "abundance" using typical scare words like 'devestating', 'catastrophic', 'severe deficiency' etc. This reveals the intellectual dishonesty of the "green-collar" criminals who are trying to scare the world into achieving it economic sabotage of the so-called "rich nations".
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@me: "The extra C,H and O needed come directly from CO2. "
The H comes from H2O, I should have said.
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Unless you are starving, it is correct to treat carbohydrates stripped from the rest of the food source they came from as poison. You've discarded useful nutrients and the fiber that will keep those carbs from doing a number on your pancreas.
Most people do poorly with refined carbs.
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Double face palm.
Half of your basket of goods could not have been purchased for billions of dollars an item a mere fifty years ago (half of health care, almost all electronic devices, and all forms of information no longer obtained by consulting long, skinny drawers of catalog index cards).
Time to climb down off your Infowars-certified soap box. (Did Alex emphasize the importance of soap in your post-apocalyptic secure collapse-of-civilization refuge burrow? Did Alex ment
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It's why soy sauce was born.
See also buttered noodles.
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Plain water has very little nutritional value. Rice has carbs, proteins, minerals, etc. It is the thing at the bottom of that food pyramid.
It doesn't have much proteins or minerals though. That food pyramid is old. 99% of people in the West if they cut their bottom step of the obsolete food pyramid in half.
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99% of people in the West if they cut their bottom step of the obsolete food pyramid in half
Ooops. Wish there were an edit button.
I meant to say 99% of people in the West would be healthier
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> Plain water has very little nutritional value. Rice has carbs, proteins, minerals, etc. It is the thing at the bottom of that food pyramid.
White rice is pretty much pure carbs. It's like eating white bread.
You have just stumbled onto the cause of our obesity epidemic while kind of trying to the opposite.
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It's a bit more complicated than that. There are/used to be plenty of places where people ate tons of white rice without getting fat.
Overfarming has already done this (Score:5, Informative)
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Reading TFA makes me wonder, though, what happens if you supply the rice with additional nutrients to match the increased yield. The experiment demonstrated that when you grow rice under enhanced CO2 concentrations, keeping all other things equal, it produces more biomass, but the nutrient level per unit of biomass decreases -- thereby discovering that, if you have 30 items and distribute them among ten boxes, the boxes will each have more items in them than if you distribute the same 30 items among fifteen
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They sat down next to the thermometers they had calibrated to a tenth of a degree and ate some.
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The fine print... (Score:5, Informative)
... if you read TFA is that the rice grows much faster and produces a lot more in the same amount of time, but because they didn't increase the available soil nutrients to match, they are basically diluting its nutritional value relative to total yield. Which is silly. All they have to do to avoid the problem is provide the plants with balanced fertilization instead of bumping one major component of healthy growth without bumping others.
This is about as useful as reporting that rice grown with too much nitrogen relative to other nutrients may grow faster but not be as nutritious or healthy as rice grown with a better balance of fertilizers. Or with the right/wrong amount of water.
The PROBLEM in other words is that the rice grew TOO WELL for a fertilizer level set for poorer growth.
Look, it's all useful information until it is turned into propaganda. A huge fraction of fruits and vegetables are grown all over the world in actual greenhouses, and standard practice in greenhouse farms is to bump CO2 to as high as 1000 ppm because IF you balance the increased CO2 fertilization against water and other nutrients, you get much larger yields, faster, from healthier plants. C3 respiring plants all over the world are growing roughly 15% faster and with larger yields than they did 150 years ago, but if you took that 15% away arguing that food crops must have been better for us without the extra CO2 you'd literally starve a billion people. This simple fact has been carefully ignored in most of the public discussions of Demon CO2, so now it is necessary to "prove" that increased CO2 is bad for plants. But it's not. Quite the contrary. With well-known, long since published federal guidelines from the Department of Agriculture. It's one of the many things that confounds the "dendroclimatologists" who claim to be able to read off global warming and past temperatures by examining tree rings. I read a study of tree growth (in general) in Europe and the increase in the growth rate and health of European forests over the last fifty or so years has been remarkable. There is an ongoing process of "antidesertification" -- deserts starting to green up again -- as a direct consequence of increased CO2. Finally, CO2 levels in the last ice age dropped to within 10 or 20 ppm of the "critical point" that would cause mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants due to inadequate partial pressure to drive diffusion into the plants at a rate capable of sustaining life and growth.
At this point there isn't a lot of reason to think we'll ever reach 580 ppm. Fusion actually looks like it is LIKELY to come home in the next decade, if not the next three years, and photovoltaics and batteries appear to have passed a critical point of their own and become at least break even if not win a bit as the cheapest source of new electrical power. Within the decade, we'll see more and more homes being built that are 80% or better self-sufficient in energy. And hey, one day it's not inconceivable that people will stop knee jerk opposing fission based power, and maybe LFTR or some other comparatively safe technology will take off to power the US for a thousand years or so.
easy to fix (Score:2)
The original rice plant wasn't all that nutritious either but was improved through breeding. Adapting rice plants to higher CO2 concentrations should be fairly simple. And it's not like we have a choice: there is no way to prevent a substantial increase in atmospheric carbon concentrations. We'll likely end up with about 600-800ppm CO2 before switching to solar, and that's fine.
Here's the bottom line (Score:5, Insightful)
We've got too many people living hand to mouth who can be easily kowtowed with threats of job loss. They'll come out and vote in any democracy against climate change because climate change is years from now and the rent's due today.
If you want to do something about climate change you need to fix their economy first. Until then they'll fight you tooth and nail and they've got the backing of the billionaires (who don't want to pay taxes to fix things) so they'll win.
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If you live in the United States making $30,000/year you are already among the richest of people who have ever lived, and still probably within the 1% globally. We are already living in the best economy that's ever existed - there's nothing to fix except people living within their means.
Fragile existence (Score:2)
And we're not living in the best economy ever unless you're a stockbroker or a billionaire. Wealth inequality the the worst it's been since the 1920s (and yes, we're on our way to another major crash. Would have had one in 2008 if the gov't hadn't bailed out the banks at the point of a gun).
The economy peaked for the middle class in the 1970s. Wages have been stagnant or
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you're one job loss away from homelessness.
That is true for a frightening number of people. However, what I find more frightening is the number of people for whom that is a direct result of personal choice. Granted, I do not have the largest circle of friends, but literally every single person with whom I am acquanted that would suffer severe financial hardship (including the possibility of homelessness) resulting from a job loss, manages to enjoy lots of luxuries. One who I can think of recently bought an expensive motorcycle (on credit, naturall
^^^INSIGHTFUL (Score:2)
Same here, most of the people I know also make really poor financial decisions. I think it the 'American way' of consumption.
Likewise, as far as a safety net, I know lots of examples of people scamming the government welfare system. There are probably facebook groups on how to do it.
Couples not getting married with multiple kids purely for welfare, claiming food stamps/tax refunds for non-existent children... the list goes on and on.
I keep hearing this (Score:2)
The Charities are overwhelmed. That's how it's always been. If Charity worked there would be no poor. My experience with charity is that it's either scams (like Goodwill, which is a private for profit company tha
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My experience with charity is that it's either scams (like Goodwill, which is a private for profit company that bills itself a charity) or they're just there to give well to do and wealthy people a balm on their conscience. e.g. they make you feel better without actually doing anything of material value. I know that sounds harsh, but, well, reality is harsh. I've had relatives hit rock bottom with major medical issues and charities gave them $20 gift cards to buy groceries. The Government paid for the medical care that kept them alive and made them healthy again.
My experience with government is that it's either scams (like the IRS, which is a partisan political tool of congress and the president that bills itself an independent and non-partisan entity) or they're just there to give well to do and wealthy people a balm on their conscience. e.g. they make you feel better without actually doing anything of material value because you've paid your taxes so you've done all you need to do to "help the poor". I know that sounds harsh, but, well, reality is harsh.
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Wealth inequality is a left-wing dogwhistle for hating the rich. Nothing more. It doesn't hurt you if someone has more money - what matters is how much you have.
If you think rich people hurt you, consider that you are rich (I don't care how much you have - if you live in the US right now you're rich) compared to most of the people in the world and definitely most throughout history. Is *your* wealth hurting others?
It does hurt you (Score:2)
Also, if you don't think Rich people are hurting you then you don't live in Flint, Mi or drink their water. And you know absolutely nothing of history or how the power of wealth has been abused. I'm not going to bother but I could spend days explaining all the ways the power of money has been abused.
Bottom line: You're not free if somebody controls your access to food, shelter, health care and education. Until then they can make you do whatever
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Environmental catastrophes in other countries are likely due to poor management in those countries. Just as you have free will and agency, so do "brown people". When you try to deny this you are denigrating them as much as if you burned a cross on their lawn.
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None of those things are economic problems, they're social problems. The US has a magnificent economy, certainly the most powerful that has ever existed, and it just keeps growing, year after year. So much so that tiny little hiccups, barely visible on the historical graph, are treated like catastrophes.
Now, socially, the US has some problems. With so much money they wouldn't be hard to solve. It's only the will to solve them that is wanting. Situation is similar for carbon emissions.
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Umm, that word does not mean what you think it means.
Note that, as a rule, if you don't know what a word means, don't use it. Or look it up first.
By the by, the word you were looking for when you settled on "kowtowed" was "cowed".
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You probably thought that was a safe entry point to your sob story of rampant societal decay and malaise (thus it has ever been).
What's actually inflating is our knowledge of the world. Modern economists now segregate inflation into two distinct terms: one for goods (that which mostly comes from China), and one for services (that which mostly comes from human proximity
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inflation eats away at my income a little every year. I'm being told that addressing climate change would kill jobs and in turn wages.... If you want to do something about climate change you need to fix their economy first.
It's the monetary system that needs fixing. Debt-based money needs ongoing economic growth to work, and we see it in the form of inflation. Seriously, we're depleting our limited real-world resources in order to maintain a fiction of money.
Ironically, Bitcoin proposes a deflationarly solution while it spends a metric shitload of energy. But in comparison, an enormous majority of the world economy only exists to maintain the debt-based fiat money system (via the consumerist culture).
More CO2 == Better plants (Score:4, Funny)
Same for water, flood your plants by putting them in the tub and fill it to a few inches above the top of the plant. More is always better.
Obvious /s
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Not necessarily true. It's like saying your car will go faster if you put more gas into it. It doesn't work that way. We for example need oxygen to survive but pure oxygen is actually pretty deadly to us. A lot of plants are limited by Nitrogen which we add into soil (fertilizer) to get plants to grow faster. Even if plants can use the extra CO2, it'll probably take many generations and thousands of years for plants to evolve to use that extra CO2 which we're cranking into the atmosphere at a rate that
By what measure? (Score:2)
That is, if a single current plant produces 'X' grams of grain with 'Y' milligrams of nutrient, then does the CO2-enriched plant still produce 'Y', distributed over 'X+n'?
That would fit the model, but would still be to
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That faster growing plant produces grain (seeds) more quickly and in greater numbers.
There's actually an inverse relationship between leaf area and seed yield. The plant has a finite amount of energy it can devote to producing both. It's been well-understood in the farming community for ages that yield of grains, fruits, root vegetables, etc. can be maximized by selectively removing leaf mass at the proper time in the growth cycle, and the scientific community has stumbled on idea more recently.
Increased CO2 does increase photosynthesis and thus the total bucket of available energy, but o
Not really (Score:2)
and raze vast swaths of forests
Stopped reading right here. Since the beginning of the 20th century, global forest coverage has remained stable. Mainly due to the reduction in the use of wood as heating/cooking fuel.
Scapegoat much? (Score:2, Interesting)
First environmentalists caused global warming by blocking CO2 free nuclear power
Nice bit of scapegoating you have there. I'm sure the fossil fuel industry had nothing at all to do with it. I'm sure catastrophic events like Chernobyl had nothing to do with it. I'm sure the fact that we still don't have a good way to deal with the waste problem had nothing to do with it.
People are afraid of radiation. Solve that and I'm sure they'll be fine with nuclear power.
then they starve us to death by blocking GMO foods...
They aren't blocked where I live. Hunger has a funny way of getting people to cease worrying about such silliness anyway.
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I'm sure catastrophic events like Chernobyl had nothing to do with it. I'm sure the fact that we still don't have a good way to deal with the waste problem had nothing to do with it.
You know, you could simply build modern reactors that do not melt down by design(pebble-bed and others) and breeder reactors that USE OTHER REACTORS WASTE AS FUEL
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There are no reactors that use "waste" as fuel. "Breeder" reactors irradiate 8U to produce fissile isotopes and then burn these in the same fuel cycle that the plain old 5U reactors use. Ditto for thorium. The waste from the power generation is the same radioactive and poisonous mix of roughly 1000 elements that comes out of every reactor.
All these elements have excess neutrons and must decay. And you have to keep them safe until they do.
There is no engineering magic that will solve this problem. It is the
Re:Scapegoat much? (Score:5, Informative)
The fundamental physics say that what you call waste is just more fuel.
Re:Scapegoat much? (Score:4, Insightful)
The waste from the power generation is the same radioactive and poisonous mix of roughly 1000 elements that comes out of every reactor.
1000 elements?! My periodic table is apparently way, WAY out of date...
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There are no reactors that use "waste" as fuel.
That turns out not to be the case.
http://egeneration.org/solutio... [egeneration.org]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
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From your first link:
A conventional 1,000-megawatt reactor produces about 20 metric tons (44,000 lbs.) of high-level waste a year, and that material needs to be safely stored for 100,000 to 300,000 years. The proposed 500-megawatt Transatomic WAMSR (Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor) will produce only four kilograms (8.8 lbs.) of such waste a year, along with 250 kilograms (550 lbs.) of waste that has to be stored for a few hundred years.
It still produces waste, just less.
And no: waste is not the fuel
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I'm sure catastrophic events like Chernobyl had nothing to do with it. I'm sure the fact that we still don't have a good way to deal with the waste problem had nothing to do with it.
You know, you could simply build modern reactors that do not melt down by design(pebble-bed and others) and breeder reactors that USE OTHER REACTORS WASTE AS FUEL
You speak blasphemy.
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First environmentalists caused global warming by blocking CO2 free nuclear power
Any amount of realistic nuclear power deployment would have been insufficient to prevent global warming on its own.
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First environmentalists caused global warming by blocking CO2 free nuclear power
Any amount of realistic nuclear power deployment would have been insufficient to prevent global warming on its own.
No single thing would be sufficient to prevent global warming on its own. Higher nuclear power adoption would have helped; it would be a step in the right direction. Alone, no, not enough. You don't walk a mile with just one step though, you take many steps... adopting more nuclear power would have been a step in the right direction.
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Re:Good thing the world embraces GMO rice then! (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't enough, but it would have given a lot more time to deal with the problem
We had plenty of time, but nobody cares about dealing with problems until it's too late.
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If we are to effectively reduce CO2 emissions gasoline/diesel need to become prohibitively expensive to the point that you simply can't drive a daily commute to the next county, while still being cheap-ish enough to allow discretionary use, like emergency run to the pharmacy, or like driving the van with all the family to Grandma's place for thanksgiving. You know, like you can Vacation on Hawaii once or twice a year, but not every day.
Every day commute should be either public transport (preferably track ve
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Sincerely hope people with these types of views never get to make any kind of grown-up decisions involving other people.
Even a 1 or 2 dollar hike in gas prices is enough to bring a pretty good chunk of Americans to their knees financially. And of course; not everyone lives in an area where mass transit is viable.
Gotta love modern environmentalism -- giving people the feeling of a moral imperative to tell others how to live their lives.
Really, the goal should be on improving sequestration capability. Curbing
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First off, you assume they are the same people. There may be overlap, just as there is statistical overlap between the GOP and KKK, but treating them as the same group is a fallacy.
Second, GMO and nuclear power are merely band-aids on climate change at best, not a solution.
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We don't need GMO crops to avoid starvation for anyone. That's just a total bullshit narrative. The West grows much more food than it can eat and wastes most of it at every step in the supply chain.
GMO crops mainly make your Twinkies and Mountain Dew cheaper.
I also get a chuckle out of the hysterics here over the nutrition content of rice. Most rice is processed in a manner that removes any significant vitamin/mineral content.
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Oh wait.
First environmentalists caused global warming by blocking CO2 free nuclear power,
Yes, yes, those mighty environmentalists with their multi-billions in profits from fossil fuels and staff of thousands of lobbyists inside the halls of power, regularly bribing politicians to favor polluting sources over any alternatives, are to blame [youtube.com].
then they starve us to death by blocking GMO foods...
Have you noticed how corpulent your God-Emperor Trump is getting? CLEARLY, it's the fault of the emaciated orphans living in the streets that you're not getting enough Big Macs to stuff in your own face.
But wait, wait, what if you can make the orphans useful?
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Plants that share the same photosynthesis pathway as rice and wheat do indeed grow larger and produce greater yields in higher carbon dioxide concentrations by creating more carbohydrates... But they don't increase the amount of other nutrients in their grains relative to that yield gain. "They're basically getting a dilution effect of the nutrients in the grains"
For the poor parts of world, malnutrition from the lack of carbohydrates is much harder to deal with than a lack of vitamins. It doesn't take a lot of land to plant a vegetable garden.
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The bigger problem is lack of protein. Rice doesn't have much of that.
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BS. The malnutrition is not due to lack of carbs, it is due to lack of overall calories. The human body does not need carbs for anything. We run very well on a bit of fat and a little protein.
Simle minds expect simple solutions (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear power and GMO foods are going to save us? Really?
Solar is dwarfing nuclear. [ucsusa.org]
As for GMO crops, um, no. Just no.
Do you realize the connection between the nitrogen cycle [wikipedia.org], fossil fuels, and the 1973 oil embargo [wikipedia.org]?
In a nutshell: World populations grew faster than land based plants can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere [slate.com]. The natural carrying capacity of this planet using sustainable traditional agriculture is about 2 billion humans. Oddly enough, about the time that the world population level reached 2 billion
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Mod this up.
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You wanted references:
https://detoxproject.org/glyph... [detoxproject.org]
https://www.wellnessresources.... [wellnessresources.com]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
https://www.cornucopia.org/201... [cornucopia.org]
http://glyphosate.news/2017-01... [glyphosate.news]
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How bad can carbonated rice be?
Japanese Rice Lager is pretty tasty, probably less nutritious,,,
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Yep, it's the self-correcting part that's going to be a bitch. Especially when you throw a lot of nukes and well-armed hungry armies into the mix.
And thus those who say "hey, let the problem fix itself" are basically advocating for genocide.
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*This* article is about rice, but it's really merely replicating other studied that have been done with other plants. The details vary, but the general result is that the fruits and seeds become higher in carbohydrates and lower in minerals, vitamins, and proteins.
This should hardly be a surprising result, as increasing carbon dioxide makes carbohydrates cheaper to produce energetically. The details vary, whether it's that the plants reduce water evaporation so the acquire less minerals by transpirations
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