UMD Libertarians

Oil is like the road system we have, that may have some potholes and ruts, but with some capital investment, we can improve them and they will serve our needs for now and the future.

"Renewable Energy" is like Lyle Lanley selling the monorail system to the people of springfield. a lot of money invested in unknown technology that may or may not work or may or may not be better than what we already have/could have invested in.

I find when people make analogies in an argument it’s because they want to obscure the facts.

oil releases co2 so does not have a future (McCain and Obama want to have cap and trade and reduced co2 emissions)

This is without question the worst analogy I’ve seen in my life because everything you wrote is false. We won’t have that extra asphalt to fix the potholes because it will run out, and believe me when I say that we know all we need to know about alternative fuels. The problem is making them cost effective and efficient on a petroleum based infrastructure.
except we are going to sell ‘renewable energy’ based on solid research and planning whereas the springfiled monorail was sold on a song and dance
Jesus, I can’t believe you just compared using alternative fuels to a fucking Simpsons episode.

well al gore’s doing his best with yelling and retarded movies

probably heard it in the bar or something and thought it was smart

how long have people been about running out of oil…and we have more proven reserves now than ever before…

Jesus you make me ashamed to be an American, how ignorant can you possibly be about this? Seriously, why do you people want oil so badly? Does it taste or smell good? What is the reason you want to hold on the precious black gold that is causing you strife at the pump every week?

he owns 4 SUVs

because it’s relatively cheap, reliable, readily available

i’ve got a 4-banger saab and teh wife has a corolla

There are several solar neighborhoods primarily in California where the homes are able to reduce electricity costs by at least 50% and in some cases produce enough to sell back to the grid. The initial cost is a bit more but by putting the technology in new homes it reduces it significantly for the builder and home buyer. It also reduces the need for new large plants and power lines.

A wind farm proposed offshore in Cape Cod is expected to produce on average between 75%-100% of the current power needed for the area and peak generation would be double the current needed power.

It’s pretty hard to get something like solar wrong when there are no moving parts and if we haven’t figured out how to build a reliable windmill by now then something is wrong with humanity. People today build there own windmill generators using car brake rotors and magnets that run reliably for years. It’s not that complicated. We just need people to invest in it. There is huge potential for profit in renewable power operations. I have no idea why so few people have not jumped on board.

And this is just cool.

Combine this idea with solar panels in strategic places around the building and you have significant energy savings for the building owner.

unfortunately once people hear you’ll have to pay a little more up front they abandon the whole idea, even though it will pay you back within x years

That must be why they have been selling like crazy.

compared to not selling at all, yes.

, spelling book, , , , ,

It’s more fun to imply that someone failed spelling in school.

Chains, whips, sticks. Man, tell me about it…..

Well, I’m for renewables all the way, but this ’selling based on solid research’ is not what is happening.

Renewable energy is being sold to congress . . . by the corn lobby. You know, the people that bought congress decades ago resulting in corn derivatives in nearly 40% of our food.

We can put nuclear power in our cars? Hot damn, nuke me baby!

but i’d like to be able to go faster than 88mph…

Electricity, yo!

so true

Stop trying to ruin my fun.

I think you’re trying to say he needs a thesaurus.

Well . . . no, but technology is improving. We can now get more out of it than ever before.

Strange…. you’d think a Republican Congress and Executive would have been able to … SOMEHOW approve more toxic dumping sites in their time. They made such HUGE strides for nuclear energy…..

On a tangentially related subject, what happened to breeder (lulz) reactors? I know Canada was investing a ton of money into breeder research, but I haven’t heard anything lately

What? Commercial nuclear power isn’t doing shit to anyone. I’m not taking any credit for what a bunch of dumb shits at government labs did half a century ago. We ALL know they fucked up.

Research is still happening, but nobody is turning them into power-scale reactors any time soon.

I think he is criticizing the lack of progress on nuclear waste disposal under bush/rubber stamp congress.

Actually, you have Harry Reid to primarily thank for that.

care to elaborate? It’s not something I’ve followed at all.

how about just the total lack of technological development in waste management?

Sure

The story is that Harry Reid is a democrat senator from Nevada, the state chosen for the first primarily commercial nuclear waste (mostly just spent fuel) repository by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (1982). He has worked tirelessly ever since 87, when the Yucca Mountain site was chosen for the repository, to do everything he can to keep it from happening. Even during the Clinton administration, when the Republicans gained majority they tried to move forward with YM, and Clinton vetoed. Reid made sure that support to override a veto faltered.

In the mean time, he has been very successful at getting the budget for YM cut repeatedly, essentially driving it into the ground. The original opening date for YM was supposed to be (and was contractually obligated) to 1998. Since then, several utilities, mine included, have sued the DoE for breach of contract since we now have to construct on-site dry storage facilities for fuel that cost millions of dollars.

So yeah, thank Harry Reid and his anti friends.

You are basing this on what?

An angle that I just thought of and was hoping to be true

I am shocked that anyone in our government would behave in such a manner.

inorite?
I just don’t know if we should be using an energy resource that produces highly destructive waste that lasts for 100s - 1000+ years. Why create that monster if we don’t have to?

Reid is a piece of shit. He sold us up the river on FISA too.

who says we don’t have to?

solar, wind, biofuel

all of which still need a lot of work done.

treating nuclear as a magic bullet is as dumb as taking it off the table.

not really. wind is pretty much ready to go right now. Solar has some really exciting developments that are just a few years away from production. MIT has recently found a way to store solar energy for use when it’s not sunny out.

yeah I saw that. still, the technology needs to be actually worked out for massive large-scale production.

we have basically no experience running all wind/solar power grids and using load-balancing technologies. It’s going to take a while. Still, that’s the future and that’s where we need to focus.

Plus there’s the whole question of the need to massively improve our power transprot infrastructure itself.

Oh… you mean someone doesn’t want nuclear waste in their backyard? :shocked:

Why haven’t any of these Republican congresscritters under a Republican president stepped up to sacrifice their own state to the completely safe and clean nuclear materials…? You know, if nuclear power is the answer to the energy problems ….. why NO progress? Blaming the democratic senator of ONE state under a combined Repub congress/executive is a damned weak excuse.

You mean the one person who lives anywhere remotely close to the mountain in the middle of the desert? Nuclear fuel isn’t exactly rusty old barrels leaking green glowing goo like your hardcore antis would have you believe. The process to choose a site was done by study back between 82 and 87. But hey, feel free to google yourself to death trying to criticize it as some horrible conspiracy.

Yucca Mountain and the entire NWPA directive is driven and controlled by the government, not utilities or vendors. We don’t have any say in it. It shouldn’t be that shocking that politics controls its fate.

So … Yucca Mountain alone is (and always has been) the entire solution to the nuclear waste issue?

Even though you went to my school and are a nuke E, you still didn’t answer the question.

Since the fed took control of it, yes. Of course, if the fed kills it and gives us back the billions of dollars we’ve had to pay into funding it, then I’m sure you’d see the utilities step up. Until something like that happens, all you can do is speculate.

Ok, what didn’t I address?

The lack of progress in nuclear power since the republicans all think it’s an issue that Obama is against it, when it is the rarest power source in the country.

*aside from solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal

…rarest power source [that the Republican Congress supported]…
Bush and his rubber stamp sure didn’t make any moves on exploring alternatives….

"On , , the Department of Energy selected ten locations in six states for consideration as potential repository sites. This was based on data collected for nearly ten years. The ten sites were studied and results of these preliminary studies were reported in . Based on these reports, approved three sites for intensive scientific study called site characterization. The three sites were ; ; and Yucca Mountain.
In , Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and directed DOE to study only Yucca Mountain….."

I’m not sure what you mean by lack of progress. Are you talking about the long span of time during which we didn’t build new plants?

Ok, so despite that this was all conjured up and passed by a Democrat congress during the 80s, you are somehow pointing the finger at the Bush administration for not messing with a politically toxic subject and not trying to invalidate the studies that led to the choosing of YM? I don’t really like GWB either, but you’re stretching the Bush hate a bit far here.

I’m not stretching anything. My point is simple and obvious — Yucca Mountain is not THE ONLY POSSIBLE SITE IN THE COUNTRY. If the Republicans were really so driven for nuclear power, then I ask again, "why has there been so little progress?" Same question.

Hell .. I think I even read that Yucca Mtn is on a fault line or something. That alone seems like it would have warranted study into alternative sites. The nuclear transportation issue seems that it might be wise to have multiple sites.

Excuse my poor definition, I meant rare as in terms of a source of energy on a large scale. None of the above are fit for large, city-size situations.

No it’s not the only possible site, but it’s the one for which the most studies have been done and where we could most easily and quickly construct a repository. Why? Because 21 years ago, it was chosen as THE single site to focus all of this effort on. It was 1980s politics that drove this, not the Bush administration or 90s Republican congress. Until this century, nobody was saying SHIT about nuclear power because public support wasn’t there. I graduated school in 2002 and even then the best job security was to work in decommissioning. Shit changed and now we’re building new plants.

Feel free to read up about YM. Most of the antis challenges to YM are much more political and emotional than scientifically-based, and most of them, when pressed, will admit to all sorts of moving of goalposts and political maneuvering to indefinitely stall the project.

Also, transportation is not an issue. We’ve already done thousands of shipments of high-level waste all over the country, including spent fuel. We have and have had the technology to design and use containers that are suitable for that while still protecting the health and safety of the public. Those containers are incredible.

Well .. I kinda expect that. Nuke waste is a pretty NIMBY topic.

But … is YM actually on a fault line?

Fair enough (although, I think teh new hotness in the transportation issue would be to raise terrorism scenarios as opposed to simple container accident issues).

No, it’s sitting on the remains of an old volcano, though the state sees a good deal of low-level seismic activity. The repository and containers are seismic qualified because of this.

You mean like hitting one with a train, a commercial aircraft, dropping them on unyielding surfaces from heights, dropping them on spikes, setting them on fire, or dropping them in a lake? Those have all been done. Like I said, those containers can take some serious punishment.

Thanks for the info ….

Not really. More like … stealing them.

Not exactly easy. Those containers weigh upwards of 125 tons and their transport is carefully monitored. There’s no way to quickly grab one. It’s not convenient like a nuclear warhead.

plus then wtf does a terrorist do with 125 tons of nuclear waste.

the only feasible thing really is just to build a big bomb and blow one up and just make a huge mess

build a few big bombs and blow them up

not feasible. you’re not going to clandestinely move around 125 tons that can’t be easily subdivided inside the US.

I’m pretty sure that was could have been said about destroying the World Trade towers….

It’s not very hard at all to hook up a truck container to a new truck and wrap the container itself in a Faraday-cage meshing or just EMP it to kill tracking devices. I’m not even bent on stealing a truck and could probably come up with a plan for it. I’d hate to see what the terrists have in mind…

Geothermal provides over 25% of the needed power for Iceland, the other 75% comes from hydro.

Meanwhile Germany gets 15% of it’s power from solar and wind, and targets to put that at 30% by 2020. Spain sets to get 30% from renewables in a couple years, 20-23% in Portugal and Austria, 30% in Finland, 35% Latvia, 40% in Sweden

Come on back to the US and it’s still , "It’s too expensive and inefficient!"

well those countries have a lot of government money as their utilities and power generation are state owned

Those containers would be absolutely horrible candidates for dirty bombs. The containers themselves are far too robust, but you also have to consider the contents: the fuel bundles. The fuel bundles are going to resist the blast as well and their contents would be terrible for any sort of dirty bomb because they are heavy solids.

Dirty bombs are much more of a psychological tool than an actual effective weapon. When one takes a look at the actual practicality of the concept, it goes right out the window, especially if you’re talking about trying to steal and use spent fuel containers for it.

Most funding for infrastructure improvements in the U.S. come from the state or federal level, and it’s no secret very little has been invested in infrastructure for a long time now.

All someone had to do for the WTC was be on the right plane, hijack it, and take the controls to steer it. It’s a simple concept and that’s why it worked.

To grab a spent fuel container, you have to overcome the security detail, bypass the engineered security and safety measures on the truck, deal with the reinforcements that will be on the way, and also have some means of breaching the container.

That’s why I keep telling people that these are piss-poor terrorist targets, almost more so than plants.

It is expensive and inefficient. Every utility building in new generation capacity nowadays includes those options in all of their feasibility studies. The cost per kw of generation is still substantially higher for the renewables, and they also are not without their own drawbacks. There’s no conspiracy to keep these things out of the mix, it’s simple economics.

Why are people who’ve proven willing to use suicide tactics
constrained to use those containers, after they’ve
successfully stolen the materials?

Psychological warfare is a fairly large part of any campaign……

really? i thought private money was used, at least in Texas im sure all power generation is private

It doesn’t matter. Suicide tactics rely on surprise and ease of use. You can’t do anything of the sort with these things that quickly because the time it would take you to move the container to a safe place to even begin extracting the materials would take FAR longer than it would take for law enforcement and the military to catch up to them. The containers are simply too robust to be quickly used as a suicide weapon.

Yeah, I’m sure a miserably failed attempt at using traveling spent fuel as a weapon will look great for them.

Who said anything about conspiracy? I’m talking about the simple minded idiocy of falling back on the ‘lowest bidder’ mentality when any decision is considered. In any given situation the cheapest solution is not always the best one.

I deal with lots of antis who have a tin-foil hat on when it comes to generation selection.

Utilities in the US are privately owned (for the most part). When it comes down to selecting new generation, price, reliability, feasibility, environmental impact, maintenance costs, and familiarity all come into play. Price is very important because the consumers are the ones paying for these plants, even when they are subsidized. Spending money on generation that’s (for hypothetical example) 10x as expensive as nuclear or coal and potentially not even viable in your business area means pissed off consumers.

None of us are opposed to alternatives (renewables), but those of us who work in energy know that they have to be able to compete to be viable.
I really hope that solar power is looked into by a larger segment of the population.
Wind power would be perfect for coastal areas and the plains where there is constant wind. Geothermal would work well in Hawaii, the northwest, Alaska and the Yellowstone area. Solar is perfect for the southwest and tidal can be used anywhere there is a large body of water. The US covers every feasable type of renewable energy source, we just don’t do anything about it.
T. Boone Pickens seems to be the only oil man who has realized the potential for renewable energy. He is investing $2 billion for windfarms in Texas.

From what I understand, Yucca mountain is unfit for storage.

Sort of. It’s not ideal because it’s on an earthquake fault line.

Source? I’ve never run across a legitimate study coming to that conclusion.

This is what he’s referring to

….would be ironic if the Dem congress actually explores alternate sites unlike the Republican congress that twiddled their thumbs on the nuclear issue.

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