". . . man-made global-warming, which is a real thing . . . "
NO IT ISN'T! You have been completely bamboozled by the Globalist fraudster fake scientists and their completely fake computer models that ignore REAL inputs into the climate system. The entire purpose of the global warming-turned-"climate-change"-scam is to financially break humanity with insane carbon taxes and be the excuse to impose a totalitarian system of tracking/tracing/spying/monitoring social credit score "mark of the beast" implanted chips nightmare for EVERY HUMAN ACTIVITY under the guise of carbon use "causing" "climate change"!
It is all 100% FRAUD! Carbon is the basis of life itself on this planet. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is PLANT FERTILIZER. To call it "pollution" is scientific absurdity and a flat-out lie. The Earth needs MORE CO2, not less! The Earth was in a precarious carbon dioxide-starved situation before the modern era. It is only now beginning to recover. CO2 does NOT cause global warming EXCEPT in fradulent made-up computer MODELS. That's it: the ONLY place you will find man-made global warming! CO2 never causes global warming. It is exactly the opposite historically: natural warming periods always raise CO2 levels. The warming happens FIRST, then the CO2 goes up as it gets released from the biosphere and oceans due to the higher temperatures.
The Earth is starved for carbon because such astronomically-huge amounts of it have been locked away in all the massive coal and limestone deposits: billions of tons of it. At one time the Earth's atmosphere was about 300,000 ppm of CO2. Now it is a paltry 421ppm, up from a devastating dearth at about 180 ppm at its worst. Did that 300,000 ppm cause "runaway global warming"? NO, of course NOT! It can't! It is physically impossible because there are numerous natural feedback loops that self-limit it from getting out of control. Do the Globalist computer climate models take any of that into consideration? No! They are ridiculously overly-simplistic and basically only consider ONE parameter and that is carbon dioxide, but they don't use realistic numbers, but rather completely fake, made-up values. They are clueless!
Earth's climate is extremely complex. Many factors interact to produce a number of different cycles that create warming trends and cooling trends, including the major and minor Ice Ages. Warming happens naturally during the interglacial periods, and they have ZERO to do with human activity. We are nearing the end of our present interglacial period. The next Ice Age will be catastrophic for humanity, which may be a factor for why the Global elites are hell-bent on exterminating seven billion of us . . . most people won't survive anyway. Far more people die due to cold temperatures than to heat. (And we are NOT having higher-than-normal incidences of hurricanes, tornadoes, or severe storms . . . and the forest fires out west are caused by forest mismanagement, not "global warming" nonsense, and the higher dollar losses due to fires is from inflation and from increasing human encroachment into wildland areas . . . there is a whole lot of propaganda going on!) But closer temporally than a major Ice Age is a cooling period we are currently entering that will be as serious as the Maunder Minimum that caused the Little Ice Age that ended about 1850. We are coming into a Grand Solar Minimum, a part of the cycle that will invariably be a serious problem, with shorter growing seasons and droughts, plus increased volcanic activity, all converging now.
The primary driver of climate on Earth is the SUN, NOT CO2! The reason is complicated but involves the Sunspot cycles and coronal mass ejection activity that affects our radiation belt and the degree of bombardment with cosmic rays entering our atmosphere that energize sulphur dioxide molecules in the upper atmosphere which in turn act as "cloud seeding" nuclei. Low solar activity= more water vapor condensing into cloud cover that reflects solar radiation and cools the Earth. And water vapor also happens to be THE primary greenhouse gas, NOT CO2!!!!!! CO2 is only a teensy-tiny part of greenhouse gases, and the human-generated part of that is even more tiny.
Everything coming out of the UN's IPCC is pure "hogwash" B.S ! If humanity is going to survive this genocidal assault, we need to educate ourselves and stop playing into their hands. Learn some REAL SCIENCE, not their lies and crap! We MUST NOT COMPLY with their anti-human agenda. So please, don't fall for it, and stop agreeing with them!
As usual, i am able to irritate people on "both sides" of this topic, which I did not mean to explore much here, except to say "don't buy what they are selling".
"Some of the monopoly-spaces being created lately pertain to man-made global-warming, which is a real thing, but the regulatory "solutions" being proposed will not work as advertised. Mainly the carbon-credit system will carve out financial profits, while choking productive economy. Other "green economy solutions" , such as electric vehicles, are seen to cause more environmental degradation than similar internal-combustion engine vehicles with efficient design, and they cost more, which is to say that they are also economically inefficient."
To clarify my broader view, greenhouse gasses do have the greenhouse-effect of letting visible light through to the surface of the earth, which it warms, and then reflecting part of the heat generated back to earth. CO2 does that.
As you point out, there are a whole lot of other factors which affect our planetary weather, and as I have recently graphed, it has been cooler and with lower CO2 while humans have been roughly as we are now, a quarter of a million years or so.
I have explored this some in posts, but not in this essay. The earth is clearly cooler than usual, but not cooler than usual for humans. Humans are pretty adaptable. Space weather is a big thing which is already changing, as earth loses magnetic field strength ant the poles are wandering. There are reasons to expect a lot of bad weather of various sorts. Man made global warming is real, but will it be added to other warming, or will it add to cooling factors to mitigate them. We can't truly know yet. What if the poles and the earth's rotational axis shift? We could well have a severe selection-event for our human species, as seems to happen periodically, the reasons being controversial, but potentially space-weather related.
There is no need to get triggered here. We can discuss things.
Magnetic pole shifts happen relatively regularly, but of course at very long intervals. They cause confusion to wildlife dependent on sensing the magnetic field for navigation during their migrations, and how species cope is unknown at this point. Humans have never gone through such an event since having awareness of it and the means to measure it.
Back to "man-made global warming": there is no valid evidence that there is such a thing. CO2 constitutes such a small percentage of greenhouse gases that its effect is insignificant, and the much smaller part of THAT that is human-generated creats an effect SO small that its signal is lost in the "noise" and CANNOT be ascertained. So to say that humans are "causing" global watming is pure nonsense. Even the actual effect of CO2 itself is much smaller than early scientists assumed. And again, the ONLY place man-made global warming exists is in faulty and fraudulent computer models that were rewritten and rewritten and rewritten UNTIL they spit out the desired answer! It is ALL just scientifically unsupportable nonsense! And also, the issue has the "fingerprints" of political manipulation all over it: the IPCC releases its published Summary of the "science" BEFORE the "bought and paid for" UN "scientists" complete their reports, and their Summaries IGNORE what little climate science (already heavily cherry-picked and contaminated with fraudulent data) manages to make its way into the "science" part of their report anyway. The entire UN panel on climate change is an utter JOKE! Nobody should afford it one bit of attention. Its only purpose is for advancing the Globalist carbon scam!
We disagree on the magnitude of the greenhouse-gas effect, but we agree that it is only one factor of many, and that other factors are likely to be more important to human survival in our lifetimes.
The greenhouse gas effect has been described for something over 100 years, at least in basic theory. It is used for PR, to push profit and control narratives, but don't throw the baby out with the bath-water. Don't buy what they are selling, but don't make the intellectual error of considering everything "they" say to be false.
Scientific reports are misconstrued for profit, but the basic physics is still valid.
" 'The' greenhouse gas effect has been described for something over 100 years, . . . "
Effect, yes. But calculations on individual "greenhouse gases", were not accurate back then : the effect of CO2 was deemed to be about twice as high as more accurate measurements in recent decades revealed. But the agenda to condemn carbon requires the use of the wrongly-measured value, so that is what gets plugged into the fradulent climate models. (On top of other manipulations to make them come up with the "correct" answers!)
" basic physics is still valid.": Not when the data they use is wrong.
My view is that the "owners" are using a variety of methods to reduce the resource-consumption of the human-herds, since resources like oil are in decline, at least the easy-oil has ong been in decline.
They will use whatever truth or falsehood fits to their control-narratives. We need to independently assess the validity of various "Facts and procedures". We may differ on details, but the big-picture is that humans are entering a time of declining resources, and those making the decisions want to cut-out a lot of those who are "useless eaters", which means "useless to them".
Of course it is ! it was ready to go then and still is. The U-238 is still sitting around not being used. I mentioned my dislike for Gore. Why ? I simply cannot believe that he wasn't PAID handsomely to scuttle the original IFR reactor by big oil. I have no proof of this... but it stinks !
The Molten Salt concept is sound. And the new molten salt reactors are small. Bill Gates & Warren Buffet are building one on land they own in Wyoming. The company is called TerraPower. Gates & Buffet aren't stupid. They will make it work and a whole new level of safe nuclear will be entered into... soon. Another possible concept is my own idea. I call it 'Navy Nuclear'. Many US Navy ships are nuclear powered, and the power plants are small. Fine. So put 20 to 50 of them just outside major metropolises... and make it work ! (Good interacting Dr. John. You know, I used to own a recording studio... and... the other 'Dr. John' recorded there ! No... the studio wasn't nuclear powered.)
The Russians have a new generation of compact, modular nuclear reactors, but that's not the US. The expertise is waning in Japan, which is why they suddenly need to build more reactors, before they lose the people who knew how.
When I Attended the World Science Festivals, 'Nuclear, a new Look' in the mid 2000's. Dr. James Hansen, and an oriental fellow whom invented the IFR reactor were there on the panel. They specifically stated what I repeated. the IFR reactor (that was cancelled) was designed to use the U-238 'nuclear waste' as fuel, burning it down so that only 1% waste would be generated where there had once been 99% waste. That the original IFR reactor project was canceled is an outrage. because if it went forward (it passed its tests at Lawrence Livermore Labs)... we would be putting all the U-238 'waste' to good use. I've really intensely disliked Al Gore ever since becoming aware of this. And by the way... this Wikipedia post is not fully truthful. They DO NOT mention the specifics of the original, approved, design... which is a further outrage.
Hi again... If I'm not mistaken, the nuclear 'waste' is uranium 238 ? My understanding is that fuel rods used in 'Stage 2 Light Water reactors', which are the standard in the USA and elsewhere... are zirconium roads that have uranium 'hockey pucks' with a donut hole slid onto them. My understanding is that these rods contain 100 'pucks'. 99 are U-238... and only 1 is U-235. And only the U-235 puck is used, leaving 99 U-238 pucks as 'Nuclear Waste'. In the 1990's a new reactor design was finalized, tested, and ready to go into widespread use. It was called the 'IFR-Reactor (Integral Fast Reactor) It was also called a 'Breeder Reactor'. This reactor used all the U-238 'waste as fuel, with only 1% left over. Amazing ! And there's currently enough U-238 being stored as waste to power the planet for 1,000 Years ! What a boon to all mankind, right ? Wrong. Al Gore, as Vice President killed the funding for this project. His lame excuse was the possibility of nuclear proliferation and of terrorists getting the materials. This is what leads me to believe that the whole energy, carbon, climate mess is theater. IFR reactors could have made a serious difference. So back to my initial statement... I want my IFR reactor powered car ! And even beyond this... it's a call to 'keep the dream alive'. I feel that the fundamental & backbone of the USA is 'Dreamers' finding a way. Lets not lose this.
Nuclear reactors need experts. America has mostly lost that expertise pool, except for military nukes, mostly Navy.
Wikipedia has this about the liquid sodium cooled breeder reactors:
The IFR is cooled by liquid sodium and fueled by an alloy of uranium and plutonium. The fuel is contained in steel cladding with liquid sodium filling in the space between the fuel and the cladding. A void above the fuel allows helium and radioactive xenon to be collected safely without significantly increasing pressure inside the fuel element, and also allows the fuel to expand without breaching the cladding, making metal rather than oxide fuel practical. The advantages of liquid sodium coolant, as opposed to liquid metal lead, are that liquid sodium is far less dense and far less viscous(reduced pumping costs), is not corrosive(via dissolution) to common steels, and creates essentially no radioactive neutron activation byproducts. The disadvantages of sodium coolant, as opposed to lead coolant is that sodium is chemically reactive, especially with water or air (both typically found in abundance in reactors).
It takes more energy to synthesize these fuels than can be obtained by burning them. They are a net-energy sink, an interesting project, but not a source of net energy.
What are your sources of your info ? Please share ? I bet if you remove the Oil & Gas subsidies and tax breaks from the equation, the cost differential might not be so bad ? How about Stan Meyers 'water powered car'. Or some way of fractionating (electrolysis ?) water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, using the Hydrogen to power engines ? Is it true that Henry Ford had a water powered car at inception ? And what about the synthetic fuel created by the Nazis ? This Oil thing is just ridiculous. Time to move on. I want an Atomic Powered Car. It could power my homes battery pack while not on the road !
The energy required to make fuel from water, as by hydrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen, is more than can ever be reclaimed by burning the hydrogen and oxygen which one gets from that hydrolysis.
You can get fuel, but you spend 2 to get 1 back, in effect. Monetary expense is not what I meant, just energy-cost-of-energy-obtained.
These processes spend-2-to-get-1.
As for atomic energy, there are so many embedded costs, and some of them, like dealing with the radioactive-waste, have not yet been worked out at all i the US. All the spent-fuel is sitting in on-site storage near reactors, because no state will let it be stored under their ground.
There are so many hidden expenses.
All the easy fuel has been found, and a lot of that has been burned.
Try a bicycle instead of a nuclear car. "Appropriate technology"
Finland mentioned: Yippee! And for once, not in context where we look like morons. But the study author, Simon Michaux, probably is not a Finn, I am afraid. The winter has begun in earnest here, -10C and lotsa snow already, somewhat early compared to last decade. Depending on what sort of electricity contracts people have made before the prices started to rise, some are paying an arm and a leg for electricity, and some (like me) are smug, havng a fixed price contract until fall next year. No real help from state.
A pet peeve: "The association between sildenafil use and decreased incidence of AD does not establish causality, which will require a randomized controlled trial." Sorry, in medicine so far, no causality exists. Causality is when you hit a billiard ball, it has to move, no other option. No randomized controlled trials ever can prove causality. Only correlation available through trials. Corruption of thinking, understanding and knowledge to mess up causality and correlation. Also elementary, should be taught in high-school. I'd like to go on, a lot, but life is short.
That's an interesting article, speculating that a viral infection in early mammals 400 million years ago allowed an increase in neuronal plasticity of interconnection in the brain, facilitating learning. It's a bit of a leap to say that is a seat-of-consciousness. This article assumes "Selfish Gene" theory (Richard Dawkins), which I like, but it is also a piece of the big jigsaw puzzle.
Personally, I do not see that it is possible to separate "consciousness" from "reality".
Which is "contained" within which?
I'm sorry it is getting cold. I really don't like the cold. I'm glad your electric rate is fixed this year.
As to "proving" causation, that's statistical. It's not a "proof" like in mathematics, but the establishment of a 95% likelihood of "causation", which is usually "good enough".
Sildenafil is an interesting drug, primarily acting to dilate blood vessels, useful in cardiopulmonary medicine, particularly right-heart-failure. Somewhere along the way, in human testing, the erection-side-effect was noticed. Erections sell, of course...
Sildenafil having long since gone generic, this s a good time to investigate whether it may help prevent some dementias. Some dementias are more vascular, but the mechanism they suggest is more interesting, more primary to Alzheimer's.
It wasn't long ago, maybe two-three years, that it was hard to find any definition of consequence about the term fascism. I even read one professor's report that this term was largely "unknowable". Wiki actually had a half decent definition until I linked to it on my Facebook page, the next day the definition was changed to right wing BS, to cover for the left wing side of the connection is my guess. I never thought I was important until they started censoring me on Facebook!
Do you have a guess as to what The FED will do with rates in the coming year?
There are lots of different causes of dementia, lots, some genetic, some "lifestyle", some chemical. "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit", some would say. That's a good approach.
What WILL the Fed do in the coming year?
"Depends"
I do believe that the Fed, embodied by business-guy Jerome Powell, will behave practically in the period of economic decline. I think they goosed growth until it died anyway, and they are giving up on it, but they can't say so.
They will not goose-growth any more.
They will try very hard to make the $US seem to be the best game in town. They will support the $US and retail banking.
They will make the ECB break first.
They will not lower rates to save markets, or to save the American economy in the short term.
I'm not going to read that long report but will comment that the investors won't make any money centralizing any of these sources and why these investments won't happen. Not even on a small scale. There is no surplus to siphon other than subsidy, which is a tricky proposition.
I used to sell solar heating devices and one of the points in my presentation was the fossil fuel expended to the end result was extended for decades through the device. Most people I had to explain what that meant exactly, they weren't as interested in the energy side of the equation as much as the ROI side. Small systems at the point of use is where this works, but even there the margins in the manufacturing, etc., aren't worthy of the fascist investors.
We installed over 150 devices back then, these people all have to be happy now that energy prices are increasing here by 14% this year.
Would be interesting to view a schematic. We had a number of configurations, the two best sellers one operated with a dc pump connected to a small solar electric panel, and the best seller was a drain back system.
This one utilized water-heaters by peeling back the metal outer casing and attaching reflective material, then treating the internal metal tank to absorb all the light and retain heat.
My friend died 11 years ago. I met him about the time he was selling the company. I saw some on houses before that.
". . . man-made global-warming, which is a real thing . . . "
NO IT ISN'T! You have been completely bamboozled by the Globalist fraudster fake scientists and their completely fake computer models that ignore REAL inputs into the climate system. The entire purpose of the global warming-turned-"climate-change"-scam is to financially break humanity with insane carbon taxes and be the excuse to impose a totalitarian system of tracking/tracing/spying/monitoring social credit score "mark of the beast" implanted chips nightmare for EVERY HUMAN ACTIVITY under the guise of carbon use "causing" "climate change"!
It is all 100% FRAUD! Carbon is the basis of life itself on this planet. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is PLANT FERTILIZER. To call it "pollution" is scientific absurdity and a flat-out lie. The Earth needs MORE CO2, not less! The Earth was in a precarious carbon dioxide-starved situation before the modern era. It is only now beginning to recover. CO2 does NOT cause global warming EXCEPT in fradulent made-up computer MODELS. That's it: the ONLY place you will find man-made global warming! CO2 never causes global warming. It is exactly the opposite historically: natural warming periods always raise CO2 levels. The warming happens FIRST, then the CO2 goes up as it gets released from the biosphere and oceans due to the higher temperatures.
The Earth is starved for carbon because such astronomically-huge amounts of it have been locked away in all the massive coal and limestone deposits: billions of tons of it. At one time the Earth's atmosphere was about 300,000 ppm of CO2. Now it is a paltry 421ppm, up from a devastating dearth at about 180 ppm at its worst. Did that 300,000 ppm cause "runaway global warming"? NO, of course NOT! It can't! It is physically impossible because there are numerous natural feedback loops that self-limit it from getting out of control. Do the Globalist computer climate models take any of that into consideration? No! They are ridiculously overly-simplistic and basically only consider ONE parameter and that is carbon dioxide, but they don't use realistic numbers, but rather completely fake, made-up values. They are clueless!
Earth's climate is extremely complex. Many factors interact to produce a number of different cycles that create warming trends and cooling trends, including the major and minor Ice Ages. Warming happens naturally during the interglacial periods, and they have ZERO to do with human activity. We are nearing the end of our present interglacial period. The next Ice Age will be catastrophic for humanity, which may be a factor for why the Global elites are hell-bent on exterminating seven billion of us . . . most people won't survive anyway. Far more people die due to cold temperatures than to heat. (And we are NOT having higher-than-normal incidences of hurricanes, tornadoes, or severe storms . . . and the forest fires out west are caused by forest mismanagement, not "global warming" nonsense, and the higher dollar losses due to fires is from inflation and from increasing human encroachment into wildland areas . . . there is a whole lot of propaganda going on!) But closer temporally than a major Ice Age is a cooling period we are currently entering that will be as serious as the Maunder Minimum that caused the Little Ice Age that ended about 1850. We are coming into a Grand Solar Minimum, a part of the cycle that will invariably be a serious problem, with shorter growing seasons and droughts, plus increased volcanic activity, all converging now.
The primary driver of climate on Earth is the SUN, NOT CO2! The reason is complicated but involves the Sunspot cycles and coronal mass ejection activity that affects our radiation belt and the degree of bombardment with cosmic rays entering our atmosphere that energize sulphur dioxide molecules in the upper atmosphere which in turn act as "cloud seeding" nuclei. Low solar activity= more water vapor condensing into cloud cover that reflects solar radiation and cools the Earth. And water vapor also happens to be THE primary greenhouse gas, NOT CO2!!!!!! CO2 is only a teensy-tiny part of greenhouse gases, and the human-generated part of that is even more tiny.
Everything coming out of the UN's IPCC is pure "hogwash" B.S ! If humanity is going to survive this genocidal assault, we need to educate ourselves and stop playing into their hands. Learn some REAL SCIENCE, not their lies and crap! We MUST NOT COMPLY with their anti-human agenda. So please, don't fall for it, and stop agreeing with them!
As usual, i am able to irritate people on "both sides" of this topic, which I did not mean to explore much here, except to say "don't buy what they are selling".
"Some of the monopoly-spaces being created lately pertain to man-made global-warming, which is a real thing, but the regulatory "solutions" being proposed will not work as advertised. Mainly the carbon-credit system will carve out financial profits, while choking productive economy. Other "green economy solutions" , such as electric vehicles, are seen to cause more environmental degradation than similar internal-combustion engine vehicles with efficient design, and they cost more, which is to say that they are also economically inefficient."
To clarify my broader view, greenhouse gasses do have the greenhouse-effect of letting visible light through to the surface of the earth, which it warms, and then reflecting part of the heat generated back to earth. CO2 does that.
As you point out, there are a whole lot of other factors which affect our planetary weather, and as I have recently graphed, it has been cooler and with lower CO2 while humans have been roughly as we are now, a quarter of a million years or so.
I have explored this some in posts, but not in this essay. The earth is clearly cooler than usual, but not cooler than usual for humans. Humans are pretty adaptable. Space weather is a big thing which is already changing, as earth loses magnetic field strength ant the poles are wandering. There are reasons to expect a lot of bad weather of various sorts. Man made global warming is real, but will it be added to other warming, or will it add to cooling factors to mitigate them. We can't truly know yet. What if the poles and the earth's rotational axis shift? We could well have a severe selection-event for our human species, as seems to happen periodically, the reasons being controversial, but potentially space-weather related.
There is no need to get triggered here. We can discuss things.
Magnetic pole shifts happen relatively regularly, but of course at very long intervals. They cause confusion to wildlife dependent on sensing the magnetic field for navigation during their migrations, and how species cope is unknown at this point. Humans have never gone through such an event since having awareness of it and the means to measure it.
Back to "man-made global warming": there is no valid evidence that there is such a thing. CO2 constitutes such a small percentage of greenhouse gases that its effect is insignificant, and the much smaller part of THAT that is human-generated creats an effect SO small that its signal is lost in the "noise" and CANNOT be ascertained. So to say that humans are "causing" global watming is pure nonsense. Even the actual effect of CO2 itself is much smaller than early scientists assumed. And again, the ONLY place man-made global warming exists is in faulty and fraudulent computer models that were rewritten and rewritten and rewritten UNTIL they spit out the desired answer! It is ALL just scientifically unsupportable nonsense! And also, the issue has the "fingerprints" of political manipulation all over it: the IPCC releases its published Summary of the "science" BEFORE the "bought and paid for" UN "scientists" complete their reports, and their Summaries IGNORE what little climate science (already heavily cherry-picked and contaminated with fraudulent data) manages to make its way into the "science" part of their report anyway. The entire UN panel on climate change is an utter JOKE! Nobody should afford it one bit of attention. Its only purpose is for advancing the Globalist carbon scam!
We disagree on the magnitude of the greenhouse-gas effect, but we agree that it is only one factor of many, and that other factors are likely to be more important to human survival in our lifetimes.
The greenhouse gas effect has been described for something over 100 years, at least in basic theory. It is used for PR, to push profit and control narratives, but don't throw the baby out with the bath-water. Don't buy what they are selling, but don't make the intellectual error of considering everything "they" say to be false.
Scientific reports are misconstrued for profit, but the basic physics is still valid.
" 'The' greenhouse gas effect has been described for something over 100 years, . . . "
Effect, yes. But calculations on individual "greenhouse gases", were not accurate back then : the effect of CO2 was deemed to be about twice as high as more accurate measurements in recent decades revealed. But the agenda to condemn carbon requires the use of the wrongly-measured value, so that is what gets plugged into the fradulent climate models. (On top of other manipulations to make them come up with the "correct" answers!)
" basic physics is still valid.": Not when the data they use is wrong.
My view is that the "owners" are using a variety of methods to reduce the resource-consumption of the human-herds, since resources like oil are in decline, at least the easy-oil has ong been in decline.
They will use whatever truth or falsehood fits to their control-narratives. We need to independently assess the validity of various "Facts and procedures". We may differ on details, but the big-picture is that humans are entering a time of declining resources, and those making the decisions want to cut-out a lot of those who are "useless eaters", which means "useless to them".
Of course it is ! it was ready to go then and still is. The U-238 is still sitting around not being used. I mentioned my dislike for Gore. Why ? I simply cannot believe that he wasn't PAID handsomely to scuttle the original IFR reactor by big oil. I have no proof of this... but it stinks !
The industrial expertise and capacity don't exist in the US.
Have you tracked the building of new nuclear power plants in the Us over the past 30 years?
They have used off-the-shelf designs and still can't manage to pull it off. this is not the country it was even 40-50 years ago.
The Molten Salt concept is sound. And the new molten salt reactors are small. Bill Gates & Warren Buffet are building one on land they own in Wyoming. The company is called TerraPower. Gates & Buffet aren't stupid. They will make it work and a whole new level of safe nuclear will be entered into... soon. Another possible concept is my own idea. I call it 'Navy Nuclear'. Many US Navy ships are nuclear powered, and the power plants are small. Fine. So put 20 to 50 of them just outside major metropolises... and make it work ! (Good interacting Dr. John. You know, I used to own a recording studio... and... the other 'Dr. John' recorded there ! No... the studio wasn't nuclear powered.)
The Russians have a new generation of compact, modular nuclear reactors, but that's not the US. The expertise is waning in Japan, which is why they suddenly need to build more reactors, before they lose the people who knew how.
When I Attended the World Science Festivals, 'Nuclear, a new Look' in the mid 2000's. Dr. James Hansen, and an oriental fellow whom invented the IFR reactor were there on the panel. They specifically stated what I repeated. the IFR reactor (that was cancelled) was designed to use the U-238 'nuclear waste' as fuel, burning it down so that only 1% waste would be generated where there had once been 99% waste. That the original IFR reactor project was canceled is an outrage. because if it went forward (it passed its tests at Lawrence Livermore Labs)... we would be putting all the U-238 'waste' to good use. I've really intensely disliked Al Gore ever since becoming aware of this. And by the way... this Wikipedia post is not fully truthful. They DO NOT mention the specifics of the original, approved, design... which is a further outrage.
This , whatever has passed in those decades, is not a possible path forward now, is it?
Hi again... If I'm not mistaken, the nuclear 'waste' is uranium 238 ? My understanding is that fuel rods used in 'Stage 2 Light Water reactors', which are the standard in the USA and elsewhere... are zirconium roads that have uranium 'hockey pucks' with a donut hole slid onto them. My understanding is that these rods contain 100 'pucks'. 99 are U-238... and only 1 is U-235. And only the U-235 puck is used, leaving 99 U-238 pucks as 'Nuclear Waste'. In the 1990's a new reactor design was finalized, tested, and ready to go into widespread use. It was called the 'IFR-Reactor (Integral Fast Reactor) It was also called a 'Breeder Reactor'. This reactor used all the U-238 'waste as fuel, with only 1% left over. Amazing ! And there's currently enough U-238 being stored as waste to power the planet for 1,000 Years ! What a boon to all mankind, right ? Wrong. Al Gore, as Vice President killed the funding for this project. His lame excuse was the possibility of nuclear proliferation and of terrorists getting the materials. This is what leads me to believe that the whole energy, carbon, climate mess is theater. IFR reactors could have made a serious difference. So back to my initial statement... I want my IFR reactor powered car ! And even beyond this... it's a call to 'keep the dream alive'. I feel that the fundamental & backbone of the USA is 'Dreamers' finding a way. Lets not lose this.
Nuclear reactors need experts. America has mostly lost that expertise pool, except for military nukes, mostly Navy.
Wikipedia has this about the liquid sodium cooled breeder reactors:
The IFR is cooled by liquid sodium and fueled by an alloy of uranium and plutonium. The fuel is contained in steel cladding with liquid sodium filling in the space between the fuel and the cladding. A void above the fuel allows helium and radioactive xenon to be collected safely without significantly increasing pressure inside the fuel element, and also allows the fuel to expand without breaching the cladding, making metal rather than oxide fuel practical. The advantages of liquid sodium coolant, as opposed to liquid metal lead, are that liquid sodium is far less dense and far less viscous(reduced pumping costs), is not corrosive(via dissolution) to common steels, and creates essentially no radioactive neutron activation byproducts. The disadvantages of sodium coolant, as opposed to lead coolant is that sodium is chemically reactive, especially with water or air (both typically found in abundance in reactors).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#:~:text=The%20integral%20fast%20reactor%20(IFR,electrorefining%20at%20the%20reactor%20site.
Bikes don't have these kinds of technical problems.
Hi Folks... the Audi Corp. created a synthetic Diesel fuel, made from only water and existing CO2 inn the atmosphere in 2015. Their execs used it to power their diesel Audi's. < https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1081102_audi-will-turn-renewable-energy-into-synthetic-diesel > Also, Sunfire.de created a syngas using much the same process. So the lack of Oil is really not such a problem in the long term/. See < https://www.sunfire.de/en/e-fuel >
It takes more energy to synthesize these fuels than can be obtained by burning them. They are a net-energy sink, an interesting project, but not a source of net energy.
What are your sources of your info ? Please share ? I bet if you remove the Oil & Gas subsidies and tax breaks from the equation, the cost differential might not be so bad ? How about Stan Meyers 'water powered car'. Or some way of fractionating (electrolysis ?) water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, using the Hydrogen to power engines ? Is it true that Henry Ford had a water powered car at inception ? And what about the synthetic fuel created by the Nazis ? This Oil thing is just ridiculous. Time to move on. I want an Atomic Powered Car. It could power my homes battery pack while not on the road !
The energy required to make fuel from water, as by hydrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen, is more than can ever be reclaimed by burning the hydrogen and oxygen which one gets from that hydrolysis.
You can get fuel, but you spend 2 to get 1 back, in effect. Monetary expense is not what I meant, just energy-cost-of-energy-obtained.
These processes spend-2-to-get-1.
As for atomic energy, there are so many embedded costs, and some of them, like dealing with the radioactive-waste, have not yet been worked out at all i the US. All the spent-fuel is sitting in on-site storage near reactors, because no state will let it be stored under their ground.
There are so many hidden expenses.
All the easy fuel has been found, and a lot of that has been burned.
Try a bicycle instead of a nuclear car. "Appropriate technology"
Finland mentioned: Yippee! And for once, not in context where we look like morons. But the study author, Simon Michaux, probably is not a Finn, I am afraid. The winter has begun in earnest here, -10C and lotsa snow already, somewhat early compared to last decade. Depending on what sort of electricity contracts people have made before the prices started to rise, some are paying an arm and a leg for electricity, and some (like me) are smug, havng a fixed price contract until fall next year. No real help from state.
Sildenafil: how'bout just B3?
Concering the virus-human interface: what if humans are meatbags for viruses? I do not agree, but a good reminder, that viruses may be more significant in being a human than what we care to think. And at the end of article an interesting hint concerning Alzheimer, too https://www.salon.com/2022/12/06/ancient-gave-us-a-gene-called-arc-and-it-may-explain-consciousness/
A pet peeve: "The association between sildenafil use and decreased incidence of AD does not establish causality, which will require a randomized controlled trial." Sorry, in medicine so far, no causality exists. Causality is when you hit a billiard ball, it has to move, no other option. No randomized controlled trials ever can prove causality. Only correlation available through trials. Corruption of thinking, understanding and knowledge to mess up causality and correlation. Also elementary, should be taught in high-school. I'd like to go on, a lot, but life is short.
Thank you for yet another interesting update!
That's an interesting article, speculating that a viral infection in early mammals 400 million years ago allowed an increase in neuronal plasticity of interconnection in the brain, facilitating learning. It's a bit of a leap to say that is a seat-of-consciousness. This article assumes "Selfish Gene" theory (Richard Dawkins), which I like, but it is also a piece of the big jigsaw puzzle.
Personally, I do not see that it is possible to separate "consciousness" from "reality".
Which is "contained" within which?
I'm sorry it is getting cold. I really don't like the cold. I'm glad your electric rate is fixed this year.
As to "proving" causation, that's statistical. It's not a "proof" like in mathematics, but the establishment of a 95% likelihood of "causation", which is usually "good enough".
Sildenafil is an interesting drug, primarily acting to dilate blood vessels, useful in cardiopulmonary medicine, particularly right-heart-failure. Somewhere along the way, in human testing, the erection-side-effect was noticed. Erections sell, of course...
Sildenafil having long since gone generic, this s a good time to investigate whether it may help prevent some dementias. Some dementias are more vascular, but the mechanism they suggest is more interesting, more primary to Alzheimer's.
Pfizer will get nothing, ha, ha, ha..
:-)
Wrong link behind Survey of Finland
Love the coffee planter planting.
What do you think causes dementia and such?
It wasn't long ago, maybe two-three years, that it was hard to find any definition of consequence about the term fascism. I even read one professor's report that this term was largely "unknowable". Wiki actually had a half decent definition until I linked to it on my Facebook page, the next day the definition was changed to right wing BS, to cover for the left wing side of the connection is my guess. I never thought I was important until they started censoring me on Facebook!
Do you have a guess as to what The FED will do with rates in the coming year?
There are lots of different causes of dementia, lots, some genetic, some "lifestyle", some chemical. "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit", some would say. That's a good approach.
What WILL the Fed do in the coming year?
"Depends"
I do believe that the Fed, embodied by business-guy Jerome Powell, will behave practically in the period of economic decline. I think they goosed growth until it died anyway, and they are giving up on it, but they can't say so.
They will not goose-growth any more.
They will try very hard to make the $US seem to be the best game in town. They will support the $US and retail banking.
They will make the ECB break first.
They will not lower rates to save markets, or to save the American economy in the short term.
This is WAR.
I agree...
I tried several times, and it is the link I got, but it doesn't transfer correctly somehow. It's live for me, but not when I copy it.
https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
I'm not going to read that long report but will comment that the investors won't make any money centralizing any of these sources and why these investments won't happen. Not even on a small scale. There is no surplus to siphon other than subsidy, which is a tricky proposition.
I used to sell solar heating devices and one of the points in my presentation was the fossil fuel expended to the end result was extended for decades through the device. Most people I had to explain what that meant exactly, they weren't as interested in the energy side of the equation as much as the ROI side. Small systems at the point of use is where this works, but even there the margins in the manufacturing, etc., aren't worthy of the fascist investors.
We installed over 150 devices back then, these people all have to be happy now that energy prices are increasing here by 14% this year.
Won't happen on a large enough scale to matter, anyway.
Rooftop solar water heaters always made sense as a long term investment.
A friend of mine made a good business of that and sold it at a good profit in the late 1990s.
He had made an original design which was efficient, reliable and cost-effective.
Would be interesting to view a schematic. We had a number of configurations, the two best sellers one operated with a dc pump connected to a small solar electric panel, and the best seller was a drain back system.
This one utilized water-heaters by peeling back the metal outer casing and attaching reflective material, then treating the internal metal tank to absorb all the light and retain heat.
My friend died 11 years ago. I met him about the time he was selling the company. I saw some on houses before that.
This link works.
Same link copied and pasted...
When I clicked I got your email direct.
Funny that... I've gone through and replaced it now.
Bottom line: prepare to be like the guy tending his garden!