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And your theory is that building vast carbon dioxide waste dumps to contain 31 billion metric tons of a gaseous compound would be easier?

If one builds a waste dump, it involves charging waste fees.   If one builds a power plant, one has an asset.    Which one makes economic sense?   A dump or an asset?
The world's largest carbon dioxide waste dump functioning right now on this planet contains what percentage of the carbon dioxide as of 2014?

Anyone mentioning the non-issues of waste (what is carbon dioxide?), proliferation (how many people died in nuclear wars in the last half century, and how many died in oil wars?) and mentioning the absurd the issue of safety - when one considers air pollution deaths and fossil fuel accidents (how many people died in oil and gas explosions compared to the number of dead from nuclear power plant failures in the last half a century?) = while attaching these issues only to nuclear energy and nothing esle is simply not being serious.

Nuclear exceptionalism is simply not rational.

The worst kind of critic of nuclear energy is one who pretends to be rational and open about it while dragging out tiresome nuclear exceptionalism rhetoric that simply doesn't stand scrutiny.

Repeating nuclear myths while pretending to decry their effects is not helpful, nor is it, really, ethical..

There is no way in hell that so called renewable energy will produce 34% of humanity's energy, as it has failed to do this in half a century of similar predictions.

Containing 14% of the world's carbon dioxide in a dump involves the capture of carbon dioxide involves 41 billion tons per decade.   There are, for the record, more than 30 years in a billion seconds.   What's your theory, that containing 137 tons of carbon dioxide per second, every second, for a half a century is a simple and cheap thing to do?   Have you any idea about the technical, financial, and geological issues involved in this outcome would be?   Your guess is that this can be brought on line in 15 years, by 2029?   Faster than breeder reactors?   Russia and India both brought breeders to completion in the last two years.   How many billion ton carbon dioxide dumps were built in the last two years?

We built more than 400 reactors on this planet in about 20 years, and they produced an average of 28 exajoules of energy each year of the first decade of the 21st century.   By contrast doing what's never been done, CSS, is easier?

There is no way in hell that it will be easier to contain hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide each decade when we can't find a way to store 75,000 tons - collected over half a century - of an insoluble relatively harmless solid as much of  used nuclear fuel is.

Your problem is that you are attempting to compare a theory that has failed in all cases to become significant with a reality and coupling it with the logical fallacy of "appeal to popularity."

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-popularity.html

Nuclear energy may not be able to stop climate change in its tracks - surely it won't, because with this kind of rhetoric flying around this late in the game it can't - but it need not do so to be the best possible, cheapest possible, and most experimentally verified approach to doing so.   Any money that is diverted from nuclear energy to CSS, or for that matter, so called "renewable" energy is essentially a decision to commit suicide at this point, whether the general public knows it or not.  

I wouldn't, by the way, put too much faith in the wisdom of the general public.   In the middle of the last millenium the general public was pretty sure that the bubonic plague was best dealt with by prayer rather than improved sanitation.   Things are not much better 500 years later.

CSS talk has been, is and always will be the equivalent of doing nothing, and the result of doing nothing is clearly visible in the planetary atmosphere in CO2 measurements over the last decade.    We blew past 400 ppm this year, and we will blow through 450 ppm just as quickly as we went from 350 to here.   We were at 350 in 1987, and I doubt, very much, that it will take more than 25 years to hit 450, especially with this kind of cynicism floating around unchallenged.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full

¶ 7/24/2014 12:51:00 AM 0 comments