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Weird, init? For millions of years the Sun didn’t melt the icecaps. Then in the 1970s the scientific community “invented a hoax” that CO2 emissions would cause global warming, and predicted that the icecaps would start melting. Then, as if to prove them right, the Sun, without getting any hotter, suddenly started melting the icecaps! Simples!
Dave indeed has a brain and can think for himself. Unfortunately, like many others, he uses it to promote deceptive superficial plausibility for political objectives.
Funny how politics so often relies upon deception. That’s why I prefer science.
What have you got against “the French”, Michael?
Dave, if you think the scientific and technical communities are primarily engaged in fabricating all these hoaxes, like global warming, covid-19, species extinctions, and helping to cover up Twin Tower demolition, where do you think the huge pace of technological advance comes from?
And where do they do this? Science is in the scientific literature, the journals, and most of it is available to the public. Where are they coordinating to make the journal discussions look convincing, and where is the real work being done?
35,000,000 years ago there were no polar ice caps.
At this time there were no people, so it could not have been people releasing Carbon dioxide/Methane into the Atmosphere to make it so warm.As you know its about politics not science. Thatcher was right-wing and Zionist and promoted man made global warming because she wanted to use it as a way of promoting nuclear power as an alternative to socialist coal and Arab oil. And its still promoted as cover for Trident.
The problem is for some religious minded people an official ploy becomes the new old time religion and careerist politicians follow rather than dare commit heresy but pointing out its all nonsense.
@ Michael
Yes you have to laugh really, as the world and everything has been going for billions of years, beyond the imagination really, and yet people (due to human vanity) say “we’ve had some extreme weather lately, must be due to human activity”.
Except there has always been extreme weather, even Noah said, “it never used to flood like this when I was a boy”!
– “35,000,000 years ago there were no polar ice caps. At this time there were no people…”
Want to be careful, or there will be no people again.
How high was sea level then?
What I was getting at, is there are new technologies to develop and we, in the U.K. could export, these new technologies.
Nuclear Power is very old, dangerous hat.
Nobody has ever found out what to do with the dangerous long lasting spoil.Clark,
too difficult to answer, this was the time when India was striking Asia to uplift the Himalaya.
Some of the Himalaya was beneath the ocean before it became the World’s largest mountain range.The reason we get long term nuclear waste is that we put uranium 238 in the reactors. It’s not a fuel, it’s an impurity. Uranium 235 is the fuel. The uranium used in civilian power reactors is only a few percent fuel, and over 95% U238, nearly all of which ends up as nuclear waste. This is called ‘burn-up’. Civilian power reactors achieve very low burn-up, less than a few percent, and the rest is long term waste.
The reason for this is political; the uranium 235 is never purified because countries don’t trust each other not to make bombs.
There are reactors that can cook down the “waste” or “spent fuel”, at least a bit and maybe lots, but development has been minimal. That was sort of the plan originally. Some of the U238 turns into plutonium, which is another fuel. It can be reprocessed out of the spent fuel, but then you need a different type of reactor to use it. But these reactors are even more expensive and complicated so none were built so a stockpile of plutonium built up which had to be guarded all the time; the UK built up about 60 tonnes I think before they thought they’d better stop making it.
Than you Clark, you have described our Dystopian future, something that really scares the shit out of me, all unwanted by a massive majority of the worlds populace.
Yet, almost nobody is against Hydroelectric power, Photovoltaic conversion, wind turbines or geothermal.These renewables are accepeted by most people, yet governments against the wishes of their own people still impose the horror of nuclear on us.
This proves we are not much more than slaves.The People “We don’t want it,
not the nuclear subs, not the nuclear weapons, not the nuclear power stations, not the piles of nuclear waste.
Government, “It does not matter what you the people want, you are getting all of it.”I can’t work out why governments go for nuclear power. It looks like an expensive liability; eg. it has to be underwritten by the state because insurers won’t do so. I think Dave’s answer might be part of it, to have workers in an industry that is related to nuclear weapons, but far more countries that have nuclear power don’t have nuclear weapons, so this can’t be the whole answer. Partly I think that big, expensive, high-security projects appeal to people who seek power and become politicians; it makes them feel important.
Probably the biggest factor is vested interests and nation-state supported marketing. These were what was behind the UK Magnox and AGR programmes, and it’s what Westinghouse and General Electric get up to. They sell licenses to have their reactor designs built in other countries, but uranium enrichment, fuel element manufacture and reprocessing remain within the cartel guaranteeing future income. Just like cheap printers that are locked into using the manufacturer’s overpriced cartridges, but on a massive scale.
One thing that has occurred to me is that having nuclear reactors in a country makes the territory much more difficult to take over militarily. If Iraq or Libya had had power reactors, especially the typical water-cooled PWRs or BWRs, the West couldn’t have just bombed the country to smithereens and smashed all the infrastructure. Typical power reactors need electricity to run their cooling. If their power fails they get too hot and are very likely to explode, dispersing fall-out to the four winds and whatever water body they need for cooling, usually the ocean.
That’s what happened at Fukushima Daiichi; the reactors shut down automatically when the earthquake was detected, but without cooling remnants of the reaction can still cause a meltdown for over a week. The tsunami destroyed the connection to the national electrical grid and drowned the backup diesel generators, eventually leading to three meltdowns and two reactor vessel explosions. There’s more radioactive material in one civilian power reactor than would be released in a full scale global nuclear war, so any government that caused a nuclear disaster by striking a country with power reactors would become a pariah, internationally and with its own people. To invade a country with power reactors a government has to be sure that it can take them intact, a much trickier proposition than just smashing the place. I find it chilling to think that governments might be booby-trapping their own territory by building power reactors.
You can guess what I’m going to say next, can’t you? There are reactor designs that don’t need power and which shut down safely – such features are called “walk-away safe” and “passive safety” – but they’ve barely been developed. Here’s one prototype, but it was shut down in 1970 and never developed further. This is also the concept that might be good at burning the existing nuclear waste and getting the unused energy out of it.
And there’s yet another aspect affecting this, and it’s the radioisotope industry. Radioisotopes are radioactive and thus unstable which means that they decay away over time. That’s why they’re not found in nature; the Earth is too old, so they can only be obtained by making them in nuclear reactors. Mostly they’re not made in power reactors. Mostly they’re made in “research reactors”, university reactors and isotope production reactors.
Inside MIT’s Nuclear Reactor – eighteen minutes. I love the bit at 12:47 where the interviewer asks the young student reactor operator if she knows what every single control does!
Radioisotopes have all sorts of uses. Caesium is needed for X-ray machines. Radioisotopes are used in silicon chip manufacture, and inspecting metals for fatigue and welds for imperfections. Americium is the smoke detector in smoke alarms. Some are used as tracers, and there are loads with medical uses. Some are used in long term power sources for satellites and spacecraft. Not many countries produce them and it’s a lucrative business.
This is probably why there was so much fuss about Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty NNPT, which gives the country the right to enrich uranium. Normally one of the nuclear cartel corporations does it, so they were probably one source of pressure. The NNPT confers the right to make “Low Enriched Uranium” LEU, which is anything up to 20% U235 (ie. 80% U238), but most enrichment for power reactors is only up to 5%. Weapons grade is 90% and over.
Iran were enriching to 20% to run their research and isotope production reactor. It was all open to scrutiny by the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA of the United Nations; it was all above-board and proper. Iran even voluntarily undertook an “additional protocol” so that they were more thoroughly inspected by the IAEA than all the other countries with nuclear activities. Their nuclear sites were monitored with closed circuit television by the IAEA. The IAEA said that no nuclear materials were being “diverted” ie. going missing, and the US intelligence agencies said that Iran was definitely not building or developing nuclear weapons, but there was this massive anti-Iran propaganda campaign.
So I reckon most of the incentive for all the fuss was to keep Iran out of the isotope production business.
Dozens of firefighters have been deployed to tackle a blaze at a disused nuclear facility in Dodewaard in the Netherlands. Police have asked the public to stay away and lock all doors and windows to avoid exposure to the fumes.
The fire broke out shortly before noon local time on Thursday in Dodewaard, which is roughly 100 km from Amsterdam. Eyewitness video from the scene shows fire crews battling the blaze on the roof.
https://www.rt.com/news/489343-fire-nuclear-plant-netherlands/
The plant has been out of service since 1997 but is not expected to be dismantled until 2045, when radiation at the site drops to safe levels. All fuel rods were removed from the site in 2003, so there is no immediate danger of radioactive fallout.The main operational areas of the plant were bricked up and contained within a so-called ‘safe zone’, to prevent areas that previously housed radioactive material from being exposed to the outside world.
The power company conglomerate behind the facility is embroiled in a legal battle with the government over who should cover the estimated €80 million cost of decommissioning.
It aint over till the peasants cough up the dough.
The nuclear plant in Dodewaard was the first nuclear power plant established in the Netherlands. It was built by the Dutch government, mainly as a means to obtain know-how about the construction and exploitation of a nuclear power plant. The plant was therefore relatively small with a net output of only 58 MW. Construction was started in 1965 and the facility opened on March 26, 1969, in the presence of Queen Juliana.
Since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the political tide turned against nuclear energy, which was already a heavily debated issue in Dutch politics. With no prospect of the construction of new nuclear power plants in the Netherlands, Dodewaard’s function as a research centre became superfluous. The ownership decided to halt the relatively small and expensive electricity production in 1997.
Now shuttered, the complex remains tightly guarded.
So after a whole year, I’ve just realised the blindingly obvious. When two parameters are each increased by the other, it doesn’t matter which rises first; both will rise. That’s the very essence of positive feedback, so Rhys Jaggar’s opening remark…
– “The evidence is absolutely clear that atmospheric carbon dioxide follows temperature increases with a lag of 700 years as oceanic-atmospheric carbon dioxide equilibria adjust themselves. Temperatures go up: carbon dioxide is released from the oceans. Temperatures go down: it is reabsorbed”
…tells us nothing about CO2 from fossil fuels increasing the temperature.
To put it as an analogy, say that poverty causes crime and crime causes poverty. Law-and-order politicians may cite historical examples of crime causing poverty to argue for better policing, and social justice politicians may cite historical examples of poverty causing crime to argue for better wages and welfare, but neither of them would be honest in citing their examples to argue against the other’s policy. Both should realise that they’re attempting to stabilise a system that exhibits positive feedback, and external influences that increase either poverty or crime could send the system spiralling out of control.
