Here ya go NNadir.

[skids]

This should keep you busy for a good hour or two...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1782024

[NNadir]

1. Can you read it for me?

Let me know how many of millions of people actually died from Beese Davis and give me the ususal summary?

The entire anti-nuclear argument relies on the conditional tenses: "Could have, would have, might have."

This is true of the entire "solar only" argument: Could, might, blah, blah, and soothsaying "in 2050..." "by 2020..." "prices will come down..."

I am pronuclear because I am concerned with the present tense: Global climate change is happening. Air pollution is killing people day after day year after year. Fossil fuels are destroying ecosystems daily, year after year, decade after decade.

When my antagonists apply the textbook on how to think poorly, I merely have to repeat what I always repeat: I am not buying the strawman argument that nuclear power must be perfect and completely without risk to be safer than all of its alternatives. (Note the Externe reports repeatedly show that wind energy is the only energy safer than nuclear - but wind always requires back up and if the back up is coal...)

I have never met a single "solar only" advocate who gives more than lip service - and weak lip service at that, immorally weak lip service - to the damage from fossil fuels during normal operations. Not one. Zero.

They can go on for hours and hours about Beese Davis, which was was caught and therefore injured zero people. Not one of them as ever bothered to open a single scientific paper about the health effects of ordinary air pollution, never mind the size of the potential tragedy that is now almost certain to occur from global climate change.

Please let me know about the fines paid for one practioner of a coal plant for destroying the atmosphere. Just one. Anywhere on earth will do.

In fact the only way to make nuclear appear dangerous is to view it in isolation. Because this kind of thinking may kill my children as well as everyone else's, I am passionate on the subject, even furious. I am not arguing to be cute or cool. I am fighting for human lives.

I actually like some forms of renewable energy and believe they are desirable. What is dangerous is the religious contention that they are safe enough to rely on 100%, and that the world can even survive without nuclear energy because someone somewhere has built a solar plant that operates 20% of the year.

It cannot.

Do ya get it?

I didn't think so. No matter how unimpressive, I'm sure I'll hear more of the same.

[BeFree]

2. Solar Only

What does Solar Only mean? Does it mean they think if we are going to spend billions upon billions of dollars on electric generation that Solar is the only place to spend that money? I don't see anyone here of that persuasion.

Most here are realists searching for an answer to a huge multi-faceted problem. Some here are adamant that nukes are adding to the problems. They have much information to stand on, and emotional outbursts containing one-sided fact up-chucks do not bend their will. Good on them.

While there may not be a long list of fines levied against air polluters, there are moves being made by many polluters to lessen their conduct, due to public reactions. More could be done by the polluters, but they cry that it would cost to much to not pollute. And many of those are the same ones who would just love to get their hands on a nuke plant if only they could find private investors - darn the luck!
WE DON'T TRUST THEM.

In the mix of needed energy are sources that do not emit pollutants into the atmosphere, or the water, or the ground. Those kinds of sources are what's needed, along with strict conservation measures - measures about which I hear little support for from the nuke advocates. It's almost as those advocates feel: "Damn the extended and external, costs we want our power and we want it now." Too bad they are not more balanced.

[Massacure]

3. Of course no one says solar only.

But no one outlines how to replace fossil fuels completely.

Why did you have to set this piece of flame bait up though?

[NNadir]

4. It means people who think providing the world's energy solely through

solar power is not just possible, but that it is the ONLY acceptable solution.

What did you think it meant?

The original "solar only" statement came from none other than the internationally known spoiled brat (embezzling) paranoid twit millionaire, Ralph Nader, who confidently declared in 1978, "In thirty years the world will be 100% solar."

There are still people 30 years later declaring the same thing, although some have readjusted the claim to partial percentages.

Here for instance is a chart from a set of international "solar only" idiots who are rather famous for stunts and appeals to magic:

http://www.cana.net.au/documents/Policy_assessment_071004.pdf

Here are the key words in their "presentation:" "2050" and "target." Here's a reality: If we rely on there targets "for 2050" we will all be dead, and not necessarily from old age.

Why not NOW? The fucking emergency is NOW, isn't it? Oh I know! It's because what they propose can't be done without impoverishing everyone NOW. I don't make promises on which my grandchildren must deliver. That shit is for the Bushies.

Now suppose that it really was possible - it's not - to provide 20% of the world's energy by solar means without impoverishing even a larger fraction of the planet, given that the impoverished fraction is already too large. Where the fuck is the other 80% supposed to come from?

Here is what a "solar only" advocate doesn't tell you: Coal, coal, coal, coal, coal, and then more coal.

This will make the global climate change even worse than it is now, until of course, the inevitable crisis hits in a grand way.

Now, nobody here can demonstrate a single fucking person who has been killed by nuclear waste, blah, blah, blah. The "...adding to the problems. They have much information to stand on, and emotional outbursts containing one-sided fact up-chucks do not bend their will" is all mysticism and bullshit.

Fact "upchucks?" Gee, I'm sorry to disturb happy dreams with facts. Let's not do facts if they fucking trouble you, if you find them too "one sided." Shit, all we need is more fantasy.

After you find out what "solar only" is, I suggest you learn something about "realism." Realism involves looking at what works and what doesn't.

Now if solar only advocates were diddling about replacing oil and natural gas, they would be worthy of some respect. If they were trying to pass legislation to replace coal with solar, they would be worthy of some respect.

However, they are not attempting to arrest coal, oil, and natural gas because they have no ethics and no minds. They cannot compare two integers, never mind two rational numbers, nor can they understand even the most primitive results of risk analysis, nor comprehend very basic high school level science. They are attempting to arrest nuclear energy based on "what if" arguments throwing out wild numbers that depend on the most improbable set of circumstances.

Here's a clue: Nuclear energy has a history. It produces 20% of the world's electricity right fucking now. Now if you shut this capacity off tomorrow there would be two options. Cutting off the 20% of the world's poorest or burning more fossil fuels. There is, in spite of what you may hear from twits, no third option.

Now the external cost of energy has been exhaustively examined and it's very clear, extremely clear, unambiguously and without possible debate, just as one cannot debate evolution, that the highest external costs of energy are related to fossil fuels. But one shouldn't need fancy studies: It's empirically obvious. You only need look in the sky or on the television news.

Now I ask every day, if so called nuclear waste is so "dangerous," where are the dead bodies? What do I get? Evasion and more misrepresentation, discussions of resumes, textbook examples of logical fallacies, blind drunken blanket statements, links to Greenpeace and Ratical.org but no fucking bodies. Not one.

Coal waste is dangerous. It fucking kills people.

I hear all about nuclear war.

Fucking napalm is dropped on human beings - for the purpose of stealing more fucking oil - but I don't hear about oil war. When was the last time someone died in a nuclear war?

Oh I know! I know! Please call on me! Sixty fucking years ago? That's right, sixty fucking years ago.

Now, if there were no coal, natural gas, and oil facilities on the planet, I might agree to get in a debate on the subject of whether we should attempt to go solar or remain nuclear. But I will STILL demand the same thing: Deeds as opposed big fucking words and promises.

But that is NOT how this debate is framed. It's nuclear or solar, not nuclear and/or solar or coal. If that's not impossibly stupid, I sure don't know what the fuck is.

I mean look at this shit: Beese Davis? Nothing happened. The failure was discovered before anyone was hurt. Not only that, the owners of the plant were fined not for damages inflicted but for merely increasing the possibility of damages.

Apparently though, we have to worry more about this fucking "might have been accident" than we have to worry about the soot, ash, coal dust, acid rain, oil wars, bombings, acid run-off, heavy metal contamination that happen every damn day because the weak minded can't get it into their weak minds that this is NOT a "might have been accident." It is fucking every day MURDER. It is intentional, ordinary, and unpreventable.

By the way, I don't trust YOU. I trust people who know what the fuck they are talking about, and no one else.

[BeFree]

6. Well, there you go again

"I don't make promises on which my grandchildren must deliver. That shit is for the Bushies."

Yet you are willing to foist upon your children the nuke waste that will last for tens of thousands of years. Hypocritical, at best.

You ask: "Where are the dead from nuke waste?" You, above all others, know radiation is a slow killer, and that the stuff is kept, at great cost, away from human contact - so far. How long that continues is the question your children shall face.

I agree coal waste is dangerous and deadly. Where we digress is in the fact that you feel coal waste can't be technologically controlled. Yet you insist radiation can be. There is a terrible disconnect in your begging for nuke generation and whitewashing of all it's consequences while totally ignoring the possibility of reducing substantially present day emissions. Reducing the emissions is the best way of averting the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere. Reducing the pollution can be done, maybe not totally, but it can be, and should be done before we foist thousands of years of nuke waste on our children.

I write these things to try to center you, Nadir. Your one sided factual presentations lead you into where you now reside, so far off to the edge you are useless to the immediate cause of reducing today's pollution loads.

We should find common ground, and resolve to work on those actions that can lead to immediate, real world solutions, working with what we have to avert a coming disaster.

What we have is a mix of sources. Some cause greater harm than others by varying degrees. Yet all of those sources are controlled by the same bastards who got us into this position, and we'd be well advised to demand of them the least harmful of new sources, and work hard to eliminate the emissions from the ones now working.

Peace

[hankthecrank]

5. Two sides beating two dead horses.

Not really dead horses but while you fight coal is just being used more. Both sides can agree that's not good right!

USA Today not good place to get info but here is a link to a story they had about coal. It was about the rails being washed away last winter. But near the end they talked about how many new coal fired power plants coming on line.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2005-08-24-coal-usat_x.htm

The Energy Department reports that 124 new coal-fired electricity plants are under development for completion in the next decade, potentially increasing U.S. coal consumption by another 270 million tons, or 25%.

http://www.boingboing.net/ has interview with Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote on eco-disasters on Earth and Mars. Mars books Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars. Earth books 50 Degrees Below, and 40 Signs of Rain. Yes its just sci fi but its good work up on Terra forming. We can see doing that to mars but can't see that we are doing it here also.

He says "Much of the carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere actually ends up in the ocean, increasing its acidity and making it harder for the little creatures to live."

So not only is Carbon dioxide messing up the deep ocean currents its killing the bottom of the ocean food chain.

[One_Life_To_Give]

7. Will Coal expand in the current market?

Concidering our third biggest source of Electrical energy is Natural Gas. Which has nearly double in price recently. And oil not being a cost effective alternative either.

Will we see a significant growth in Coal Power?

[phantom power]

8. Sadly, yes.

It's simply the most expedient thing to do. Wrong, but expedient.