The New 2012 Xipi

[flecc]

4. Three strikes and a chip - not from birth.

Just as with other areas of crime, there'll be people to fix it for cash. In this case there are so many doctors around with light surgery skills these chips wouldn't be in for long for the serious criminals.

Peak Oil is a favourite of mine, too. You'll get oil company shills popping up here and there assuring us we're nowhere near the peak, but that's utter bs.

But you don't know that, nobody does. We simply don't know how much oil there is in the world, all we know is that at present rates of consumption we will be ok for another three decades at least given the knowledge of what we have to come and existing reserves. Then a presumption of the quantity there is in the areas we've yet to exploit like the Arctic Ocean and southern Libya and the unexplored areas like the Southern Ocean and a number of land areas can reasonably at least double that and maybe very much more.

The difficulties of reaching it are not important, oil is such a useful and valuable source compared with other energy forms that we'll find ways, still at less than green energy costs.

Look at the USA where for over a half century we were told they'd exhausted all their oil. Now they are producing it in large quantities again and are on course to be overall energy self-sufficient within five years. So much for our "knowledge" of what's available.
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[GaRRy]

and thats not counting oil from coal which is starting to become economically viable

Sasol Sees Profit Gain on Stronger Oil, Weaker Currency - Bloomberg

Sasol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[eddieo]

I LOVE Coal!

 

[flecc]

and thats not counting oil from coal which is starting to become economically viable

Sasol Sees Profit Gain on Stronger Oil, Weaker Currency - Bloomberg

Sasol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yes indeed, and with the USA and China both with almost inexhaustible supplies of coal for conversion, the two potentially biggest users of oil in future can be domestically independent. This is in fact the USA's declared political aim.

Compare that with the scarce and fast running out lithium.

 

[eddieo]

I am working on a new battery chemistry, all very hush hush...... I have so far blown up my garage and destroyed two sheds by fire

 

[flecc]

That will teach you not to buy the cells from ebay Eddie!

 

[neptune]

@Scimitar. we are largely singing from the same hymn sheet. Let not our differences blind us to the things we have in common .
1.Believe it or not there are people around Chernobyl and Fukushima who would disagree with you.
2.OMG please try to keep up. Cold fusion has been verified in hundreds if not thousands of laboratories throughout the world.
3. OK, no conflict.
4. Sounds reasonable. Would it have saved Madeleine McCann?
5. It takes just one white crow to prove that not all crows are black.
6. Peak Oil. Perhaps we should say Peak cheap oil. Flecc will tell you that there is enough oil in Tar Sands to last 200 years. I forget the actual figures here, but up until recently we could extract 40 barrels of oil at the cost of one barrel used as energy. If I remember right it would take 10 barrels to extract 40 barrels from tar sands. Of course they will be starting with the richest tar sands, so it will get progressively worse.And the amount of environmental damage caused is enormous. There will always be oil for the Military and the Police. For Joe Public, it will be rationing by price.

 

[flecc]

No, I wasn't thinking of tar sands and their accompanying disadvantages, I'd rather see them left alone. I was only thinking of oil reservoirs in the locations mentioned, plus the re-utilisation of previously thought to be spent resources.

Petrol has long been rationed by price, so nothing new there, but with no viable alternative people will still manage to buy it somehow.

Cold fusion is limited by the insubstantial nature of fairy tales, it needs to actually exist to be practical.

 

[muckymits]

I LOVE Coal!

you will eat anything, sure you not preggers?

 

[Scimitar]

@Scimitar. we are largely singing from the same hymn sheet. Let not our differences blind us to the things we have in common .
1.Believe it or not there are people around Chernobyl and Fukushima who would disagree with you.
2.OMG please try to keep up. Cold fusion has been verified in hundreds if not thousands of laboratories throughout the world.
3. OK, no conflict.
4. Sounds reasonable. Would it have saved Madeleine McCann?
5. It takes just one white crow to prove that not all crows are black.
6. Peak Oil. Perhaps we should say Peak cheap oil. Flecc will tell you that there is enough oil in Tar Sands to last 200 years. I forget the actual figures here, but up until recently we could extract 40 barrels of oil at the cost of one barrel used as energy. If I remember right it would take 10 barrels to extract 40 barrels from tar sands. Of course they will be starting with the richest tar sands, so it will get progressively worse.And the amount of environmental damage caused is enormous. There will always be oil for the Military and the Police. For Joe Public, it will be rationing by price.

I'm talking about thorium reactors, not conventional. A whole different kettle of boiling whizzy things. If the reactors at Chernobyl and Fukushima had been thorium, people would likely still be living on the near doorstep.
That said, conventional nukes, although problematic, have a very good track record when run and built properly. Chernobyl was irresponsible design and operation, Fuku was stupidity taken to new heights - building a reactor near a massive fault line, was asking for that "once in a thousand years" event. Hopefully, we'll see an end to conventional reactors, but not in my lifetime. You can't make bombs out of thorium or its by-products and mankind has always needed a source of weaponry.
Cold fusion is a chimera, a myth, a total crock of hot air.
It's long been discredited and NOT duplicated in hundreds of other labs. The research was faulty, simple as that.
The end of "Peak Cheap Oil" is right; sure, there will remain lots of oil in the ground, but the whole Peak Oil controversy was always referring to the end of the easily obtainable cheap oil, to pretend otherwise is disingenous at best. Without doubt, we are on a downward slide now and we'd better get our houses in order, quite literally - by simply using less, by having low-consumption items.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed a viable, cheap, energy-intensive battery technology comes along before the lithium runs out.

 

[flecc]

In fairness, the failure of Chernobyl RBMK reactor number 4 was solely due to an unauthorised test being carried out during initial commissioning tests. The other 3 reactors at that station were being run entirely responsibly. The number 4 failure damaged reactors 2 and 3 slightly, but it's not generally known that reactor number 1 was restarted just 12 weeks later in 1986 and continued to supply their grid through into year 2000.

The Russian RBMK reactor design is no more dangerous than our current British AGRs that are at all but one of our active nuclear stations, both are graphite core designs suffering the lack of intrinsic fail-safety that PWRs have. What the RBMK did lack at that time was high quality computer control, but since then they have been equipped with Westinghouse control systems and function perfectly as some of the most efficient nuclear power stations ever designed. Indeed, the two largest nuclear power stations in the world are both RBMKs of 1500 mW capacity.

I agree that thorium is a far better option, but the problems of using that are still not completely solved and I think we'll have to almost run out of uranium before enough effort is put into thorium reactor research, design and construction.

 

[Scimitar]

I agree that thorium is a far better option, but the problems of using that are still not completely solved and I think we'll have to almost run out of uranium before enough effort is put into thorium reactor
research, design and construction.

Well, as I said, by the time we get around to it, the Indians and Chinese will have shown us a clean pair of heels on it and we'll be buying the tech from them - shameful.

 

[flecc]

Nothing new there then Dave, most other things made there.

We'll just stick to theme parks, stately homes and ceremonial parades celebrating fake history for their tourists.

 

[PJM]

What part of fake history do we celebrate by ceremonial parade's

 

[neptune]

The use of fission reactors in a safe manner, relies on the operators never making a mistake. That is something which on a long term basis has never been achieved in the history of the world. The odds against winning the lottery are 14 million to one. Yet someone wins every week. They are gambling with my life and the future of the planet on which I live . I do not recall ever having been asked if that was OK with me.
"This reactor is perfectly safe because it is computer controlled. Nothing can ever possibly go wrong, go wrong, gowronggowronggowronggowrong..,,,"
Cold fusion has been replicated in over a hundred labs worldwide, and has been endorsed by MIT, and publicly demonstrated there, and endorsed by NASA. Fact. I expect we shall have to fool about with Thorium for a few decades before people start to wake up.

 

[neptune]

cancelled duplicate post

 

[flecc]

What part of fake history do we celebrate by ceremonial parade's

Much of our pomp and circumstance stuff, uniforms etc, was created in Victorian times and is artificial, not historically based but either greatly embellished or wholly made up.

 

[flecc]

The use of fission reactors in a safe manner, relies on the operators never making a mistake. That is something which on a long term basis has never been achieved in the history of the world.

Three layers of computer control is the primary control of all of today's reactors with humans as the backup. The last I checked showed that no more than the first layer has ever failed before it was repaired, giving substantial safety redundancy. Anyway an accident doesn't have to be a problem as Three Mile Island proved. It's enclosure prevented the problems that Windscale and Chernobyl caused, and today's designs are like this plus even more safety measures.

Like all opponents of today's nuclear power, you ignore the fact that the three accidents were all with the first generation reactors, which like all new technologies had weaknesses not present in second and subsequent generation reactors.

Cold fusion has been replicated in over a hundred labs worldwide, and has been endorsed by MIT, and publicly demonstrated there, and endorsed by NASA. Fact. I expect we shall have to fool about with Thorium for a few decades before people start to wake up.

Sorry, but this is pure nonsense in practical terms. The "demonstrations" have been on a minute scale with no substantial verification that it really has been achieved. If it were viable for practical use, these scientists would be grabbing for the research grants which the politicians would be delighted to give if this science were practical, since it's what they dream of.

Whoever heard of a boffin who wasn't desperate to claim research funds for a genuine advance? Truth is it's never happened, ever.

 

[PJM]

So by that token all of our famous military regiments are Victorian show biz. Sorry Flecc that is one sweeping generalisation too far. Can I refer you to a small encounter with the French that culminated at Waterloo. Have a look at paintings of this alone to see the uniforms. Unless my history is way out that was way before Victoria came to the throne. Most of the regiments who feature in the parades have long histories going back many hundreds of years. Christmas may have been an introduction of Prince Albert but the military pomp and ceremony goes back a long way. The trooping of the colour comes from the standards used to rally troops to the King for example. Your knowledge of battery bikes may be deep but on this point you are way off of historical fact.

 

[flecc]

Yours is the sweeping generalisation PJM. I didn't say all, I said much, I didn't refer to the military at all and I didn't mention parades. We have many instances of non-military uniforms and ceremony and it is those that are mainly affected by Victorian imagination. Try the royal opening of parliament for example, hugely embellished over what happened before Victoria.

I don't pretend to this knowledge being originally mine, I'm quoting historians speaking during broadcasts.
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