OPINION OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! (White Giant)

hummm... You can still edit your post and correct that. See the notepad with the pen? Click it. ; )

Got your people mixed up MM, but I don't mind if Zetetic doesn't!

First off Zetetic: Saying the British Isles are "a bit cloudy" is an understatement! Just like our Oregonians here, the Brits don't suntan, they rust!

Back to MM for a second: TMI is okay. The one reactor is down, but the other two are up and running, and have been. One of my high school classmates (J. Heuser) is head of security there.

On to the discussion. Zetetic, your assessment of the energy problems/solutions is on target. Hydro is clean, efficient, and incredibly low maintenance. Watched a program(me) on the History Channel a couple months back which attempted to show what the world would be like if every human disappeared tomorrow. One of the things which amazed me was that the Hoover Dam would continue to pump out electric for a couple decades even with no one there to operate it! And it would go on practically forever if it wasn't for a pesky little barnacle that likes to live in the water intake channels.

Hydro runs into the same problem here with environmentalist opposition. I'd like to make something clear here. I am not opposed to conservation. Every major religion (and anyone with common sense) tells their adherents to be good stewards of the land. It is the hypocrisy of the environmental movement that arouses my ire. The man who makes millions making false movies about polar bears has a house whose monthly electric use could supply hundreds of homes, while the man the world loves to hate owns a home which is over 80% powered by geothermal.

People who place their "agenda" over the common good have more power than the average guy in the street. I don't pretend to have the answer to that, but I love complaining about it.

Zetetic: Right on target with the solar panel idea. My home has a solar panel, unfortunately it was put up in the 70s when the tech was brand new, so it is not very efficient. And you are correct that solar has come a long way. If you'd like to be futuristic about things, the idea of placing massive solar panels in space is an interesting alternative. The only drawback currently is the transmission of the power from space to earth. Space based solar panels benefit from no atmospheric interference, no cloud cover concerns, and 24 hour production. Anyone see a problem?

Another futuristic option, although a somewhat scary one, is the development of fusion power. Or is it fission? I get the two confused. Pretty sure it's fusion I'm talking about. It takes nuke power to the next level. Self sustaining, no waste. But an accident would probably wipe out half the population of the earth. But hey, that would solve the energy problem, right? LOL.

Your comments about fuel cells are also on target.
Back when I was a preteen I lived in Japan for 5 years. Mitsubishi corporate headquarters had a section of their building open to the public which showcased the "products of the future". They make a lot more than just cars,and I was fascinated by the stuff they had. Included in the display was a car with fuel cell technology. Oh, did I mention that I lived there from 1965-1970?
Additionally, when cars were first coming out, the Dusenbergs, etc., did not run entirely on gasoline. My grandfather's first car was a Stanley Steamer, which by it's name you know what it ran on. You cannot convince me that with today's technology we can't just take the old models and find a way to upgrade them to fit today's world.

As both Zetetic and MM mention, no single solution will suffice, it has to be a broad ranged effort along many different fronts.

MM, excellent article regarding biofuels. Corn based ethanol is a very sore subject with me, it ranks as probably the worst legislation in the US since Prohibition. Especially since it was just a "shut the people up so we can get reelected" program.

Now if the three of us ran the real world instead of countries on SC...

Concluding, MM, you may have then sold me a program, I always buy one of those too. But if you did you forgot my little pencil, and I want it! LOL.

John: I didn't know what that notepad was for. I been searching for an edit button, but now I know lol. I'll use it next time

JMR, I watched that exact same program on the History Channel too! incredibly interesting stuff they had on there. The wind mills, too, would still be producing electricity as well. Pretty interesting thinking about how green technology would far surpass fossil fuel tech, even long after humans have vanished! lol!

JMR, I have no idea why you would hand someone a pencil when they're selling you a program, but I don't ever remembering someone giving me one to use lol. I DO remember that Kevin Costner stole my pen after I asked him for an autograph there lol.

But, um, I guess after all these rants, my original point was that the Chinese should put all their energy into developing all these technologies we have been talking about, in order to be more independant from foreign resources. They're following the exact same path that we did, and look where it got us. If we were to switch to alternative energies, we should be able to leap-frog back ahead of the Chinese again, and let them suffer the consequences of being too dependant on Fossile Fuels.

Got it backwards MM. The program guy is supposed to give the buyer one of those pint sized pencils to keep score with. I didn't get one that day, and I still want it! lol.

Regarding the Chinese once again, they're not strictly developing fossil fuel programs. They are also beginning construction on what would be one of the largest hydroelectric complexes in the world on a river in western China running along the border with Tibet. The name of the river escapes me at the moment, but it's a large river which runs down into India. And therein lies a problem. If the project is completed the river flow will be so drastically reduced that approximately 1 million Indians will be without water. Considering the on again/off again relations between China and India, this could be interesting.

Off topic interlude....

This thread was started on Thursday, May 24, 2007.....Is wwwporkchop even playing anymore?

lol who knows? but its a fun thread so...

Yeah I think it's the Yangze River, or the Yellow River (that may very well be the same damn river tho)

One hydroelectric dam is not going to put a dent in the future energy demands of China though. They'll probably do what we did, and in fact they already are: throw up a bunch of cheap coal or oil burning plants.

Robert. Fusion is what you were looking for. The process as theorized is to covert a hydrogen isotope into helium which liberates massive emounts of energy in the process. E=mcsquared I believe. The developemental problems have centered around magnetic containment of the process and energy output/input ratios as I recall, but it does indeed represent the best long term prospects for mass energy production. The "blow up the world" thing is so much misinformation. Unlike fission, the splitting of heavy elements, fusion is not a process that is self sustaining. It can't "run away" or get out of control. However, it does produce heat energy in "bursts" that largely contribute to the engineering challenges in utilizing it for electrical production. I believe the French are developing a plant which uses fusion to produce lower temp plasma to heat water to steam turbines much like fission plants work today.

At any rate, I haven't researched it in any depth lately, but you might look into it.

Zet. I believe you hit on an excellent point. Small scale energy diversification would go a long way to allieviate our current problems. The alternative energy options are all viable, but limited in potential. None have the capacity individually or collectively to meet the worlds demands, but they can each contribute if used on a widespread but "micro scale". Solar panels on car tops, as roofing materials, and transluscent solar films on window glass can all enable energy production at the site to reduce overall demand from the grid. Small wind generators, not the huge airplane wing type, on high rise roof tops and edges are another option.

It does require a shift in thinking, however. The Industrial Age are produced a mentality of centralization to take advantage of economies of scale, and produced a psychological conditioning in our populations for "bigger is better". The powers that be also tend to prefer to have as much control over the factors of our lives as well. Therefore, the resistance to decentralization of energy production encounters resistance from above and below. It's time has come though.

Regarding Hydroelectric. It also is an excellent alternative, but limited by geography to how wide spread it can be used. I believe the US has actually used every hydro source practical in our territory by the late 60's. Therefore, its potential for helping in the long term is severely limited.

I trust in the creative potential of mankind to find solutions if we free ourselves from our devotion to ideology which currently drives the energy debate.

Incidently, someone might want to fire up some new threads for this discussion as this one seems to be becoming a bit unwieldy.

Just a thought.

MM: Switch grass

Never heard of it, but it sounds very interesting.

Renewable sources of energy

I think the best way of selling the idea of large-scale conversion to renewables to a reluctant population (such as oil-dependent Americans) would be in terms of energy security. Even if it works out as slightly more expensive in the short term, the investment will pay off as the price of the technology will fall with widespread adoption. You then have a country that is less dependent on potentially expensive imports from unstable parts of the world.

Britain used to be self-sufficient in oil until output from the North Sea peaked in 1999. Even then, the price of North Sea Oil fluctuated with the global price, so even self-sufficiency in a commodity does not guarantee a secure supply (if foreign buyers will pay more, they'll be able to buy more raising prices for domestic buyers).

MM: The Gulf Stream alone could produce millions, if not billions, of kwh.

Probably not - it's too far out to sea to be economical to harness. Most tidal barriers and wave-energy generators are constructed across wide river estuaries and straits between mainland and islands. There are new potential generators that are efficient enough to convert the flow of water in a river to electricity without damming the river (they essentially take the form of a turbine placed on the river bed), but I don't think they've been tried anywhere yet.

"I was afraid the English people on these boards would think Americans were morons for not utilizing the railroad as much as they do in the UK."

Yes, and no. Americans are much better at exploiting their railroads for freight than we are. Our railways still carry far more passengers than freight so we could each learn from the other. The US coasts would be ideal places to build high-speed lines linking large population centres with fast, frequent, electric trains. Fewer internal flights means fewer emissions, reduced dependency on oil for fuel and reduced risk of terrorism (although we have had a number of rail bombings in Europe in the last few years). Not to mention the hassle you avoid by not going through airport security.

Rail travel is often very competitive with air travel over medium distances (up to 600 miles). The journeys are usually city centre to city centre so you don't have the trek to an out-of-town airport. You avoid the queues for security and you don't need to switch your laptop and mobiles off for take-off on a train.

There are now no flights between Paris and Belgium because of the High-Speed rail link and fewer between London and Paris and Brussels because of Eurostar.

JMR: Hydro runs into the same problem here with environmentalist opposition. I'd like to make something clear here. I am not opposed to conservation.

Yep, it's irritating. Most dams seek to alleviate the environmental problems as best they can. Most have salmon runs at the side so that migration patterns of fish are not disrupted.

Solar panels

Back to solar panels again: the UK government provides grant money to home-owners who wish to invest in solar panels or other renewable generators. They have been doing this for a few years, making money available each month. To begin with, applications would use up the supply within a month. Supply hasn't kept up with demand though, and currently the grant money is snapped up within 40 minutes of being made available.

JMR: Another futuristic option, although a somewhat scary one, is the development of fusion power.

It is fusion, not fission. It's the same source of power that powers the sun and other stars: fusion of hydrogen into helium. It's not scary as the only radioactive material that is produced is the walls of the reactor (a tokamak: from the Russian for Toroidal Chamber with Magnetic Coils). The high heat needed to sustain nuclear fusion is beyond all known materials, so it has to be contained by very strong magnetic fields.

The latest generation of tokamak is planned to sustain nuclear fusion for a WHOPPING eight minutes (!) and will require less energy to sustain fusion than it generates during those eight minutes. Fusion Power is still a pipe-dream and we are unlikely to get a commercial reactor before 2050 with widespread adoption in the following 30 years. That said, people have been predicting commercial reactors within the next 30 years for the past 50 years, so keep your fingers crossed.

To follow up on FarmerBob's post. ITER is being built in Caderache in France, but it is very much an international project part-funded by the US.

JMR: They are also beginning construction on what would be one of the largest hydroelectric complexes in the world on a river in western China running along the border with Tibet.

It's not the Yangtze as suggested by MM. The Chinese have already dammed that with the Three Gorges Project (creating the largest man-made lake thus far).

Air travel in a low-carbon economy

Just had a thought about longer-range travel where railways are impossible or uncompetitive. The Soviets developed a Wing-In-Ground effect (WIG) vehicle in the 1970s. It's a sort of cross between a ship and a plane and uses the extra lift generated by wings at very low altitude. See ekranoplan on Wikipeda.

Their craft were designed to fly no higher than 5 or 6 metres and required a huge number of jet engines to take off, but once airborne, needed very little fuel to continue flying.

This may seem like a ridiculous suggestion, but Boeing have a concept aircraft, the Pelican, which would take off as normal from a runway, but fly over the oceans at 6-15 metres.

These types of craft, would be far faster than a ship, but slower than current airliners. They would use far less fuel, potentially making them able to exploit fuel cells or solar cells which would be unlikely to provide enough power for a traditional airliner.

Thought I would turn this into a double post and cement my position as a science nerd (it was inevitable really, my first degree is in physics - it's alright though, I'm better now)!

I thought I would take the opportunity to waffle on about nuclear fusion. E=m(c squared) does play a part as FarmerBob mentioned, but it's a whole lot more complicated than that. If you are bored easily by science, might be worth skipping over this post.

Put simply, it takes a lot of energy to force two hydrogen atoms together. This is because they are positively charged and like-charges repel. However, once they get very close together, the attractive power of the strong nuclear force takes over and the two atoms crash together to form an atom of helium.

The strong nuclear force governs the binding energy of atoms. Binding Energy is the energy required to break an atom apart into its constituent components, i.e., the energy needed to push the protons and neutrons far enough apart that the strong nuclear force is no longer sufficient to overcome the repulsive effect of the positive charge of the protons.

This is where E=m(c squared) comes in. Einstein's famous equation states that the mass of a particle has an energy associated with it (the 'c squared' being a constant of proportionality). This is extremely weird and has the counter-intuitive result that even massless particles, such as the proton, can posses momentum (normally the reserve of something with mass). This is the principle behind solar sails since, with momentum, light can exert a pressure.

When two or more particles are bound together (such as when two hydrogen atoms are fused), they have a lower overall energy level (another counter-intuitive result, but it has been experimentally verified). Because of this lower energy level, there is actually a difference between the mass of a two-particle system (say a deuterium atom of one proton and one neutron) and a separate system of separate particles (one free proton and one free neutron). This has been experimentally verified. This means that by combining, or fusing, two protons (hydrogen atoms), you can extract this difference of energy in the form of movement (kinetic energy, or rather, heat).

The reaction used in Fusion Reactors (tokamaks) actually involves two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, which each have one proton (otherwise they wouldn't be hydrogen) and respectively 1 and 2 neutrons. When fused, this reaction produces an atom of helium (2 protons plus 2 neutrons) plus one free neutron which between them have 17.6MeV of usable energy. This is far greater than the 0.01MeV needed to force the particles together in the first place.

(The electron-Volt, eV, is a fancy measure of energy used by physicists. It's much easier to handle than its equivalent in Joules when dealing with the small numbers involved with individual particles.)

In order to overcome this energy barrier (the 0.01MeV to overcome the repulsive forces of the positively-charged particles), we heat the particles in a reactor (tokamak) to over 100 million degrees (Celsius) forming a plasma (a state of matter where the electrons have too much kinetic energy to remain in orbit around the nucleus of an atom). This gives them the necessary energy to overcome the repulsion, and they fuse to form helium and a free neutron. This free neutron, as it is uncharged, can move across the magnetic field used to contain the plasma providing sufficient heat to sustain the reaction, and carrying excess heat out of the containment field where it can be used to generate electricity.

Congratulations on sticking with me to the end of this post. I hope I have explained things clearly and not confused or bored too many of you too much!

I'm going to answer Zetetic's post in a new thread, since I agree with Quetzalcoatl and FarmerBob that this is getting unwieldy. Hard to know what to call it since we've diverged from the original. Guess I'll just go with the tried and true. Look for "U.S.opinion, the sequel."

LOL! I actually understood what zet was saying in his second post...up until he was talking about the MeV thing....

In response to Zet's first post about switchgrass:

http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/switgrs.html

It is actually an amazing plant. Incredibly adaptable to whatever environment we want to grow it in, unlike corn. It produces hundreds of times of energy that corn ever possibly could. First time I heard of it, the plant specialist guy that presented the idea of growing switchgrass on the sides of highways. Millions of square-acreage that generally aren't wooded

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

The grass stretched as far as the eye could see, and hundreds more miles beyond that. An ocean of grass-deep enough to swallow a horse and rider-swaying and singing in the steady wind of the Great Plains.<!-/Quote-!>

Sounds like the prologue of a plague.

Yes a white plague.........


0_0

[quote]

"� Now, though, in research plots and laboratories in the Plains states and even in the Deep South the seeds of change are germinating. The tall, native grasses of the prairie, so vital to our land's ecological past, may prove equally vital to its economic future. Such grasses once fed millions of bison. Soon, grown as energy crops, they may help fuel millions of cars and trucks, spin power turbines, and supply chemicals to American industries."

[/quote]

Ummm, actually, if anything, it'll reduce the likelyhood of plague. It will be restoring what was there before the white man came and ruined it all....

Wow This thread is Awesome!

lol liar!

This has gotta be the longest thread in the history of....threading!

Yep, this thread is so "Awesome" that it got its very own sequel!

lol yeah I discovered that

LMAO!! LET THE THREAD CONTINUE!

lol why?

I would rather live here than in a country with the freedom to believe what i wish than in a country that supports genocide, terrorism, or a government that will kill my entire family because i had an opinion.
BTW i am not a racist ( for those who might interpet this post as so )i judge people on their words and actions alone.

And curious as to what people of other countries out there think the US should do about the conflict between Georgia and Russia. ( you know the people who think the US should stay out of foreign affairs )
Should the US stand up for what Georgia is looking to become or let Russia and the Ex' KGB spy/new President start re-forming the Soviet Union?

What? That isn't a question worth considering. Georgia is such a minor country that it wouldn't possibly affect us whatsoever.

This has absolutely nothing to do with us at all. It does not present any kind of national security issues.

The conflict between Russia and Georgia is over a piece of land that has been in dispute ever since the USSR broke up. It is a very worthless peice of land as well, and why Russia cares about it is beyond me.

I also highly doubt it has anything to do with Putin, a new president, ex-KGB spies or what have you, are trying to reform the Soviet Union.

If there is any foreign involvement at all, it would be handled purely by the UN, and in all liklyhood, Russia would end up losing that disputed territory anyway if the UN did get involved.

Also, the funny thing is, America is considered to be pretty damn well "hated" throughout the world. I don't think that assessment is correct at all, considering this is the most desirable country to live in. Mexicans would not be illegaly crossing the border by the MILLIONS, regular civilians hold celebrations in other countries if they can get exit visas to the US. Indians come here to study because of our education system. This is the number one vacation destination in the entire world for Japanese people.

America generally isn't hated. Just the hypocrisy and "oppression", depending on your point of view.

Like the lectures to other nations over human rights. Or condemning wars of aggression. Or condemning state-sponsered terrorism.

The world isn't black and white; good vs evil; with us or against us. It's about time America realised this.

Lectures on human right? You think we are HIPOCRITES on that subject matter?

Yes, we had slavery, yes we had the race riots. But that is all in the past. There is hardly any "opression" at all in this country. Unless you happen to think that all the huge capitalists are inherently oppressive.

Well, all I can say to that is that, there are no such things as "sweatshops" here, where 8 year olds get paid a penny a day to make 300,000 shoes.

Of course we should condemn wars of aggression. The UN should be condemning those wars as well, but they don't.

State-sponsered terrorism? When have WE sponsered terrorism? We go after military targets, not civilian, at least, not purposely. Civilian targets will inevidably get hit, but we do NOT target them with the means to just kill a bunch of innocent civilians.

And if we have not stepped in to prevent such wars, let's seee what the world would look like.

First, the nazis would be ruling Europe with an iron fist for a couple of decades. Then Russia would have finally defeated Germany, due to the sheer numbers of Russians. But then Europe would have been ruled with an Iron Communist Fist. Same with all of Southeast Asia, including Japan.

Now, lets say what happened exactly what happened until the 1990s.

Iraq would have taken over the oil fields in Kuwait, then would have attacked another country in the region to take over some other resource.

Using these newly aquired resources, they would have attacked Israel, and combined with Soviet-backed Syria, would have continued attacking any other neighbors that have not fallen in line. Then what? when would it have stopped? in Egypt? In Greece? In Italy? In France?

Same thing happened with Nazi Germany. They just attacked, and attacked, and attacked, until FINALLY, after much great effort and the cost of millions of lives, the Nazis were put down.

So no, the US does NOT put up with countries that attack their sovereign neighbors. If we don't no one else would.