Nuclear Power is Still The Best for NOW

No new nuclear power plants have been built in the USA since 1979, since the 3-Mile Island accident.  In that accident, no measurable radiation escaped the facility, and nobody in the community was hurt in the least.  In the 30 years since then, there have been no other accidents, and the nuclear power plants that were in operation at that time are still in operation today, producing 20% of our electricity.  That 20% displaces 370 million metric tons of greenhouse emissions EVERY YEAR! 

What about the nuclear waste?  Over those 30 years, the entire sum of waste nuclear fuel is 3000 tons, which is .0008% of the carbon-based emissions that would have been produced from either coal or natural gas power plants (for that same 20% of supply). 

What about the environment around the nuclear power plant?  From the outside, a nuclear power plant has no more impact on the environment than an inert lump of concrete.  There are fewer emissions from a nuclear power facility than there is from a pile of freshly dug up dirt.

What about the cooling water?  All natural substances contain radioactive material, in fact BEER contains 13 times more radioactivity than the cooling water from a nuclear power plant has.  The water coming out of a nuclear plant is no more radioactive than when it went in!

Let's get off our rumps America and stop letting the loudmouthed, uneducated fear mongering idiots hiding behind environmentalist agendas determine our destiny as a nation.  It is time for the silent majority to wake up, scrape off the sludge of apathy and demand more nuclear power plants!

Being Artistic Does NOT Make You Smart...

...in fact, if that's all you do, it just means that you haven't found any realistic way to impact humanity, and are frustrated by that, therefore you turn to artistic expression to quell your own feelings of inadequacy.

Don't get me wrong, art (of most forms) is an exceedingly important and satisfying part of humanity, and some artists throughout history have been unmitigated rascals, while others have been real champions of purpose and reason (as can be said of people in any profession).  If you love doing some form of art, that is fantastic, and I salute you, but don't make that your only contribution to humanity, do something else that is also useful and do your art as a hobby, until you can prove that your art is providing more value than your day job, then you can become "an artist".

What has sparked my rant against artists?  I recently read a statement by someone, who could only be classified as an artist, that was so unconscionably stupid, while honestly believing that they were being deep and intellectual, I simply could not contain my mirth, and had to share it.

What was the statement?

On the "Opaque:Dining in The Dark" website, if you go to the "Dining Room" link, you are taken to a completely black page, and if you roll your mouse around in there, some phrases will appear.  One series of phrases goes like this:
"Once I feared the dark"
"But I learned the dark is never black"
"Just a deep, deep shade of red"

Why not pink or purple, or heliotrope?  Hey art-fag!  Any color can be deepened to black, black is merely the absence of light, in other words, no light is escaping from the black object, it has NO color.

Another art-fag comment from the Hall of Shame:
Standing outside the art building at Brigham Young University, a mountain nearby was on fire near the base, while I paused to consider that, an art student emerged from the art building and also paused to consider the fire.  After a small period of time, he took a self-superior breath of air and said in a matter-of-fact tone, "well, it's a good thing the fire is down there, because fire can't burn uphill."

That was over a decade ago and as you can see, I still chortle about that lamentable individual's rather deficient intellectual abilities.

Solar Energy is Great, Burning Food for Fuel is Stupid

Another pretty good book I have read recently is "Earth: The Sequel" by Fred Krupp.  A somewhat leftist treatise of many different alternative energy options that exist in the world and where they are in current development.  There are some exceedingly viable and attractive energy options out there that are just barely out of reach as far as commercial deployment cost.  One of my favorites that I think really needs some more attention is distributed solar panels, i.e. we all have solar panels on our roofs.  This really makes sense to me for several reasons:

1. The "fuel" is free and won't diminish significantly for another 5 billion years, no matter how many people are using it, nor how much they use.
2. Peak generation time is during sunlight hours, which just happens to be peak usage time as well.
3. Terrorists (or natural disasters) will find it much harder to disable our power network if every building is a production unit.
4. With the panels on the roof, they really make sort of a "shield" against the sun, so my house absorbs much less energy, and the energy need for cooling goes down.
5. The roof is really useless real estate anyway, you can't use it for anything, if we can get something useful out of all that area, we may as well.

There are of course some drawbacks that need resolution:

1. The cost of implementation is grotesque, a 30 year payoff is simply not viable in my opinion.  We need to get that down to a 5-10 year payoff and many more people in today's ever mobile society (moving from house to house, about every 6 years) will be willing to pay the cost and do it.
2. The current "excess storage system" is that the excess power goes on the public grid and the power company pays you for it, thereby offsetting the cost of the power you use at night or during other non-generation times.  We need a long-term reliable local storage system.  Something like a bunch of batteries stored in the attic or buried in a vault near the house that does not require frequent access because they are some kind of maintenance free battery that can last through 12,000 cycles (30 years would be ~11,000 cycles).
3. Even with great local storage, we still need the public grid.  Solar generation is just too finicky, unless some major efficiency advances are made to solar technology (I'm talking 85% or better energy conversion), we just cannot generate enough electricity to power everything, all day long.  It snows where I live, and the roof is completely covered for at least 4 months of the year.  If you think I'm going up there to scrape the snow off the panels after every storm like I do the driveway, yer crazy!
4. We have to come up with a combination of materials that are plentiful and cheap to make the panels out of.  Once the above problems are resolved, millions of people will be flocking to the Solar Store to get their system.  We must take care that such a run on the materials will not impoverish some other industry or become self-defeating due to the high cost of the (now) rare and hard to obtain materials. 
   

A perfect current example of problem #4 is corn ethanol.  A commodity that was cheap and abundant, depleted by the overwhelming demand of energy production.  Furthermore, because of all the ridiculous subsidies on corn ethanol, corn is now a much more lucrative agricultural product, so farmers are planting fuel corn instead of animal feed corn, which drives up the cost of meat; planting fuel corn instead of human edible corn, driving up the cost of corn to eat; planting fuel corn instead of wheat, driving up the price of wheat and creating a worldwide shortage of the Staff of Life, which drives up the cost of nearly every other kind of food; planting fuel corn instead of following the scientific plan of crop rotation and letting land fallow, causing the land itself to become depleted.

One of the people interviewed for the book "Earth: The Sequel" was Bernie, who owns some kind of ranch getaway in Alaska, and is constantly searching for ways to make his ranch run on something other than the diesel generators that most out of the way places in Alaska run on.  He says it perfectly with respect to corn ethanol, here is a sound clip from the Recorded Books Audio version of the book:

http://www.advancemfgtech.com/burn_food_stupid.mp3