glolady - 17 December 2008 04:14 PM
It is not if but when.
Everyone gets up in arms about 9-11 or Katrina, why were they not warned?
Because people do Not want to believe until their bubble is pricked.
Don’t you see that it’s a completely different situation? We know there are solar flares, and we know that they regularly interfere with things like short-wave radio. No one is saying that it’s not a concern. But WHEN the sun does eventually fry us—as I’ve said, it’s already boiling off our atmosphere, so it’ll happen even without proton storms—there’s really nothing we can do about it. It’s also only a matter of time before another massive asteroid hits the planet, much like what happened before the dinosaurs went extinct, and many, many times before that. We’ll also go into another ice age at some point, too. All of these things are true.
It’s not a matter of people not wanting to believe—they do believe, and it’s a CERTAINTY that the sun will eventually roast the Earth—it’s a matter of it being more-or-less irrelevant, as it’s completely out of our hands. It’s not like Katrina, which was both preventable and badly handled at the time, because the equivalent suggestion to yours would be “Let’s close up New Orleans because a storm may hit one day.” It’s not like 9/11 in any way, unless you mean we should all stop using air travel because planes can be flown into buildings.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t build safer nuclear reactors with this possibility in mind. You say Solar flares a real concern? Fine, let’s put enough shielding around those computers and set the grids up in such a way that even if a MASSIVE solar flare swings our way, happens to hit America in the process (it’s only the side facing the sun that gets hit, after all) and knocks out everything, at least it won’t cause a total meltdown. That should be relatively simple to do, and it may already be in place. After all, we’re talking about radiation, and I’d imagine that the control rooms and computers of nuclear plants are pretty well shielded from absurdly high levels of radiation to start with.
Just because the nuclear reactors are now safe in this scenario doesn’t mean that everything else won’t fall apart, however. Computers everywhere will fry. Cars, planes, cell phones and everything else with a computer for a brain—even DVD players—will also stop working. Hospital computers won’t work anymore. Millions of people will die from the resulting chaos, and that’s not counting the millions who will die from the cellular damage caused by the protons themselves.
Like I said, it’s a doomsday scenario. Y2K meets Hiroshima, if you like. What nuclear plants are doing at the time will be more or less irrelevant. Even if most of them go into total meltdown, it’ll be a few million more deaths on a tally sheet of hundreds of millions of deaths.
And it still has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand, which is—assuming we’re going to keep using nuclear power—should we transport nuclear waste through urban areas?
There is enough FREE energy and technology to make such. It is the GREED in the Profit that keeps the pig suckling.
That’s true, although not at our current standard of living. Let’s say that we took all of the existing solar panels and wind farms and whatnot, and only used that for energy in the future. Nuclear was out, as was fossil fuels. We could all live in unheated, electricity-free homes, but we’d be in the cold and the dark. We could all go no farther than we could walk or bike, and most of us would have to move back out to the country to become farmers and never bother with things like stores. (There’d be nothing to buy since the factories were closed, and no way to get it since trains and big-rigs use fossil fuels.)
Maybe if we all had a solar panel to our name—something I’m not sure is even the case now in terms of supply—we could at least have a few light bulbs or something. That’s an extreme example, but it we were dedicated to using existing alternative energy alone, I’m guessing that this is roughly the lifestyle we’d be talking about.
But who wants that?
Assuming we don’t take such a drastic move, and simply move towards a more energy-efficient and less polluting future, there’s not enough energy to supply what we need today to live in the kind of society we have without something along the lines of nuclear or fossil fuels. Wind and solar aren’t up to it yet, although I have hopes they will be soon enough. But we’re talking about decades of transition at best—probably more like centuries—and during that time we’ll still need energy just to keep society stable, much less allow for innovation.
Once we’ve got wind farms and solar arrays that are meeting our needs, I say we shut down the reactors and the coal plants. But not until.
