Chernobyl was a big cock-up allright, as was Fukushima, although that seems to have been less severe.

What would you say is the most dangerous form of energy production we have now? What about the safest? Look up "Deaths by terawatt hour", you might be surprised.

Even wind power has killed about 3 times as many people per TWH produced as nuclear, AFAIK mainly due to the amounts of steel and concrete used in constructing the plants, the production of which is relatively dangerous. Coal is on a different planet altogether, killing about 1500 times as many people per TWH as nuclear.

Even if you assume the total deaths from nuclear power production are underreported and underestimated by a factor of 10, that would still only put it on par with solar power in terms of people killed to produce energy.

Now, nuclear isn't a cureall solution to our energy problems. Even if we wanted to, we simply couldn't build enough power plants to cover all our energy needs with nuclear, you've got the storage issue, you've got the issue of plant placement, and in general relying on one technology alone is a bad idea.

Still. Coal. 1500 times as deadly. How many articles and videos have you seen on how scary coal is? What gives?

Pretty much what @Mordhaus said.

There's no way to sustain the numbers we have today without changing 99% of people's habits, most effectively starting with breeding habits.
With the need for only 10% the power required today, you would never need to use nuclear power at all, or hydro. You could supply it on wind and solar with a small fossil fuel peak power generator system.
The planet MAY survive....but I don't count only extremophile bacteria as really 'alive'. Worst case scenario, we could be Venus 2.0, in my eyes, that's not alive.

That conveniently leaves out the fact that income tax rates have plummeted since the 1940s. That's been the big consistent change, not the government increasing spending as a percentage of GDP, which wildly fluctuates.

The reason why there's a fight to get this funded is because there's a portion of this country that thinks you must pay for every new expenditure by cutting spending elsewhere because the national debt will kill us if it doesn't come down, and taxes can never ever ever ever ever be raised ever ever ever ever. They will absolutely never consider that raising taxes is worth funding anything, and are completely okay with cutting funding for things that are even needed and are worth the money (see cutting funding for PBS).

I say "principled" because they sure don't ask for reduced spending to pay for when they need help. See Katrina and other disasters, Mitch McConnell's fund to help nuclear power workers, etc.

But the fundamental problem here is the flat refusal to accept the reality that:
1. The national debt and annual deficits can, will, and should fluctuate depending upon circumstances. The "sky is falling" reaction to added debt is beyond ridiculous. This country has flourished economically under almost non-stop deficit spending. This isn't to say raising the national debt and running annual deficits is always good, but it sure as hell isn't always bad.
2. The same reaction to tax raises is also ridiculous. Tax rates can be increased or decreased, depending on circumstances, and raising or lowering them isn't inherently good or bad.

A sane reaction to this whole thing isn't - "well, they spend money on things that don't matter, so that's why this can't be funded."

It's "I don't care if it costs every single one of us an extra dollar in taxes in a year, or we need to cut funding on (insert wasteful program here), we need to get this done."

Okay, so it's not a spontaneous and challenging interview but rather a soapbox for his philosophical meanderings.

And that makes him wrong how..?

A lot of the stuff he says is bang on the money, particular as it regards America's actions and stances. Iran is a perfect example. It wouldn't be climbing back from being a fundamentalist state if the US hadn't deposed the democratically elected leader and installed the Shah all those years ago. Which eventually precipitated Ayatollah Khomeni's rise to power as a fundamentalist leader by overthrowing the Shah... Now Israel, and ergo the US, rail against Iran being able to have nuclear power because they are a rogue state, but they are only a rogue state because of western interventionism.

You might not think much of the guy (I don't personally), but you can assess the truth of his words for yourself can't you? He's saying things that plenty of people think or understand, but few care to actually speak out about it. Yup, it's borderline propaganda, so approach it with a critical eye, but a lot of what he talks about is bang on.

Burning coal releases more radioactive material in the environment than nuclear power. [1] [2]

While I am 100% on board with the "carbon bad, not carbon good, global warming = real, made by man and a real prick of a problem" message, the biggest fault made by people like Maher etc in prosecuting their case to the "sceptics" is reliance on bad information.

For example, the sums have been done on solar and wind, and generally speaking, wind is only borderline viable for supporting a society (and that's only if you don't add the cost of some form of buffering/storage). Solar, particularly home roof grade, is fucking awful, and essentially a waste of time compared to tracking mass production arrays. In terms of energy to build/install/maintain/remove, it barely pays for itself. Solar thermal is also more efficient (helios arrays etc), but the two best bang for buck technologies for producing massive amounts of power at a very low carbon cost are nuclear and hydro.

And they are two technologies that people seem to want to get rid of. Germany shuttered it's nuke capability after Fukushima (and added more coal capacity). Italy's solar market has fallen in a heap, France is almost carbon neutral only because it is predominately nuke powered. One of the original climate change warriors, Dr. James Hansen of Nasa, is fully supportive of nuclear power, and get's constantly lambasted by green types because they do not want nuclear power to play a part.

Refutation of solid science and willful ignorance is not solely the province of people who deny climate change, and it's no less deplorable.

Or maybe we tackle this from 180 degrees.

As opposed to what is happening, or how likely, we may find common ground on what it is we should actually be doing.

I've already made the suggestion of electric vehicles and fission, fusion or renewables in place of coal as the road away from emissions. Specifically improving li-ion batteries as Tesla is doing is a major step. Researching sodium-oxygen batteries would be even better as they can hold 4-5 times the power and have cheaper materials and recent results have us close to making them viable, so I'd like to see gov money directed there.

For power solar and wind are currently only cost-competitive because the scale is small enough that we get away with treating coal plants like giant batteries covering our baseline. They simply aren't cost effective to scale up for base load yet, and not likely to be for another 10-20 years. We can have a lot of nuclear plants built in that time. With electric cars coming into the picture, we're also going to need that extra electric capacity. I again would strongly encourage more gov money going into French style large scale nuclear power deployment. China's already doing it, even they've had enough of their current coal literally blocking the sun in the sky on them and nuclear is part of their clean air push. We should be encouraging that and following suit out this way.

I also wasn't kidding about Lockheed-Martin's fusion research. A lot of new ideas are out there for fusion confinement plans and Lockheed has publicly declared their intentions to have a demonstration reactor in 5 years time. I'm hopeful, and if that pans out, the roll out of truly cheap and clean power will start in the next decade for the sole reason that fusion under cuts coal for price.

Part of me reason for these measures versus more drastic ones is we need to keep our economies growing because regardless of what we do the next 30 years, the oceans will continue rising that entire time and the mitigation measures we're going to gradually be spending more and more on are gonna required us to have the money to do them.

If anybody's got better suggestions I'm all ears.

The funny thing is that either all or most of the land based nuclear power plants in the U.S. are actually based on designs for submarines. I've heard it suggested that many of the deficiencies of the designs come from there, and that a completely fresh design could be safer and better.

Invocations (related=http://videosift.com/video/19-year-old-hopes-to-revolutionize-nuclear-power) cannot be called by Clive because Clive is not privileged - sorry.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/19-year-old-hopes-to-revolutionize-nuclear-power

You are partially correct, I listed the rank of a top submarine officer incorrectly, but not his position, I'm not in the Navy. He was Executive Officer of the first nuclear sub, but only First Lieutenant of the diesel. EDIT: He "qualified for command" of the nuclear sub...probably why I thought "commander" but properly should have said "was in command". Shortly after being assigned to lead the nuclear sub trials, after helping design and build it, he led the American shut down of the Chalk River reactor, lest you continue to insinuate he was an 'armchair warrior' that never held command.
(record below)

◾17? DEC 1948 - 01 FEB 1951 -- Duty aboard USS Pomfret (SS-391) Billets Held: Communications Officer, Electronics Officer, Sonar Officer, Gunnery Officer, First Lieutenant, Electrical Officer, Supply Officer Qualifications: 4 Feb 1950 Qualified in Submarine


◾05 JUNE 1949 -- Promoted to Lieutenant (j.g.)


◾01 FEB 1951 - 10 NOV 1951 -- Duty with Shipbuilding and Naval Inspector of Ordnance, Groton, CT as prospective Engineering Officer of the USS K-1 during precommissioning fitting out of the submarine.


◾10 NOV 1951 - 16 OCT 1952 -- Duty aboard USS K-1(SSK-1) Billets Held: Executive Officer, Engineering Officer, Operations Officer, Gunnery Officer, Electronics Repair Officer Qualifications: Qualified for Command of Submarine Remarks: Submarine was new construction, first vessel of its class


◾01 JUNE 1952 -- Promoted to Lieutenant


◾16 OCT 1952 - 08 OCT 1953 -- Duty with US Atomic Energy Commission (Division of Reactor Development, Schenectady Operations Office) From 3 NOV 1952 to 1 MAR 1953 he served on temporary duty with Naval Reactors Branch, US Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D.C. "assisting in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels." From 1 MAR 1953 to 8 OCT 1953 he was under instruction to become an engineering officer for a nuclear power plant. He also assisted in setting up on-the-job training for the enlisted men being instructed in nuclear propulsion for the USS Seawolf (SSN575).


On December 12, 1952, an accident with the experimental NRX reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada's Chalk River Laboratories caused a partial meltdown. The resulting explosion caused millions of liters of radioactive water to flood the reactor building's basement, and the reactor's core was no longer usable.[7] Carter was ordered to Chalk River, joining other American and Canadian service personnel. He was the officer in charge of the U.S. team assisting in the shutdown of the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor.[8] The painstaking process required each team member, including Carter, to don protective gear, and be lowered individually into the reactor to disassemble it for minutes at a time. During and after his presidency, Carter indicated that his experience at Chalk River shaped his views on nuclear power and nuclear weapons, including his decision not to pursue completion of the neutron bomb.[9]

I don't buy for a minute the idea that Sony alone made the call to cancel the release.

What do you do when you get hit and threatened by what appears to be a rogue state, like happened to Sony? You go to the cops. Probably the FBI in this case. After that, considering your company is now in the middle of an international diplomatic situation involving an unstable nuclear power, you get some considered advice from the US state dept. (probably) on how to proceed.

Judging by the outcome, the decision was it's best to cancel the release to avoid making the situation worse, but to make it Sony's call, because a western government would rather not be seen bending to terror or demanding censorship.

@newtboy
I think the people of Kiribati would disagree that it's not time to panic!
If you'd read my post I didn't claim the people of Kiribati weren't in a position to panic. I actually went further in agreeing with you, to the point that they should have been panicked a hundred years ago in 1914 already. The distinction being that what ever the climate does wasn't going to save them. 200 hundred years of cooling and sea level decline from 1914 would still have them on an island a few feet on average above sea level and still a disaster waiting to happen.

California alone, which produces over 1/4 of America's food,
Here we do have a difference of fact. I don't know what measure you've imagined up, but the cattle in texas alone are more than double the food produced in California. The corn and other crops in any number of prairie states to the same. You can't just invent numbers. Yields across crops have been increasing steadily year on year in North America for decades.

The violence is often CAUSED by the lack of food, making the 'men with guns' have a reason to steal and control food sources. If food were plentiful, it would be impossible for them to do so.
I'm sorry, read more history, you are just wrong on this. 10 guys with guns against 10 farmers with food and the farmers lose every time. The guys with guns eat for the year. The farmers maybe even are able to beg or slave for scraps that year. The next year maybe only 5 farmers bother to grow anything, and next harvest there are 15 guys with guns. Look at the Russian revolution and that's exactly the road that led to Stalin's mass starvations and lack of food. It's actually why I am a Canadian as my grandfather's family left their farm in Russia with the clothes on his back after the his neighbours farm was razed to the ground enough times.

The thugs SELL that food, so it doesn't just disappear
Food doesn't create itself as noted above. The cycle is less and less food as the thugs destroy all incentive to bother trying to grow something.

adopting new tech, even quick adoption, absolutely CAN be an economic boon
I agree. I hadn't realized that adoption of new tech was that simple. I was under the impression one also had to take the time to, you know, invent it. The existing technology for replacing oil and coal cost effectively doesn't exist yet. Electric cars and nuclear power are the closest thing. The market will adopt electric cars without us doing a thing. Switching from coal to nuclear though, even if universally agreed and adopted yesterday, would still take decades for a conversion. Those decades are enough that even if we got to zero emissions by then(~2050), the sea level and temperature at 2100 aren't going to look much if any different(by IPCC best estimates).
So I repeat, if you want meaningful emission reductions, you have no other option but restricting consumption across the globe. That hasn't been accomplished in the past without setting of wars, so I keep my vote as cure is worse than disease.

The 78% glacial mass loss was worst case if CO2 emissions are still accelerating in 2100. The mountains with the glaciers will still be bulking each winter and running off each summer, just to a 78% smaller size in the depth of summer. As in, absolutely not 78% less run off. And they are not 'my' numbers as you wish to refer, but the IPCC's numbers. Your effort to somehow leave question to their veracity is the very campaign of 'doubt' in the science the video is talking about.

Democrats are the party of NO
No Nuclear power
No coal,
No fracking,
No oil,
No gasoline.
No cars,
No GOD,
No getting ahead,
No profits,
No equality
No capitalism
No Free markets
No critical thought
No Jobs

This is not the party of "Move Forward" but the party of the dark age.
And by looking at this video we will be heading back to the dark age soon

The description rather misses the point. The electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen requires a good deal of electrical power. It's not free energy--you actually get a good deal less out of it than you put into it. The advantage to hydrogen fuel is that it is energy dense and theoretically storeable and transportable much as fossil fuels are.

The problem, though, is that it is extremely hard to store and transport because it escapes so easy (hydrogen being so tiny). I'd hazard that, left alone, all of the hydrogen would escape from that car's tanks in a matter of days.

There really is no easy solution. If you could effectively store and transport hydrogen, and use nuclear power to create it, that would solve a lot of problems. It would create new ones too.

This is, of course, not to belittle what this man has done. It is a fine engineering project, and it is people like this who will, little by little, refine the techniques and solve the problems that are necessary,