Evolution at work. No more bottom feeding. In a few thousand years with the help of some radioactive muck they've been feeding on they'll be like slimy gray reptile cats. They've already got whiskers growing!

In order to be a scientist, you have to practice science. Getting an advanced degree does not make you a scientist any more than me studying football make me a football player.

Here's a summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science#Scientific_criticism

If scientists are those that practice science then every creation scientist who has published a peer reviewed paper is a scientist.

http://creation.com/do-creationists-publish-in-notable-refereed-journals

And here's the real question. Name one current product based off of any hypothesis/theory that was posited and proven by 'Creation Science'. Too hard? What about any process, maybe based on the geology or biology research.

Read the above link.

You can talk about 'the controversy' all you want, but the proof is that we use technology daily that is based on physical properties discovered by the same individuals that studied Rubidium. Sure, the specific Rubidium research didn't go into daily life, but the research into radioactive isotopes led to Nuclear Fission, and then after that, it 'exploded'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#Natural_fission_chain-reactors_on_Earth

Some of the greatest scientists who ever lived were creationists, does that make all of their claims valid?

You're not a martyr, and neither is anyone in the US. None of this conversation has anything to do with the religious Zealots that are killing other religious individuals in other countries.

You said there was no persecution today, but in fact there is quite a bit. Christianity is illegal in 51 countries. It's almost getting to the point in America where sharing your faith might become a civil rights issue.

And you're absolutely correct, me slipping in a little jab at comparing Christian Zealots to Islam Zealots definitely reveal a bit about my 'character'... but just because it was an attack doesn't make it, or anything else I said, less true.

God says what is true about you and me, and that's all that matters.

In order to be a scientist, you have to practice science. Getting an advanced degree does not make you a scientist any more than me studying football make me a football player.

Here's a summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science#Scientific_criticism



And here's the real question. Name one current product based off of any hypothesis/theory that was posited and proven by 'Creation Science'. Too hard? What about any process, maybe based on the geology or biology research.


You can talk about 'the controversy' all you want, but the proof is that we use technology daily that is based on physical properties discovered by the same individuals that studied Rubidium. Sure, the specific Rubidium research didn't go into daily life, but the research into radioactive isotopes led to Nuclear Fission, and then after that, it 'exploded'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission#Natural_fission_chain-reactors_on_Earth


You're not a martyr, and neither is anyone in the US. None of this conversation has anything to do with the religious Zealots that are killing other religious individuals in other countries.


And you're absolutely correct, me slipping in a little jab at comparing Christian Zealots to Islam Zealots definitely reveal a bit about my 'character'... but just because it was an attack doesn't make it, or anything else I said, less true.

Indeed, I am all for reactor simplification, the reactor I want to see constructed could theoretically be nearly completely made on a factory line then shipped and installed very simply. The molten salt reactor concept is just a bunch of pipes with a graphite core. Most of the Gen4 reactors have this goal, and while large construction projects do mean jobs, usually good jobs...they are also costs, and if we want China and India to adopt greener power systems, they need to be cheaper than coal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

I am going to sift this after I post, but it is a short look into reactors in general, and why the MSR and other potential Gen4 concepts could eliminate that huge capital and labor cost. And nearly completely eliminate radioactivity problems to the general public.

300 billion is actually not to much money when you get down to it. Each year, the global economy spends up to 10 trillion dollars on dino fuel technology. Considering the reliability of NPPs and the nearly 90% load rate over the course of many years...those costs are really really good! Typically speaking, when you consider the costs of decommissioning, waste transportation, nuclear generally ends up being about on par with coal...mostly because nuclear plants last so darn long, over 60 years for some of our gen2 plants in the US and still going strong! Compare that to the 150 billion or so Germany has spent on solar project to their total ACTUAL output and it is a very telling tail. Even more so when you look at total carbon emissions of Germany compared to France.

Waste is actually what made me anti-nuclear myself. My introduction to caring (negatively) about nuclear was the Fukushima Daiichi incident. But after learning more about that situation, I actually really started to appreciate nuclear more. No one died as a result of FD failure, the containment building stopped most of the most harmful radiation, and the stuff that did get out is the really mild stuff (stuff with the million year half lives). I don't want to downplay this, it is still a very serious industrial mess to clean up, but compared to the 20 thousand people who died in the Tsunami and the tons of fuels, trash and other crap that got souped around in Japan as a result, the old reactor help up respectably, and is a credit to the operators (all of whom are currently alive an well).

I had a common misconception about radioactivity, I thought something with a long half-life was bad because it was going to be radioactive for a long, long time. That is mostly wrong. What that means is it is going to be hardly radioactive for a long time, elements that are short lived are VERY radioactive, but disappear very fast. I don't want to mire you in most of the gritty details, but the fission products reactors produce don't last very long, most only hours, a fewer some decades, and only a few longer than that. Stuff that has billion year a billion year half life...well, you don't really need to worry about it at all, it just isn't that radioactive. Most of the worry is based around "transuranics". That is just fancy speak for "stuff heavier than uranium". This is the stuff like Plutonium and Curium ect. The great thing about modern, Gen4 reactors is they don't really make those things...the thorium reactor I like starts with thorium, which is a long, long way from making anything heavier than uranium (less than 1% theoretically possible). So micrograms per year...not really that much to worry about (there is also no way to really get that to go into the environment because we don't use pressure vessels, but I will leave that to Kirk to explain).

I don't want to make it sounds like there isn't any risk or anything, but the risks have been way overplayed by political interests and not technical ones. For instance, many of the exclusions zones for FD were way overblown, they were no more radioactive than my home in the mountains ...but that isn't want you heard in the news.

But I think I will leave it like that. Nuclear has a bunch of mystic joojoo around it. Don't take my work for it, please, give "bill gates nuclear" a google, or other "gen4 reactor" stuff a chance before you completely write off nuclear as a green option for the future. I personally think it will have a big role to play if we want to stem off CO2 production AND bring more people into a western quality of life. Thanks again for the back and forth.

Wow, thanks for the points, now I can buy those radioactive butt plugs I have been yearning for!

O by the by, neutrons decay in free-space, in other words, free neutrons are radioactive. With a decay time of less than 15 mins, it means 2 things: slow neutrons will be less detectable at distance because they decay, you still need to be relatively close to the source of neutrons to detect them regardless of speed. Neutrons are also the only form of radiation that will make things radioactive, meaning if you get to close and the bombardment is to intense , you can cause damage to your equipment via internal radiation of beta and gamma rays.

This is also why they use water in nuclear reactors, hydrogen, and in particular deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron) slow neutrons better than anything. Water is mostly hydrogen by mole, so it is a very good moderator, both light water (regular water) and heavy water (deuterium water).

What is happening in this particular case is known as nuclear spallation. When a high energy proton hits something like carbon or nitrogen, it will at times knock a proton or neutron loose. Those neutrons are moving at relativistic speeds in most cases, so on the flip side, when those neutrons bounce their way out back to space, if there is water in the way they get slowed way down...enough that they decay before they reach the detector.

This is the same exact effect that allows for carbon dating, sometimes, the high energy neutrons that come out via spallation will in turn knock out a proton from a nitrogen atom, it then becomes mildly radioactive carbon. This happens at a relatively predictable rate, and since the decay of carbon 14 is also predictable, dating is possible.

Science rant over

As a kind of plug (sorry), thorium based reactors are really great sources of Pu238 creation via neptunium exposure to flux. Pu238 is unique among isotopes as to be both physically and radioactively hot, but that radiation relatively benign, weak alpha particles (but your still number one if my heart!). Very simple shielding is needed to keep electronics safe...and a layer of human skin is all the shielding you need for a human . Problem is, isotopes of plutonium are all chemically identical, in a normal uranium reactor, you get the full range of Pu (239 weapons, 240 spontaneous fissions, 241 smoke detector ect). This means you don't get that nice predictable alpha decay, you get a mix of everything...not so good, you need REALLY pure Pu238 to be useful in Radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG, the things that powers curiosity). Just one of the many overlooked but awesome things about radionuclides. </end shameless plug>

There are actually beaches that are more radioactive than Pripyat, just don't live in the red forest.

@Fletch I humbly suggest keeping radioactive materials in large quantities out of the jet stream, plus they have lots of goodies in there once we are smart enough to extract them (and with new laser technology like the Silex Process, that might be really soon!)...but I am totally for a space elevator, lets start tomorrow afternoon, I have it off.

Old fire alarms? Radioactive signal? Tiny nuclear bomb? Am I High?



A)
B)
C) Yes

>> ^messenger:

Drop a radioactive ball down into the liquid water environment and give everything there terminal cancer.


And wait till we get a medical bill to prove there's life?

I should point out we actually do use the weak force for energy production, that is what is going on in the curiosity rover, radioactive decay of Pu238...but it is one of the lowest power conversion ratios that you can do for electricity production (thermocouple). They are just really simple with no moving parts, but it ain't going to solve no energy crisis! We actually have infinite gravity wells via black holes, @maestro156, but you still can't generate perpetual motion from it. I would like to hear your idea on how you could, though.

BTW, I told the author for that article, "Comments are the radioactive waste of the Web", that he was a douchebag.

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

"Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

Steven Pinker,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..