@bcglorf
there are a few things i dont understand about your position.i hope you can clear them up for me.

1.you state that there is conclusive evidence that it was the assad regime that executed the use of chemical weapons and that only russia and the syrian government are stating otherwise.
could you supply this evidence for us?
because as far as i can tell the only entity providing evidence is isreal and i have to admit being skeptical of their claims.they have been wrong before and often.

2.now lets address the hypothetical that it IS assads regime that is responsible for the chemical attacks.
how does this give the united states the right to unilaterally use military force?
where is the diplomatic option?
why are we not even attempting to bring the players on the ground in syria to the negotiating table?
sanctions?embargoes?
why are we jumping right over steps 3 and 4 and diving into bombings?
how is killing innocent civilians considered "humanitarian"?

3.if the reasoning that we are being given is that a syrian intervention is based on "humanitarian" grounds and that the assad regime has perpetrated "crimes against humanity" (which is possible).where is the united states deriving this moral authority?
when we consider that the united states itself used:phosphorous and depleted uranium in iraq,which IS indeed considered a war crime.
in fact the united states has pretty much broken international law in every conflict since 1950 in regards to war crimes.
so where is our supposed moral authority?

4.if we dismiss the questionable intelligence in regards to chemical weapons in syria AND we ignore the utter hypocrisy in using banned weaponry and we focus on JUST the crimes against humanity defense for intervention.that somehow the united states is doing all this for "humanitarian" reasons.
then we must ask the question:
"if the united states is such a beacon of moral purity and is the defender of the weak and helpless that it will strike at any sovereign nation that dares to kill its own citizens.why is it that the united states turned a blind eye in other countries that perpetrated almost mass genocide against its own people"?

what makes syria more special than the millions of human beings who were allowed to be murdered and slaughtered by its own government while the united states sat back and did nothing,and many times supplied the very weaponry USED to murder those people?

the hypocrisy is staggering.

the implication is that the united states is NOT interested in a stable syria but exactly the opposite.
maybe this thought is troubling for americans but i submit that if that is the case then they have not been paying attention.

*edit-as for your "iraq is the way it is due to saddam hussein" assertion.
really?reeeaaaally?
you do realize the united states armed saddam.we didnt pull the trigger when he went after the iranians and the kurds but we supplied the gun.
you do realize that we never left iraq after the first gulf war.
are you aware that even as reprehensible and venal saddam was,iraq had running water,hospitals,schools.even with the continued bombings and sanctions iraq had a functioning government?

are we to believe ,by your assertion,that iraq is in the state it is right now due to saddam hussein and america bears ZERO responsibility?
we have occupied iraq for TEN YEARS.saddam was executed 7 yrs ago.
the united states has failed on an epic scale in regards to iraq.

remember that whole "we will be greeted as liberators"
"the oil we confiscate will pay for the war"
maybe i am reading your commentary wrong but i cant wrap my head around your assertion.
it just does not hold up under the simplest of scrutiny.

Spying, bombing people, getting corporate whores elected, and running a short term insurance company will all make you TONS OF CASH while the going is good.
What's the plan when all the cash has been shifted into the 0.1% & everyone else is sick and hungry and under attack from a billion angry uranium poisoned orphans?

*holds up finger*

I like Ron Paul's stance on non-intervention. I like Ron Paul a lot.
But what he is saying on Syria and the convoluted power system there is simply not true. There are Al Kaida fighters on the sides of the rebels. However, there are also Hezbollah fighters on the side of the Assad Regime.
If America's stance on what asserts a terrorist group and what not holds true interpolitically they, by their own theory can not stand by passively and watch. America HAS to do something- they allready "invested" too much into the region to now sit back and not act. WHAT exactly this intervention should look like is the question and you can see the current adminsitration suffer with a good answer to it.
Don't listen to the currently popular theme of "Gas-weapons are just another way to kill people". If you think the deployment of poison gas weapons into a urban warzone is the same as just "regular" bombardment you have to seriously go and read up on how gas-weapons behave in an urban environment especially WHEN combined with regular bombardment.
The use of this weaponry is an absolute show stopper, which makes it a lot more painful to realize that the USA itself is using enriched Uranium munitions and clusterbombs) - Nonetheless- the USA not acting now would be like saying: "You might not be as powerful and omnipotent as we are, but go ahead since we take this so seriously that we trivialize it to start our own wars".

Does it have to be military intervention? Hell, no.
Can it be expensive? Hell, yes.

The Use of UEAE-weapons (undiscriminatory extended area effect weaponry- i.e. stuff which even gets into protection shelters and doesnt worry which ones) is like lining up and shooting an entire part of a town by principle. Kinda like a poor man's nuke and even if it was a ruse by the rebels- this certainly warrants the current drama.
The USA invaded Iraq because they thought that Sadam Hussein had these weapons (fabricated charges or not, thats what they started the war on) so what exactly would be the consequences now if America sits back?
John Steward said on the daily show that this is like 7 year old bullies fighting on the playground. The irony is that he is frightingly right.
Again, I am against military intervention but this is some serious stuff.

@kulpims - Yes, the physics of it suggest that even shooting fairly heavy depleted uranium shells at very high velocities at a fairly high rate of fire can't really put much of a dent in the momentum of a *very* heavy plane moving at a pretty high velocity.

Still, the pilot at the time told me in person (and some research I've done since then also suggests it may be true) that angling the gun off of perfectly straight alignment was deemed necessary due to shear forces that would require fairly dramatic pilot correction when firing the weapon.

Definitely nothing like dramatically slowing the airspeed of the plane, but I still found it impressive that the recoil of the gun became a design challenge even in such a large aircraft.

True but the Atheist also holds the "belief" that there is not GOD. So which belief is more correct? For me to get into a biblical debate with you and the atheist sift community would be pointless. It's like the saying you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink. So this makes me search the web for other ways to argue the point. Here is 1 of them.

Mathematically speaking evolution falls flat on it face..
Lifted from site: http://www.freewebs.com/proofofgod/whataretheodds.htm



Suppose you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to 10. Put them in your pocket and give them a good shake. Now try to draw them out in sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back in your pocket after each draw.

Your chance of drawing number 1 is 1 to 10.
Your chance of drawing 1 & 2 in succession is 1 in 100.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2 & 3 in succession would be one in a thousand.
Your chance of drawing 1, 2, 3 & 4 in succession would be one in 10,000.

And so on, until your chance of drawing from number 1 to number 10 in succession would reach the unbelievable figure of one chance in 10 billion. The object in dealing with so simple a problem is to show how enormously figures multiply against chance.

Sir Fred Hoyle similarly dismisses the notion that life could have started by random processes:

Imagine a blindfolded person trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. The chance against achieving perfect colour matching is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. These odds are roughly the same as those against just one of our body's 200,000 proteins having evolved randomly, by chance.

Now, just imagine, if life as we know it had come into existence by a stroke of chance, how much time would it have taken? To quote the biophysicist, Frank Allen:

Proteins are the essential constituents of all living cells, and they consist of the five elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur, with possibly 40,000 atoms in the ponderous molecule. As there are 92 chemical elements in nature, all distributed at random, the chance that these five elements may come together to form the molecule, the quantity of matter that must be continually shaken up, and the length of time necessary to finish the task, can all be calculated. A Swiss mathematician, Charles Eugene Guye, has made the computation and finds that the odds against such an occurrence are 10^160, that is 10 multiplied by itself 160 times, a number far too large to be expressed in words. The amount of matter to be shaken together to produce a single molecule of protein would be millions of times greater than the whole universe. For it to occur on the earth alone would require many, almost endless billions (10^243) of years.

Proteins are made from long chains called amino-acids. The way those are put together matters enormously. If in the wrong way, they will not sustain life and may be poisons. Professor J.B. Leathes (England) has calculated that the links in the chain of quite a simple protein could be put together in millions of ways (10^48). It is impossible for all these chances to have coincided to build one molecule of protein.

But proteins, as chemicals, are without life. It is only when the mysterious life comes into them that they live. Only the infinite mind of God could have foreseen that such a molecule could be the abode of life, could have constructed it, and made it live.

Science, in attempt to calculate the age of the whole universe, has placed the figure at 50 billion years. Even such a prolonged duration is too short for the necessary proteinous molecule to have come into existence in a random fashion. When one applies the laws of chance to the probability of an event occurring in nature, such as the formation of a single protein molecule from the elements, even if we allow three billion years for the age of the Earth or more, there isn't enough time for the event to occur.

There are several ways in which the age of the Earth may be calculated from the point in time which at which it solidified. The best of all these methods is based on the physical changes in radioactive elements. Because of the steady emission or decay of their electric particles, they are gradually transformed into radio-inactive elements, the transformation of uranium into lead being of special interest to us. It has been established that this rate of transformation remains constant irrespective of extremely high temperatures or intense pressures. In this way we can calculate for how long the process of uranium disintegration has been at work beneath any given rock by examining the lead formed from it. And since uranium has existed beneath the layers of rock on the Earth's surface right from the time of its solidification, we can calculate from its disintegration rate the exact point in time the rock solidified.

In his book, Human Destiny, Le Comte Du nuoy has made an excellent, detailed analysis of this problem:

It is impossible because of the tremendous complexity of the question to lay down the basis for a calculation which would enable one to establish the probability of the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth.

The volume of the substance necessary for such a probability to take place is beyond all imagination. It would that of a sphere with a radius so great that light would take 10^82 years to cover this distance. The volume is incomparably greater than that of the whole universe including the farthest galaxies, whose light takes only 2x10^6 (two million) years to reach us. In brief, we would have to imagine a volume more than one sextillion, sextillion, sextillion times greater than the Einsteinian universe.

The probability for a single molecule of high dissymmetry to be formed by the action of chance and normal thermic agitation remains practically nill. Indeed, if we suppose 500 trillion shakings per second (5x10^14), which corresponds to the order of magnitude of light frequency (wave lengths comprised between 0.4 and 0.8 microns), we find that the time needed to form, on an average, one such molecule (degree of dissymmetry 0.9) in a material volume equal to that of our terrestrial globe (Earth) is about 10^243 billions of years (1 followed by 243 zeros)

But we must not forget that the Earth has only existed for two billion years and that life appeared about one billion years ago, as soon as the Earth had cooled.

Life itself is not even in question but merely one of the substances which constitute living beings. Now, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. We would need much greater figures to "explain" the appearance of a series of similar molecules, the improbability increasing considerably, as we have seen for each new molecule (compound probability), and for each series of identical throws.

If the probability of appearance of a living cell could be expressed mathematically the previous figures would seem negligible. The problem was deliberately simplified in order to increase the probabilities.

Events which, even when we admit very numerous experiments, reactions or shakings per second, need an almost-infinitely longer time than the estimated duration of the Earth in order to have one chance, on an average to manifest themselves can, it would seem, be considered as impossible in the human sense.

It is totally impossible to account scientifically for all phenomena pertaining to life, its development and progressive evolution, and that, unless the foundations of modern science are overthrown, they are unexplainable.

We are faced by a hiatus in our knowledge. There is a gap between living and non-living matter which we have not been able to bridge.

The laws of chance cannot take into account or explain the fact that the properties of a cell are born out of the coordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous coordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.

Rare fluctuations do not explain qualitative facts; they only enable us to conceive that they are not impossible qualitatively.

Evolution is mathematically impossible

It would be impossible for chance to produce enough beneficial mutations—and just the right ones—to accomplish anything worthwhile.

"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10^50. Such a number, if written out, would read 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000."
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10^50 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence."
I.L. Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong (1984), p. 205.

That's interesting... I wasn't aware of that. It seems Nazi policies and distaste for "Jew Science" greatly slowed their nuclear research down, but they were still making fast progress on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_energy_project

"In the late 1930s, Germany might very well have had a 5-year lead on the West in [atomic weaponry]. ... [But] Manhattan did go forward, first and foremost as a counter to the feared German development [of atomic weaponry]." Google Books: How to lose a War.

The following thread isn't a primary source, but it's enough to make me think more research would probably find similar conclusions to the commenters:

Germany was working on nuclear bombs and reactors. German scientists Hahn, Meitner and Stassmann discovered the nuclear chain reaction in uranium in 1939. One reason Albert Einstein wrote FDR lobbying for an all out effort to make an atomic bomb was he got letter from German friends saying we know how to make atomic explosions for Gods sake hurry up. Einstein got through to FDR and we know were this ended up. In Germany they put their best man in charge a theorist named Werner von Heisenberg...

Would think it'd sound more like 'skwiro' in Clapham; though there is a high chance your friends in Clapham were Polish

I fully defend the i in i-um in aluminium though. You wouldn't call helium helum or uranium uranum.

I'm guessing it only got bent into 'aluminum' because it became a popular and cheap element to manufacture with, so it entered the pop lexicon of America and got softened up.

I'm glad the element of surprise wasn't uranium or this video would have been half as funny.

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.

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>

>> ^charliem:

Whats its application?


Many new reactors are experimenting with new fuel types. This has a higher fissile density because of the structure, so you can pack more fuel into a given space, it also has better thermal transfer and less susceptible to radiation damage that traditional uranium oxide. Hyperion Power Generation plans to use a uranium nitride compound in their Gen4 reactor. Gen4 reactors are a whole new breed of reactor, the infusion of modern computer modeling and materials development. While we still have a shitty regulatory system in the US as to not allow newer safer reactors to come online here, they will be launching in places like China, the UAE, and Korea in the future. America is poised to fall behind in the technology it invented, as it has with many other areas that aren't wall street or the technology sector.

>> ^charliem:

Whats its application?


My highschool chemistry tells me that nitrating stuff is often done to make it explosive so from that weapons.

In reality though I'd guess they probably don't really know. I think most of the time when new compounds are made they are only guessing at the properties and don't really know what they have until they already have made it and tested to see how it acts.

Safe nuclear refers to many different new gen4 reactor units that rely on passive safety instead of engineered safety. The real difference comes with a slight bit of understanding of how nuclear tech works now, and why that isn't optimal.

Let us first consider this, even with current nuclear technology, the amount of people that have died as a direct and indirect result of nuclear is very low per unit energy produced. The only rival is big hydro, even wind and solar have a great deal of risk compared to nuclear as we do it and have done it for years. The main difference is when a nuclear plant fails, everyone hears about it...but when a oil pipeline explodes and kills dozens, or solar panel installers fall off a roof or get electrocuted and dies...it just isn't as interesting.

Pound per pound nuclear is already statistically very safe, but that isn't really what we are talking about, we are talking about what makes them more unsafe compared to new nuclear techs. Well, that has to do with how normal nukes work. So, firstly, normal reactor tech uses solid fuel rods. It isn't a "metal" either, it is uranium dioxide, has the same physical characteristics as ceramic pots you buy in a store. When the fuel fissions, the uranium is transmuted into other, lighter, elements some of which are gases. Over time, these non-fissile elements damage the fuel rod to the point where it can no longer sustain fission and need to be replaced. At this point, they have only burned about 4% of the uranium content, but they are all "used up". So while there are some highly radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods, the vast majority is just normal uranium, and that isn't very radioactive (you could eat it and not really suffer any radiation effects, now chemical toxicity is a different matter). The vast majority of nuclear waste, as a result of this way of burning uranium, generates huge volumes of waste products that aren't really waste products, just normal uranium.

But this isn't what makes light water reactors unsafe compared to other designs. It is all about the water. Normal reactors use water to both cool the core, extract the heat, and moderate the neutrons to sustain the fission reaction. Water boils at 100c which is far to low a temperature to run a thermal reactor on, you need much higher temps to get power. As a result, nuclear reactors use highly pressurized water to keep it liquid. The pressure is an amazingly high 2200psi or so! This is where the real problem comes in. If pressure is lost catastrophically, the chance to release radioactivity into the environment increases. This is further complicated by the lack of water then cooling the core. Without water, the fission chain reaction that generates the main source of heat in the reactor shuts down, however, the radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods are very unstable and generate lots of heat. So much heat over time, they end up causing the rods to melt if they aren't supplied with water. This is the "melt down" you always hear about. If you start then spraying water on them after they melt down, it caries away some of those highly radioactive fission products with the steam. This is what happened in Chernobyl, there was also a human element that overdid all their safety equipment, but that just goes to show you the worst case.

The same thing didn't happen in Fukushima. What happened in Fukushima is that coolant was lost to the core and they started to melt down. The tubes which contain the uranium are made from zirconium. At high temps, water and zirconium react to form hydrogen gas. Now modern reactor buildings are designed to trap gases, usually steam, in the event of a reactor breach. In the case of hydrogen, that gas builds up till a spark of some kind happens and causes an explosion. These are the explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Both of the major failures and dangers of current reactors deal with the high pressure water; but water isn't needed to make a reactor run, just this type of reactor.

The fact that reactors have radioactive materials in them isn't really unsafe itself. What is unsafe is reactor designs that create a pressure to push that radioactivity into other areas. A electroplating plant, for example, uses concentrated acids along with high voltage electricity in their fabrication processes. It "sounds" dangerous, and it is in a certain sense, but it is a manageable danger that will most likely only have very localized effects in the event of a catastrophic event. This is due mainly to the fact that there are no forces driving those toxic chemical elements into the surrounding areas...they are just acid baths. The same goes for nuclear materials, they aren't more or less dangerus than gasoline (gas go boom!), if handled properly.

I think one of the best reactor designs in terms of both safety and efficiency are the molten salt reactors. They don't use water as a coolant, and as a result operate at normal preasures. The fuel and coolant is a liquid lithium, fluoride, and beryllium salt instead of water, and the initial fuel is thorium instead of uranium. Since it is a liquid instead of a solid, you can do all sorts of neat things with it, most notably, in case of an emergency, you can just dump all the fuel into a storage tank that is passively cooled then pump it back to the reactor once the issue is resolved. It is a safety feature that doesn't require much engineering, you are just using the ever constant force of gravity. This is what is known as passive safety, it isn't something you have to do, it is something that happens automatically. So in many cases, what they designed is a freeze plug that is being cooled. If that fails for any reason, and you desire a shutdown, the freeze plug melts and the entire contents of the reactor are drained into the tanks and fission stops (fission needs a certain geometry to happen).

So while the reactor will still be as dangerous as any other industrial machine would be...like a blast furnace, it wouldn't pose any threat to the surrounding area. This is boosted by the fact that even if you lost containment AND you had a ruptured emergency storage tank, these liquid salts solidify at temps below 400c, so while they are liquid in the reactor, they quickly solidify outside of it. And another great benefit is they are remarkably stable. Air and water don't really leach anything from them, fluoride and lithium are just so happy binding with things, they don't let go!

The fuel burn up is also really great. You burn up 90% of what you put in, and if you try hard, you can burn up to 99%. So, comparing them to "clean coal" doesn't really give new reactor tech its fair shake. The tech we use was actually sort of denounced by the person who made them, Alvin Weinberg, and he advocated the molten salt reactor instead. I could babble on about this for ages, but I think Kirk Sorensen explains that better than I could...hell most likely the bulk of what I said is said better by him



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

But the real question is why. Why use nuclear and not solar, for instance?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

This is the answer. The power of the atom is a MILLION times more dense that fossil fuels...a million! It is a number that is beyond what we can normal grasp as people. Right now, current reactors harness less that 1% of that power because of their reactor design and fuel choice.

And unfortunately, renewables just cost to darn much for how much energy they contribute. In that, they also use WAY more resources to make per unit energy produced. So wind, for example, uses 10x more steal per unit energy contributed than other technologies. It is because renewables is more like energy farming.

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


This is a really great video on that maths behind what makes renewables less than attractive for many countries. But to rap it up, finally, the real benefit is that cheap, clean power is what helps makes nations great. There is an inexorable link with access to energy and financial well being. Poor nations burn coal to try and bridge that gap, but that has a huge health toll. Renewables are way to costly for them per unit energy, they really need other answers. New nuclear could be just that, because it can be made nearly completely safe, very cheap to operate, and easier to manufacture (this means very cheap compared to today's reactors as they are basically huge pressure vessels). If you watch a couple of videos from Kirk and have more questions or problems, let me know, as you can see, I love talking about this stuff Sorry if I gabbed your ear off, but this is the stuff I am going back to school for because I do believe it will change the world. It is the closest thing to free energy we are going to get in the next 20 years.

In reply to this comment by ReverendTed:
Just stumbled onto your profile page and noticed an exchange you had with dag a few months back.
What constitutes "safe nuclear"? Is that a specific type or category of nuclear power?
Without context (which I'm sure I could obtain elsewise with a simple Google search, but I'd rather just ask), it sounds like "clean coal".

>> ^zor:

The moon's a great place to build all kinds of evil shit. You wait, it will be more popular than drones or satellites one day. Picture a uranium powered robot howitzer with nearly unlimited ammo that can assassinate people on earth at will and defend itself for 190 years. It makes its own ammo from the moon dust and uses steam instead of gunpowder. Indestructible, with unbreakable command encryption.


You don't even need that. All you have to do from the moon to cause massive devastation to the earth is throw rocks. The moon is essentially uphill of a very large gravity well, all you need to do is give a rock a little push and BLAMO. Anything can be used for evil, from words to bombs it is seldom the thing that is the problem, usually it is the person/people.

The moon's a great place to build all kinds of evil shit. You wait, it will be more popular than drones or satellites one day. Picture a uranium powered robot howitzer with nearly unlimited ammo that can assassinate people on earth at will and defend itself for 190 years. It makes its own ammo from the moon dust and uses steam instead of gunpowder. Indestructible, with unbreakable command encryption.