Dangerous fossil fuel accident causes earthquake.

[NNadir]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070806/ap_on_re_us/utah_mine_collapse

I am surprised that there have been no long pensive posts about how it is impossible to use dangerous fossil fuels safely.

This is hardly the first dangerous fossil fuel accident of this type. Buildings collapse into pits in China pretty much every damn day.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/l4l5718n31273530/

The world could not care less.

[phantom power]

1. A few lives are worth...

holding out for our nuclear-free renewable dream. Which is just around the corner.

[Trillo]

2. Your sarcasm has been dripping pretty heavily the last few weeks.

Sometimes the best sarcasm is the raw truth. If they hadn't been down in that hole digging for product to sell, nobody would be rushing to dig them out now. Mountain top removal is so much safer.

What is the value of even one life? Perhaps somewhat more than in China, or perhaps that's merely perception for the proles' consumption.

Here's to hoping for good luck for the trapped miners and their future rescuers. Hope they're still alive.

[skids]

3. The really sad thing about "retreat mining"...

...is that even when you don't have an accident you destroy a perfectly good CAES pressure chamber.

[Trillo]

5. Compressed Air Energy Storage?

Like this?:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk.nyud.net:8090/~matti/ise2grp/energystorage_report/img24.gif
Source: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~matti/ise2grp/energystorage_report/node7.html

[skids]

6. Yep that would be the nym for that acro. n/t

[NNadir]

7. You do realize that Amory Lovins wrote a long pile of bullshit about this in 1976

He said it was already "commercially available," implying that the world no longer needed fossil fuels, or the plants for which he reserved incredible irrational and pixilated (and dangerous) hatred, nuclear power plants.

Compressed air storage was commercially available in 1976. In gas stations. Big deal.

Now I guess we have to go through this all over again.

It really doesn't matter how energy is stored. The storage of energy always wastes energy.

What matters is how energy is manufactured. There are only a few forms of primary energy in the world.

[Trillo]

8. Not that broken record, again:

I believe this is crossing over into topics other than just this single thread. Sorry.

I've got one of those 'stupid' CAES mini-tanks in my home's garage, though in retrospect, it was one of the most useful tools I ever invested in. A high-speed air-powered mini-drill is much less expensive than an electric one, and smaller and easier to handle, as well. So too is an air-powered hammer versus electric. Perhaps I spent too much time reading Popular Science magazines of 40 years ago (a much different rag than today).

I think what is in a number of people's minds, including my own, is what have TPTB concealed from us?

TPTB include a deceptive ivory tower class that seems to have increasingly institutionalized deception while simultaneously claiming its opposite. One can judge this fact simply from the pinnacle of corruption that seems to exist all around us 'in high hierarchy' today: ivory towers seem to be the gatekeepers of who rises in our culture (yes, there is the old money hierarchy as well). After all, those in the ivory don't claim to be 'stupid', nor would most others honestly call them such, but they do seem to routinely level those charges (as well as routine punishments) against those they consider beneath them.

There is certainly enough tinfoil, or conspiracy theories, surrounding the government's confiscation of just Tesla's writings after he died, to ask the (above) question. How many others have their been? How much of corporatist derived wealth is due to similar concealment?

Ever read of the story of Royal Rife? We now know that $Billions were at stake, but we still don't know absolutely about the validity of his treatments, as his lab (where he kept meticulous records, verified by courtroom proceedings) mysteriously burned.

Perhaps there are only a few primary sources of energy. That doesn't mean that the next one isn't yet to be discovered, nor does it mean that when it is discovered, that the cream of the crop in the deceptive corporatist class will open-source it, in fact, their modus operandi pretty much guarantees it will be concealed to some degree or another.

It's probably short sighted to not, at least, entertain the possibility that there's more yet to be discovered. However, as you've observed in the past, what hasn't yet been discovered doesn't help us today, unless it's being concealed today and yesterday.

In an age of distrust and rule by deception, the latter seems increasingly likely.

Basically, many of us have learned the hard way that if we trust TPTB, we will get burned.

Don't worry NNadir, Sen. Domenici (R) is brooding over GNEP: nuclear energy planning seems well funded despite the protestations of many who are and will be paying the taxes and charges, essentially insuring their proit, for your industry's various past and future financial and other shortcomings, including but not limited to WTF to do with all the damn waste product.

If only little people could get such financial backing.... I'd love to see $60K worth of photovoltaics on every home in the world that could use them, but that kind of eats into the hierarchy's nuclear-scale profit schemes.

The Win-Win World is but an idealist's dream, but dream we will.

[TheWraith]

9. Oh, conspiracy theories. Lovely.

"I think what is in a number of people's minds, including my own, is what have TPTB concealed from us?"

Right, because there are cars that run on water, and NO other scientist has EVER figured it out.

"There is certainly enough tinfoil, or conspiracy theories, surrounding the government's confiscation of just Tesla's writings after he died, to ask the (above) question."

It couldn't have had anything to do with the fact that he was claiming to have built a death ray, capable of taking down aircraft at a range of 200 miles, could it?

Moreover, people should remember that Tesla's experimentation really had little or nothing to do with the generation of electricity, but ways to distribute and use it. He was incredibly brilliant, no question about that, and probably could have developed some things that we still don't have today, but I wouldn't expect a magical power source to be one of them.

"Ever read of the story of Royal Rife? We now know that $Billions were at stake, but we still don't know absolutely about the validity of his treatments,"

Yes, we do. His claims were false, like a whole lot of scientific claims back then. No one has ever been able to make any of his so called discoveries or treatments actually work under lab conditions.

"Perhaps there are only a few primary sources of energy. That doesn't mean that the next one isn't yet to be discovered,"

It's already been discovered, somebody just needs to fund the building of it. Check out Dr. Robert Bussard and the Polywell reactor. Or are you going to claim someone's hiding that?

"It's probably short sighted to not, at least, entertain the possibility that there's more yet to be discovered."

It's even more short sighted not to entertain the possibility that maybe there isn't a massive worldwide conspiracy out to force everyone to use nuclear power.

"If only little people could get such financial backing.... I'd love to see $60K worth of photovoltaics on every home in the world that could use them, but that kind of eats into the hierarchy's nuclear-scale profit schemes."

Have you actually bothered to do the math on that? It comes out to being hundreds of times more expensive than it would be to simply build nuclear plants to supply all the world's energy needs. Centralized production isn't just some tool of the evil Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission: it's done that way because it's efficient. Producing and setting up independent electrical production systems for even just 100 million homes would be an absolute nightmare, taking decades, compared to building enough large power plants to feed those same homes.

[Trillo]

10. Did you misread?

"Moreover, people should remember that Tesla's experimentation really had little or nothing to do with the generation of electricity, but ways to distribute and use it. He was incredibly brilliant, no question about that, and probably could have developed some things that we still don't have today, but I wouldn't expect a magical power source to be one of them."

Where did I make ANY claims about the content of Tesla's work?

You seem to be claiming that the government confiscated Tesla's work after he died due to an alleged threatening statement (I don't read your rendition of it as threatening) he made and therefore the government was preempting a danger to airplanes, yet, would it not have made more sense to confiscate his work after he made the alleged (and stretched) "terroristic threatening" statement instead of waiting till after his death?

Regarding Royal Rife: You really have never have heard of "radiation therapy" for cancer? Sometimes it's not enough to read, sometimes you also have to connect the dots in your mind, dots that others have carefully concealed from you through years of consistent misdirection but that are really 'in plain view.'

Whatever else Royal Rife's original treatments may have been, all indications are that they involved RF waves, and while both statements are arguably too brief, it is also an accurate description of radiation therapy.

My post, anyway, was largely about having lost faith in the power of science, particularly when it works with government and business, to promote truth and to be honest with the public. Gore seems to say similar things regarding a well financed misinformation campaign waged by some scientists.

+++
How has anything you've written concentrated on restoring faith and integrity in science and its various institutions?
+++

BTW I do think that Broussard's invention needs study and possible development. That's the process utilizing boron, no? If I was in a position to do so (I'm not unless it comes up in an public election) I'd vote to give that project some funding, but if the public helps fund it, I wouldn't vote for it if there wasn't a prohibition on all the profits from it being privatized in the future.

Nuclear has such a poor record of accruing costs, such as Atlas Corporation's mine tailings that haven't been paid for yet, that I have no idea how anyone can estimate nuclear's reality-based costs. What's the point of doing "Math" with creative, sham figures that have been deliberately minimized? That's just a pointless and tedious exercise in futility, with outcomes that are as sham based as the input figures.

The same is true of fossil fuel, the true costs have been shifted away from the producers, some times towards disease processes due to toxins that individuals must pay to treat, mines deaths are another, while fossil fuel profits have largely been concentrated in a few hands.

The opposite stretching of truth seems true with PV--I heard a professor, from one of the U.S. universities on TV back in the late 70s or early 80s, say the new laser process for making solar cells reduced PV cell production costs to "pennies per square foot". All the businesses that now sell them want us to believe something else about their 'much greater' cost, their 'scarcity', the 'exotic silicon' that they are made from (silicon is processed sand). This is another example of likely sham figures grossly exaggerated (instead of minimized), and how the industry's presentation of truth to the public is twisted to the advantage of a few existing industries, patent holders, and a few large investors.

Perhaps the professor couldn't add, but that seems unlikely to me!

You may have the last word: I no longer involve myself in drawn out arguments with advocates. Life is too short for such willful frustration!

This also is all off the topic of live or dead miners, which is the topic of the thread. Last I heard is they haven't found them yet. Time is drawing short, if it hasn't already. :(

[NNadir]

11. This Tesla religion is getting more and more and more bizarre.

I've been hearing a lot of fanciful stuff these days from anti-nukes, none of whom can produce an exajoule of energy.

If the energy of wishful thinking were joules all of our problems would be solved.

As for "costs" of nuclear, it's pretty amazing that one hears this the most from people who think solar energy is free.

Anyone who thinks that nuclear energy is expensive has never, ever, remotely, bothered to look at either the internal or external costs of energy. Fully loaded, nuclear energy is the cheapest form of energy in the world, bar none. That is, in fact, why almost 300 new nuclear reactors are either proposed, ordered or under construction.

Amory Lovins proved to be a useless mystic in 1980 when he wrote:

Our thesis rests on a different perception. Our attempt to rethink focuses not on marginal reforms but on basic assumptions. In fact, the global nuclear power enterprise is rapidly disappearing. De facto moratoria on reactor ordering exist today in the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, and probably the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan and Canada. Nuclear power has been indefinitely deferred or abandoned in Austria, Denmark, Norway, Iran, China, Australia and New Zealand. Nuclear power elsewhere is in grave difficulties. Only in centrally planned economies, notably France and the U.S.S.R., is bureaucratic power sufficient to override, if not overcome, economic facts.

Lovins, A.; Lovins, L. H and Ross, L. Foreign Affairs, Summer 1980, pp. 1137-1177.

Maybe the anti-nukes think we can't look up their 27 year old "make stuff up" predictions.

The "uneconomic" nuclear power quadrupled its already exajoule scale level of production, nearly reaching 30 exajoules and the "centrally planned" (aka "communist) country of France - 5th largest economy in the world has nuclear electricity as its fourth largest export, reeling in the bucks from the coal burning anti-nukes in Italy and elsewhere.

Amory Lovins didn't know an economic fact in 1980 and the anti-nukes of today can't face the fact that they have been singing this same religious hymn for almost 3 decades while the world chokes on dangerous fossil fuel waste.

Now there's this endless "solar will save us" blather.

For the record, the solar energy industry tells the truth about its costs:

www.solarbuzz.com.

The costs, which are rising yet again, is why solar energy is a tiny and trivial form of energy.

Nobody could give a rat's ass to conspire against the solar industry by the way. There are zero energy industries, including regrettably the dangerous fossil fuel industry (which couldn't pay anti-nukes enough), that is worried about competition from the solar industry. The only people who think that solar electricity is a threat to dangerous fossil fuels, never mind nuclear, are people who still think Amory Lovins is a genius.

A genius is a person who can make predictions that are confirmed by experiment. People whose entire set of predictions prove to predict nothing that actually happens are either incompetent scientists or worse, ritualistic shamans.

Gerhard Schroeder's natural gas industry doesn't fear solar energy, which is why Gerhard Schroeder shilled for solar while angling for a job with Gazprom. The natural gas industry fearing solar would rather be like Toyota fearing a bicycle shop.

As for the Tesla anti-scientific fantasy, it's been kicking around forever, in fact for more than 60 years. All of the energy it has been produced as been the useless energy of talk. It hasn't even run a calculator. Even solar energy is not that pathetic. Never let it be said that there is an anti-nuke who feels trammeled by reality.

[Systematic Chaos]

4. He's getting fucking pissed.

And he's not alone.