Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2009 August 21

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August 21

Dog mess vaporization using liquid oxygen?

Could dog mess be instantly vaporised by a device attached to its back that mixed the offending material with liquid oxygen? Would an aluminum/iron powder reaction improve the process, and could the thermal energy power a sterling generator to run portable devices? I thought I'd better ask before I try this out. Trevor Loughlin (talk) 02:03, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

This sounds like a way to blow up your dog. How are you going to collect the excreta and contain the combustion process? --FOo (talk) 02:09, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

How are you going to explain to your dog you are the alpha male? Bus stop (talk) 02:12, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Urinate in the places that your dog likes to urinate? --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 02:15, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Might leave the pavement slightly scorched/pitted afterwards too. Or blister the paintwork on nearby buildings/parked cars (if not directly set them alight). You might not be the most popular person amongst your neighbours for a time. --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 02:15, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Aluminum/iron powder reaction? What are you trying to do, use thermite to get rid of dog poo? bibliomaniac15 02:27, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Does Trevor kill weeds in his garden with napalm and brush his teeth with sodium hydroxide, do you reckon? --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 03:04, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't have a dog, nor am I a dog lover. I would be using Thermite AND liquid oxygen.The device would be like a calorimeter with an automatic lid closing motor, so the dog would not be blown up.80.2.202.175 (talk) 02:57, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Thermite AND liquid oxygen would be a PERFECT recipe for starting a major firestorm. And a "calorimeter with an automatic lid closing motor" won't help either -- unless it's made out of tungsten, it would simply melt from the heat. Don't even THINK of trying this at home, OK? 98.234.126.251 (talk) 03:10, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

If dog poo were collected and accelerated into a trajectory which carried it to the Sun, that would dispose of it conclusively, though at a higher cost than the proposed method. It might also be composted, along with lawn clippings, as discussed in an earlier thread, at a lower cost. Edison (talk) 03:36, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The oxygen alone with some accelerant will suffice. Usually a bomb-type calorimeter is started with a nichrome wire and a bit of thread if the sample will combust on its own. Otherwise a tablet of Picric acid is added to the sample cup. You would need a fairly large "bomb" and a fair amount of accelerant to combust wet dog poo. --BenBurch (talk) 19:12, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Just remember to train the dog to run under a tank before going potty. 152.16.59.102 (talk) 04:42, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Reacting the dog extremely rapidly with oxygen would also negate the need for any future use of the method. Just freezing with liquid oxygen would do the job nicely too. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 09:58, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

If by "dog mess" you mean explodingdog, your techniques might not work so well. ;-) ~AH1^(TCU) 12:08, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Why not just pick it up and put in bin?

Digital physics and the bugs

Has digital physics yet addressed the problem of, if the universe is a computer or the output of a computer, how to thoroughly test it for bugs that might be exploited to violate the laws of physics? NeonMerlin 03:58, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I hang around with a lot of physicists, and I have never heard any of them ever use the term "digital physics." Briefly scanning the article's sources, I can't see any reference that specifically mentions "digital physics" either. A Google Scholar search finds a very small set of papers, mostly not referring to the topic in that article. I think this article may be guilty of coining a neologism - as far as I can tell, there isn't actually community of physicists who consider this a "branch" of physics. As such, in response to your question - no, I don't think that any such scheme has been thought out. I think what's really at issue here is the debate between determinism and non-determinism, as well as the complexity of the system; calling the universe a "computer" and assuming there are inputs and outputs is a philosophical leap, to say the least. "Bugs", as you call them, would seem to be inconsistencies in the laws of physics - which have not really been observed. Whether such inconsistencies, if they exist, are "part of a plan" or "errors in design", is a purely philosophical, unfalsifiable concept. Nimur (talk) 06:33, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

You meant "Simulated reality" not "digital physics" right? "Digital physics" does not specifically require a universe computer.

Specifically see Simulated_reality#Scientific_and_technological_approaches some science-fiction/scientist thinkers have examine briefly these ideas.83.100.250.79 (talk) 10:03, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The laws of physics are a description of how the universe behaves. If a law is violated you don't say that the universe violated the laws of physics, you say that you had the wrong laws. The only difference between a bug and a feature is whether the behavior is intended or not, so the idea of a bug in the laws of physics presumes an intent that differs from the reality. You'd have to say whose intent you're talking about and how we'd know what it was. -- BenRG (talk) 11:29, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Don't take the computer metaphor TOO literally. If you do, you fundamentally miss the point of using it in the first place (which may or may not be helpful anyway). Saying "can we test for bugs" makes about as much sense as saying "maybe we can upgrade the graphics card." --98.217.14.211 (talk) 12:48, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I assumed the question idea was the direct "we are in a computer" concept - as described in the every popular Brain in a vat page.83.100.250.79 (talk) 13:55, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

THAT would be nice. Things have been looking pretty pixelated around here for far too long.... — Sam 63.138.152.155 (talk) 13:40, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

It's OK, God has ordered us a quad core with dual-SLI 8800 cards. SteveBaker (talk) 14:45, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I found a glitch. --Sean 14:43, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The idea that we are all "inside The Matrix" is a perfectly valid one - and not at all new.

The weirdnesses we find when we try to probe to smaller and smaller and larger and larger scales of our "matrix" could quite easily reflect the limits of the resolution and capacity of the underlying simulation - the limits of the speed of light and our inability to see back before some particular time in the past are exactly the kind of arbitary limitations we'd impose in a real simulation. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that we'd eventually build really big computer games (think "Second life" or "World of Warcraft" - only much bigger) and that the AI's living inside it would wonder whether the fact that the ground is made up of tiny green squares and that time appears to be quantized into 1/60th second chunks was somehow indicative of the fact that they are living in a computer. Now consider that every civilisation that reaches that stage of technology probably runs dozens or even thousands of such synthetic universes. What are the odds that we're living in the real universe? Thousands to one against, perhaps?

There is no concievable test we could perform to prove that - we dismiss some insanely wierd quantum phenomena as "the way the universe runs" - when perhaps it's really just the precision with which the computer running our universe is able to store the positions and momenta of particles.

14:45, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Somebody just sent me this link yesterday on the simulation argument[1]. I haven't read it yet, but it might be good. Like the brain in a vat, the universe as a computer simulation or merely a thought someone's mind is a purely philosophical concept. Wouldn't the only way to test this hypothesis except for leaving this simulation and observing it from the outside? Mac Davis (talk) 16:58, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I think that it might be possible to hypothesize the kinds of error you'd expect from a simulation. Furthermore, I think that's exactly what we ARE seeing.

• Quantization and round-off errors at the finest scales of things would be something to look out for...and indeed, we've noted that things like mass, length, time, etc are indeed quantized...exactly as they would be if you stored them in a computer.
• Things like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle could be examples of finite arithmetic precision in whatever computer is running our universe.
• Having randomness at the smallest scales of the universe allows the simulation to run very approximately at that level - which would represent a huge saving in computer power.
• I could also imagine the finite speed of light and the limitation on not being able to travel faster than light would be the kinds of thing that a universe-simulation programmer might add in order to keep things within reasonable bounds. If humanity can't travel beyond it's own solar system, you don't have to simulate anything beyond a lightyear or so in any kind of detail.
• You don't want infinities cropping up in your simulation - so black holes have to be decently cloaked in event horizons to make that work.
• All of the physical constants in the universe seem to be set up just perfectly such that life can develop - in our naturalistic view of the universe, this is a big mystery - but that's exactly the kind of thing that a simulation designer would have tweaked to make things come out the way he wants.
• We can see that the universe started with the big bang - very little "data" was needed to start the simulation running...again, that's exactly the way you'd want to start things working.

We can't prove that this is a true hypothesis - but circumstantial evidence is all around us.

SteveBaker (talk) 18:55, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The laws of physics do not suggest a design intended to reduce computational effort. Quite the opposite, in fact. The most obvious example is that computing the behavior of a quantum system appears to require exponentially more work than computing the behavior of a classical system. Like most conjectures in complexity theory that hasn't been proven, but no one can find a subexponential algorithm. If you want a cheap universe you should just make it discrete in a classical way. The uncertainty principle doesn't help, it makes things incomprehensibly worse. None of your other bullet points make sense either. -- BenRG (talk) 15:32, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - is that some philosophical rumination, Steve, or are those ideas supported by any theory or prior research? I think we might have to flag it as ... Nimur (talk) 05:29, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Ob.xkcd SteveBaker (talk) 18:57, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

what are the different types of leaves?

www.botanical-online.com/hojastiposangles.htm#peciolades3 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shy222s (talk • contribs) 05:18, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

As with most things, there are numerous methods of classification for leaves. You can speak of layout, such as palmate vs. pinnate, and the go onto compound vs. simple formations of the above. You can speak of standard leaf morphology (which has a palisade mesophyll on the upper surface with a spongy mesophyll on the lower surface) vs. nonstandard morphology, such as eucalyptus, which possesses palisade mesophyll on both surfaces to allow for increased photosynthesis. You can speak of real leaves vs. modified leaves, such as cactus spines. I'm sure there are others, but that's a start. I'm no botanist, though. DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 13:36, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Leaf gets into quite a bit of detail on the subject. Dcoetzee 18:38, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Gallbladder-Thickening of the gallbladder wall

During an ultrsound for gallstones, a thickening of my gallbladder wall was detected. Does thickening equal cancer? I have an appointment with a surgeon but I was hoping for a head's up. Are there a list of possibilities to what "thickening" means? If so, please let me know.

Needsanswer (talk) 05:34, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I think the whole point is that it takes a doctor to interpret the results of your ultrasound. One of the reasons we do not give medical advice on ref desk. Sorry and best of luck. Vespine (talk) 06:18, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

As Vespine pointed out, we won't diagnose anything. But if you're interested in background knowledge, we have an article on gallbladder, gallbladder cancer, which links to Gallbladder and Bile Duct Cancer from Johns Hopkins University. Neither their description of symptoms nor their ultrasound overview explicitly mention wall-thickening. Remember - internet-based sources, even from reputable research hospitals, are not a substitute for a professional medical opinion. Nimur (talk) 06:37, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

My advice would be to not look up a list of potential causes. Differential diagnoses without any other information are totally useless. Imagine the differential diagnosis of "Fatigue", ranging from the most common (overexertion) to the rarest (Cancer of the absolutely-everywhere); not only will there be two thousand unrelated causes inbetween but which of the two aforementioned diagnoses will stick in your mind? - Fribbler (talk) 09:39, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I removed some medical advice from here. (See talk page for details..) -- Captain Disdain (talk) 09:08, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

See here. No, thickening does not equal cancer. A thickened gallbladder wall is a very, very common finding on ultrasound, and the most common cause is a polyp. Gallbladder cancer is rare. Polyps are common. Good luck with your surgeon. - Nunh-huh 10:00, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

How fast are we really, really moving?

Lots of time travel talk around here lately.

The big time travel issue that's always ignored is that moving through time would also require moving through space - at least if you wanted to end up in the same location and not inside a mountain, asteroid, nebula, etc.

So, here's my big question:

If one was able to "slip out" of space for exactly one second, with zero velocity (as opposed to the inherent velocity we have now), how far would he be from his original location when he "returned?"

I'm thinking this involves all sorts of interesting velocities - Earth orbit, Solar System movement in the Milky Way, galactic expansion...

Science RefDesk is the Best RefDesk! 218.25.32.210 (talk) 08:00, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

"with zero velocity" compared to what? I know you mean "well, duh, not moving", but what is the inertial frame of reference? What is the stationary (or other fixed coordinate system) point to which you would like to be not-moving? DMacks (talk) 08:10, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

One of the fundamental principles of General Relativity is that your question is meaningless. There is no absolute reference frame. --Carnildo (talk) 08:20, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Not just general relativity, there is no absolute reference frame in classical mechanics either.83.100.250.79 (talk) 12:20, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

To give essentially the same answer with a slightly different spin - we know from special relativity and general relativity that space and time are not independent, but are intimately connected in spacetime. Your time axis and my time axis are not necessarily aligned, and the difference becomes obvious if we are moving at high speed relative to one another, or at different places in a strong gravitational field. Therefore to "slip out" of space you must "slip out" of spacetime, in which case you have also "slipped out" of time too. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:27, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The closest we get to an absolute reference frame is the CMB rest frame, and the local group of galaxies are moving at 627 ± 22 km/s relative to that. The Earth's movement will vary over time since it depends on whether the various sources of motion are in the same direction or not and those directions change over the course on an orbit. --Tango (talk) 11:07, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Indeed - but that doesn't make the question any more meaningful. There is absolutely no standard reference frame by which your time travelling machine can be stationary with respect to...however, since time travel isn't possible - it requires magic. It's truly impossible to describe the problems of a magical time-travel machine because Gandalf, Merlin and Dumbledore wave their wands and make it come out alright in the end. If you imagine a magical space-travel machine (a 'teleporter') - it could have the exact same problem. Your starship is in orbit around some planet - the 'away team' zap down to the planet and suddenly find themselves sliding sideways over the ground at 10,000 mph or so! You teleport yourself to the nearest star - but discover that it's moved over the four years the light from it took to reach us and (presumably) the four years our teleporter took to get us there.

We can't reason about that though because making logical conclusions from impossible technology is...impossible. What happens if you try to cut a mirror in half using a light sabre? Silly question - meaningless answer. (Which isn't going to stop someone from trying to answer it...right...below...this...line: SteveBaker (talk) 13:53, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I just want to point out that Gandalf would wave a staff, not a wand, as Galdalf prefers to handle something with more length and girth. Googlemeister (talk) 14:31, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, for a minute I thought you were talking about Sir Ian McKellen and his penchant for lengthy, girthy rods, not Gandalf... Coreycubed (talk) 14:44, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I used to have a staff but they all quit. These days you just can't get the minions ... Gandalf61 (talk) 15:43, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I think that might have been the joke... --Tango (talk) 16:49, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Just because Gandalf's wand isn't mentioned in any of the Middle Earth books doesn't mean he doesn't have one. I'm sure he has lots of things that weren't mentioned explicitly. For the record, it's sparkly and has a large golden star on the end. :-P SteveBaker (talk) 18:24, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm sitting here holding tightly to my chair and my keyboard, because I have realized that both are moving East at several hundred miles per hour! (due to the Earth's rotation and my latitude). If I use my time travel gizmo to move back an hour and undo an unfortunate Wikipedia edit, I have to allow for that rotation as well as the orbit of the Earth around the Sun and the movement of the solar system. It looks like a time travellor needs a gadget which allows for time and relative dimensions in space. Edison (talk) 15:25, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

What you don't seem to understand is that Extragalactic cosmic ray that just zipped past your ear happens to be dead stationary at the exact center of the universe...so you are actually moving at 99.9% of the speed of light...I hope you have a firm grip on that chair! SteveBaker (talk) 18:24, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Blasphemy. I have it on the authority of Anaximander that the Earth is in the centre of the infinite "in the same place because of its indifference". Aristotle and Tolemy agree that this is the way it is so we have an overwhelming consensus here. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 05:27, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

The correct spelling is "Ptolemy", not "Tolemy". 98.234.126.251 (talk) 08:15, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Nope. It's Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαίος . -Arch dude (talk) 13:52, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

My ptypo. Sorry. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:08, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

We are all traveling thro time at the speed of light. If we travel in distance, our speed thro time diminishes.(hence strange time effects). Minowski space-time continuum

Electrical fuses on the European continent

Electrical plugs in the UK often contain small fuses however, unless I am mistaken, European plugs do not, and domestic installations appear to rely on the fuse boxes/switches at the point of entrance of the electrical supply. Does this make the European standard less safe than in the UK, where I think both are usually used at the same time? ----Seans Potato Business 10:14, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

This seems to be a result of the ring main system, which is used in the UK, where the ring (one originally, but nowadays more) has to supply ALL power points / all devices with electrical power. All (or most) of mainland Europe uses a radial cabling architecture with the associated pros and cons. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 12:05, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Does that mean, then, that the consumer unit in such a star-wired scheme has a fuse per outlet (and thus has several times more fuses than its ring-main counterpart)? -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 12:11, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

A star-wired scheme has one fuse per line (or whatever that is called in electricianese) plus one main fuse. Each of these lines supplies a specific area (a number of power points and the light fixtures) of the apartment / house. As a result you can easily disable one of these lines (by disabling the fuse) and run an extension from the next room to supply light or to operate power tools. There exist specific regulations as to the permissible loads. There are also power points with a built in fuse on the market. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 12:35, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Is there then, one line per room or thereabouts, for example a UK house might have ~8 fuses per fuse box (2 downstairs 1 for plugs,1 for lighting), ditto upstairs, plus circuits for kitchen,garage,bathroom,central heating, but with such a method I think about 20 might be needed - is this the case?83.100.250.79 (talk) 13:02, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

In the US, we use the radial system and appliance cords generally do not have integral fuses. See Distribution board for a typical electrical service entrance. -Arch dude (talk) 13:58, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The article on the ring circuit say that pre-WW2 in UK there was typically one outlet per fused circuit, and the ring circuit was developed during the postwar housing rebuild. One outlet per circuit is a quirk, from the time that one outlet per room was considered adequate wiring. Wiring in the U.S. always was radial and provided numerous outlets per fused radial circuit. The ring design requires 5-6 as much testing time (per the article) and I expect that when someone buys a house and seeks to add wiring to existing circuits, there is a high likelihood of dangerous mistakes, such as cross connections between two rings, making the fusing too high. There is also apparently a danger of cable overloads if heavy loads are connected near one end of the ring. It would not be too bad to install and test on a new installation, where the walls are open and the cables can be visually traced. but revisions would be a nightmare, unless accurate wiring diagrams are available or the electrician has Xray vision. It sounds expensive, due to the complexity of installation testing and the large number of fuses required. An advantage is its selectivity, so that one bad appliance only cuts off its own power. The outles having shutters which cut off the access to the hot and neutral holes until the ground hole is plugged would keep kids from sticking things into sockets and getting zapped. In the U.S. code requires number 10 wire (5.26 mm² for 30 amperes, but the ring bus article says the UK gets by with just 2.5mm², the equivalent of between 13 and 14 gauge wire. The U.S. would consider #14 wire only good for 15 amps. Like your wires toasty, eh? Edison (talk) 13:54, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

But 15 amps at U.K. voltage 240V delivers the same power as 30 amps at U.S. voltage 120V so what's the difference ? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 15:10, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Wires overheat strictly based on amperes of current, and not based on the power carried, which is a function of voltage.Edison (talk) 15:18, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

So for the same power carried - which overheats first?83.100.250.79 (talk) 15:22, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

For the same power carried the wires on the smaller voltage and higher current (US in that case) will overheat faster. That's why high voltage transmission lines are high voltage (and low current). That way they reduce losses on the transmission lines. Dauto (talk) 15:30, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but the US wires are thicker to compensate - that's what I meant. Do they work out the same?83.100.250.79 (talk) 15:51, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Edison's rhetorical "Like your wires toasty, eh?" could distract us. Nobody wants their wires toasty except in the special case of an apparatus dedicated to partial oxidation of edible planar segments of wheat derived consumables. It has not been shown that U.K. supply wires heat any more than U.S. supply wires when delivering the same powers. In fact the ring main wiring in U.K. houses provides two parallel routes to each socket, doubling the effective wire cross section for a single load. There is no such advantage with star (radial) wiring in the U.S. Regrettably electrical development in the U.S. is sometimes influenced by Edison's eccentric notions. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 04:43, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

The distribution of lines in the star system varies depending on many things. For example, in my apartment, the kitchen has two lines each powering three outlets, plus dedicated lines for the dishwasher, the stove, and the garbage disposal. On the other hand, there's just a single line for the entry hall, living room, and bedroom, powering a dozen outlets and three light fixtures. --Carnildo (talk) 23:29, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Another problem is that if a broken wire or loose connection causes the loop to open at one end, the other end has to carry all the load. This open circuit would not be detectable until an overload caused wires to heat up and other failures. The only test would be current measurements at each end of the loop at the source. Edison (talk) 15:18, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes the US method is far better.83.100.250.79 (talk) 15:22, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The loop system would be safe if the breaker had current sensors on each of the outgoing phase and neutral wires and tripped if flow stopped on one. This would obviously run the cost way up. Verifying the ground (earth) connections are intact going both ways would be more complicated, since they are supposed to be non-current carrying in normal operation. Edison (talk) 15:28, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

"would be safe" - there's no real sane reason do make a ring system in a house - except as some sort of copper saving measure (which I'm not 100% convinced it does effectively - considering the longer runs), everything else about it adds up to more ways to go wrong, more work, and more difficult to detect faults.

Maybe there is an example where a ring system makes sense for reasons other than saving a bit of copper and being able to bodge electrically unsafe circuits (by modern standards)?83.100.250.79 (talk) 15:58, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

What Edison cites as "another problem" can alternatively be viewed as an advantage that makes it easy to test the integrity of a ring main. At the incoming supply point temporarily break the connection to first one side of the ring, then the other. If one appliance plugged anywhere in the house keeps working in both tests then the ring is o.k. The copper saving by ring wiring may be uncertain but it has another advantage that it serves many household appliances of widely differing powers using only one standard cable size. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 05:08, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Although I'm not a fan of ring systems - you missed one probably negligible advantage - that is - the resistance of the wire to any point on the ring is the less dependent on distance...83.100.250.79 (talk) 10:25, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Sexuality: nurture or nature?

Are people really born with their sexual preferences? Apparently, it became politically correct to consider homosexuals as born that way and not some kind of mental illness, but is it true?--Quest09 (talk) 10:29, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

That sounds like a false dichotomy. Whether homosexuals are born that way or not is independent of whether or not it is mental illness (which is purely a question of definition). We don't really know the causes of homosexuality. Homosexuality#Etiology has a discussion of the question, though. --Tango (talk) 10:53, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Indeed, all features of living things are a combination of both "nature and nurture". Some twin studies that I read, demonstrated approx. 30% genetic contribution to homosexuality but there are other factors explained via the link above. Regardless of whether one is born a certain way, if that condition doesn't harm others and involves more distress to "treat" than to simply accept (like trying to "treat" someone's distaste for Marmite), then it's clear to me that the individuals in question are better left to live their lives with equal rights and acceptance. ----Seans Potato Business 11:25, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Note that "being born with a given orientation" != "genetically disposed towards a given orientation", since there are pre-natal non-genetic influences. As an extreme example, the sex (not just the orientation) of many oviparous animals is heavily influenced by temperature during the brooding period. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:17, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

There is a third element beyond nature and nurture: a random element. Even identical twins raised in the same environment don't turn out exactly the same, and this is due to this random element. For another example, identical twins raised in the same environment don't have identical patterns of freckles, since the location of each freckle is random. StuRat (talk) 12:30, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

This also raises the issue of the "hidden question" that always accompanies such inqueries; as though it were OK to discriminate against homosexuals if it were something entirely up to their choice. It's like saying "If they weren't born this way, but instead chose to be gay, I should be able to treat them badly". You aren't. It actually doesn't matter one way or the other why one or another person is gay, one should treat all people with respect and dignity. The fact is that the "reason" why certain people have certain sexual orientations is likely to be widely variable. --Jayron32 13:03, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Nice point, Jayron! DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 13:39, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

But identical twins are never raised in the exact same environment, because their parents may treat them differently and they will experience some different things. EamonnPKeane (talk) 14:05, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Some things (like eye color) are 100% genetically determined. Other things (like which accent you speak English with) are 100% nurture. Many things are a mixture of both - and many genetic things are the consequence of so many genes interacting that it becomes almost impossible to isolate (and thereby prove) a genetic basis for that trait. Homosexuality is tough to determine. Naive evolutionary logic would suggest that there is zero genetic basis for the trait because the drastically reduced chance of homosexuals reproducing and passing this hypothetical 'gay gene' onto the next generation would eliminate the gene in a very short amount of time. However, the world is more complex than that. If a large number of interacting genes were to produce the trait and all of them were separately highly valuable - then they could all be present in the population and vital to the survival of the species, even though they produce the occasional individual who would have a strong preference to NOT reproduce. That's the kind of thing that makes this such a complicated question. Consider, for example, the gene that produces sickle-cell anemia. If you carry two copies of this gene, you're in a lot of trouble. Most such people die at a young age without lots of modern medical help. How come the gene is still around? Well, it turns out that if you only inherit one copy of the gene, you have virtual immunity to malaria. That's such an amazingly useful thing that the gene is quite prevelant in places where malaria has historically been rampant. SteveBaker (talk) 13:10, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm so glad you picked "speaking accent" as an example for 100% nurture. Check outForeign Accent Syndrome for a sort-of-exception. jeffjon (talk) 13:56, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

That's all very exciting - but Foreign Accent Syndrome isn't genetic either, it's to do with brain injury - which is most certainly nurture. SteveBaker (talk) 18:12, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Note that your sickle-cell anemia example implies that for a gene with an obvious tendency to limit reproduction, it must also have some advantage to continue to be so widespread. There may be advantages to a group to have certain non-reproducing members, such as with worker ants. Also, since heterosexuality and homosexuality aren't absolutes, but rather a continuum, perhaps having slight homosexual tendencies might allow an individual to get along better with those of their gender without preventing them from reproducing. This seems to be the case for bonobos, for example. StuRat (talk) 22:24, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Using a transistor as a relay/switch

Hi all,

I have a light bulb attached to a battery, and I have a small microcontroller I want to use to turn the light bulb on and off. Normally I think that this would be something that would be done with a relay, but unfortunately all I have is some NPN-type transistors. Is it possible to mimic the effects of a relay using one or more transistors?

Thanks! — Sam 166.131.64.248 (talk) 13:22, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

What current and what voltage are specified for the bulb, what is the battery voltage, and what is the current rating of the transistor (model number, manufacturer?). What are the output specs for the microcontroller (manufacturer, model), such as the amount of current and the on off voltage? Please understand that we or Wikipedia can accept no liability for any direct or consequential damage if you follow information provided here (frying the microcontroller, or the lightbulb coming on at the wrong time, failing to come on, or burning out, fire, etc. Edison (talk) 13:33, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The bulb is actually a tiny little bulb and is being supplied with 3V. The microcontroller can actually supply up to 5V, but I want to keep the two circuits separate. — Sam 63.138.152.155 (talk) 13:41, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

See Solid state relay for the product that does this. But yes, for a small DC voltage and current, you can just use an appropriate transistor. -Arch dude (talk) 13:46, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Also, go acquire a copy of The Art of Electronics. You will save a lot of time. -Arch dude (talk) 13:48, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Ok, both of those are fine, but any advice how I can actually use the transistor to do this? Is an NPN an "appropriate" transistor? I'm happy to learn more, but I working with what I have at the moment, and can't get new supplies for now. Thanks! — Sam 63.138.152.155 (talk) 14:26, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I believe an NPN transistor is correct since that's what they use to control motors with arduinos (see here, specifically a TIP120). However, I'm not sure I understand why you need the transistor at all if your microcontroller can supply enough voltage and current for the bulb. Can you not just power the controller with the batteries and run the bulb off the output pins? TastyCakes (talk) 14:35, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I think this link gives a more thorough description of how you'd use a transistor to do what you want to do. Also I just read that you want to keep the two separate, so disregard my question above. TastyCakes (talk) 14:37, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

You need to check the data sheet to determine if the microcontroller can safely source or sink enough current to light the bulb. Many times, microcontrollers can safely sink much higher current than they can source. This means it is best to connect the first lead from lightbulb to positive voltage (from the battery); the second lead of the lightbulb connects to the microcontroller; and the software ties that output with negative logic (1 keeps the voltage high and the bulb is off; and 0 keeps the voltage low and the bulb lights; current actually flows into the microcontroller). In general, this is a bad idea - you should use a buffer amplifier to keep the digital low-power items away from the higher-current needs of the light. You can build a buffer amplifier using one transistor; or you can get an elaborate design going; or you can buy a specialized IC which already does this. It depends on your needs and enthusiasm-level. Nimur (talk) 15:36, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Since we really don't want you to fry your microcontroller please be aware of the risk inherent in connecting a microcontroller output directly to a lamp that is supplied by a different supply than the microcontroller. Sooner or later the microcontroller supply will be turned off and what happens then depends on the microcontroller chip. Current may flow from the bulb and through an unintended path on the chip. The chip may not survive that treatment. (I learned this the hard way when I used to connect the printer port on a PC to external circuit projects.) A safe choice is to connect an output of the microcontroller via a resistor 10 kilohm to the base of your NPN transistor, emitter to 0V ground, and bulb between its own 3V supply and the collector. Then a '1' (high) from the microcontroller will light the bulb. The transistor works like a relay but without moving parts or sound and it needs less drive current. A difference is that the output at the collector is not isolated like a relay contact would be, but that is not an issue here. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 04:07, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) Cuddlyable has provided a good example of a one-transistor (BJT) buffer-amplifier. We have a section, Buffer_amplifier#Single-transistor_circuits in our article. Nimur (talk) 05:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Nimur that section shows common-collector voltage follower buffers. I described a common-emitter saturated switch like this. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 21:50, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, let's add it to the article then! Nimur (talk) 22:09, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

rectifier

what will be the output of half wave rectifier at 10HZ,50HZ,50KHZ & WHY we get no output at higer voltage?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.200.60.207 (talk) 15:23, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

You get the same ouput at each frequency - only one sign of the AC input is let through, there's a image at Rectifier#Half-wave_rectification83.100.250.79 (talk) 15:26, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

As far as I know the output is the same at high voltage, unless the voltage is so high as to break the rectifier - which would probably cause AC output. (In semiconductor rectifiers the "breakdown voltage" is important)83.100.250.79 (talk) 15:28, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps the OP means a rectifier with filter where the output will depend on the input frequency f. The simplest filter is a reservoir capacitor which may give these results when there is some load (resistance) on the output: High f: pure DC output. Medium f: DC output that contains ripple at frequency f. Low f: half-waves at frequency f i.e. the capacitor is ineffective. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 03:40, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, at a higher voltage, the voltage may be larger than the diode's reverse breakdown voltage. So any charge stored on a capacitor after the diode would simply feed backwards through the diode on the other half of the AC cycle, which would probably result in a busted diode, and some smoke. Ilikefood (talk) 20:58, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Home three phase supply

The article Distribution board seems to say that USA houses have 3 phase supply (in the UK only 2 single phase) Do other countries get 3 phase supply in the home?83.100.250.79 (talk) 15:24, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

With rare exceptions, US homes have a single-phase 220VAC supply. The distribution panel provides 110VAC branch circuits for the typical sockets all over the house, and 220VAC branch circuits for the major appliances, which use physically different types of sockets. The 220VAC is provided on two poles that are 180 degrees out of phase with each other: each varies by 110VAC with respect to "neutral". The 110VAC branches each use one pole and neutral. The 220VAC branches use both poles and do not use neutral (sort of.) The distribution panel is constructed so that you can add a two 110VAC breakers in adjacent slots, or add a single 220VAC breaker in two slots. Industries and large buildings generally have a 3-phase distribution panel. These panels can still supply single-phase 110VAC and 220VAC branch circuits, but they can also supply 208VAC three-phase circuits. -Arch dude (talk) 20:14, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

If there is a neutral, and two lives +110, and -110 I assume - isn't that not single phase (two phase? was that a typo?) (though not true 120degree three phase)

So domestic houses don't have true 3 phase 120V (that's the one with the 208V 'spiker'?)

So the +120,neutral,-120 (@180degrees) are what comes into a domestic house - that's just three taps from a single winding of a transformer - with neutral being tapped inbetween the two 120's?

So three power wires enter a US house?

Are all these things I've said above correct? (or have I missed it)83.100.250.79 (talk) 20:28, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

No. First, there are only two "live" wires, not three. the thirs wire is grounded at the pole and at the house. When the wires are overhead instead of underground, you see a bare steel cable with two insulated wires wrapped around it. The bare cable servers as ground/neutral and is also the weight-bearing part. The two power wires are not plus and minus: they are both 110VAC, so each of them varies from +110 to -110 sixty times per second with respect to neutral. Since they are 180 degrees out of phase, one of them varies from +220 to -220 with respect to the other one. -Arch dude (talk) 00:16, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

The U.S. uses two systems; a Split-phase electric power system for residential customers, featuring the three wires you describe (two "hot" wires 180deg out of phase @120V and a midpoint neutral wire) and true Three-phase electric power in a "Delta" configuration which features the same three wires as the split-phase system along with the fourth "208V" high leg on a 4th wire. The 4th leg is out of phase midway between the other two legs to provide 240V with either of them. The advantage of this system is that it can be used to supply both residential (using only 3 of the wires, skipping the 208 V supply) and heavy industrial (using all 4 wires) applications. There are also apparently evenly distributed 3-phase systems that feature 4 wires, 3 120V wires which are 120deg out of phase and a neutral wire. I don't feel like working out the trigonometry right now, but this will produce considerably less than 240V when two "hot" wires are used, rather than if you used the 2x120 + 208 system. --Jayron32 23:33, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The three-phase system Jayron is talking about is described at High leg delta. -- 128.104.112.102 (talk) 00:06, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

(ec) Basically right. Our article calls the US -110/+110 V system split phase (as distinct from two phase). On most of the electric poles at the residential street level in the US, there are three live conductors, distributing three phase power. Still out in the street, one of those phases is tapped to a transformer (usually one per block or so) to create the 110/220V split phase. The +110/-110 conductors (with the neutral) are run to each house on the block to run the 110V circuits and a few 220V circuits (water heater, clothes dryer, etc.) Often to save on the cost of copper, transformers closest to the substation will be fed from one phase, which gets dropped from the poles, the middle transformers take from the next phase, and the most distant electrical poles only have a single remaining live conductor. This is all for residential usage. The large commercial and industrial buildings I've seen take the three phase in directly (to run their heavy-duty motors/pumps/air conditioners/etc.). -- 128.104.112.102 (talk) 23:54, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The technical term for what's available in the US is Split-phase electric power. --Carnildo (talk) 23:35, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

ok thanks - I understand the difference between 2 phase and split phase now.83.100.250.79 (talk) 09:50, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Resolved

Eating after a Work out

Hi, How long should i Wait to Eat after doing Cardio exercise? Thanks 82.194.62.200 (talk) 16:21, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

It depends on how hard you work out, what you eat, and how sensitive your stomach is. Most people can handle a granola bar right away even after running a couple of miles at top speed. You might want to give your metabolism an hour to settle down before eating a steak, though. Looie496 (talk) 16:36, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

This isn't completely related but is it true that food goes down the wrong intestine if you exercise after eating? Spiderone (talk) 16:39, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

No. What does "the wrong intestine" mean, anyway? Aaadddaaammm (talk) 16:45, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Aren't your intestines in series? Anyway, I think for cardio exercise varies from person to person and is at least partly a matter of preference. On long distance runs and triathlons and such, people quite often eat during the race, but some find it harder to digest than others. I've never heard of a time limit after, unlike with weight lifting when it's commonly suggested to eat protein within an hour of finishing, when muscles are supposedly more open to absorbing it. TastyCakes (talk) 16:47, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

If you put it into your mouth and swallow it, it should go through the small intestine first (there are some who have had their small intestine removed, but it is not standard). Googlemeister (talk) 16:49, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I generally can't run less than an hour or two after eating, and don't feel much like eating after running. But that could just be me; I think (as above contributors have noted) that it varies from person to person. My average run is 4-7 miles (6.4-11.2 km-ish), if that helps. Awickert (talk) 20:27, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

How do you digest food without a small intestine? As you sure you don't mean they have part of their small intestine removed? --Tango (talk) 20:47, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Can't remember what it's called, but there's a type of surgery occasionally performed whereby the small intestine is removed; if I remember rightly, the patient has to carry around some sort of bag (which is attached to the digestive system) that contains some sort of mechanism to digest the food. Ideas, anyone, on what this is called? Nyttend (talk) 02:15, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Colostomy_bag?12.34.246.72 (talk) 19:15, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Thick eyebrows?

On my Chinese side there are a few people with thick eyebrows. I was wondering, is this a Mediterranean thing or a Chinese thing? I say this because I believe there might be Portuguese ancestry via Macau on my Chinese side. Spiderone (talk) 16:50, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

In general, I would expect the Portuguese to have thicker eyebrows than the Chinese. StuRat (talk) 22:29, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Chinese people are still pretty capable of having thick bushy eyebrows. Take Zhang Fei, for example. bibliomaniac15 03:59, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Do we reliably know the thickness of the eyebrows of a man who died in 221 AD ? StuRat (talk) 09:30, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Why is a thunderstorm blue?

I thought I was seeing blue sky but soon realized that was actually a thunderstorm. Normally they are darker, but still blue.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 16:52, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Maybe for the same reason the sky is blue. Mac Davis (talk) 17:01, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Like this one perhaps?

I doubt it. The sky is blue because it's scattering light according to Raleigh scattering - but that sort of scatter only applies to things much smaller than a water droplet. If the storm is scattering light at all, it'll be due to Mie scattering - which is responsible for the look of fog and thin clouds. But for thick clouds like thunderstorms, there is essentially no light transmitted through the cloud - so it's all about reflected light - not scattered light. I presume that the remainder of the sky was so intensely blue that the blue light from the sky was being reflected by the storm cloud. That would require that the sun was somehow not visible (like it had just set - or was behind another cloud or something). Dark-ish blue clouds are often visible when the sun is hidden like that (see photo at right for example). SteveBaker (talk) 18:06, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

The cloud looked like the blue part in that photo.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:23, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

"That's Rayleigh!"

• Raleigh scattering - 472,000 ghits
• Rayleigh scattering - 417,000 ghits

The mob have spoken, learn to live with it. SteveBaker (talk) 02:20, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Nice try, but you're counting all the people discussing scattering grandma's ashes in Raleigh, North Carolina. With quotes it's:

• "Raleigh scattering" - 14,000 ghits
• "Rayleigh scattering" - 417,000 ghits

--Sean 12:24, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

So you're saying that scattering grandma's ashes isn't what makes stormclouds look blue?! SteveBaker (talk) 20:57, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Because thick clouds in general tend to appear blue;

see ^[2] , especially Figure 5. For some reason we just don't tend to notice it. 69.140.12.180 (talk) 03:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)Nightvid

Voltage between outlet and ground

I have one of those power adapters that transform 120 V AC to a number of DC voltages (I can choose which voltage I want). When I measure the AC voltage between one of the terminals and a cold water pipe, I got 4 volts yesterday and 2 volts today. Why is the voltage not 0? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.237.234.104 (talk) 18:45, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

You are probably measuring the neutral wire versus the cold water pipe. The neutral wire is the wire at zero volts in reference to the "hot" wire, however this may be at a slightly different voltage than say, the water pipe. The water pipe should be at the same voltage as the "third" plug on your three pronged outlet, which is defined as "ground". Ideally ground and neutral should be at the same voltage, but for various reasons may be slightly different. --Jayron32 23:18, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I was measuring the voltage between the direct-current output terminals of one of these adapters (but with adjustable output voltage):

http://bluewatersecurityprofessionals.com/Magellan_Roadmate_110V_Power_Adapter.jpg

and the cold water pipe. Both terminals, not just one of them, are at an AC voltage of 2 volts with respect to the water pipe. Interestingly, the voltage decreases very slightly as the output voltage of the adapter is increased. Out of curiosity, I also measured the voltage between the neutral and ground wires. The difference was tiny, about 0.4 volts. --99.237.234.104 (talk) 01:32, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

The OP is probably using a sensitive (high resistance) voltmeter which responds to leakage current through the adaptor. That can be proven by connecting a resistor of, say, 100 ohms across the voltmeter terminals: the indicated voltage would fall to zero. In contrast the voltage difference between neutral and ground, though small, has a very low resistance source and the 100 ohm resistor will not change the indicated voltage. In other words, the adaptor leakage is a constant-current source and the neutral-ground difference is a constant-voltage source. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 03:15, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I tried both a 5 kilo-ohm resistor and a short circuit, but the first had no effect at all (even though my multimeter's resistance is 1.1 mega-ohms when measuring voltage) and the second decreased the voltage by only 0.1 volts. This multimeter is quite enigmatic.

Another mystery: when I touched the two leads of the multimeter, one with each hand, it registered about 0.03 volts. This was well above the multimeter's detection limit of 0.001 volts. I switched the leads so that each lead was now touching the other hand; same reading, and not the expected -0.03 volts. I oriented the leads in different directions; same reading. Whenever I took my hand off, the voltage reading instantly dropped to 0. I'm starting to wonder whether anything is wrong with my multimeter. --99.237.234.104 (talk) 12:14, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

(I hope the OP can find a 100 ohm resistor.) A high resistance voltmeter with long test leads is susceptible to stray mains radiation so biological potentials can be measured reliably only inside a Faraday cage or outdoors far from any cables. When you short circuit the test leads they make an inductive loop that can pick up the few millivolts you are seeing. FWIW if your hands really deliver 0.03V you can hold hands in a chain of about 100 friends and together make a LED shine brightly. Useful to know. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 21:31, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Look at the AC plug on your adaptor. Note that you can plug it in either way. The adaptor does not know and does not care which of the two prongs is live and which is neutral. The adaptor acts as an isolation transformer. The adaptor's outputs are not referenced to the AC neutral, but to each other. You should expect the cold water pipe's voltage to be about half way between the "ground" output and the "+DC" output, the exact voltage will depend on accidental very high resistence paths inside the adaptor and will be different depending on which way the plug is plugged in. If you now short the DC ground output to the cold water pipe, the groud voltage will equal the water pipe voltage and the +DC will be as expected. You can get teh same effect with a resistor instead of a short, as long as the resistor is considerably smaller than the (very high) accidental internal resistance path in the adaptor. -Arch dude (talk) 13:40, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Supersymmetry and Noether's theorem

I recently saw Steven Weinberg talking about symmetry and physics[3]. One theme in the talk was the duality between symmetries and conservation laws as shown by Noether's theorem. He then went on to talk about Supersymmetry and various challenges it poses. The thought occurred to me is there a conservation law which corresponds to supersymmetry? --Salix (talk): 19:36, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Supercharge. Dauto (talk) 04:21, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Nuclear power advances and the environment

How much less environmental impact per megawatt do modern nuclear power plants have compared to older ones? NeonMerlin 19:37, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Basically unchanged, I'd think. Barring Chernobyl-type incidents (even the Three Mile Island accident is credited with only one or two probable cancer deaths), nuclear power plants themselves don't really produce an environmental impact by operating. I'd expect the potential impact of used fuel doesn't vary much, either. — Lomn 19:58, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I think that the bigger issue is finding appropriate geologically-inactive and politically-tolerable places to put the nuclear waste. I don't know if this portion has improved at all or not. Awickert (talk) 20:23, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

There is usually Thermal pollution. APL (talk) 20:40, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

That's true; but probably, newer power plants release cooler water, thanks to the now-mandatory enormous cooling towers which have become the iconic symbols of nuclear power plants. It's hard to quantify "environmental impact per megawatt" (it's hard to quantify environmental impact in general). But since modern plants generally can produce more power than older ones, with effectively the same "environmental footprint", it's probably fair to say that there is less impact per megawatt. A more precise question, for example, might ask if modern plants have less thermal pollution per megawatt, which can be easily defined and numerically compared to older plants. Nimur (talk) 21:29, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Why are they throwing away valuable energy into the air? They better be sucking every last drop of heat out of that water Matrioshka-style and turning it into useful energy til the outlet's 1 degree above ambient. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:57, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't know, but I assume it has to be cost effectivness. At some point the cost of increasing efficiency will exceed the cost of the uranium it would save. APL (talk) 23:59, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Indeed. If it were efficient to do that, they would. It's an obvious thing and nuclear engineers are a bright bunch. Using the excess hot water to heat nearby homes is quite good, I know some power plants (I think nuclear, although it might be fossil fuels, the principle is the same) do that. --Tango (talk) 00:04, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Especially for the dollars of electricity they can liberate per kg, the fuel itself ain't expensive. The stuff they have to build to use it is expensive. They can't put windmill(s) near the top or throughout the tower (or do they do that that already)? Compared to the cost of the core, tower(s), scontainment bldg., or many safety systems can that really cost that much? They could slowly save money for the next who knows how many years, or sell the extra electric directly. Can't their habitable areas be inside the plumbing for non-radioactive coolant(s) (because of hollow walls) and they would turn a mixing valve to the non-heating pipeline when it's not cold outdoors? There's got to be something. The cost of extra features is sunk but the revenue from the 21st century's energy prices could always rise. It's sweltering in here, I thought I told Homer Simpson to turn the tertiary light-water nonemergency coolant valve two-and-a-half knobs and a smidge to the right after the warm front passed Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:27, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

It's not just a matter of economics. Per second law of thermodynamics, the maximum possible efficiency is given by (T2 -T1)/T2 * 100% which means that at least T1/T2 * 100% of the energy must be wasted as heat. Where T1 is the environment temperature and T2 is the temperature inside the reactor (both measured in Kelvins). Dauto (talk) 04:34, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

So for example if the reactor core temperature is 800 K (which is actually quite a bit higher than that in most PWR-type nuclear reactors) and the outside temperature is 300 K (as on a warm summer day), the maximum efficiency of the reactor would be no more than 62.5 %, and you can't get more energy than that out of the nuclear fuel no matter how you try. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 04:55, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

That's right. Dauto (talk) 05:00, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, yah, and a car engine should work better if nonessential surfaces touched Plutonian air.. I don't see why thermodynamics would prevent putting turbines inside venturis everywhere in the lower cooling loops. Maybe it could even be rational to load the last loop up with so much intermittant heat/pressure extractor that pressure would build up and release like a truck exhaust. Yes, I know there's a point to stop, eventually heat will even conduct out the pipes faster than the inlet can build it up. A few degrees is still enough to power a village or small town. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 08:24, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

See heat engine#efficiency. The second law of thermodynamics limits the efficiency to a maximum as I described above. There is always going to be a sizable fraction of heat wasted (That means it cannot be transformed into usable work, but it could be used for other things such as heat near by houses during winter)I don't see what putonian air's got to do with anuthing. Dauto (talk) 14:31, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Cause the heat sink on Pluto is colder. Never mind. We seem to disagree on what we call waste heat. Consider a hypothetical heat engine that would take a 310K input and have 302K output on a 300K day, producing electricity equivalent to sucking 7K of the heat out, I would call that very efficient, and producing almost no waste heat, while you would call that very inefficient, and producing loads of waste heat. Comparing it with another engine turning 16K inflow into 8K outflow making 4K's worth electric in 4K ambient we would disagree which is more effiecient and which makes less waste heat. (all other things being equal) For engine purposes I don't even count the heat below the ambient as even existing to think about. That's like a hydroelectric turbine and what's below it's potential energy drop. But the lower gravity gradient is still there.. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:58, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

You're confusing heat (which is what I was talking about) with temperature and internal energy. Efficiency is defined here by the fraction of the energy provided by burning the fuel that eventually gets transformed into useful work. It's got nothing to do with the internal energy that you say should not be taken into consideration just as potential energy below the drop in a hydroelectric doesn't get counted. You are right that this internal energy shouldn't be counted for the definition of efficiency. Guess what, it is not counted so you don't really have a point here. Dauto (talk) 04:29, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

You're right. I have no point. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:59, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

The important point is the KIND of pollution they generate. The nuclear waste containment issue is not by any means beyond our technical ability to fix. It simply requires the political will to pick some nasty corner of the planet to dump all that stuff. The contrast is with CO2 pollution which is essentially impossible to fix...we have zero effective techniques to deal with it and we're pretty much out of ideas. If we put as much research effort into containing and dealing with nuclear waste as we put into trying to make "clean coal" work (which is a total joke) - we'd have the problem nailed by now. The problem is that whatever place you choose, a case can be made for not putting the waste there...but no matter how poorly you choose, the worst case scenario is that some small part of the planet gets trashed. That's better than what we're doing right now - which is to trash the ENTIRE planet. Even in the worst case scenario (Chernobyl) - there were 56 direct deaths and perhaps a few thousand people who'll die younger than they should. Compare that to a big tsunami or an earthquake - it's not that big a deal. a 40x40mile region is more or less uninhabitable - but it's turned into a wildlife haven with all manner of rare and endangered species thriving there...and (let's face it), it would be a REALLY good place to dump nuclear waste. Compare it to (for example) the Aberfan disaster in which a heap of tailings from a coal mine slipped, engulfed a school and killed 120 school kids - or the Val di Stava Dam collapse when a 'tailings' dam broke and killed 250 people. The 4000 miners who go to an early grave every year in the US due to black lung disease is very comparable to the number who contracted cancer as a result of Chernobyl. We could have a Chernobyl-scale accident every year and still produce less death, disease and devastation than the coal industry. SteveBaker (talk) 23:02, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Why didn't anyone else think of that? We should leave our nuclear waste in Chernobyl! Better yet, breed it first (with sufficient safeguards to avoid hurting homeland security), then dump that waste. The less tons of nuclear waste being transported intercontinentally the better. Less opportunity for an accident. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:56, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Note : While Chernobyl is home to some rare wildlife that is thriving, a lot of other wildlife does poorly there. APL (talk) 03:56, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Why hasn't anyone brought up nuclear reprocessing yet? Done properly, it could reduce the amount of nuclear waste by as much as 88% while simultaneously increasing the amount of energy we could extract from the same amount of uranium by several times. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 04:30, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Because a) reprocessing produces plutonium, which, being chemically different from uranium, is very easy to enrich to weapon grade material and b) reprocessing also has non-trivial contamination issues. But the major point is a) - any solution that you would not trust to run in Nigeria, or Iran, or Venezuela, is not going to do much good for the envirjonment - it just means that oil will be burned elsewhere. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:07, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

So what? If we meet all of OUR electricity demand with nuclear power, that would STILL make for a sizable decrease in pollution of OUR air and water (it would eliminate mercury pollution near our coal-fired electrical powerplants, for instance). As for the Iranians and the Venezuelans burning oil, well, why would that be our concern? I mean, (1) their energy production is MUCH lower than ours anyway, so less pollution will be generated in absolute terms, and (2) if THEY suffer from smog on a regional level, why would that be an issue for the US, eh? 98.234.126.251 (talk) 22:20, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Who is WE? First, promoting an energy economy that only (maybe) works for developed, stable, friendly nations, and tell the rest of the world to run on dried camel dung is politically infeasible and morally bankrupt. Secondly, many of our major environmental concerns are global in scope, and many of the ones that are local are also treatable locally (in your example with decent scrubbers). But thirdly, you imply a wrong dichotomy. It's not clean nuclear vs. dirty coal, it's sustainable, clean, renewable vs. dangerous, dirty, expensive, and resource-limited. Nuclear has some advantages, especially in the short term, but is not sustainable without proliferation, and it's not now and never has been economically competitive if all costs are internalized. R&D has been massively subsidized, risks not ensured on the free market, and accruals for nuclear waste disposal are entirely insufficient. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:04, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

The US, India and China are the three biggest CO2 producers - with Russia and Europe (as a whole) contributing also. All of those places could usefully sustain nuclear power stations - all of them are already nuclear weapon owners and all four are pretty stable governmentally - so we don't have to worry too much about proliferation issues. We don't need the dubious, unstable countries of the world to use nuclear. They can either buy electricity produced by their neighbours, switch to wind/solar/etc - or even, just go on polluting. They aren't a big enough part of the problem here. Nuclear power probably isn't sustainable because natural uranium isn't a renewable resource. However, it is the one, single, sure-fired way to solve the CO2 problem. A massive program for constructing modern, relatively safe reactors could dramatically ramp up the amount of electrical power produced - and kill the use of coal and gas. Really cheap, (relatively) clean electricity allows us to switch transportation fleets over to electric power and thereby cut the use of oil to a minimum. That would give us the breathing space we so desperately need to figure out how to cut back our energy needs and to get hydroelectric/tidal/wind/wave/solar/biofuel/geothermal types of power sources up and running. The trouble is that nuclear power has fallen so far out of favor and piled up such a weight of legislation, NIMBY, and general public distrust that it's going to take major political willpower to make it happen. Also, pretty much everyone who ever designed or oversaw the construction of a working nuclear power plant is now in retirement! (Outside of France, where - for some wierd reason - nuclear power never got really unpopular.) Nuclear power's problems are indeed fairly severe - but we are at the point where drastic solutions are needed - and there are no really pleasant solutions left. Nuclear is probably the least unpleasant at this juncture. SteveBaker (talk) 20:49, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Stephan Shultz, if you wanna have any credibility in energy-related discussions, you should know that the so-called "renewable energy" is a scam that was intended for no other purpose than to make some folks a lot of money (at public expense) without doing anything to meet our energy needs! Just look at most mainstream energy studies, they all agree that "renewable energy" cannot meet more than a tiny fraction of our energy demand (25% at the VERY MOST)! To advocate that we should change to using "renewable energy" exclusively is tantamount to advocating that we should GIVE UP OUR AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE AND GO BACK TO A PRE-INDUSTRIAL, LATE 18TH CENTURY EXISTENCE -- IF WE DO THAT, ELECTRICITY WILL BECOME SO EXPENSIVE THAT MOST OF OUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO DO WITHOUT! That said, the ONLY non-fossil-fuel-based energy source that can meet (ALMOST) ALL our energy demand is nuclear energy ("almost" because it's not practical for transportation, for reasons that have nothing to do with availability). And also, according to Scientific American, nuclear energy IS economically competitive with natural gas when you take economies of scale into account -- and now that SAFE, ECONOMICAL "fourth-generation" nuclear reactors are on the verge of commercialization, we can very well expect nuclear energy to become competitive with coal as well. ("Renewable energy", on the other hand, is MUCH more expensive per kilowatt than either coal or nuclear -- even in terms of production costs ALONE, and without taking into account the intrinsic supply limitations.)

And IMHO, if all the third-world nations end up running on dried camel dung, well, WHY WOULD WE GIVE A DAM? Why is THEIR welfare any of OUR concern, anyway? We should be concerned about meeting OUR energy needs, and let those people figure out how to meet THEIR energy needs on their own. Wasting OUR resources on solving THEIR problems (and getting NOTHING from them in return for our troubles except hatred, envy, and the occasional car bomb) will get us NOWHERE.

Furthermore, your claim that clean energy would "do no good unless we can get everyone to use it because the oil will just get burned somewhere else" is ABSOLUTELY COUNTERFACTUAL and doesn't even make ANY LOGICAL SENSE -- even if only the developed, stable, civilized nations like the US, Europe and China change from mainly coal to mainly nuclear power, that would STILL make a BIG dent in the amount of pollution generated worldwide (as SteveBaker correctly pointed out in the post above). But from someone who's too ignorant in economics and energy policy to even understand how a $150 per barrel carbon tax can hurt our economy, well, what sort of logic can we expect?

In short, the statements you made in your post are completely inaccurate, counterfactual, illogical, anti-American, and probably politically motivated in the first place. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 23:24, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Seems like nuclear is the only way. We have too little time left to act. Someone should make a commercial a la T. Boone Pickens "Oil is not the answer. Some sort of inertial, laser; magnetic thermonuclear or other fusion is the answer. Nuclear power plants is the bridge."</endhumor>

That's right, we gotta change our electricity production from fossil fuels to nuclear power, and get started today. I'm not too sure about fusion power, though -- so far, nobody ever achieved a fusion reaction that lasted more than thirty seconds or so, or produced more energy than was used to initiate and sustain it in the first place. Perhaps that might change eventually, but so far it don't look like it's gonna happen anytime soon. (BTW, why don't you sign your posts?) 98.234.126.251 (talk) 08:57, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

My bad, that was me. Fusion is very weak. The nuclei make tremendous energy (for a particle) when they fuse, but it is so hard and rare for them to join because nuclei don't like to be near each other. Despite, what 10-15 million K, plasma densities many times that of water and billions of psi the core of the Sun still makes only 35 watts per cubic meter. That's 20 times weaker than the human body! Yet, supergiant stars produce 1,000,000 sunpower! from only 1 and 1/2 orders of magnitude higher temperature and 100 times the mass. An order or magnitude cooler and lighter and it becomes a millisunpower or even a microsunpower, till fusion finally stops. The scientists seem to recognize this by making their reactions much hotter than the core of the Sun, but so thin, the heat density is more like coffee, and like you said, it's still not enough. Those things are so expensive already but the only solution seems to be.. MAKE IT HOTTER! (And/or denser! And/or bigger!) Develop more powerful lasers? Larger tokamaks? Who knows, it might be ~ a century until most energy is made by fusion power. Maybe it will never be figured out. One thing's for sure, we were/are being led astry by clean coal/drill baby drill/corn/natural gas cars/slightly smaller large vehicles.. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:34, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Well said, Sagittarian Milky Way. Yeah, by some estimates, it'll be more than 50 years before a sustained, controlled fusion reaction is even experimentally demonstrated, let alone commercialized. That said, fission power is the next best thing for the production of electricity, and it will certainly be a major part of our energy policy for the 21st century. I disagree with you about clean coal, though -- coal-to-liquids is certanly useful for transportation (to replace foreign oil and thus achieve energy independence), and can be coupled if necessary with carbon sequestration to alleviate global warming concerns. (Nuclear power is not practical for transportation, for understandable reasons.) So, what I believe we should be trying to achieve is to use nuclear power wherever possible (i.e. to generate all of our electricity), and use coal-to-liquids (possibly with CO2 sequestration) where liquid fuels are required (i.e. for transportation). Corn ethanol (and biofuels in general) won't be economical and won't fulfill our demand for liquid fuels to any extent (and foreign oil promotes terrorism and will run out soon anyway), so we'll need coal-to-liquids to take care of that. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 00:04, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Seems bass-ackwards (and barely above sweeping it under the rug) to me. What about running ships and planes with natural gas? We've got plenty of gas. Since there's almost 4 hydrogens for every carbon, it's just about the closest thing to burning not-carbon as is there is commonly on this Earth. And electric cars? Build 1 or more maglevs on very populated corridors as a fast, convenient alternative for distances that are both short for a plane trip and long for a car trip? Possibly it's even be worth the extra transmission losses building nuclear power plants far away from people just so they can even get built without everyone complaining. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 06:07, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, we got plenty of natural gas, but it's in high demand as it is, so it's still much more scarce than coal. Besides, there might also be safety concerns with natural gas that there aren't with liquid fuels (like, for instance, what if some air finds its way into the fuel tanks). Electric cars might be efficient and non-polluting, but the problem is, right now they have nowhere like the performance, range or payload that they need in order to truly replace gasoline-powered cars. Maybe that could change in the near future, but until then, they'll remain on the margin. (And besides, electric 18-wheeler big rigs are nowhere on the horizon right now.) Maglevs might be a good option for distances of 100-500 miles, but high-speed trains are better -- almost as fast, but a lot easier to build. As for building nuclear plants far away from people: great idea, but unfortunately you weren't the first to think of it. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 08:03, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

But isn't alot of the demand for heating and electricity? If we get people to switch to nuclear-fired electric heating and loghts we might not need alot of the gas we use now. Once we do that, would the shortage really be that bad, considering we have enough gas for almost/about a century right now?

That looks scary. The tanks are under pressure, they must have to be ruggedized and tough. Our article on liquefied natural gas shows that LNG ships have traveled over a hundred million miles and 35 years without a single man lost or accident on board. Only 3 explosions have occured in total, the earliest in 1944. What about the 1996 fuel tank explosion/airliner destruction? Flour silos explode too. I hope we would do this with the utmost of safety precautions. <h>Make them bulletproof and put DragonSkin armor on them, lol.</endhumor>

Maybe carbon could be scrubbed from ships?

Read the Tesla Roadster article, then the Tesla Model S article, then Tesla BlueStar. If you read them in order, I bet it will completely change your opinions on electric cars.

You're right, HSR is better, maybe I was just jealous of the Chinese. I read that the fares might never pay it back. But if it helps their national pride, so be it..

No, I'm not the first person to think of it, but why should I be? They still didn't listen to them as the nuclear plant I know is surrounded by about 10 thousand suburban residents within a mile, some of them right across a street from the fence. Doesn't Augusta, GA have something military nuclear across a river from it? I don't know about other states, but maybe some did isolate them out there. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:02, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

"If we get people to switch to nuclear-fired electric heating and loghts we might not need alot of the gas we use now." -- You got a point there, Sagittatian: if we do that, then natural gas might become economically feasible for transportation. Unfortunately, nobody has actually crunched the numbers on that yet (to the best of my knowledge), and I can't crunch the numbers myself because I'm not an economist, but a petroleum chemist.

"Maybe carbon could be scrubbed from ships?" -- Maybe, and then again, maybe not. I really don't know if anyone's done any research on that yet.

"Read the Tesla Roadster article, then the Tesla Model S article, then Tesla BlueStar. If you read them in order, I bet it will completely change your opinions on electric cars." -- I'm perfectly familiar with Tesla electric cars: they got good performance all right, but they still got only about a 150-200 mile range, compared to 400+ miles for your typical gasoline-powered car (quite aside from the fact that they're way too expensive for most people). 98.234.126.251 (talk) 23:54, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

(antiindent) The point was, the profit from the $110K 2008-2010 cars will be used to fund the $50K 2011 cars (they're already making profit), whose profit will be used to fund the $20-30K 2012 cars. Did 1993 computers drop in price this fast? There is virtually no maintainance, you get a $6K tax refund, and it costs $10 to $30 per 1,000 miles to "fill up the tank". $1250 in "gas money" a decade if your utility gives you a discount for electricity at night. The idea of the gas station being able to swap your drawn battery with a full one in 5 minutes is already in the works. There isn't even a radiator, the 150 lb motor is so noninefficient it can be air-cooled. Electric cars seem more far along than all the other technologies we mentioned so far, which are acheingly long. And you car drivers are so spoiled. Only 240 miles range, oh boohoo. You know what?, I never rode in a passenger car till I was almost 10 and I was wondering why it TOOK SO LONG! We did have to refuel, finally. If we can't even make this tiny sacrifice for our country of having to go to the gas station a little more often and/or cutting it a little closer than what can we do? It's actually 244 miles. Closer than 244 miles of me is Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Manhattan, Gettysburg, my state capital, Erie Canal, Appalachians, Atlantic City, where all your credit card bills go, Canada (almost), a subway that runs over the ocean, and a slave port (the one in Roots). And random strange metropolitan areas. All within 1 fillup. Battery-tech will slowly improve, why should there be any laws of physics limiting batteries range compared to gas? It's all chemical energy. Exotic lower mass compounds like alcohol, nitromethane are even less energy dense, but their octane number is like 116, or 136 or something, so they're actually more powerful than gasoline, just because their able to be squeezed more w/o knocking, which is why they're used in drag racing, so gasoline is not near the limits for chemical energy density or gas tank range either. Before when they were less fuel efficient they only went 300 miles. Model S will be a 5.7s 0-60 high-end sedan, the BlueStar will be a sedan. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:18, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Tesla cars are still much too expensive for most people, which is why they're not all that popular. I don't really have anything against electric cars per se (well, I won't when they get the same performance for the same price as gasoline cars), but right now plug-in hybrid cars are a much better choice than all-electric. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 03:01, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

The plug-in hybrid isn't available yet, either. (though very soon) An electric car almost as good as the Chevy Volt will be available only two years later (Tesla BlueStar) for a similar price (though still a little bit expensive). As of right now, there is no car that a normal human being can buy that can be plugged into anything. But prices will go down so fast it's like almost not the future the day when regular people will be able to afford one because the powers of mass production will be able to lower the costs more. Electric motors are very simple compared to gasoline engines, if enough people buy them they should even get cheaper than regular cars. Oh, and see a Killacycle video on Youtube, it's cool. It reaches 168 mph in 1/4 mile. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:15, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Good, let's hope that this happens soon. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 04:33, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Let's hope so. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:42, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

• so-called "renewable energy" is a scam that was intended for no other purpose than to make some folks a lot of money (at public expense) without doing anything to meet our energy needs! - No, from Renewable energy: "In 2006, about 18% of global final energy consumption came from renewables," - and wind power is growing 30% per year. Hence it does have purpose - it produces energy and cuts down reliance on non-renewable sources.
• Just look at most mainstream energy studies, they all agree that "renewable energy" cannot meet more than a tiny fraction of our energy demand (25% at the VERY MOST)! - It's certainly going to be difficult-to-impossible for renewables to completely fill the gap. However, with energy savings and judicious use of nuclear - we could maybe cut the use of CO2-producing energy production to the degree necessary to save the planet...maybe.
• To advocate that we should change to using "renewable energy" exclusively is tantamount to advocating that we should GIVE UP OUR AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE AND GO BACK TO A PRE-INDUSTRIAL, LATE 18TH CENTURY EXISTENCE -- IF WE DO THAT, ELECTRICITY WILL BECOME SO EXPENSIVE THAT MOST OF OUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO DO WITHOUT! - Well, not everyone is an American - and some believe that Americans will indeed have to give up at least some of their energy wasting ways. I don't think that going back to pre-industrial existance is possible with the scale of population we have now - but something has to change or we will have a planet we can't live on anymore. But very few people expect to be able to switch to 100% renewable energy production anytime soon. The goal is to cut it drastically to give ourselves time to come up with a better answer. Right now, it's a matter of mid-term survival.
• That said, the ONLY non-fossil-fuel-based energy source that can meet (ALMOST) ALL our energy demand is nuclear energy ("almost" because it's not practical for transportation, for reasons that have nothing to do with availability). - That's certainly nonsense. If we switch to electric cars & trucks (probably via plug-in hybrids) - we can indeed run our cars from nuclear-produced electricity. This is perhaps the easiest to imagine part of the puzzle.
• And also, according to Scientific American, nuclear energy IS economically competitive with natural gas when you take economies of scale into account -- and now that SAFE, ECONOMICAL "fourth-generation" nuclear reactors are on the verge of commercialization, we can very well expect nuclear energy to become competitive with coal as well. - Nuclear reactors might be technically ready for commercialization - but the current legislative barriers (in the US at least), together with the NIMBY problem, makes it VERY tough to get these things onto the generation grid quickly.
• ("Renewable energy", on the other hand, is MUCH more expensive per kilowatt than either coal or nuclear -- even in terms of production costs ALONE, and without taking into account the intrinsic supply limitations.) - That's only true if you let coal pollute the world "for free". If we charged the coal power plants with the cost of cleaning up the CO2 they produce - they'd be bankrupt overnight. Coal is only cheap compared to renewables when the 'value' of destroying the planet is $0. Nuclear might also suffer the same problem - but as I said above, the cost of dealing with nuclear waste is mostly the political decision to do it. It's not inherently costly. Anyway - when you count the FULL costs, renewables win every time. That's why we need some kind of carbon tax - to represent the costs to the entire planet fairly.
• And IMHO, if all the third-world nations end up running on dried camel dung, well, WHY WOULD WE GIVE A DAM? Why is THEIR welfare any of OUR concern, anyway? - Because we have to live on the same planet as them. If China and India don't do something just as dramatic as is advocated for the USA and Europe (although Europe is WAY ahead on this) - since we're all living on the exact same planet, we all get our cities flooded - we all get bizarre weather patterns - we all lose our biodiversity. You can't put up big walls around your particular corner of the planet and say "We're alright!" - that's just stupidly naive.
• We should be concerned about meeting OUR energy needs, and let those people figure out how to meet THEIR energy needs on their own. Wasting OUR resources on solving THEIR problems (and getting NOTHING from them in return for our troubles except hatred, envy, and the occasional car bomb) will get us NOWHERE. - See above.
• Furthermore, your claim that clean energy would "do no good unless we can get everyone to use it because the oil will just get burned somewhere else" is ABSOLUTELY COUNTERFACTUAL and doesn't even make ANY LOGICAL SENSE -- even if only the developed, stable, civilized nations like the US, Europe and China change from mainly coal to mainly nuclear power, that would STILL make a BIG dent in the amount of pollution generated worldwide (as SteveBaker correctly pointed out in the post above). - It's a matter of degree. If the big three polluters (US, India, China) were to make (say) an 80% cut in their CO2 emissions - then maybe we'd have bought enough time to gradually bring the rest of the world into the fold and have a relatively 'soft-landing'. However, if the big three only make a 20% cut - then we need everyone else to join in too. What's actually happening is that everyone is mostly talking about making a zero percent cut - fighting to avoid increasing out output anywhere higher than it is now. That's nowhere near enough!
• But from someone who's too ignorant in economics and energy policy to even understand how a $150 per barrel carbon tax can hurt our economy, well, what sort of logic can we expect? - This isn't only about economics. Without a carbon tax, the CO2 levels will continue to rise, global temperatures will rise, the ocean levels will rise and the three biggest cities in the USA will be under 20 meters of ocean. Since almost all of our productive farmland is below 20meters above sea level, food supplies in the US will become exceedingly scarce. The dent this will make in our economy will make a $150 per barrel carbon tax look like quite a good deal. The trick for the US is to become a major supplier of zero-CO2 power generation systems to the world. The US needs to turn those empty car factories into windmill plants - or nuclear power plant component makers - or electric car factories. To leverage the much-touted skills at science and technology to become world leaders in this technology. As the realisation that we really are in deep-doo-doo finally settles into the brains of people like yourself (and the Chinese and Indians) - this technology will be in high demand - and the US needs to be there ready to push the stuff and make a killing. However, that requires brains and a 'buy-in' to the problem...and sadly people like the person I'm replying to here are major roadblocks to doing that.
• In short, the statements you made in your post are completely inaccurate, counterfactual, illogical, anti-American, and probably politically motivated in the first place. - Um...actually...judging to my responses above, I think those remarks are REALLY SERIOUSLY misdirected.

SteveBaker (talk) 01:28, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) One additional issue I didn't think about was contamination of groundwater due to in situ uranium mining, in which chemicals are pumped into the ground to leech uranium out of the ground. The plus of the technique is that there is no big hole; the minus is where some of the leeching agent gets. Awickert (talk) 01:46, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

"It's certainly going to be difficult-to-impossible for renewables to completely fill the gap." -- That's exactly the point I was making, renewables cannot provide more than a small fraction of the USA's energy needs. Nuclear power, however, CAN supply the ENTIRE nation's electricity needs, leaving transportation as the ONLY consumer of fossil fuels. That's why nuclear power is BETTER for the US than renewables and should be pursued aggressively, not "judiciously" as you seem to advocate here. The goal is to replace ALL the coal-powered electric plants with nuclear electric plants, that will solve the pollution problem even without wasting our taxpayer money on renewables, which are (at best) a very partial solution, and (at worst) a shameless scam pushed upon us by certain interested parties.

"Well, not everyone is an American - and some believe that Americans will indeed have to give up at least some of their energy wasting ways." -- Seriously, do you and Stephan Schulz work for the UN or something? I thought a Texan would know better than to advocate such blatant anti-Americanism which is otherwise seen only in third-world nations and in the UN general assembly. We're (and according to the opinion polls, most Americans will agree with me here) NOT giving up our way of life because some third-world chumps want us to -- end of discussion!

"If we switch to electric cars & trucks (probably via plug-in hybrids) - we can indeed run our cars from nuclear-produced electricity. This is perhaps the easiest to imagine part of the puzzle." -- We've already discussed this before, but I'll say this again until you finally get it: It's not just about the cars and trucks, it's also about the ships and planes. So until you come up with some way to run a jumbo-jet on electricity, we'll need fossil fuels to run this part of our economy (which will still be less than 30% of our fossil fuel use now).

"Nuclear reactors might be technically ready for commercialization - but the current legislative barriers (in the US at least), together with the NIMBY problem, makes it VERY tough to get these things onto the generation grid quickly." -- As you yourself said before, this is a matter of political will.

"when you count the FULL costs, renewables win every time." -- That does not account for the fact that renewables CANNOT meet ALL our energy needs, as you yourself have admitted more than once. Yeah, I'm all for phasing out coal-powered electrical plants -- but replacing them with NUCLEAR POWER, not renewables, since nuclear power will be produce much less pollution, but (UNLIKE renewables) can meet ALL our electricity demand WITHOUT requiring us to give up our American way of life.

"Because we have to live on the same planet as them. If China and India don't do something just as dramatic as is advocated for the USA and Europe (although Europe is WAY ahead on this) - since we're all living on the exact same planet, we all get our cities flooded - we all get bizarre weather patterns - we all lose our biodiversity." -- Perhaps I should have been more clear from the start in defining "us" and "them". For the record, I do NOT oppose having the Chinese and the Indians use nuclear technology (in any event, they already have access to it); what I do oppose is sharing this technology with every Tom, Dick and Harry in the world when many of them (like Iran, for instance) would gladly use it to make an atom bomb with which to destroy New York City (or LA, or any other suitable American city). Nuclear technology should be restricted to those nations that already have it and/or can be trusted with it, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY is what I'm saying -- the rest of the world can get along as best they can WITHOUT access to nuclear power.

"It's a matter of degree. If the big three polluters (US, India, China) were to make (say) an 80% cut in their CO2 emissions - then maybe we'd have bought enough time to gradually bring the rest of the world into the fold and have a relatively 'soft-landing'. However, if the big three only make a 20% cut - then we need everyone else to join in too." -- The scenario that I'm discussing would involve having the big three replace about 50% or so of their fossil fuels with nuclear power.

"Without a carbon tax, the CO2 levels will continue to rise, global temperatures will rise, the ocean levels will rise and the three biggest cities in the USA will be under 20 meters of ocean." -- Didn't we discuss it all before? #1, this assertion presumes that the warming trend observed in recent years is due to the so-called "greenhouse effect", whereas quite a number of scientific studies point to an increase in solar radiation as a major contributor, if not the sole cause, of the warming trend (which, by the way, may have reversed for the past 3 years). #2, a carbon tax of $150 per barrel will CRIPPLE our nation's transportation system, as I have already proved to you before. #3, as I've already said, even if the "greenhouse effect" hypothesis is correct (which I strongly doubt), a MUCH better way to deal with the problem is to subsidize nuclear reactor construction for electricity generation -- that can STILL cut our CO2 emissions by 70+% (assuming that ALL our electricity is produced from nuclear power), while still allowing the transportation system to operate normally, and having a much lower economic cost than a carbon tax. Your statement that it's a choice between "$150/barrel carbon tax" and "let the cities get flooded" is a false dilemma, and as such, is complete nonsense.

"However, that requires brains and a 'buy-in' to the problem...and sadly people like the person I'm replying to here are major roadblocks to doing that." -- You're DEAD WRONG here, mister: for the record, I have ALWAYS advocated aggressively expanding nuclear power generation to meet our electricity demand, for many different reasons. What I oppose, and ALWAYS will, are stupid, brainless, half-baked, anti-American ideas like an across-the-board $150/barrel carbon tax that would cripple transportation, or a complete reliance on renewables (which would require us to cut back our energy consumption by 75 OR MORE PERCENT -- and consequently LEAVE AT LEAST THREE-QUARTERS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THE DARK WITH NO ELECTRICITY). Your accusations, besides being a personal attack, just DON'T MAKE ANY SENSE!!!

98.234.126.251 (talk) 05:04, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh, the man from the "I spell in caps and use a lot of exclamation points, therefore I'm right" fraction is back. Just apart from the many factual errors in your comments: I under understand that the categorical imperative is a mouthful. But I thought the Golden rule was universally recognized and even taught explicitly in US schools? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:30, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

What "factual errors" are you talking about here? I challenge you to identify every single one of them and present undisputed information to the contrary (which I don't remember you ever doing thus far). And what, may I ask, does the categorical imperative have to do with nuclear technology? 98.234.126.251 (talk) 08:47, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Give it a minute. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:09, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Every single one of them? Poor Schulz. It'll take you much longer than a minute. - Drew Smith What I've done 09:33, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, miss-understanding. I was asking 98 to take a minute of thought to figure out what the categorical imperative and the Golden Rule have to do with energy policy. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:17, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

I was asking for your response. Frankly, these kinds of philosophical questions are not my concern -- my only ethical concerns are that I must do and stand for those things that are in my country's interest. That's called loyalty to one's country (or patriotism, for short), for those of you who are unaware of this concept. (I hate to admit this, but I haven't always said or done what was best for my country -- but I'm trying as best I can.) 98.234.126.251 (talk) 12:36, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Drew, if you wanna take this challenge too, go right ahead. I seriously think, though, that the majority of your (and Schulz's) time will be occupied not with identifying whatever "factual errors" might be there, but with searching all over the whole wide world for even a tidbit of reliable info that contradicts my statements. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 11:56, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Speaking of factual errors, I found one in SteveBaker's last post that I had overlooked until now. Remember, Steve said that "almost all our productive farmland is below 20 meters" and will therefore be flooded in his nightmare global-warming scenario? Well, (quite apart from the fact that the 20-meter figure is very doubtful to say the least -- and Steve never provided any hard evidence for it), I've just visited the USGS website and took a look at the map of elevations in the US -- and guess what, it turns out that although parts of Louisiana and Arkansas are below 75 meters elevation (the map only shows elevations in 75-meter increments), most of the Great Plains (which is where most of our farmland is) is actually above 75 meters. Steve -- I just proved you wrong on this count, you might as well admit it. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 09:48, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Also, regarding SteveBaker's claim that "when you count the full costs, renewables win every time" -- you (all) might wanna take a look at the September 2006 issue of Scientific American, it's got a nice histogram (bar graph, for the uninitiated) that compares the production costs of different kinds of energy (I believe it's on page 96). Anyway, that graph shows solar power is the MOST expensive to produce, while nuclear is only slightly more expensive than coal. (I know, and freely admit, that this graph shows the production costs of hydrogen from different sources rather than electricity; but then again, the costs of producing electricity from those sources are prob'ly not too far off from these numbers, are they?) 98.234.126.251 (talk) 11:22, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

It's on page 98, sorry... 98.234.126.251 (talk) 11:27, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

TO give a more precise figure for the cost of nuclear power vs. coal: the very same magazine (Scientific American, September '06) gives the price of electricity produced from coal as 4.2 cents per kilowatt-hour; electricity from nuclear power is currently priced at 6.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, but can be brought down to 4.2 cents per kilowatt-hour simply by design and construction improvements to nuclear reactor plants, without the need for any major technological breakthrough (according to a 2003 MIT study). 98.234.126.251 (talk) 11:39, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Looking at the graphs on causes of warming, anthropogenic causes have contributed more to global warming than solar activity has for the past 30 years or so; also see Attribution of global warming. As for the climate cooling for the past 3 years, that's also wrong. Arctic sea ice reached its dramatic minimum in 2007; methane was found to be releasing from subsea permafrost in 2008. And in 2009, the Chacaltaya glacier disappeared, a large portion of the Wilkins Ice Shelf shattered, and in July the global ocean temperatures reached a record high for that month, breaking the old record set back in 1998 (which some skeptics say was the warmest year on record, it wasn't!). This is all while solar activity has been at a drastic minimum for those very three years you claimed. Nuclear may be a good solution, but in some areas wind and solar or geothermal are viable alternatives! As for the Great Plains, one study points out that a farther 1°C (1.8°F) of global warming could turn much of the Great Plains and American Midwest into semi-desert, starting with the Sand Hills area. As for oil, read oil depletion and peak oil, it'll run out in a few decades at this rate. "We", if by this case you mean the Americans, should care about what happens in other countries, because climate change is likely to trigger political instability, and the hatreds of terrorism could be directed at what is seen as the main contributor of this warming, namely the US. What we need to solve any global issue is cooperation. Many American cities are indeed quite close to sea level, and will be affected by sea level rise. 98, it seems that you are taking every opportunity to attack what you dismiss as anti-American or what you think to be "right", trying to make all other arguments worthless by pointing out every possible inaccuracy. If that is the case, you probably belong on Conservapaedia, not the Wikipedia refdesk. Or perhaps LiveScience, where other users will actually agree with you. You have done this to many posts recently and caused the subject of the conversation to stray away from what the initial OP asked, which is what we are actually supposed to answer. ~AH1^(TCU) 11:55, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Solar power a "viable alternative" to nuclear? I don't think so -- just look at the production costs of solar power vs. nuclear power, and you'll see the difference. Not to mention that solar power can NEVER provide more than 10% or so of the USA's electricity demand -- to try to produce ALL our electricity from solar power would require more solar panel area than we got land! Whereas, nuclear power CAN provide all our electricity (albeit at considerable cost in capital investment, it is true). As for global warming -- assuming that it's indeed caused by CO2 emissions, then nuclear power is just the solution that we need, because it's the only non-fossil-fuel source of energy that can provide ALL our electricity, whereas renewables can only provide a small fraction (and that could reduce CO2 emissions by as much as three quarters eventually, which would solve the global warming problem and all its consequences just fine -- once again, ASSUMING THAT there's a casual link between CO2 emissions and global warming). And as for terrorism, that's a whole separate topic altogether, and has absolutely nothing to do with global warming -- to say that it does is the same as saying that black cats bring bad luck. And regarding your statement that my posts have caused the subject to stray away from the original question: I don't remember exactly what was said by whom in earlier posts, but if you check this current thread, you'll see that it was Stephan Schulz who first brought up politics, not me (I was just suggesting that reprocessing could be a good way to deal with nuclear waste, and Schulz responded with the politically charged and factually dubious statement that "any solution that you would not trust to run in Nigeria, or Iran, or Venezuela, is not going to do much good for the environment - it just means that oil will be burned elsewhere".). 98.234.126.251 (talk) 12:24, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

"... to produce ALL our electricity from solar power would require more solar panel area than we got land". Complete nonsense. Not even close. Nellis Solar Power Plant produces 25 million kWh of electricity annually and occupies an area of 0.6 km². So to produce the whole electricity consumption of the US, 4 trillion kWh, would require about 100,000 km² of solar power plants, or about 10% of the area of the Great Plains. That's big, but it's certainly not "more area than we got land". Gandalf61 (talk) 13:09, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Indeed -- and how much does the electricity cost to produce? Besides, Nellis is in the desert (I've been there), so it receives much more solar radiation per unit area than most other areas of the US (even the Great Plains). To try to extrapolate the energy density at Nellis to the rest of the US (as you seem to be doing) would lead to a vastly exaggerated estimate for the amount of solar power that can be produced per unit area. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 23:42, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

And, 98, you need to keep in mind that this is not an all-American website. This simply isn't the place to share your American patriotism, or to start debates. Besides, not even all Americans are so defensive of their country on the Internet as to attack all opposing opinions, as illustrated perfectly by Steve over there. ~AH1^(TCU) 00:06, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Why is it always that it's OK to advocate left-wing politics (like the carbon tax) on Wikipedia, but it's not OK to oppose them in the same place? Are we talking about a double standard here, or what? It's just like you lefties always do -- you welcome all political opinions as long as they agree with your worldview, but when someone disagrees with you, you just shout'em down, or get all defensive and say "this isn't a place for political debates", or try to twist their statements to make it look like they mean something else. And besides, why shouldn't I be defensive of my country when there's a big, wide and hostile world out there with so many people who hate America and would gladly hurt it if they could? As for this not being an all-American website -- yeah, I see that the "one-world mafia" is really out in force here, and American patriots are very much in the minority. (Well, maybe there are a few who are just not sharing their patriotism for fear of being shouted down or personally attacked.) 98.234.126.251 (talk) 01:01, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

AEB1

Schulz and Gandalf, I'm still standing by for your refutation of my arguments in favor of nuclear power vs. renewables. Are you having a hard time finding the figures you're looking for? 98.234.126.251 (talk) 01:17, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Most people look at global warming from a scientific perspective, but right now it's frankly safe to say that there will be some degree of geopolitical impact as the planet warms, chiefly from increased stress on water, food, and resources. You seem to be advocating yourself to be a rightist, and therefore are perhaps more likely to perceive Wikipedia as leftist, liberal and even anti-American (this is because Wikipedians on average are less conservative than the average American). In that case, I again recommend Conservapaedia or LiveScience. We're not advocating the carbon tax for the USA. Besides, this question wasn't about the United States in the first place, but nuclear power in general, which does have its advantages, but the main issue is what to do with all the radioactive waste. As a non-renewable resource, uranium supplies can still run out. ~AH1^(TCU) 03:45, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Go easy on him, he's the only reasonable reasonable rightist I've seen. Don't want to scare him off.. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:59, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Schulz, Gandalf, AH1 (especially Schulz): If you're claiming to not advocate a carbon tax, then how do you explain Schulz's strident (and illogical) arguments in favor of a carbon tax in the discussion on coal liquefaction just a couple weeks ago? Have you forgot so soon, huh? Well I haven't, and I will use his previous statements against him if he starts pushing politics again. And as for uranium supplies running out: scientists estimate that they'll last for at least several hundred years even if the industrial nations generate all their electricity from nuclear power. And besides, we can always use breeder reactors to produce more nuclear fuel artificially.

Also, Schulz, you have claimed that my previous statements contain "many factual errors", but you still haven't pointed out any specific ones (aside from my assertion that global warming is caused by solar activity -- well, I might be wrong on that, but it's not really relevant to whether nuclear power is better than renewables), much less refuted them, even though it's been almost 24 hours since you made the claim. Therefore, I strongly suspect that you couldn't really find any "factual errors" in my statements that are contradicted by reliable information. And you still haven't explained what does the categorical imperative have to do with energy policy. But hey, I can wait a while longer while you search for the info. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 07:43, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

• "... to produce ALL our electricity from solar power would require more solar panel area than we got land" is a specific factual error. Even if an average solar power plant is only 10% as efficient as Nellis, total area required to equal current US electricity production is still only 1 million km². I don't know what you are hoping to achieve here, but I suggest you take your bad-tempered rants, taunts and claims of infallibility somewhere else. Gandalf61 (talk) 10:10, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
• I do advocate a carbon tax - or rather, I advocate any system in which a reasonable value is put onto the use of a limited shared resource (like our atmosphere), so that the free market optimization does not lead to the well-understood tragedy of the commons. A carbon tax is one possible implementation. I've never claimed anything else. So far, you have not brought up any source, just a nebulous claim about "most mainstream energy studies" that allegedly "all" claim that renewables can at most provide "a tiny fraction (25% at the VERY MOST)" of "our" energy demand. Well, apart from the fact that the combination of "most" and "all" is a nice bit of rhetoric, the claimed fact is, from a scientific perspective, plain wrong. Iceland has one of the highest primary energy consumptions per capita - even higher than the US - and they manage to provide the vast majority of their energy from renewables. Nearly 100% of electricity and heating are hydro and geo already, and they are actively attracing energy-intensive industries to use their surplus capacity. They are aso moving into hydrogen for transportation.[4][5]. Denmark, a high-consumption northern European country is already providing 20% of its electricity via wind power right now. Gandalf already pointed out your obvious error about solar panel areas. Your claims of "proof" of anything only hold if you think that "proof" and "bland assertion" are the same. And your "America first" kind of patriotism is short-sighted and naive to the extreme. The current "American way of life" is not sustainable in the long term - and neither is the European way of life. If you deny this, you ignore basic scientific facts because they are politically inconvenient. The alternative is not going back to a pre-industrial level, but to move on to more resource-efficient ways living. The earlier we start, the softer the transition and the less disruption to our life styles. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:14, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Technically, geothermal is not a renewable energy source. Those Icelanders are gonna be so screwed in another billion years or so. :) Franamax (talk) 17:28, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Technically technically, solar is not renewable, either. We're all gonna be so screwed in another 4 billion years or so. ;-) --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:38, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Well I dunno about that. It was God wut made the Sun, it was scientists wut made those supposed radioactive elements generating the heat and them as wut invented the gravity story explaining primordial heat. Who would you rather trust? Luckily, so long as there is politics we will still have hot air moving around, so I guess windpower wins in the end! :) Franamax (talk) 20:21, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm always surprised at how vehemently a carbon tax gets opposed. Certainly it will shift economic activity, but in the way people do best, by giving them an incentive to avoid paying taxes. It gives certainty for business planning, it encourages conservation first, and the tax revenues can be used to reduce other forms of taxation and to give every person a rebate representing a "right" to emit a certain base amount of carbon. There's nothing like a tax to get people's minds focussed on how to avoid having to pay it. Franamax (talk) 17:36, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

98.234.126.251, I take you are a supporter of nuclear power. The problem with nuclear power is that it is also non-renewable, so it might buy us a couple of decades but that's it. Eventually we will have to rely on renewable resources, not because it's politically correct, but simply because we will have no other choice. It seems reasonable to me that it is better to be prepared for the inevitable than wait for the shortages to become severe before taking action. Governments do know that and one of the things they will do to force society to take the necessary steps to be prepared will be instating a carbon tax. Deal with it. Dauto (talk) 19:13, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Actually, if we could successfully complete the nuclear fuel-cycle, it would indeed solve a lot of problems. I have no source, but I think it's something like 3% of the available energy that gets extracted from fissile uranium before the fuel is poisoned. After that, it's just junk. Nuclear as it stands right now conveniently ignores an externality, disposing of the spent fuel and decomissioning reactors (plus the accident insurance issue, which we haven't had to face for 20 years, TG). Dramatically expanding nuclear power output will only expand the conundrum of safe disposal, and with all due respect to SB, deciding today on a "safe storage" method to help us bridge the gap is a disservice to our descendants one thousand years from now - are we really that smart?

I do agree that we somehow need to bridge the gap, but first of all we need to concentrate on reduction of energy use. Just because I have a windmill out back, that doesn't mean I should leave the air-conditioner running all day when I'm not even in the house. There is vast opportunity in replacing inefficient electric motors in factories which are held back by depreciation schedules and discounted-cost calculations monitored by the accounting department. Industrial plants and power-stations release their excess heat and CO2 without even trying to make use of it. What is required is a fundamental shift in attitude so that energy release is seen as an important thing, which should be minimized. I've been in an apartment building in Paris where the lights only come on when you open your door or get off the elevator, and stay on long enough for you to get to your unit and open the door. That's good, why do you care if the lights are on once you're inside the door?

What I'm getting at here is that there is no one simple answer. It's not solar or any other renewable, it's not nuclear, it's not "clean coal". It's a mix of all of them and the best way to get there is to use the power of human ingenuity. And the best way to harness that power is by creating incentives. Since energy is a fungible commodity, a simple carbon tax (which I support) may not be enough. Ref to SS's (questionable) comment above about nuclear reprocessing being infeasible since "we" can't "trust" other countries. Whilst true, it's not a reason to not explore the possibilities. Nor are the potential of nuclear power or renewable sources sufficient to give the answer. We need a mix, and we need incentives - hence my support for not only a carbon tax to recognize the externality of AGW, but an energy tax in general to recognize depletion of planetary resources. We need to recognize both the cost of producing energy and of consuming energy, and yes that will require a fundamental attitude shift which may indeed threaten the "American way of life", which seems to involve keeping restaurants so cold that you shiver while you eat. (I'm Canadian, it happens here too). End of rant. Franamax (talk) 21:19, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

""... to produce ALL our electricity from solar power would require more solar panel area than we got land" is a specific factual error. Even if an average solar power plant is only 10% as efficient as Nellis, total area required to equal current US electricity production is still only 1 million km2." -- "Only" 1 million km2?! That's the entire area of the Great Plains, as you yourself have admitted! Are you seriously proposing that we cover the entire area of our most productive farmland with solar panels?! Besides, this still conveniently ignores the much higher production cost of solar power vs. nuclear power (and I'm talking like 20-25 cents per kilowatt of solar vs. 5-6 cents per kilowatt of nuclear -- see the difference?)

"Iceland has one of the highest primary energy consumptions per capita - even higher than the US - and they manage to provide the vast majority of their energy from renewables." -- This completely ignores the fact that Iceland got a much lower population than the US, so the total energy consumption is a lot lower. Same for Denmark. Your misrepresentation of statistics won't do you much good -- I've got a lot of experience in detecting and exposing such manipulation.

"The current "American way of life" is not sustainable in the long term - and neither is the European way of life." -- You got any figures to back it up, or is this another of your unproved (and questionable) assertions? Surely we can meet our electricity demand for the next several centuries with nuclear power -- is that not "long-term" enough for you?

"I'm always surprised at how vehemently a carbon tax gets opposed. Certainly it will shift economic activity, but in the way people do best, by giving them an incentive to avoid paying taxes." -- Schulz, didn't I already prove to you that some industries (such as the airlines, for example, or the steel industry) CANNOT "avoid" a carbon tax because their business activity intrinsically results in CO2 emissions? That will mean that they get taxed disproportionately, to the detriment of the economy in general. (If the Waxman-Markey bill passes, then in a couple years you'll see what I'm talking about.)

"The problem with nuclear power is that it is also non-renewable, so it might buy us a couple of decades but that's it. Eventually we will have to rely on renewable resources, not because it's politically correct, but simply because we will have no other choice." -- Wrong again, uranium reserves will last for at least several hundred years even if the developed nations rely exclusively on nuclear power for electricity. And besides, with breeder reactors we can generate more nuclear fuel than we use -- so in that case, we can rely on nuclear power for thousands of years without the fear of running out. Your statement that it will "buy us a couple of decades but that's it" is DEAD WRONG and amounts to nothing but SHAMELESS DEMAGOGUERY. And relying on renewables will greatly increase the cost of electricity, to the detriment of everyone who uses it (including all our industries, and especially the high-tech industries). Do you really want that kind of future for America, when nuclear power can easily provide enough power for every American without contributing to CO2 emissions? Or do you have a vested interest in promoting renewables to the exclusion of nuclear power, Dauto? 98.234.126.251 (talk) 00:45, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Umm, 98.234, has anyone warned you yet about soapboxing? When you type in capital letters "DEAD WRONG" and "SHAMELESS DEMAGOGUERY", that's a pretty good indication that you're standing on a box in Hyde Park. We don't do that here, and if you persist, it's a blockable offense.

As regards factual errors, please reserve your vitriol on the "surprised at how vehemently a carbon tax gets opposed" comment for just me. What on earth did Stephan Schulz have to do with my edit? Please read the thread more carefully before you comment.

On the economic issues around a carbon tax, well yes of course the costs would fall more disproportionately on large consumers of energy, that's the whole point. D'uhh. But think through your basic economics (which you accuse SS of ignoring). When a good or service increases in cost, the demand for that good or service decreases and generally the profitability of the business will decline - so yes, coal plants and truck fleets will have more expensive and thus less desirable output. Conversely, when a good or service attains a price advantage, demand for it will increase and profit opportunity will also increase - so energy retrofitters who know how to insulate your building and recycle your waste heat will do more business; rail will proportionately do better than long-distance trucking; truck fleets will focus more on emission-efficiency by using smaller vans and shorter-range deliveries; ships and airplanes will be at more of a disadvantage in a carbon-taxed regime, ships because they currently benefit from a no-fuel-tax regime and they're allowed to burn bunker oil, the worst of the dirtiest most-awful fuel on the planet, airlines because they also get off with zero-tax between countries and because they're a vastly inefficient form of transport. Even there, the incentives form to put those big sails onto cargo ships and explore more efficient forms of air transport. And yes, there are prototypes of electric-powered ships and aircraft, tell ya what: you deliver one source to support your more wild claims, I'll put forth one of my own...

Yes, of course, any notion of accounting for external costs has grave implications for the existing way of doing things. The key is to do it in a measured and predictable way. A carbon tax (and more generally, an energy intensity tax) will certainly be disruptive to the "American way". But I find it quite frankly laughable that you would see that as a threat. The US started off with an economic model based on colonialist trade patterns and rebounded quite smartly when independence went and ruined it. Losing a war with Canada didn't set you back (OK, maybe not the best example). Fighting a civil war over the issue of OMG-we-need-slaves-or-the-economy-won't-work was pretty messy, but didn't sink the country. Electrification came and was embraced, telegraph/Telex/telephone/Fax/email all went pretty well. Shouting/heliography/radio/television/satellties seemed to work OK. Every one of these required wrenching transformations in economic terms amd more importantly, changes in attitude. Why you would react in almost hysterical terms to this particular change is beyond me. Are you saying that the American people have lost their ability to adapt and grow? Franamax (talk) 03:05, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

"Umm, 98.234, has anyone warned you yet about soapboxing?" -- Tell the same to SteveBaker and Stephan Schulz, they're pushing politics as much as I am. Or is it only soapboxing when you advocate right-wing politics? BTW, as despicable as I find some of your posts, I haven't yet threatened to get you people blocked, or otherwise to take away your freedom of expression (unlike you). Or do you think that only liberal points of view are protected by the First Amendment, and that it's OK to "dispute" other points of view by threatening to silence the speaker? Man, what a double standard!

"airlines because they also get off with zero-tax between countries and because they're a vastly inefficient form of transport." -- They're also the fastest form of transportation for trips of more than 500 miles, so "inefficiency" is irrelevant here. Really, would you rather spend several hours flying coast-to-coast in a jet plane, or spend 3 DAYS or more traveling by train? In other words, we here in America need air transportation because of the vast distances involved. Maybe over in Europe you people can do without air transportation, but that's up to you -- as for us, we'll keep our jetliners come hell or high water, because we truly cannot afford to go back to just rail transportation even if we wanted to.

"And yes, there are prototypes of electric-powered ships and aircraft" -- OK, show me a picture of an electric-powered jumbo jet prototype, and then maybe I'll believe you.

"you deliver one source to support your more wild claims, I'll put forth one of my own..." -- Actually, I have provided sources for some of my claims, in case you haven't noticed. Tell me exactly which claims you want sources for, and I'll give you the sources, or take my claims back if I can't.

"Electrification came and was embraced, telegraph/Telex/telephone/Fax/email all went pretty well. " -- There's an important difference here, in case you didn't notice: electrification was a new technology that gave American companies a competitive advantage, whereas a carbon tax is an economic burden that will place American companies at a competitive disadvantage. You see the difference here? 98.234.126.251 (talk) 03:41, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

On the first point, soapboxing, since you seem to have a stable IP address I was planning a mea culpa on your talk page since I could accuse myself of the same thing - plus an invitation that if you would register an account, we could more easily talk to you. Too late now. Yes, we are all guilty of expounding our viewpoints to some degree, but I think yours is egregegious. When you need to GET YOUR POINT ACROSS IN CAPITALS, you're no longer making an effective point, that's all. I personally try to stick to points which I can find a ref for quickly, or make clear that I am speculating. SB can stand on as big a soapbox as he wants, since it pretty much always conceals an armaments factory which spews forth weapons of undeniable truth. But hey, mount the ponies and ride up the hill if you feel the need. Remember to wave your flag. SS, I do agree that the first comment was unfortunate, i.e. there's no reason at all that we in Canada shouldn't pursue our own nuclear-fuel reprocessing strategy - but that doesn't make him an overall politico-buffoon. Possibly you've only just arrived here. We try to talk reasonably and back our statements with citable and reliable sources. We're not a general forum for venting opiion. (And BTW, there's no First Amendment rights here on private property - but if you see your actual government doing you wrong, let me know and I'll help you however I can. If you think Wikipedia has screwed you over, tough luck, you bought the wrong can of sardines)

I'm confused about the "over in Europe you people can do without" remark. Would it help if I spelt it CANADIAN? That's where I live, it's the big blank space up top of the weather report. We're facing our own challenges too. Geez, whatever happened to "world's longest undefended border"? It's fun to go from closest friend to potential enemy within 10 years. But that's Fox News for you.

Air transport of course is useful where it's appropriate. There's the rub - airlines get to buy their fuel tax-free, which no other transport mode does. So it's not a level playing field. Adjust the pricing to reflect the external costs of CO2 and I'm right with you. But you will find that a lot of air travel can be replaced by trains. A TGV-style corridor between Houston, Austin, DFW and San Antonio would wipe SW Airlines right off the map (keeping in mind that the SWA chairman was quoted as "we don't compete with airlines, we compete with buses").

Keep the order straight, I asked you for a new source. Produce one and I'll do the same.

On the last point, I think you need to go back and review how competitive advantage works. The same dynamic comes into play regardless of the source of the external costs - the organization or individual works to minimize the costs. If a business is faced with an increase in raw material prices, or energy taxes, they don't just throw up their hands if it's taxation, they go about maximizing profit under the circumstances. That's the genius of the open marketplace, it always maximizes overall value when there's open competition. Put simply, any and every change in technology and society is a challenge. The US managed to survive all of them, including the "temporary" income tax introduced during WW1. I really don't understand your fear. Actually, living in Canada, I'm more afraid that you guys will get there first. We were a shameful third at sustainable fission reactions and we can't sell our superior and safe CANDU reactors. And we're way behind on many other next-gen techologies too. Thanks for the reminder to write my government reps about this and talk to you 20 years from now! Franamax (talk) 05:41, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

"On the first point, soapboxing, since you seem to have a stable IP address I was planning a mea culpa on your talk page since I could accuse myself of the same thing" -- OK, no hard feelings, these kinds of politically charged topics do tend to cause heated debate.

"I personally try to stick to points which I can find a ref for quickly, or make clear that I am speculating." -- That's the difference in style between us, I often quote statistics from memory but can't quite remember the name of the source where I got it from (but I usually can find the source if asked). So just because I don't give the name of the source right away, doesn't mean that the info is unsourced or otherwise unreliable, as you're about to find out.

"SB can stand on as big a soapbox as he wants, since it pretty much always conceals an armaments factory which spews forth weapons of undeniable truth." -- Not always: I've proved him wrong once, on the clathrate gun hypothesis, when he was saying "the clathrates are already melting, disaster is just around the corner" and I showed him evidence that most clathrates won't melt for at least a thousand years. And even in the current discussion, I disproved his claim that the Great Plains will end up under the ocean because of global warming -- and all I had to do was to look at a map of elevations. So his "armament factory" is not quite so invincible after all...

"SS, I do agree that the first comment was unfortunate, i.e. there's no reason at all that we in Canada shouldn't pursue our own nuclear-fuel reprocessing strategy - but that doesn't make him an overall politico-buffoon." -- In an earlier debate, he called America a "terrorist nation" for bombing Afghanistan, claimed that our support of the Contras in Nicaragua somehow justified 9/11, and compared the War on Terror to "doing a magic dance to keep the lions away" -- if that's not being a "politico-buffoon", then I don't know what is.

"I'm confused about the "over in Europe you people can do without" remark. Would it help if I spelt it CANADIAN?" -- That remark wasn't directed at you personally, but at the other parties to the debate, most of whom appear to be European. But since you're Canadian, may I ask why are you so much against air transport? From what I know, air transport is even more of a necessity in Canada than it is here in the USA.

"Geez, whatever happened to "world's longest undefended border"? It's fun to go from closest friend to potential enemy within 10 years." -- I never said anything to that effect, and I don't think it's relevant to the debate at all.

"Adjust the pricing to reflect the external costs of CO2 and I'm right with you." -- I guess I should've clarified from the start that it's not so much the idea of a carbon tax per se that I oppose, but a carbon tax AT THE LEVELS THAT SOME OF THE OTHER CONTRIBUTORS HERE ARE PROPOSING (i.e. $150 PER BARREL) -- a carbon tax OF THAT LEVEL would of course be COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. A tax of, say, $10 (or even $20) per barrel, might be OK, though.

"But you will find that a lot of air travel can be replaced by trains." -- Original research: I've plotted the travel time vs. distance for each mode of transportation using Graphical Analysis (using the scheduled average speeds for each mode, and making some assumptions about waiting time at the station / airport), and the results that came out were that train travel can be faster than plane travel for trips of up to 500 miles, but plane travel is definitely faster for longer trips. Yeah, fast trains do have a place in the transportation system; however, many of the transportation routes in the US (and Canada, too) are much longer than 500 miles, so air travel will always remain a necessity for those routes.

"A TGV-style corridor between Houston, Austin, DFW and San Antonio would wipe SW Airlines right off the map" -- SWA serves many other routes besides the ones you mentioned, many of them longer than 500 miles.

"Keep the order straight, I asked you for a new source. Produce one and I'll do the same." -- You didn't tell me which of my claims you want sourced. But here we go: my claim that nuclear power can provide all our electricity for "thousands of years" is based on figures from Megawatts + Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons by Garwin and Charpak, which states that with the use of breeder reactors and nuclear reprocessing, 320,000 QUADS of electricity can be generated from nuclear power in total, whereas the annual consumption of electricity by the whole wide world (I'm not talking about just the US now) was about 106 quads a year in '96. Do the math, and you'll come out with an answer of about 3,000 years. Your ball now, Franamax.

"On the last point, I think you need to go back and review how competitive advantage works." -- You should keep in mind that an increase in external costs for American businesses (but not Chinese ones, for instance) will make American goods more expensive, and thus less able to compete on the international market, compared to Chinese goods. That's the rub here -- the nation that "blinks first" and implements a carbon tax without waiting for the others to do the same, gives up at least some of its competitive advantage.

"I really don't understand your fear." -- As I should've made clear before, it's not a carbon tax per se that I fear, but a $150/BARREL carbon tax that SteveBaker proposes and Stephan Schulz tirelessly advocates. If you crunch the numbers and see how much economic damage such a confiscatory tax on anything would do, I can bet you'll be pretty scared too. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 09:15, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

AEB2

Your memory is severely faulty. I have not advocated any particular level of tax. I have said that the (nearly) US$150,- per barrel price we had back in 2008 very quickly lead to interest in energy efficiency and alternative sources. I think a tax that pegs the price at or near that level would possibly be a good thing, as it increases stability of the price and reduces the influence of speculative fluctuations. But even that is not a tax of US$150,- per barrel. I don't think I have ever called "America" or even the US "a terrorist nation". I've certainly never "claimed that our support of the Contras in Nicaragua somehow justified 9/11" and I strongly request that you either back that with a source or retract it. You seem to have a very black and white, us vs. them view of the world. That is not a useful model, and it helps neither in understanding nor in solving problems. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:16, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

OK, Schulz, I found the thread you asked for when you requested that I either "back it up with a source" as to the claims you made about the support of Contras justifying 9/11 and all, or take it back; it was actually from about a month ago. Read it and weep, everyone:

And if they be "harmless farmers", then WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING SHELTERING TWO TERRORISTS IN THEIR VILLAGE?! WHY DON'T THEY KICK THOSE TWO CHARACTERS OUT?! Remember, IF YOU KNOWINGLY SHELTER A TERRORIST IN YOUR HOME (VILLAGE, WHATEVER), THEN YOU'RE JUST AS GUILTY AS THE TERRORIST AND YOU BECOME A LEGITIMATE TARGET YOURSELF! Besides, as I already said, WINNING THE WAR ON TERROR IS NOT ABOUT GETTING THEM TO LIKE US (WHICH THEY NEVER WILL), BUT ABOUT MAKING THEM FEAR US. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 07:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, first off, the "terrorists" may not be terrorists, or the villagers may not know that they are terrorists, or they may be forced to shelter them, or they may not consider them terrorists. Given that the US is sheltering any number of people others can rightfully call "terrorists", does that excuse 9/11? If not, why not? And why does the same argument not apply to some village in Afghanistan? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:17, 24 July 2009 (UTC) (Emphasis mine)

And then again near the end of the thread:

...Why do you think we haven't been attacked here in America for these past almost 8 years? Well I'll tell you why: because the terrorists are too busy trying to save their filthy asses over in Afghanistan to have time to prepare the next attack here in America. For the record, the War on Terror has already killed most all of Al-Qaida's top generals, so for the time being all they can do is make uncoordinated localized attacks on our soldiers and kill a few at a time at the most -- and as long as we continue pounding them over there, they won't have the time or the resources to come over here and kill hundreds of our people. It's a basic principle of strategy: keep attacking the enemy whenever you can, and the enemy won't have time or resources to regroup launch a major attack. If you don't know that, I recommend you read up on Clausewitz before you go discussing strategy with anyone anywhere. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 00:19, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Re. 98: Right. I do a little magic dance around the campfire every night. I've not been eaten by lions since I started doing that, so magic works. Why again, has the US not been subject to serious Islamic terror for the 200 years before 9/11?.. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:52, 26 July 2009 (UTC) (Emphasis mine, once again.)

So, at the very least, I've just quoted you saying that our support for "people whom others can rightfully call 'terrorists'" justifies 9/11 and that our bombing of Afghanistan is on the same level as the terrorists' attack on the WTC, and that the War on Terror is like "doing a magic dance around the campfire each night to keep the lions away". (BTW, in the first quote, the word "terrorists" in the phrase "others can rightfully call terrorists" links to the article on the Contras -- so I've just proved that you consider the US support for the contras as a justification for 9/11). Schulz, do you see how you've made an ass of yourself? 98.234.126.251 (talk) 04:35, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Ummm...apparently its not your memory, its your reading ability. What you quote there is a classical Reductio ad absurdum. Your claim that some so-called terrorist hiding among villagers justifies indiscriminate bombing of that village is as absurd as the claim that the sheltering of terrorists by the US justifies 9/11. The basic principle of such an argument is the reduction to the (obviously) absurd, in this case the claim that sheltering contras justifies 9/11. Note that this is the exact opposite of what you claim - I'm not justifying 9/11, I'm using the example to demonstrate that indiscriminate bombing with disproportionate levels of so-called "collateral damage" is just as unacceptable. I strongly suspect you differ, but for me the life of an Afghan peasant has the same value - no more and no less - as that of a New York banker - and yes, even if that peasant (or that banker) burns 3 US flags per day. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:11, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

98.234.126.251, You are right that breeders and reprocessing could potentially increase the amount of nuclear energy avaible by a factor may be as high as a hundred fold turning the couple of decades I talked about into a millenium or so. But not without a price increase in the energy production, and since you were shooting down solar power for being expensive I thought that was also excluded. I would like to point out that different people can have different opinitions and still be polite. There was no reason for you to shout at me and call me demagogue. I find your style very abnoxious and I won't waste anymore spit with you. Dauto (talk) 15:48, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

OK, so no-one is actually proposing a $150/barrel tax (here in BC, the carbon tax will end up around $11/barrel, give or take depending on whether 7.2 cents/litre on gasoline is representative of the total mix of carbons in a barrel of oil). But just for fun, lets crunch those numbers. A barrel of oil is 440kg CO2, so the tax will be $340/tonne. $150/b x 20 million bpd means tax revenue from oil aoine will be $1 trillion/yr. Now if all carbon-equivalent emissions were taxed at the same rate, which from out article is ~7.1 Gtonne/yr, that's $2.4 trillion. So basically, the entire US federal government is paid for. That means no federal income tax on either people or business, no capital gains tax, no nothing. Now think about how comparative advantage (sorry, this is what I meant in the first place, I screwed up when I called it "competitive" advnatage) works: even if every single thing the US produces is more expensive than what the rest of the world produces, there will still be something that the US can specialize in and make money on. But it won't go that far. The US will instantly become the preferred location for every single business in the world that has relatively low carbon-intensity. Every single bank, insurer, software firm, law firm, engineering company, architecture firm, educational institute - every single one of them from around the globe will set up a US business. Nuclear reactors would pop up on every street corner, renewable power would sweep the country (though the energy-intensive components would be made offshore). Obviously the economic changes would be incredibly wrenching, which is why no-one would seriously propose such a level of taxation. But in our just-for-fun scenario, the US would gain an incredible comparative advantage in a huge range of economic activity, so much in fact that every country in the world would have no choice but to also "blink" and follow suit. In practice, that vast revenue stream would be shared out among state and local governments too, so there would be some tiny level of ongoing federal tax, and there would likely be offsetting import duties and export rebates (which would then be equally exploited for their economic value). Now imagine that release of pollutants that more directly harm human health were taxed in the same way (and here import duties would be essential). You would basically have a situation where the only time you were taxed was when you were doing harm to others. If you live clean and green, you pay nothing!!! Nada. Zero. Obviously that's a Utopian scenario, not everyone can be an outdoors hairdresser with a garden, but the point is that any particular level of taxation doesn't erase competitive advantage, it just shifts it around in the economy. That's the beauty of taxing undesirable activity. But no-one here is advocating such a radical shift. Franamax (talk) 01:42, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

98.234 posting from a public library: Schulz, you should recall the previous discussion about reprocessing from a couple of weeks ago (sorry, I don't remember the exact date or the section title, but I can look it up later today), where I advocated an embargo on nuclear technology to terrorist nations to prevent nuclear proliferation; during that discussion, I said some pretty nasty (but well-deserved to say the least) things about Islam, and you got into the act along with several other users, and it essentially turned into a big shouting match. It was during that discussion that you made all three of the comments that I allege you made, and I can quote them when I look up that thread, just wait a few hours.

Dauto, I already quoted figures from an MIT study that said that the cost of nuclear energy can be lowered to 4.2 cents per kilowatt (same as coal power) with state-of-the-art technology (including breeders, which would also extend the supply of nuclear energy for 3000 years). OK, maybe I should've been a bit more civil as far as your statements are concerned, but your assertion that "nuclear power will only last for a couple decades" is obviously BS, and when I see obvious BS quoted as if it were scientific fact, I tend to lose my patience (as many of the rest of you do).

And Franamax, a nation like the USA cannot live on financial and educational firms alone, without domestic industry to provide consumer goods for the people. We simply cannot afford to depend completely on foreign nations to produce our cars, fridges, furniture, electronics, etc., etc., etc... for our people, because of obvious geopolitical implications -- i.e., other nations would then be able to easily blackmail us into submission simply by embargoing trade with us. Your basic fallacy is to presume that "we're all brothers" and can live in peace forever. Franamax, most other nations hate and envy us for being so successful, (well, maybe Canada and a few others are exceptions), they all got a big chip on their shoulder, and they wouldn't hesitate to hurt us if they could, even if that means setting aside their own self-interest. And nuclear reactors will only pop up on every corner if we retain the industrial capability to manufacture them, or else the foreign nations will rip us off money-wise on reactor components and make it much more expensive to build them, thus keeping us from fulfilling our energy needs. (As for renewable power, I already demonstrated that it won't "sweep the country" because of production costs alone, 20-25 cents for solar vs. 5-7 cents for nuclear, keep it in mind.) And finally, it's impossible to live a modern lifestyle and be perfectly "clean and green" -- for one thing, it will mean no steel (hence no appliances of any kind), no aluminum (hence no cars, no planes), no copper (hence no electrical equipment), no plastics of any kind, no synthetic fibers (which are essential for many applications). Manufacturing these items INTRINSICALLY results in a certain amount of pollution, and implementing a carbon tax won't stop the pollution while still getting us these things we need for a modern lifestyle -- it will just "shift" the pollution (and the manufacturing) offshore (thus draining our economy and making us vulnerable to trade embargoes) while keeping it at the same level, and make these items more expensive and harder to get. 146.74.230.104 (talk) 23:24, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Umm, "most other nations hate and envy us for being so successful" - I could hazard a guess as to which news channel you watch on cable. That was what I meant when I asked you to provide sources. Care to back that up?

And in case you're really worried about how "foreign nations will rip us off money-wise on reactor components", well hello, Canada speaking, only the US' single-largest trading partner, not that that counts for anything in the "they're all enemies" milieu. But even setting aside our well-developed and intrinsically-safe nuclear technology, I can't even begin to describe what's wrong with your contention that rip-offs happen in an open bidding process. You're actually describing corruption on a truly massive scale. Do you really have that advanced of a battlefield mentality that you think only a "few" other nations are friends of the US? I mean wow, just wow...

And just to clarify, no-one is suggesting that we should no longer use any plastic or steel, just that such use should reflect the true costs to all of society. So yes, in that sense, we are all "brothers", at least until we get us another planet. I do share your concerns about de-industrialization and having a level playing field, but your notion that the status quo muct be defended at all costs (even though that status quo has changed radically in the US over the last 30 years, with much/most new prosperity having been created in places other than assembly lines) - well, it's rather bizarre. Franamax (talk) 00:39, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Pretty much all the first-tier (in industrialization) countries are allies, with very similar standard of living: the US, Western Europe, Japan, S. Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, a few small others, with most of the population in NATO so on a planetary problem, they should be considered collectively.

Would it be practical to tax carbon based on the actual additional damage caused? The first parasustanible ton of American carbon this year would not do as much harm as the 6,800,000,000th. This would be slightly less unappealing to businesses than a flat tax. It would take only 1% of GDP to do all the things needed to build theinfrastructure and things to prevent global warming from happening – a 5 to 20% cut. Interestingly, if this completely came from carbon taxes, it would not drastically change the price of energy as 98 feared. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:19, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Franamax, I didn't say that Canada is an enemy of the US, I said "most nations hate us", not "all nations hate us". You're putting words in my mouth in order to make a straw-man argument. And when you say that I got a "battlefield mentality", I might respond by saying that you got a "one-world mentality", and with just as much reason. But as for other nations -- well, the Islamic nations all hate us just for being infidels, and you can take that to the bank. The folks in Africa and South America envy us because we're so prosperous and they're dirt-poor, so they would just love to see America brought down to their level (or at least humiliated in some way). The Russians have been brainwashed to hate us for almost three generations, so no wonder we're not popular in that part of the world. The Chinese don't hate us especially as far as I'm aware, but they see us as their biggest rival and would love to screw us over given half a chance. And Western Europe our "allies", you say? All I can say is, they all got a chip on their shoulder bigger than their feet because they used to be the most powerful in the world and now we've taken their place. No, they're not actually gonna do anything to hurt us directly because their own self-interest is at stake, but well I've been following public opinion polls in Europe, and I can see that the Europeans don't like us at all. Just tune in to BBC, for instance, and you can see how much schadenfreude they spew forth whenever the USA gets into a little bit of difficulty. No, to regard Western Europe as loyal, steadfast allies would be supremely naive -- they're only our allies because they depend on us for trade and for defense. Which brings me to my second point: When you deny that rip-offs happen in an open bidding process, you neglect that it's only a truly "open bidding process" if American manufacturers (of nuclear reactors, in this case) are equally represented at the bidding table with all the rest of'em. Whereas, if the US throws away its manufacturing capacity by taxing it to extinction, then it's no longer an open bidding process, but a process where only foreign firms are represented -- and they can then screw us over as much as they like, and we can't do a thing about it. And while it may be true that "most prosperity has been created in places other than assembly lines" (well, I'm not too sure about "most"), that does not contradict the fact that we need to retain our domestic industrial capacity, for geopolitical reasons if nothing else. Implementing a carbon tax (well, above a certain level anyway) could jeopardize that -- it would be an incentive for our industrial firms to outsource more, to the detriment of our economy. (A supreme irony of this is that a high carbon tax might even keep American factories out of the bidding for making nuclear reactors -- the very nuclear reactors that we'll need in order to reduce CO2 emissions in the first place.) 98.234.126.251 (talk) 05:36, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Is there any evolutionary reason for natural disaster movies being so cool to watch?

Seems strange when the hominids that enjoyed the spectacle instead of going into survival mode would've been the ones most likely to die. Maybe the savanna is a relatively docile place (except the dangerous animals, which yes, might be horror/hunting/Gladiator/even running back in American football, but not natural disasters), and humans have not had enough time in more dangerous areas to adapt? The Rift Valley had earthquakes, but in the absence of overhead death traps even a 9 earthquake can be neutralized by lying prone on asphalt (see Banda Aceh). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:15, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Disaster movies can combine aspects of both the horror genre and that of camp movies, and their effectiveness has been been studied in literary and film criticism. See for example:

• Disaster movies: the cinema of catastrophe By Stephen Keane
• The pleasures of horror by Matt Hills
• Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination by Ken Feil
• The Imagination of disaster and Notes on "Camp" by Susan Sontag

None of these address the evolutionary aspect directly, but hopefully will still be of interest. Abecedare (talk) 23:19, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Just an idea, backed up by absolutely no scientific anything: perhaps people have an instinct to pay attention to peoples' stories of natural disasters so as to learn how to avoid/survive them if they ever get into that situation. Of course, the best way to survive a natural disaster usually has the first step of "Throw the movie away and forget about it". --Falconus^{p t c} 00:02, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

There may of course be no evolutionary association. It is a mistake to believe that all behaviour or physical characteristics are related to success or failure of past or future evolution. 86.4.181.14 (talk) 07:13, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Any "exciting" activity will lead to release of endorphins and related compounds, and creates a pleasurable sensation. Some of these exciting activities (such as running from a sabre tooth tiger) are accompanied by fear. However fear is generally an unpleasant sensation. It is a survival trait to lead individuals to remove themselves from potentially harmful situations. In our modern culture, we have increased the number of activities that lead to endorphin release without the accompanying fear, such as sports, action movies, computer games, dancing, etc.. Some people choose activities with a higher level of risk such as freefalling or bungie jumping, thus possibly generating higher levels of endorphins ("adrenaline junkies"). Axl ¤ [Talk] 10:46, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I guess I have a less cynical attitude about this than most people. I agree with Falconus: we are programmed to find depictions of terrible things interesting because if something terrible happens to us (which is far from impossible), we will have at least a little bit of knowledge to guide our reactions. It seems odd to me that people think we ought to be interested in abstract artistic stuff with no practical relevance, and that it is somehow shameful to be interested in depictions of situations that we might actually find ourselves in, i.e. soap operas, reality shows, shows like Cops, etc. Looie496 (talk) 19:20, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

And seeing a mile-wide tornado approaching an underpass, shooting a human out of it like a cannon and he goes flying up in the air and dodges a cow and smashes a flowerpot and something metal flies by going arrAAnk and then he drops out of the airstream and runs one thousand five hundred feet in the air and starts falling and the camera follows him all the way down like the Pearl Harbor bomb and the last frame shows dandelion fluff and goes THOOSH! as the screen goes black is supposed to help you survive how? :) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:11, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I agree with the previous posters who said that watching people who are in actual life-threatening situations was useful, in the past, as it helped us learn how to survive in similar situations. Unfortunately, the farther you get from the actual event, such as a retelling, then a fictionalized account, then outright fiction, the less useful it is. We seem to lack the ability to discern useful, true accounts of life-threatening situations from the fake crap we see in the movies. Thus we remain convinced that if any bad guys ever chase us in a car they will suddenly flip over as if they went up a ramp, then their car will explode mid-air, as if it had been filled with dynamite. StuRat (talk) 22:21, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

It's easier to manipulate feelings when more is at stake. So a mediocre disaster movie may be more watchable than a mediocre non-disaster film. 67.243.4.208 (talk) 21:51, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Energy drink studies vs. just sugar and caffeine?

Have any double-blind studies on the effects of energy drinks given sugar and caffeine to the control group, to test the value of the other active ingredients? NeonMerlin 23:03, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

No. Nor have any beer companies sponsored controlled studies to see whether giving the equivalent amount of ethanol to a couple of beers results in having a better party. alteripse (talk) 02:00, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I think he means, have they tried testing taurine, ginseng, etc. No need to be snide because of an honest question. --HitmanNumber86 (talk) 04:12, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I think a certain amount of snideness is justified. Energy drink makers have no motivation to do those tests because they have a damn good idea what the outcome would be. Looie496 (talk) 19:09, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

"Energy drinks" are all pretty much scams to get you to pay good money to drink unhealthy products, by making you think they are somehow good for you. As such, the makers don't want to pay for any scientific tests of any of the claims they make, as that may result in them being proven to be false. And, since nobody else is willing to put up money to test their highly dubious claims, they don't get tested. StuRat (talk) 22:09, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

You're darn right, StuRat. You want energy, drink coffee or black tea -- you'll get every bit as much "bang" but it'll cost you a lot fewer bucks. 98.234.126.251 (talk) 22:24, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Really? In here price per mg of caffeine seems to be similar between coffee and energy drinks (unless you brew it yourself café tea is just way too expensive for its caffeine content). --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:47, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I brew my own tea and coffee -- it ain't that hard at all (especially if you got a coffee machine in your kitchen). Also I live in America, so the prices are different from those in New Zealand. (P.S.: It would really be appreciated if, when you're talking about prices in New Zealand, you actually say "in New Zealand" instead of "in here" -- other people will know what you're talking about without having to click on the link to find out.) 98.234.126.251 (talk) 00:13, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Some of it is probably the placebo effect. John Riemann Soong (talk) 05:12, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

What I mean is whether ginseng, guarana, taurine and etc. have been tested against a backdrop of caffeine and sugar, which might for all we know change their effects due to interactions. NeonMerlin 06:59, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

OK, now this is a different problem. Those are "natural products", meaning they can't be patented. Therefore, there's no profit motive to justify a company spending the levels of money necessary to prove or disprove their effectiveness, alone or in combination. I've often thought that we should have government grants to universities to study such natural products. I would guess that most are useless, but that there's an occasional gem in there that actually does at least some of what is claimed. It sure would be nice if we could find those items. StuRat (talk) 14:04, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Sure, it would be nice to see universities doing some research that had immediate relevance to the students. NeonMerlin 16:29, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Drunk-happy or drunk-angry?

Some people become aggressive when drunk, others euphoric. What determines which occurs? Personality traits, for example? Long-term alcohol misuse? Side note: The euphoria is 'paid for' by some depression when the alcohol wears off, pushing people to drink again. 78.146.187.7 (talk) 23:13, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Excuse my French, but when it comes to alcohol, drunkenness, and personal behavior, I think the appropriate answer is simply Shit Happens. Chalk it up to different personalities, but essentially it's going to depend on their mood before, while, and after drinking, what is going on in their personal life, what the circumstances of the drinking are (drinking alone may be inherently depressive, while drinking at a frat party inherently "euphoric"), and all sorts of other things. Some people get angry, some get tired, some get hungry, and some vary. ~ Amory (user • talk • contribs) 23:55, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Essentially alcohol disinhibits the individual. We therefore see an exaggeration of whatever emotions the drunkard is feeling. The circumstances of the drinking will affect the emotions as much as the feelings of the sot. I cannot subscribe to the idea that euphoria has to be 'paid for' by later depression. Generally the depression is felt as a result of the physical after effects of the alcohol - the hangover, but not all topers suffer this. 86.4.181.14 (talk) 07:08, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't know if this is OR or what, but historically in the Black Country (where I grew up), there were pubs that brewed their own beer. Some of the beers became known as "singing beer" while other beers became known as "fighting beer" for their effects on the consumers. Now whether this was due to the ingredients, change in water, or the physiology of the consumers, I really don't know and I suspect we can never find out now. The only referenced source I can come up with for this is by someone called Trevor Raybould, who used to lecture at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and who published articles in the Black Countryman, date probably 1980s.--TammyMoet (talk) 09:36, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Nit pick: drunkard: (somewhat derogatory) A person who is habitually drunk. A kinder (more accurate) term would be drunk person, IMO. Aaadddaaammm (talk) 17:23, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

That sounds silly, but somebody should have branded the beers thusly. "Give me a fighting beer!" Tempshill (talk) 04:06, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Kate Fox says in Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour":

"the effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by social and cultural rules and norms, not by chemical actions of alcohol... In some societies ... drinking is associated with aggression, violence and anti-social behaviour, while in others ... drinking behavour is largely peaceful and harmonious. ... This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research but in carefully controlled proper scientific experiments - double-blind, placebos and all. To put it simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol." (emphasis added)

. Unfortunately, the book contains no references, and my desultory attempts to find sources have been unsuccessful. I would be delighted if anybody can point me at these studies. --ColinFine (talk) 17:54, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

It's unsurprising. Alcohol is a psychoactive drug; and the effects of a psychoactive drug are determined in part by set and setting: the mindset with which you approach the drug experience; and the social and sensory context in which you partake of it. The fact that most drinkers do not themselves regard an evening at the pub as a "drug experience" is simply naïveté. --FOo (talk) 08:06, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Tammy, my first thought on that would be that the happy and mad beers are more likely reflective of the owners of the pubs. I've done some OR of my own and I could point you to two bars right now, one where almost everyone is happy, another where it would be very easy to get into a fight. The difference is that the management of one "encourages" trouble-makers to go elsewhere, and the other doesn't care as long as they pay. Over time, the fighters end up where they can get into fights. Franamax (talk) 17:44, 25 August 2009 (UTC)