KLA said:

No DV82XL. Not the sign of a lazy one. It’s the sign of a missing one.

Indeed – I consider myself very “left” in the sense that I’m implacably opposed to Social Darwinism (either plutocracy at home or imperialism abroad) but I disagree with many of the positions of the movement-left. I hate tribalistic politics with a passion.

By the way, on the Climate Resistance blog I mentioned your Energy from Thorium post on the biased WWF/Allianz report…

        Chem Geek Gregor said:

Uh.. Do you have anything other than Palin supporting it to dispute that reactor design?

I remember reading about it a whole ago. It looked pretty sweet to me.

No, no, no. Don’t you get it?
Palin supported it! I mean it MUST be bad! [/sarcasm]

        Bruce said:

Maybe you could make a post about this:

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/big-alaska-looks-to-small-nuclear/

It strikes me as proof that this kind of small nuclear power generation is irresponsible now that someone like Palin is latching onto it. This is the same Palin that wrote an Op-ed saying the cap and trade bill was stupid.

Is there any way small nuclear like that could be remotely safe? It just doesn’t seem possible to me.

Uh.. Do you have anything other than Palin supporting it to dispute that reactor design? I remember reading about it a whole ago. It looked pretty sweet to me.

        DV82XL said:

Because following an ideology is easer than thinking for one’s self. It’s the sign of a lazy intellect.

No DV82XL. Not the sign of a lazy one. It’s the sign of a missing one.

        Stewart Peterson said:

Bruce, I think you’re trying to be a good liberal instead of following your conscience. Why do you have to prove your loyalty to some “movement?”

Because following an ideology is easer than thinking for one’s self. It’s the sign of a lazy intellect.

        Bruce said:

We need more indentity politics, because identity politics is all about identifying the people who are the problem and marginalizing them.

What about doing it the other way around: identifying bad things and preventing people from doing them, instead of creating an arbitrary standard of who is “good” and who is “bad” and preventing the “bad” people from doing anything, even if the “bad” people have some good ideas?

The Kursk’s reactor was recovered in one piece and operable. The Titanic wasn’t an indictment of the safety of reciprocating steam engines running on coal; it sank when it hit an iceberg, and that didn’t have anything to do with the engines–what does the Kursk have to do with the safety of turbine steam engines running on nuclear fission?

Also–about the linked article–what they’re talking about when they say it’s the best place for the reactor to be is the literal physical impossibility of a meltdown. With the reactor shut down and surrounded by cubic *miles* of literally ice-cold seawater (as in 28-32 degrees, which is lower than the freezing point of fresh water, but saltwater is still liquid at those temperatures, which is why salt melts ice), you couldn’t ask for a better cooling system.

Do you know how these reactors work? That’s not a rhetorical question–do you?

Bruce, I think you’re trying to be a good liberal instead of following your conscience. Why do you have to prove your loyalty to some “movement?”

        Bruce said:

I suppose you mean nuclear submarine reactors. Yeah right, they are safe, what about the Kursk?

http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v05n3p18.htm

Wasn’t a reactor problem. Nor was it a reactor problem that caused the loss of the two US nuclear submarines (the Scorpion or the Thresher). Operations in deep waters are dangerous and nobody is going top claim that they’re not. However, the US Navy has a spotless safety record when it comes to nuclear reactor operation.

It’s not just submarine reactors that demonstrate that small reactors can be built with extremely good safety. Some of the highest regarded reactors in the world, when it comes to safety include small reactor designs like the SLOWPOKE and TRIGA designs.

I’m not so sure that would be a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Bush’s policies, but it’s generally been regarded as a bad precident and a problem with moving forward when an administration starts considering wholesale prosecution against the previous administration. It can very quickly turn into a nasty situation which will only result in more reprisals down the road.

Ford was faced with a very sticky situation like that. With the hindsight of history, he seems to have done the right thing.

“Control a country’s energy and you control that country” – Henry Kissinger

“Energy is the ability to do work. Once you come to grasp with the implications of that statement, you will understand why this is of such vital importance” -me

The reality of things is that we have a pretty good idea what we need to do things. The Apollo program didn’t really involve any one day that suddenly an amazing technical discovery made it all possible. We knew back in the 1950’s and earlier we could go to the moon. We knew doing so would need a huge rocket and we even knew roughly how big it would need to be. The engineering of all the valves, gas regulators, communications relays, thrusters, sensors and so on wasn’t really all that revolutionary. A huge project, yes, but nothing we didn’t know we could do.

        Bruce said:

I suppose you mean nuclear submarine reactors. Yeah right, they are safe, what about the Kursk?

http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v05n3p18.htm

There was nothing wrong with Kursk’s reactors.
The men in her engine room lived for nine days after the explosion while the authoritarian Russian government dithered.
Eventually, they ran out of air to breathe.

http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v05n3p18.htm

Well, it’s clear who is responsible for that with the previous administrations politicization of the justice department and CIA. They should stand trial and then maybe there’d be some faith restored in our government. Thats another topic, though. Also, its the other way around, it’s people like you who fail to call out groups of people on their errors that allowed things to continue for so long as they did under Bush that are the problem. We need more indentity politics, because identity politics is all about identifying the people who are the problem and marginalizing them.

I hope that this break in posting by Dr.Buzz is giving him a chance to reflect on whats important. Even if Obama is not perfect on energy policy – why is energy policy so important? It’s just one part of his political platform. There are a lot of other things like Education, refocusing NASA’s priorities, saving american jobs and so forth. Also, maybe there will be advances in technology that allow us to make it work really well, such as the advances that allowed the apollo program to be succesful.