FTA: Much of the increase in support for energy exploration has come among groups that previously viewed this as a less important priority than energy conservation - young people, liberals, independents, Democrats, women and people who have attended college. Fully half of people ages 18 to 29 (51%) now say expanding energy exploration is a more important priority for energy policy than increasing energy conservation and regulation; only about a quarter of young people (26%) expressed this view in February. The proportion of liberals who say expanded energy exploration is the more important priority also has doubled (from 22% to 45%). Overview: As Gas Prices Pinch, Support for Energy Exploration Rises
Sure. I am all for energy exploration as long as we don't explore for more oil to burn into the atmosphere. Solar, wind and nuclear would be excellent technologies to explore. Oil exploration today would not result in any improvement in energy production for many, many years to come.
That's the part the most people don't understand. As if exploration involves rummaging around for spigots attached to massive oil fields.
Of course solar, wind and nuclear are already available. For nukes, all it takes is the stroke of a pen. The "many, many years" oil argument, while true, goes back over ten years. Had it been allowed during that time, oil would now be flowing from ANWR and offshore rigs.
True, but 10 years ago $10/bbl oil would have prevented it. We're gonna need that oil later, frankly. As more oil producing developing nations (Iran, for example) become more affluent, they're going to be exporting less and less oil. Conservation and efficiency are the first line of defense against this problem. At it's peak, ANWR will shave a whopping $0.80 off the price of a barrel of oil. There's a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. That's the real problem.
You might be able to build more nukes "with the stroke of a pen" but that wouldn't solve the seemingly intractable problem of LONG TERM STORAGE OF NUCLEAR WASTE! Until then, I'm not prepared to gamble my great great,,,grand children's future on something that is "good enough" Don't give me the line, "The French do it, why don't we?" They haven't solved the long term problem yet either, just delayed it. Not to mention the fact that NO private investor will build nukes because they can't get liability insurance. The only way to get the investors off the hook is for the Feds to pick up the tab. Also consider that any new plant proposed to day would be 10+ years from going on line. Can you spell Wpps? Nope, go down some other road, Icarus
I think we need to get it to a point where we use petro-chem for production of products that can (as of now) only be made from oil. I think what tripp was getting at when he said they injected substance was a desposal method? Help me out here if you will tripp? One of my Professors had a theory that you inject waste in to diving plates or shoot it at the sun.
That's not entirely true. I do not like this, but this is the present law: Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The bigger showstopper is getting financing. Anyone with big money sees WPPSS like scenarios rather than quick $$$ returns. The government really goes out of it's way to subsidize (indirectly) big power plants and puts up barriers (often directly) for sustainable plants. For example, early SEGS plants were limited to 30 MW. After intense lobbying, the limit was raised to 80MW.....and the only way around this was to build multiple 80MW plants, thereby limiting the economy of scale and making solar more expensive. Imagine limiting a nuclear plant to 30 MW. What would be your cost per kWh out of that? It really is nutty how (behind closed doors) most all mainline politicians really think solar and wind are still in the "evaluation" stage.
Whoopdeee Frigging doo! With the exception of the glassification (sp) system these are are not only here now, they are not even in real life testing. Sending nuke waste into subduction zones is a great idea. Any one been able to do it? Fusion reactors to burn waste? Anyone doing it at scale? Not that I know of. As for the French method of making glass blocks and burying them deep in the earth. Sounds good until you think that the last I heard Nuke waste stays lethal for ~250,000 years. So you have the issue of stable geology to find the place(s) that will be absolute stable for those years. A bit bigger nut to crack perhaps, given the nature of people, is how are you going to keep the storage secure? In this nut case world we live in, we have spent billions to "keep us safe from terror" for little gain, and you are asking me to believe that no nutcase (state sanctioned or not) will in that 250,000 years, with increasing production we can keep it safe? Look at Russia, look at N. Korea, look at Pakistan! Our enemy is now our friend is now our enemy! The Russians can't keep track of the bombs the USSR once had, convincing many that a black market nuke (bomb) from the former Soviet Union is not an impossibility. You don't think with enough imagination and enough money some wing nut could figure out how to get enough waste to devastate the world, or a good portion of it. If you believe that, I will sell you a bridge to Brooklyn! Betcha hadn't thought about that! Icarus
Unfortunately America is deficient in comprehending math and scientific evidence and easily swayed by sound bite headlines. This is easily evidenced in this thread where some people thinksthat a swipe of a pen will result in nuclear power plants popping up everywhere(except in their backyard of course) with no consequence at all.
Sad, but not surprising, that the art of allegory is over your head. Maybe you slept through that class, too. BTW, what I'll be celebrating Friday, the birth of America, was also created with the stroke of a pen (and barrel of a gun).
If a meaningless question is asked, does the answer have any useful meaning? All this tells me is that energy is now a much more discussed subject than the last useless poll on this subject. Seriously, the knowledge of one expert oil geologist is vastly more important that the accumulation of 200 strangers in a shopping mall...or a phone book. Everyone (including me) has a view on the hot topic of the hour....but 99% of my views are useless to include in a poll. The one percent that might be useful would be destroyed by putting it in a poll.
Agreed. What got my attention most is the trend. More Democrats than Republicans now support exploration, an enormous shift in sentiment. Pocketbook issues usually rise to the forefront eventually.
I whole heartedly agree. Forunately, we can make oil out of biomass, so petroleum isn't the only way. It's just cheaper (for now). I suppose you could try to bury stuff in subduction zones, but it'd be massively expensive. Also, oceanic plates subduct (continental plates are too bouyant to subduct) at painfully slow rates. It varies from zone to zone (it's mostly a function of the sea-floor spreading rate at the MOR on the other side of the plate) but we're talking centimetres/year. Like 5-15 centimetres/year. Somewhere in that range anyways, memory's a bit vague. It's been a long time since I took tectonics. Shooting radioactive waste into space is a horrid idea. Booster failure would spread the stuff over a huge area, not exactly a good outcome. Let's just use CANDU reactors and the like. That way we can use thorium in addition to uranium.
