Fission-Steam, Carbon, SDEcabs, Whalebone, Sunni resistance

Fission-Steam
If Carbon justifies Fission-Steam
the external costs of Fission are born in the name of Carbon
['Carbon' here means anthropogenic emissions of CO2 to Atmosphere]
The used fuel, the radioactive wastes, must be guarded by well armed Militia for 10,000 years.
This will cost, and will distort societies for that long, because of the rights we must give up to these Militia.
Privacy, Free Assembly, freedom from Arbitrary arrest.. all these will be lost forever to the Militia.

The protectors, who must be armed for 10,000 years plus, should be given their correct name. not Plutonium Militia, but Carbon Militia
We have to sustain this Militia only because we had a Carbon plan which led us to Fission, so Carbon takes the blame, not Fission.
So we might ask, given Carbon Militia Eternal, what other tasks might they better do?
- confiscating engines of excessive capacity?
- enforcing efficient glazing,insulation, heat pumps, shading, heat exchanges?
What is the salary of the Carbon Militia for 10,000 years?
How might that appear in a discounted cash flow?
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The only reason for Fission-Steam is Carbon.
Meaning reduced CO2 emissions
because Carbon represents an emergency
the immanent disaster projection.

[Note "projection" not_ prediction.
Club of Rome etc & Carbon models dont produce "predictions" in the sense that X will happen.
They produce "projections" which state that if nothing intervenes, current trends indicate a tendency to X.
But something nearly always happens. The models are valuable in examining alternatives, they are not strictly "predictions"]

We do not_ choose Fission-Steam
for cost, health & safety, or other eco-issues, we choose Fission-Steam for Carbon

Cost is to some extent irrelevant, within a factor of 3-5 , we are acting on the Carbon emergency, which may well have a cost.
We are not choosing Fission for safety, even though fewer mine deaths & lung disease deaths might result. We have lived with these, and Fission has its own dangers.

Since we choose Fission-Steam for Carbon, we must be sure that it does have a Carbon advantage.
It seems that the fuel cycle reduces Carbon only if we use high-grade ores. So all that low-grade ore & Uranium from seawater etc are worse than coal.
Building the power stations takes years, and concrete construction makes Carbon . If the Carbon emergency is acute, the delay may render Fission worthless from a Carbon perspective.

Daughter nucleotides dangerous for 10,000 years may be the price we must pay for Carbon. But lets be sure we get a real net reduction in CO2.

The absence of coal mines, coal trains, coal smoke stacks, and coal subsidies may be great benefits, but the argument is about Carbon, so these benefits, and the dangers of critical piles, are minor considerations.

Lets be certain that subsidies to Fission, or Coal are well known, and well-compared to the benefits of subsidies to decentralised, people-friendly technologies, such as PV,Wind turbines, efficiency...

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afterdowningstreet
New book from Helen Caldicott :Nuclear Power's Not the Answer,

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Coal CO2 sequestration:
Futuregen's 10 members .. largest coal mining companies, among them BHP Billiton of Australia....the China Huaneng Group, is also a member .. India's government signed on in March.. .. already behind schedule .. starting operation by 2012...

"Futuregen is a smokescreen, since it's not intended to bring technology to the market at the pace required to deal with the problem," said Daniel Lashoff, (dir NRDC).."We don't have that kind of time."

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NYT 29/05/2006
¶One acre of soybeans = 50 gallons of biodiesel fuel.
¶ 427 E6 arable acres in USA
¶USA driver = 464 gallons of gasoline a year..198 million drivers in USA
¶"Arable acres needed to make enough biodiesel: 1.8 billion."
..500-megawatt coal-fired = emissions = 750,000 cars (Shell).

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SDEcabs
Total-Timetable.
Plan for a transport system:
Within the city electric taxi-cabs will be on call.
Low -powered, low acceleration, they will have the advantage of position-transparency.
Cheap transponders on-board will give their location and velocity to within 1m & 1m/sec
So cell-phone/pager gizmos will have an accurate ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival].

Urban travelers hate to wait. So this accurate ETA will cut waiting time to the uncertainty.
Current city traffic flow will be continually modeled, so the uncertainty will be low.

Electric cars are clean, they can drive into comfortable bright clean foyers.
So any waiting is done in shelter & comfort.

E-Negotiations for multiple-customer hire can determine taxi-routes for pickup & put-down.
If the customer requires priority, she can get a single-hire taxi.
Prices can be negotiated.

Similar position-transponders on rail-carriages mean that pagers/cell phones can accurately report train ETAs.
Transponders can be around $100 per carriage gps + local calibration. Backed up by bar-code, RFID tags, multiple-redundancy systems.
For a railway, these position systems enable trains to be run much closer together, with greater safety, than current systems which locate trains at isolated points only. We must know where every carriage is, and what velocity, at all times. These systems are cheap.

Self-drive ecabs (SDEcabs) with location systems could operate safely within pre-scribed areas. So SDEcabs could be hired without risk of loss.
Two-man pickup teams might drive to find SDEcabs wherever they had been left within the Allowed-Drive-Zone.

One thing this system does not address is long commutes. The 120kph commute to the semi-rural house 100km out of town may only work with rail, not road. So the commuter may drive a small SDEcab, or shared cab to the rail station, then pickup another SDEcab at the destination station.

A city full of light, 30kph, clean quiet Ecabs will be a far far better place.
Hybrid petrol-Ecabs may serve some role, but they must switch off the petrol motors before entering the indoor pickup foyers.

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re Whalebone:

Whales washed up in New Zealand become the property of the Department of Conservation and are then buried and then given over to the local iwi (Maori tribe) for distribution if and when this is deemed appropriate.

It seems that there are few Whalebone carvers in NZ. Although NZ whalebone comes from stranded dead whales, carvers are reluctant to feed the market. Similar to the attitude to elephant ivory, for fear of encouraging killers. So kiwis must carry cowbone.

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re "Sabrina's fallen overboard":
nylon

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afterdowningstreet

What Is Going On With the Iraqi Resistance?
"G and H appear to have mistakenly absorbed the portrait of the Iraq war that the U.S. military is currently pushing: that the main thrust of the fighting has become (or always has been) the ethno-religious battle between Shia and Sunni. This is horribly inaccurate: the overwhelming preponderance of violence now and in the past is the battle between the U.S. forces and the (mainly Sunni) resistance."

Fission-Steam Carbon Whalebone Sunni resistance