I’m reasonably certain there are better ways to “educate” park-goers and give them some soon-to-rust modern art sculptures than spending $322,548 of public funds when most people are struggling just to put food on the table. Besides, educate them about what, that wind power is an inefficient waste of their tax dollars? Alternative energy sources should be used effectively so people are educated that they’re a benefit, not a waste of money. This accomplishes literally the opposite of advancing the cause of alternative energy.
It’s pretty obvious the City Council didn’t research or discuss what they were spending other people’s money on, and now most of them are covering their asses and making excuses after the fact. I just hope Deputy Mayor Cherie Kidd got a decent bribe, or she’s just an idiot.
The project, Councilman Lee Whetham added, “made sense at the time.”
Translation: I didn’t pay attention to what I was doing or take my job seriously so now I’m dodging responsibility.
And people wonder what everyone hates politicians.
This stuff makes me pretty much reject every political conspiracy out there. Simply put, the people in government are just average people bumbling through as best they can. There is no over arching plan to destroy America or enslave people to feed to the Reptillian aliens living under Denver’s airport. This really is the best they can do.
Pretty much. Any conspiracy theory requires so much competence from its conspirators that I find my self thinking, “Are we talking about the same government?”
…Unless the apparent incompetence of the government is part of the conspiracy…
Yeah, when I see VAWT my reaction is pretty much the same as when I see “perpetual motion machine”. Proponents tend to be con men or sadly deluded enthusiasts.
I think regular prop windmills are very beautiful, and would love to see them lining the local coastline the way they do the Pennsylvania ridges.
Why won’t Thorium reactors work? I went on a tear on youtube a few weeks ago, and I had problems finding people with credible reasons why they wouldn’t work. Other than the main reasons that 1) the current design makes bomb materials and 2) that’s the way we have always done it and 3) while they have made them small scale, there would need to have some R&D to make them work large scale.
So far I haven’t really heard anything about how they fundamentally can’t work. Unlike other Eco-friendly projects, like Waterseer, which can’t work because of physics.
I am certainly in no position to say whether or not they could work. Simply, that they haven’t paid off, in spite of a great deal of hype. Companies have poured huge amounts of $ investing in HAWTs (propeller-type windmills) rather than VAWTs, because they expect a payback. If thorium reactors were as superior as they are purported to be, I would think that by now, the same companies that invest in regular fission reactors would be heavily investing in the R&D to make thorium reactors widespread.
tl;dr, “Possible” is way different than “Practical”.
Oh, they could work, but so can many other economically, militarily and politically unsound ventures. You rapidly get into the guns and butter argument; thorium reactor development would be so titanically expensive, with so little ROI compared to other ventures, that you really should look at what you’re not going to be able to do if you start driving tax dollars into developing thorium. The USA has better options than thorium - that we’re already not exploiting because hydraulic fracking is so cheap.
Now, if I was in India, I’d probably be a full bore thorium fanatic. They have so much of the stuff laying around, and such a high population density, it’s a superb research and development opportunity for Indian scientists.
I took have an issue with the tech in wind energy. I think it is a decent idea in some applications, but there are many issues with it, primarily storage. That isn’t to say I think we should totally abandon it, but I still don’t see it as a long term solution.
With Thorium I still haven’t found a good reason for someone to NOT dump a few billion into getting a proof of concept reactor up and running. The science and number seem sound. It is unmeltdownable - you can literally walk away from it and it would be fine. Granted your point that “if it is such a good idea, why doesn’t someone do it?” has some merit - but we can find many cases where a challenge to the paradigm was met with a lot of scoffing and resistance. Treating ulcers because they were caused by bacteria, not stress, comes to mind. But this too is why I was trying to find info on why it wouldn’t work, and so far no one has shown me it couldn’t. Unlike things like Solar Roadways and the Hyperloop, and pretty much all of the herbal supplement stuff out there.
Ah, thats a good answer. Isn’t this also one reason making new nuclear reactors has been pretty stagnant as well?
My impression is that one of the biggest obstacles to building new plants is regulatory. If you’re not building a design that’s already been used and approved (and really, no one is going to build a design from the 70s, the last decades when new ones were started), it’s apparently a difficult and long process to get permitted, which equals $$$. It kinda makes sense, given the possible consequences, but I do wish they would get on with it. I don’t really see a green future without a lot of nuke power.
Could be wrong, opinion formed from vague memory of reading articles.
Absolutely. Until the Cheney energy plan of 2005, it was literally impossible to make money on a nuclear reactor in the United States of America. The much vaunted Free Market™ totally bitchslapped the terrestrial fission industry with its invisible hand.
Under the Cheney energy policy the federal government provided operator liability limitations, taxpayer funded insurance, direct taxpayer investment, release from decommissioning cost escrow requirements, and per-watt subsidies to nuclear plant operators. This chicanery, combined with the greenwashing of nuclear power and the Bush/Obama administration policy of allowing relicensing of dangerous BWR designs past their design lifetimes, is the current economic reality of the US nuclear industry.
Unfortunately most articles on the subject are propaganda of one sort or another. You have to read absurd numbers of them and fact-check them against each other and independent sources. For example, the claim that terrestrial fission plants are overregulated and that regulatory compliance is overly costly can be persuasively framed, but it’s factually incorrect. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the quintessential example of regulatory capture, and regulatory costs are only a very small percentage of the costs of terrestrial nuclear fission, although in absolute numbers such costs may seem quite large.
I’ll note in passing that the claim that privately owned nuclear fission plants could be profitable if they were not required to be insured by companies capable of paying for the costs of an accident appears to be true. This, again, is the work of the marketplace, presumably providing an accurate assessment of risk.
If you reject every political conspiracy then you miss a great deal of actual criminality occurring on a regular basis. Conspiracies do not require coordination en masse nor do they require reptilian alien involvement. We shouldn’t reject the fact that conspiracies can and do happen ALL. THE. TIME. because we reject tin foil hat wearing conspiracies. We should just carefully measure and investigate any conspiracy and reject those that fail to produce factual evidence of said conspiracy.
I hate the term “conspiracy theory” because it has become a knee jerk reactionary logical fallacy to reject any possible notion that individuals conspired to perform some criminal act.
If it’s not possible for nukes to be built because of the liability risk, is it really chicanery? I mean, I would call bullshit on the subsidies and the relicensing of old designs, but again, I think nukes have to be an important part of any future energy mix, and if the essentially unlimited liability (I mean, how do you price rendering a large area uninhabitable for who knows how long) means that won’t happen, then I think creative solutions are in order. I’d prefer it not involve gov’t subsidies, but as long as the gov’t does hand out energy subsidies I want to see a new generation of nukes involved.
