Fission plant wastes are two differnet problem sets: 1) Fission products, which are pretty much gone after a couple of hundred years for even the long-lived ones, and 2) transuranics bred from uranium absorbing neutrons. It's the transuranics that are the long-lived stuff, but they are potentially nuclear fuel, so should be recycled into new fuel rods. Plutonium is the most obvious one of these, but any transuranic is going to alternate between absorbing neutrons, decaying via some decay path or another, and eventually hit a fissionable isotope of something, at which point it gives off a bunch of energy and joins the fission product problem set.
Of course, if this fusion technology of Lockheed's really does pan out, no one is going to bother. I want a Mr. Fusion to power my Tesla.
A usefull corrolary to keep in mind is one from the "Freefall" web comic: "Any technology, no matter how simple, is magic to you if you don't understand it." And too few people really understand science or technology on even a basic level.
On the other hand, I like Dr. Barry Gehm's version, too: "Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not advanced enough."
While environmental studies professors continue to pump out ready excuses for imposing increasing economic feudalism in Europe and North America, China and India are going to build out nuclear power and produce energy. I doubt they'll be dissuaded from trying because of anything this professor says.
When people like this say, "the world can't" remember that they actually mean, "we aren't going to let you."
This. I wish I had mod points today to mod this up.
As I suspected...
Not a very detailed article -- basically, it just says "Amory Lovins says that..." which I find singularly unconvincing without more support than that.
Lovins is an absorbing speaker. I heard him give a talk on his idea for his super-duper-ultra-mega-hypercar. But his arguments veer towards the tendentious. In the example of his car ideas, it's amazing to me to hear someone who supposedly has a degree in physics assert that crumple zones will protect someone in a featherweight vehicle in a collision with a normal car. Really? Has conservation of momentum been repealed because he says so? I don't think so.
I'm not ever going to forget that one of his premises is that cheap, clean, abundant energy is inherently a bad thing. "Nothing short of disasterous", in his words.
Not that I'm going to toss it out just because Amory said it. But I'm certainly not going to blindly accept it as TRVTH because Amory said it, either. I'm going to subject it to a great deal of scrutiny, to see what his assumptions are.
I used Waze off-and-on for a while. I didn't find the "social networking" stuff exactly appropriate while driving. Worse, it kept popping up screen-obscuring advertisements for things like Enema (however the rapper spells his name) albums that I have active antipathy to, and no way to get it to target ads less inappropirately.
Worst, though, was the battery use, and the fact that no matter what I did with the settings, it insisted on randomly re-starting itself and devouring my battery. That was why I eventually uninstalled it.
It did have some good features, but I sure hope Google doesn't incorporate its misfeatures into Google Maps.
would reply to this
He sees a lot of egotism at work, too, but he says if you're setting out to change the world, you're probably going to need a big ego to do it.
"Yes, I have an attitude. It is not my problem."
Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -- Frank Hubbard
