Ok, so what has been done by these organizations to protect the contamination of the ecosystem's genome from GMOs. I'm kind of on the fence about GMOs however it seems to me there is as much ground to be cautious about deploying them when they can introduce species extinction by interfering with the germination of seeds.

It seems to me that whilst there are great benefits there are also great risks, especially when there is an abundance of food and the real issue is attempting to manipulate commodity prices through the practice of grain dumping at sea.

If we need more food, wouldn't it be more logical to end grain dumping and improve food distribution than to grow more food that will just be dumped at sea anyway? Maybe we should be trying to understand the genome better before we go modifying it in the ecosystem.

That's a metric fuckton of metric...

Why not just post a story instead of being OT? I mean a new Tails version is actually 'news for nerds' so why post it in a story about an impact crater? Are you saying that this release is so good that it caused an impact crater hundreds of millions of years ago.

Please there is enough stoopid in the world - we don't need it here.

I'm just trying to understand this. Why is there a stigma about being cautious about introducing GMOs the the ecosystem if we don't have an untouched backup of the ecosystem that sustains us. It's not as if we can un-introduce GMOs to the ecosystem once they are there so what is the problem with having strict controls over their deployment? Am I missing something?

You know that 'anarchy' is "a state of society without government or law" so if a government is ignoring the law it is halfway to anarchy already. I think the thing is that they don't value their freedom enough to stand up to the government that is constantly taking it away by deceiving the population.

If you fear the government then you are not free, if the government fears the people then you are.

The 2005 Energy act specifically put measures in place that prevents ordinary people from intefering with the placement of a nuclear reactor. It is impossible for a normal person, or a local community, under the law, to prevent the placement of a nuclear reactor in their community.

Nuclear power has too many establishment, operational and ongoing costs to be an attractive investment anymore. The existence of the Price-Anderson act shows investors that Nuclear power is an investment oxymoron. If it waa safe and profitable, then there would be no need for the P-A act.

I think it should be the other way around. We haven't invested enough in solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power sources yet and we should develop them to derive maximum energy yeild from them.

Nuclear was scaled to quickly in the first place - jumping from 100Mw to 1Gw too quickly to understand the proper safety systems required and coming to terms with the surrounding factors that were not well understood when the plants were first conceptualized. Simply put like coal, nuclear power has consequences that weren't well understood.

I think there is a place for Nuclear power, just not in our generation. If you really support nuclear power and want to see it done properly stepping back now and building the foundational infrastructure whilst developing reactor technology means designing and building for 100 years to support a proper nuclear infrastructure that can last 1000-5000 years.

It is an ambitious long term goal that would change the very nature of the world economy to achieve that could guarantee the future of humanity instead of condeming it to reduced birth rates and transgenic disease the way the shortsighted vision the current nuclear industry does. People talk about Nuclear power, but if you engage in the cognitive effort of what is *really* required to make it work you find it is nothing like the nuclear industry we have now.

All of the current accidents show that humans are not mature enough to have the long terms vision required to deal with nuclear power right now.

Transmission losses are a good point, but regardless of the other inputs to the grid I think the really interesting thing about these developments are that it really changes the dynamics of the grid as a supplier and consumer becomes the same thing.

Sometimes people will have power to sell and sometimes they will need to buy it so, to me, it looks like a whole new trading market emerging for who and what will provide certain levels of available capacity. The trading and management technologies that deal with those demand fluctuations look interesting and they don't even exist to service the market that way yet.

I think the thing we are missing is, the deployment of different technologies for managing solar, wind, geothermal, tide and so on are going to create a boom in Information Technology that eclipses every boom in IT we have ever seen and the very nature of how we consume electricity will be nothing like it is today.

We often get lost in the 'which generator is better' however these types of developments herald some of the most interesting and exciting times for IT geeks and gadget builders as the need arises for such solutions.

Problem solving at its best!

Indeed it is area dependant however I think you are referring to photovoltaic as opposed to Solar thermal which has line and point modes of collection. IIRC the output of point mode stations quadruple as the size of the station doubles because the higher temperatures achieved at the point.

Obviously there are limits to the largest size, however we are nowhere near that yet.

Any form of your 5th point would use plutonium.

The biggest problem with the mining of uranium is the amount of energy required to extract the ore from the rock...

...and all of the new sources coming on line are all from harder ores i.e. it takes more enrgy to extract from the granite ore bodies than it does from sandstone ore bodies. This means the energetic output of your reactor is soaked up by the energy you used to get the fuel in the first place.

Again this becomes an issue of how much energy goes into getting the uranium out of the seawater, you would probably look to extracting uranium from coal station smoke stacks or from the fly ash before turning to seawater

Well you probably mean 'burner' reactors at that rate, and they have to acheive 20% (and then it's fuel reprocessing - but thats the integral bit) and then provided we have the materials technology to build that reactor. Sure the prototype IFR is very promising but after all the other factors are accounted for, like burn up rate (even at 20% as compared to the current 0.3%), reactor availability you are still left with a reactor that has to be decommissioned after 50 years and then you use up even more energy because you can't demolish it like any normal building.

So these other factors are also considerations when weighing up the energetic viability of the fuel cycle.

I think you will find that Solar thermal generation doesn't scale in the way you have assumed.