Hi, my name is "somewhere in the Outback" and I volunteer to take the entire world's nuclear waste! I do this because I am geologically stable. I do this as a ruse though. The waste will never be buried too deep. Instead we'll just store it in cooling ponds until G.E. finally commercializes the S-PRISM. These reactors burn nuclear waste and could run the world for 500 years just on today's waste! Half a millennium of power is worth about $30 trillion dollars! So Australia could then sell the "waste" which will then be fuel back to the world at a massive profit. So pick me pick me! I'm old and wise and waiting for your nuclear waste! http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/nuclear-posters/

As I just shared above, Roy Spencer is a creationist. See this post. http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2355816&cid=36930874

Um, yeah, but isn't the author of the paper, Roy Spencer is a Creationist that cannot admit an old earth (as far as I understand his version of Creationism — I might have that wrong). However, he *has* signed of on a THEOLOGICAL statement that God designed the world so well that global warming cannot harm it? Did you even read his wiki?

"We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)

The nuclear bombs are $700 billion over 10 years? What about saving $600 billion a year, or $6 TRILLION dollars over 10 years? Would American like that? Here's how, spend MORE on nukes, but nuclear power not nuclear weapons, and get off foreign oil. Do everything you can to electrify transport; electric cars, fast rail, trolley buses. The EIA says peak coal could be around 2030, so it's time to start building out your electric transport systems and Gen3.5 nukes (like the AP1000 that are incredibly safe) and Gen4 nukes that eat waste. (When GE finally releases it's S-PRISM). Whether or not you think spending $700 billion on nuclear BOMBS over 10 years, well, that's up to your defence policy. But I will say that it could make sense to enter more weapons treaties and reduce the global arms by BURNING the bombs in nuclear reactors for clean energy security!

Hi, I know these guys have FOSS driving all the electronics on their FOSH. http://opensourceecology.org/

Here here! Deaths per terawatt coal is 4000 times worse than nuclear.

Nuclear power is safe. The Fukishima incident proves so. If that's as bad as it gets, bring on the nuclear age right now! Statistically the deaths per Terawatt hour are 4000 times higher for coal than nuclear. Some even have deaths from wind turbines higher than deaths from nuclear! (Servicemen falling off the wind turbine!) Also, condemning nuclear power wholesale because of Fukishima is like writing off aviation because of the Hindenberg! Fukishima was a Ge2 nuke. We're up to exponentially safer Gen3.5 reactors with passive safety physics where the core can NEVER melt down, and then Gen4 is only a decade away! GenIV nukes are the game changers! They're the Integral Fast Reactors (IFR's) that will EAT nuclear waste and bombs, cannot PRODUCE bombs, and could run the world for 500 years just on today's nuclear waste.

Just imagine what we might have by 500 years! I say go for IFR's NOW! They are the ONLY economical way to do carbon-free baseload power without bankrupting the economy.

ColdWetDog, how expensive is a car?

Well that would depend if it was hand built as an individual project or whipped up on a factory line wouldn't it?

We must deploy today’s GenIII reactors immediately. We cannot wait any longer. These GenIII reactors have passive safety features undreamt of in Chernobyl and Fukishima.

And they have the GenIV feature of being modular. Think about that for a moment. Older nukes were the “Rolls Royce” of the energy world. They were hand-crafted site-constructed expensive beasts! But GenIII reactors can be modularised and put up on the assembly line. Safety systems can be standardised as part of the production line process. It will bring the costs down dramatically, and cuts Rolls Royce costs down to the Hyundai level, while being better than the original.

Now, GenIV reactors are still my favourite as they burn nuclear waste. They breed it up. I’ve said repeatedly that we have about 500 years of fuel sitting around in cooling ponds, just waiting for GenIV reactors to burn it.

But it’s not that simple. We don’t have access to all that energy yet. Even if I waved a magic wand and overnight and we had the thousands of GenIV nukes we need, it would still take a few decades to breed up our nuclear waste to the right purity to run them! That is, although we *already* have 500 years worth of nuclear fuel sitting around in our ‘waste’ cooling ponds, it will take a few decades to get at it all as the fuel only doubles every 7 years.

So build the safe GenIII nukes now, and then we’ll have all the waste we need ready for the GenIV reactors when they finally come off the production line! As a friend over on BNC said,

"Gen III+ reactors (AP1000, ESBWR) are also largely ‘modular’ with parts built in a factory and assembled on site. We can do this now. New designs should be developed, but there is no need to wait. In 10 years China will be building AP1000 (or their higher-power variant the CAP1400) reactors at rates that will astonish the world. They are building the module factories now."

We have the technology right now. We can do this! We should build AP1000 assembly lines to fly them out the doors onto the trucks and freight them straight to site for assembly like so much giant-sized Lego. It’s time to do this, and the faster we start the better we’ll cope with peak oil and climate change.

This is rubbish! We already have the technnology, Gen3 AP1000's which the Chinese are making modular as we speak. That's nukes on a production line people! Prices will drop. All nukes to this stage have been hand crafted Rolls Royces. Once these modular AP1000's are on the assembly line prices will crash down to 'Hyundai' equivalent prices, yet these guys have safety features Fukishima could only dream of. Then, by the time GenIV reactors are finally coming off their own production lines, we'll have enough once-through-fuel (nuclear waste) to burn for 1000 years.

Robot cars will cause major societal revolutions, from doubling how many cars we can fit into a car-park, to drivers never having to visit a public or corporate car-park again, to solving drink driving, to ending car-crashes (or most of them) and saving a million lives a year (worldwide), to even enabling New Urbanism and less cars on the road and changing our relationship to car ownership. Imagine the end of taxi drivers. Imagine cars you can rent instead of buy, but without the human labour component. Everything's going to change! http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/robot-cars/

Energy will be a AND/AND solution. We can't rely on just one source, we need many. Wind power is one of them.

Can you please explain this statement? GenIV nuclear reactors feed off waste and could run the world for 500 years just on the waste we already have today. They are baseload, load following, and live in concrete bunkers that are pretty much bomb-proof, 9/11 proof, and definitely cyclone proof. But wind turbines only have a 33% capacity factor which means they only work a third of the time, the other 2/3rds are down when we don't decide they need to be down (as when a nuke is getting serviced) but when nature stops blowing, and turbines definitely aren't cyclone proof.

Sure we need other energy sources such as liquid fuels for cars, but when it comes to electricity, the world's cheapest electricity will come from GenIV nukes built in a modular format on an assembly line, trucked to site and then clipped together on site like so much super-sized lego. AND there's no need to build "super-grids" to shoot solar electricity from one side of a continent to the other or wind back again, so you save there as well. (Let alone the cost of all the huge seaside salt-water hydro dams required to act as giant batteries for the intermittent wind and solar.) Whichever way you look at it, GenIV nukes ARE the silver bullet. And we have enough uranium and thorium on earth to run the world for hundreds of millions of years.

Agreed! Not only is it $708 on defence, but America spends $600 billion a year buying overseas oil. Imagine if Washington mandated a shift to electric cars, fast rail, New Urbanism and above all, GenIV nukes that eat waste and could run America for 1000 years off the nuclear waste you have already collected! GenIV nukes can be load-following, run all day all night all weather all YEAR with no seasonal variation (unless required), and could basically free America from parting with $600 big ones every year. I don't get you guys. You spend $600 billion buying overseas oil, then end up invading Iraq to set up a big police station in the Middle East. Iraq + Annual overseas oil bill = America OFF OIL FOREVER and paying home-grown nuclear & renewable jobs for your OWN energy independence!

I have to agree with you sheehaje, the Star Trek retelling was a great job and I hope they go for it with sequels. But — sing it with me —"George Lucas raped my childhood..."

////Stabilization of the axis and climate regions?///// Yep, they are the main reasons I've heard. How do planets without a moon go as far as having a stable axis?

Climate change is all a Conspiracy organised by the M.I.B. who killed J.F.K, faked the moon landing and stole the alien aircraft from Area 51!!!

But I’m here to stop them! I will now reveal to the world the presence of this infamous font of infamy! The M.I.B. are actually the Mason’s in Black. You can learn all about them if you just buy my upcoming book, Why climate change is crap and you must fear the M.I.B. instead for just $29.95.

If you like Why climate change is crap you might also enjoy the sequels,

More about the M.I.B,
What you can do about the M.I.B.,
How to survive the coming M.I.B. take-over,
Another 100 reasons climate change is rubbish and your local CSIRO lab have also been brought out by the M.I.B., and finally,
How the M.I.B. fabricated the laws of physics on a universal scale to trick every spectrometer and science student in every lab across the planet, ever. No really. (This last title is a little long but my publishers say it appeals to a very specific market. One has to pay the bills, and what the heck is wrong with that?)

You’ll probably want to buy the boxed set for only $100. It’s all good science, you can trust me. The fact that I couldn’t get my works published in the peer-reviewed journals only proves how far the M.I.B. have come! Once they have control of our minds, the Rubber Duck underwear laws are soon to follow.