you are right, you will go down in flames from the 'nuclear fanboys'. You deserve it.

We have much more pressing concerns to deal with than this inane bullshit:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/un-study-says-76-trillion-needs-to-be.html

and keep this in mind when you consider your excruciatingly stupid decision:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/20/us-germany-energy-idUSTRE75J42J20110620

And in case you are a 'climate change skeptic' I'd suggest you check the statisics on coal and oil deaths, in relation to nuclear:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html

What an unmitigated, colossal, inconceivably short-minded, pooch screw of a fuckup this flip-flopping is. It's guaranteed to cost lots of lives and billions of dollars.

And the chance of a 9.0 earthquake plus tsunami is - in case you are wondering - is pretty much next to NONEXISTANT in Germany.

If you don't like the current brand of nuclear reactors, use that reputed german engineering skill and build LFTRs and IFRs to take their place, don't cower under the utter spinelessness of this decision.

Ed

> Wikileaks isn't putting anyone at risk, when the US government put this charge forward to Wikileaks, Assange responded asking for an example
> name of someone who would be put in trouble so they could negotiate over further redacting the documents to protect such people, the US
> responded stating they wont negotiate over it and to hand it all back.

I think that falls under the header of 'refuse to negotiate with terrorists'. By vetting the documents, the US would have given implicit admission that the leaks were somehow legit.

They are not. It takes two to tango, and the fact that he chose to release them to the detriment of pretty much everybody (except perhaps underground movements like Al Quaeda who will use it as a recruiting tool against pretty much every arab government in existence).

Politics is a dirty business, and governments by necessity need to be given a measure of secrecy in their proceedings. They can't be given carte blanche, of course, but at the same time, they have to be free to be able to negotiate with a certain expectation that what they decide will be confidential. If wikileaks had gone through the documents and picked out bits and pieces which were warcrimes (ie: that directly lead to someone's death) that's one thing - full sale disclosure is quite another.

I HOPE that Mr. Asssange is caught and sentenced. Ironically, I think it paints the US in a pretty good light, considering exactly how restrained the response has been to the original leaks. Now that he has poked the eyes of much more dangerous governments (iran, north korea, etc) my guess is that his life is forfeit, and its only a matter of time.

But I think that he knows this already.

Ed

> Wikileaks isn't on some quest to destroy the government: It is serving the purpose of saving it from itself, before it becomes completely
> unaccountable to its citizens and eventually becomes destructive of its own ends.

bullshit guy..

There is no way that with this amount of volume of documents being released that they would possibly be able to vet all of the information contained therein and make it so that the people referred to could be free from repercussions from its publication. People will die because of this, and the moron who released it will likely get the death penalty.

I can't say I've got a lot of sympathy for him.

Ed

who the hell moderated this comment as +5 funny? Everything in it rings true, especially the part about coal and mercury (one of the reasons, btw, for the rise in autism)

Ok, we find now that we can replace - on average - 15% of the coal burned in a given plant if we retrofit it with solar thermal.

Great - now we have to go that extra step and replace *100%* of the coal burned in a given plant with small, right sized nuclear reactors like:

• hyperion power
• babcock and wilcox
• NuScale power
• sandia labs
• tsinghua university

not to mention south africa's PBMR, and the travelling wave reactor (intellectual ventures). It's simple - make a mass-producable, small, efficient reactor, use it to boil water at both the pressure and temperature of your average coal-fired power plant, and *turn off the burning of coal altogether*. And do it in scale.

That way, there isn't a horrendous capital cost (pocket nuke reactors are small and you are only replacing the boiler), the fuel is cheaper, and as a side benefit current coal plants increase their capacity factor from ~75% to above 90%.

This is really the only way to combat global warming in a way that profits everybody; it allows developing countries to leverage their experience in building coal-fired power plants to build carbon-neutral sources, and given the factory approach is comprehensively scalable, as scalable as producing fighters or bombers in WWII.

We have to do this. We have to stop dicking around with solutions that only work 15% of the way, have appallingly low capacity factors (for 53 days in a row, the windmills in denmark produced basically nada in the way of electricity, texas has an average of 8.7% capacity (ref: here ).

The stakes are too high. I encourage everyone to watch:

http://fora.tv/2009/08/18/A_REALLY_Inconvenient_Truth_Dan_Miller

which shows the true state of our affairs with regards to the climate (the person introducing Mr. Miller says, in short, "He's going to tell us all how we are really fucked".

Looking at the evidence, I agree with him.

Ed

no.. it's not 5000 nuclear power plants simply because when you compare electricity to fossil fuels you are comparing apples to oranges.

Right now, 104 nuclear reactors do 20% of our electricity. Hence, 500 nuclear reactors could supply it all.

As for transportation,40% of our energy supply is oil, mainly for use in transportation, which is at best 20% efficient. electric vehicles can approach 90% efficiency at point of the motor. Hence, the amount of true work to replace it is 40% / 4.5 or about 8% of our energy supply.

Anyways, you get the idea. When you see a 'million barrels of oil equivalent' chart it really is misleading, because they count million barrels of oil thermal in the case of coal, natural gas, etc. and million barrels of oil *electric* with nuclear, and hydro.

So all in all, less than 1000 nuclear plants could do it with a wide margin - the main trick of course is getting everything electrical which is no small trick..