Ippoippo

Wooohooo.

Some new reading for me. I’ve been reading through the older posts, and there are quite a few amusing ones.

… I liked this.

I mean, come on, it’s obvious this is obvious how the ‘markets’ work.

Trader on the BBC says Eurozone Market will crash

The system is fundamentally broken and just can’t continue.
To get continuous economic growth, we need to increase energy usage. Even if we improve efficiency, there would come the point where efficiency would hit it’s maximum possible and energy use would still go up.

This discussion actually looks at the implication of this. What would happen if we continued to increase energy consumption by 2.3% per year (historic average). In short, we hit the point that in 200 or so years time, the sun just can’t supply enough energy. Also, if we ended up consuming ‘extra-solar’ energy, the waste heat from said consumption would end up toasting the planet!

Therefore, continual energy consumption cannot happen, and therefore economic growth cannot happen forever.

Galactic-scale energy: Part 1

Quite an interesting article over at the BBC, Fukushima: Nuclear power’s VHS relic?

The most obvious cause of the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was the massive wall of tsunami water that swept the site clean of back-up electricity generation on 11 March, removing cooling capacity from reactor cores and resulting in serial meltdown.

Would a newer reactor have fared better? Was the relationship between industry and regulators too close? Perhaps.

A question less often discussed, but equally intriguing, is whether decisions made half a century ago for reasons of commercial and geopolitical advantage have left the world with basic designs of nuclear reactor that are inherently less safe than others that have fallen by the wayside.

To make an analogy with the world of videotape: have we been guilty of rejecting the nuclear Betamax in favour of an inferior quality VHS?

Some interesting points, but what the article doesn’t talk about is that these reactors have very ‘useful’ byproducts… if you want to build nuclear weapons. Lets face it, reactor design was also done to enable the ability to produce weapons (something you can’t do with Thorium reactors for example).

Japan can’t say when nuclear reactors will restart

Link here

Wonder how long it will be before they finally get rid of Kan. He really is stirring up the status-quo in the comfy industrial-government relationship.

Some 50 utility workers posed as citizens to back atomic power on TV

Link here.

Ahhh, good to see some openess in the industry still.
Wouldn’t have a problem if 50 workers went on TV, and were up front about who they worked for, before putting forward their arguments. It’s the whole hush-hush thing that stinks.