7 ms·

Running out of oil is not what should scare us. It's very easy to make the stuff, and we have tons of it, even now. What we're losing is the cheap energy that c

Running out of oil is not what should scare us. It's very easy to make the stuff, and we have tons of it, even now. What we're losing is the cheap energy that came with the easy-to-exploit stuff that's dwindling. (Making oil, as any physicist would intuit as per entropy, will generally cost more than it's worth.) The energy ROI on Pennsylvania surface-level oil was 30:1 and up. That stuff's gone. So-called "peak oil" (which we are probably at) isn't about "running out". It's a behavioral effect (peak production) insofar as we have some choice (as a collective) in how much we produce. The Hubbert model says that "peak" occurs at the 50-percent point. Based on what I've read, I'd guess that (a) we are at peak production and will be at-or-near this plateau of 80-85Mb/day for ~20 years, but (b) decline will be slow and some of that will be the good kind (alternatives), and (c) we've used less than 50% of the world supply (meaning the symmetry of the Hubbert model isn't the case). Either way, we need to start working on alternatives. Global warming is a lot scarier than "peak oil". Markets work, and the bad case of "peak oil" that I consider credible is that our standard-of-living becomes like that of Eastern Europe (say, Hungary) for ~20 years. I've been there. It's not that bad. You have to hang-dry your clothes; you get used to that stuff. Climate change could kill off the species. That's much scarier. Personally, I'm a fan of modern nuclear technologies, as a bridge until we're all-green. Most of the anti-nuclear prejudice in the US comes from known design flaws in plants that are over 30 years old that were built before people knew what they were doing. Modern, passive-safety nuclear plants just don't have those TMI/Fukushima/Chernobyl risks. There are dangers (perfectly safe energy production does not exist) but they're much less severe.

LatvjuAvs 14y ago
How else can we make people pay more money out of they pocket? Lets scare them with global warming bullshit, everyone will have to pay! Ideal!
dualogy 14y ago
> What we're losing is the cheap energy that came with the easy-to-exploit stuff that's dwindling. Pff, just buy the expensive stuff on credit like everything else these days and let the next generation deal with it.. ;)
- jvzr 14y ago
  Why hang your clothes when you can buy new ones? ;-) Totally agree with OP.
  - lloeki 14y ago
    Some clothes — if taken care of properly when worn — actually barely need any washing but merely being swapped regularly and ventilated. In fact washing and drying them can dramatically reduce their lifetime. Unless I end up soaked one way or another (rain, running...) I don't wash hoodies and jean's trousers as much as I did.
    - nsxwolf 14y ago
      You may not realize this, but you smell.
      - lloeki 14y ago
        Of course I don't do the smell test myself, to be absolutely sure not to be a nuisance to anyone. Besides, sweat is absorbed by underwear like t-shirts, which I obviously change and wash much more frequently. In any case, use your best judgement and be respectful to others.
andyking 14y ago
You have to hang-dry your clothes; you get used to that stuff. I do that, and I live in Britain, which I believe is a lot better-off than Hungary. I don't know anyone who doesn't!
- heidar 14y ago
  Why do you think it is a lot better off than Hungary? There's not a very big difference between them in terms of human development.
  - earnubs 14y ago
    I think he's being very generous to the author by not laughing out loud at the suggestion that hang drying clothes is a measure of progress.
    - hispanic 14y ago
      I think it'd represent a great deal of progress - in terms of our simplistic way of thinking that equates convenience and the harnessing of fossil fuels to human advancement. It requires a lot of destructive practices to manufacture, operate, and dispose of clothes dryers. That's more enlightened than using a 100% sustainable clothesline and a breeze?
    - swombat 14y ago
      One advantage of hang-drying is it's less destructive to fabrics... I wash at 30 degrees on a 1-hour cycle, and hang dry... my clothes seem to pretty much last forever. Except for trousers, which eventually get a hole in the crotch. Fucking trousers...
      - joubert 14y ago
        Except for trousers, which eventually get a hole in the crotch. Fucking trousers... A thousand thanks for posting this. I thought I had some physical deformity because my last two (very-often-worn) jeans wore through in the crotch in less than a year. (Of course that made other aspects of my life more convenient). Good to know I'm not the only one.
davidw 14y ago
> hang-dry your clothes That's actually a great way to utilize solar energy, and the done thing here in Italy, which, despite having its problems, is not a poor country. In winter, you can put the clothes near a radiator/heater and that's pretty effective too.
- alttag 14y ago
  Works for a single or maybe a couple, but as family size grows this quickly becomes impractical. With my family of five, this would be a nightmare.
  - tonyedgecombe 14y ago
    It isn't for my family of four, even with our rather damp UK weather.
  - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
    It becomes very difficult and often impossible seasonally in some climates. But we might get a lot of mileage by improving the efficiency of these things, and reducing their usage when the weather is nice. Line-drying also may not work well in high-density housing.
    - arethuza 14y ago
      We can dry pretty much all our clothes indoor on lines in Scotland - which is a pretty damp place. We have two small rooms for laundry that have "pulleys": http://www.pulleymaid.com/classic_clothes_airer.htm http://www.pulleymaid.com/classic_clothes_airer.htm We are in a double upper flat - so no access to hang clothes outside.
    - davidw 14y ago
      Italy's population density is pretty high and it works fine. You can buy fairly compact, multi-level drying racks. Or, of course, there's this: http://www.gettyimages.it/detail/foto/italy-naples-drying-laundry-hanging-above-street-fotografie-stock/200431742-001 http://www.gettyimages.it/detail/foto/italy-naples-drying-la... Family size? We have two small kids and hang-drying works fine. There are times I wish we had a dryer, but mostly I don't miss it too much.
vardump 14y ago
For what it is worth: a) I think decline will start at latest by 2020, probably a year or two earlier. I came to this conclusion by looking at past declines and current regional production data. Exports decline has already started in about 2005 - oil producing countries consume a larger part of production by themselves. Major oil price fluctuations can be damaging, because too high prices cause demand destruction and too low will bankrupt marginal producers. b) We don't know what type of decline to expect, but it might be steeper due to EOR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery) techniques depleting the fields faster. c) We don't really know how large part of the global recoverable supply we've consumed, because it is likely several OPEC-countries have reported exaggerating reserve data in past in order to increase their production share.
wowoc 14y ago
I live in Eastern Europe. How else do dry your clothes apart from hanging them?
- dasmoth 14y ago
  Tumble drier. I've never understood the things. (<-- UK-based).
- Luc 14y ago
  Not sure if you're joking or not ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer )... A couple of years ago I was sat on a train passing through Flanders (one of the richer regions in Western Europe), next to a Texan family. The husband noticed a clothes rack full of towels on a terrace, and exclaimed 'Look at that! Did you see that?! They don't have a clothes dryer! Those poor people, we should thank God we were born in Texas!'. Which was followed by much commiseration about how hard it was to find a proper church on holidays.
  - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
    Living on the Texas Gulf coast, we line-dry clothes in the summer, when it isn't too humid. Our nosey old blue-haired neighbor had to comment to another neighbor about how unfortunate it was for us that our clothes-dryer had obviously broken, and we must not be able to afford a new one. What's really funny is that we have a privacy fence around three sides of our fairly large back yard. Due to the part of the yard where the clothes are hung, the view of the clothes is very limited from the street.
  - wowoc 14y ago
    Not joking. But I had my suspicions, I think I might have seen a clothes dryer in American movies or something. BTW. We have -30°C winters and we still get by without them. We just hang our clothes indoors, next to a radiator.
- ucee054 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer
fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
>Personally, I'm a fan of modern nuclear technologies Me too, liquid-fueled reactors, in addition to having a safe rest state, can utilize nearly all of the fuel in them, as opposed to the very low utilization of solid fuel designs (current tech). An MSR using much more common Thorium could potentially be used (economically) to produce carbon-neutral fossil fuel replacements. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thorium+remix https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thorium+remix
smky80 14y ago
> Global warming is a lot scarier than "peak oil" Honestly I always figured the global warming hysteria was mainly a cover for pushing "anti-peak oil" policies without having to admit the Emperor is naked. Cutting carbon emissions by 10%, a carbon tax in Australia, etc., doesn't strike me as really being able to put a dent in a catastrophic global warming were it actually occurring, but it does seem a reasonable approach to reduce fossil fuel consumption in the near-term.
- hispanic 14y ago
  Personally, I don't care if global warming is real, imagined, man-made, or naturally-occurring. Because, from where I stand, the "austerity" measures and lifestyle changes that have been proposed to combat global-warming (at least in the U.S.) are pretty much all good things that should be pursued, regardless. And yet people (the majority of Americans, it seems) sneer at the thought of making personal or societal sacrifices for the sake of species or generations other than our own. It always frustrates me - the sense of entitlement to not having to care about the downsides of convenience.
  - smky80 14y ago
    I don't disagree with your sentiment. I do have practical and moral objections though to policies which couldn't possibly mitigate the issue in question but still involve the societal sacrifices. In the end, cheap clean energy like fusion, thorium fission, solar ("burning" the water/rocks/sunlight) is really the only solution to both peak oil and global warming.
  - nawitus 14y ago
    Eh? If global warming was not real, and there wouldn't be any negative sides from CO2 emissions, then it would of course be bad to reduce Co2 emissions by lowering the standard of living (assuming that you're an utilitarian and not a psychopath). On the other hand, maybe you're talking about other negative environmental effects that are linked to activies that cause CO2 emissions. I think well being of people should be maximized, and in the optimal situation there shouldn't be any lifestyle changes or "austerity" measures to reduce CO2 emissions if there's no reason to reduce CO2 emissions. If they're required, then of course it's reasonable to adopt them.
sageikosa 14y ago
Crush some coal, mix it with warm water, drop it 7000 feet into the ground, extract up-flowing crude. http://www.hcssllc.com/ http://www.hcssllc.com/
caf 14y ago
Most of the anti-nuclear prejudice in the US comes from known design flaws in plants that are over 30 years old that were built before people knew what they were doing. Modern, passive-safety nuclear plants just don't have those TMI/Fukushima/Chernobyl risks. I wonder if they said similar things 30 years ago, too.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  To be fair on that, nuclear (even using those creaky, old designs) still has a better safety record per kilowatt-hour than fossil fuels.
- mpyne 14y ago
  Chernobyl-style designs have been known to be a less safe design for as long as they have been around. They are weapons-production reactors scaled up for power production, without any of the design changes to add inherent safety that were made for even 1950s-era Western designs. Chernobyl belongs in a category all by itself for that reason. TMI was certainly an economic issue, but it was never a public health concern, even in the middle of the meltdown. In fact TMI was a validation of the public safety concept of nuclear power plant containment design; despite suffering a full as-bad-as-it-gets meltdown there was only a minimal release of radioactive gases to the environment. As far as Fukushima, there were actually two different sites, Dai-ichi and Dai-ni. The Dai-ni reactors were a very slight spec bump up from the Dai-ichi reactors due to being started later. Both sites suffered the same earthquake & tsunami; all of the operational Dai-ichi reactors melted down, none of the operational Dai-ni reactors suffered damage. The disasters were beyond design basis for both. So even 40-50 years ago they were continuing to make design improvements to increase the safety margin of nuclear power to account for "unknown unknowns". Meanwhile even today coal plants pump carcinogenic exhaust directly to atmosphere and people judge it as an acceptable tradeoff because the damage is constant.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    The two sites experienced different levels of ground acceleration and inundation (with the newer one experiencing less of both). If you want to insist that the design made a difference, you should probably do more than just wave your hands. The fact that Dai-ni only almost lost backup power was probably a major boon. If they had lost active cooling, things probably would have been just as tenuous as they were at Dai-ichi.
onemorepassword 14y ago
I was with you up until the nuclear part. I don't know about the US, but most resistance in Europe is not "prejudice" about plant safety, but educated concerns about waste and waste-storage safety. As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns but tries to make the other side look like dumb scared peasants, I'll be on the anti-nuclear side. For one reason and one reason only: I may not be able to judge how safe modern nuclear energy is, but I'm damn well able to perceive which side is being the most dishonest. If I can't trust people to have an honest debate, I'm definitely not trusting these same people with nuclear plants, however safe it may be possible to do in theory.
- nawitus 14y ago
  Waste is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...
  - onemorepassword 14y ago
    You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. Congrats. Edit: Just to be clear, I belong to the part of the population you can convince of nuclear energy, at least as an intermediate solution. But not this way.
    - nollidge 14y ago
      > You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. I'm sure the proof is obvious to you, but how about explaining it for the rest of us?
      - thoughtsimple 14y ago
        This might help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository It is anything but a solved problem. And of course none of this talks about decommissioning reactors and what to do with the low level nuclear waste that is the decommissioned reactor.
nawitus 14y ago
You can create oil from oil shales and the price won't be that high ($70 using current tech, maybe $50/barrel at larger scale). There's massive amounts of oil shales to be used. I agree that the real problem with oil is not peak oil but global warming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics
lobster_johnson 14y ago
> You have to hang-dry your clothes; you get used to that stuff. Just FYI, hang-drying is a poor metric for comparing standards of living. It's very common all over the world, in affluent societies such as Germany, the UK and Scandinavia. It's not about whether you can afford modern dryer technology, it's about whether your apartment has the space for one. I know mine doesn't.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  You'd be amazed how little space a drying rack needs. Though if you're really cramped for space and clothes don't dry in the course of one day, they can be a bit annoying (I'll assume you're out of your apartment for most of the day). Setting a fan on the clothes will dry them much faster, and it's still much more efficient than a heated dryer.

LatvjuAvs 14y ago

How else can we make people pay more money out of they pocket? Lets scare them with global warming bullshit, everyone will have to pay! Ideal!

dualogy 14y ago

> What we're losing is the cheap energy that came with the easy-to-exploit stuff that's dwindling. Pff, just buy the expensive stuff on credit like everything else these days and let the next generation deal with it.. ;)

jvzr 14y ago
Why hang your clothes when you can buy new ones? ;-) Totally agree with OP.
- lloeki 14y ago
  Some clothes — if taken care of properly when worn — actually barely need any washing but merely being swapped regularly and ventilated. In fact washing and drying them can dramatically reduce their lifetime. Unless I end up soaked one way or another (rain, running...) I don't wash hoodies and jean's trousers as much as I did.
  - nsxwolf 14y ago
    You may not realize this, but you smell.
    - lloeki 14y ago
      Of course I don't do the smell test myself, to be absolutely sure not to be a nuisance to anyone. Besides, sweat is absorbed by underwear like t-shirts, which I obviously change and wash much more frequently. In any case, use your best judgement and be respectful to others.

andyking 14y ago

You have to hang-dry your clothes; you get used to that stuff. I do that, and I live in Britain, which I believe is a lot better-off than Hungary. I don't know anyone who doesn't!

heidar 14y ago
Why do you think it is a lot better off than Hungary? There's not a very big difference between them in terms of human development.
- earnubs 14y ago
  I think he's being very generous to the author by not laughing out loud at the suggestion that hang drying clothes is a measure of progress.
  - hispanic 14y ago
    I think it'd represent a great deal of progress - in terms of our simplistic way of thinking that equates convenience and the harnessing of fossil fuels to human advancement. It requires a lot of destructive practices to manufacture, operate, and dispose of clothes dryers. That's more enlightened than using a 100% sustainable clothesline and a breeze?
  - swombat 14y ago
    One advantage of hang-drying is it's less destructive to fabrics... I wash at 30 degrees on a 1-hour cycle, and hang dry... my clothes seem to pretty much last forever. Except for trousers, which eventually get a hole in the crotch. Fucking trousers...
    - joubert 14y ago
      Except for trousers, which eventually get a hole in the crotch. Fucking trousers... A thousand thanks for posting this. I thought I had some physical deformity because my last two (very-often-worn) jeans wore through in the crotch in less than a year. (Of course that made other aspects of my life more convenient). Good to know I'm not the only one.

davidw 14y ago

> hang-dry your clothes That's actually a great way to utilize solar energy, and the done thing here in Italy, which, despite having its problems, is not a poor country. In winter, you can put the clothes near a radiator/heater and that's pretty effective too.

alttag 14y ago
Works for a single or maybe a couple, but as family size grows this quickly becomes impractical. With my family of five, this would be a nightmare.
- tonyedgecombe 14y ago
  It isn't for my family of four, even with our rather damp UK weather.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  It becomes very difficult and often impossible seasonally in some climates. But we might get a lot of mileage by improving the efficiency of these things, and reducing their usage when the weather is nice. Line-drying also may not work well in high-density housing.
  - arethuza 14y ago
    We can dry pretty much all our clothes indoor on lines in Scotland - which is a pretty damp place. We have two small rooms for laundry that have "pulleys": http://www.pulleymaid.com/classic_clothes_airer.htm http://www.pulleymaid.com/classic_clothes_airer.htm We are in a double upper flat - so no access to hang clothes outside.
  - davidw 14y ago
    Italy's population density is pretty high and it works fine. You can buy fairly compact, multi-level drying racks. Or, of course, there's this: http://www.gettyimages.it/detail/foto/italy-naples-drying-laundry-hanging-above-street-fotografie-stock/200431742-001 http://www.gettyimages.it/detail/foto/italy-naples-drying-la... Family size? We have two small kids and hang-drying works fine. There are times I wish we had a dryer, but mostly I don't miss it too much.

vardump 14y ago

For what it is worth: a) I think decline will start at latest by 2020, probably a year or two earlier. I came to this conclusion by looking at past declines and current regional production data. Exports decline has already started in about 2005 - oil producing countries consume a larger part of production by themselves. Major oil price fluctuations can be damaging, because too high prices cause demand destruction and too low will bankrupt marginal producers. b) We don't know what type of decline to expect, but it might be steeper due to EOR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery) techniques depleting the fields faster. c) We don't really know how large part of the global recoverable supply we've consumed, because it is likely several OPEC-countries have reported exaggerating reserve data in past in order to increase their production share.

wowoc 14y ago

I live in Eastern Europe. How else do dry your clothes apart from hanging them?

dasmoth 14y ago
Tumble drier. I've never understood the things. (<-- UK-based).
Luc 14y ago
Not sure if you're joking or not ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer )... A couple of years ago I was sat on a train passing through Flanders (one of the richer regions in Western Europe), next to a Texan family. The husband noticed a clothes rack full of towels on a terrace, and exclaimed 'Look at that! Did you see that?! They don't have a clothes dryer! Those poor people, we should thank God we were born in Texas!'. Which was followed by much commiseration about how hard it was to find a proper church on holidays.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  Living on the Texas Gulf coast, we line-dry clothes in the summer, when it isn't too humid. Our nosey old blue-haired neighbor had to comment to another neighbor about how unfortunate it was for us that our clothes-dryer had obviously broken, and we must not be able to afford a new one. What's really funny is that we have a privacy fence around three sides of our fairly large back yard. Due to the part of the yard where the clothes are hung, the view of the clothes is very limited from the street.
- wowoc 14y ago
  Not joking. But I had my suspicions, I think I might have seen a clothes dryer in American movies or something. BTW. We have -30°C winters and we still get by without them. We just hang our clothes indoors, next to a radiator.
ucee054 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago

>Personally, I'm a fan of modern nuclear technologies Me too, liquid-fueled reactors, in addition to having a safe rest state, can utilize nearly all of the fuel in them, as opposed to the very low utilization of solid fuel designs (current tech). An MSR using much more common Thorium could potentially be used (economically) to produce carbon-neutral fossil fuel replacements. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thorium+remix https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thorium+remix

smky80 14y ago

> Global warming is a lot scarier than "peak oil" Honestly I always figured the global warming hysteria was mainly a cover for pushing "anti-peak oil" policies without having to admit the Emperor is naked. Cutting carbon emissions by 10%, a carbon tax in Australia, etc., doesn't strike me as really being able to put a dent in a catastrophic global warming were it actually occurring, but it does seem a reasonable approach to reduce fossil fuel consumption in the near-term.

hispanic 14y ago
Personally, I don't care if global warming is real, imagined, man-made, or naturally-occurring. Because, from where I stand, the "austerity" measures and lifestyle changes that have been proposed to combat global-warming (at least in the U.S.) are pretty much all good things that should be pursued, regardless. And yet people (the majority of Americans, it seems) sneer at the thought of making personal or societal sacrifices for the sake of species or generations other than our own. It always frustrates me - the sense of entitlement to not having to care about the downsides of convenience.
- smky80 14y ago
  I don't disagree with your sentiment. I do have practical and moral objections though to policies which couldn't possibly mitigate the issue in question but still involve the societal sacrifices. In the end, cheap clean energy like fusion, thorium fission, solar ("burning" the water/rocks/sunlight) is really the only solution to both peak oil and global warming.
- nawitus 14y ago
  Eh? If global warming was not real, and there wouldn't be any negative sides from CO2 emissions, then it would of course be bad to reduce Co2 emissions by lowering the standard of living (assuming that you're an utilitarian and not a psychopath). On the other hand, maybe you're talking about other negative environmental effects that are linked to activies that cause CO2 emissions. I think well being of people should be maximized, and in the optimal situation there shouldn't be any lifestyle changes or "austerity" measures to reduce CO2 emissions if there's no reason to reduce CO2 emissions. If they're required, then of course it's reasonable to adopt them.

sageikosa 14y ago

Crush some coal, mix it with warm water, drop it 7000 feet into the ground, extract up-flowing crude. http://www.hcssllc.com/ http://www.hcssllc.com/

caf 14y ago

Most of the anti-nuclear prejudice in the US comes from known design flaws in plants that are over 30 years old that were built before people knew what they were doing. Modern, passive-safety nuclear plants just don't have those TMI/Fukushima/Chernobyl risks. I wonder if they said similar things 30 years ago, too.

michaelochurch 14y ago
To be fair on that, nuclear (even using those creaky, old designs) still has a better safety record per kilowatt-hour than fossil fuels.
mpyne 14y ago
Chernobyl-style designs have been known to be a less safe design for as long as they have been around. They are weapons-production reactors scaled up for power production, without any of the design changes to add inherent safety that were made for even 1950s-era Western designs. Chernobyl belongs in a category all by itself for that reason. TMI was certainly an economic issue, but it was never a public health concern, even in the middle of the meltdown. In fact TMI was a validation of the public safety concept of nuclear power plant containment design; despite suffering a full as-bad-as-it-gets meltdown there was only a minimal release of radioactive gases to the environment. As far as Fukushima, there were actually two different sites, Dai-ichi and Dai-ni. The Dai-ni reactors were a very slight spec bump up from the Dai-ichi reactors due to being started later. Both sites suffered the same earthquake & tsunami; all of the operational Dai-ichi reactors melted down, none of the operational Dai-ni reactors suffered damage. The disasters were beyond design basis for both. So even 40-50 years ago they were continuing to make design improvements to increase the safety margin of nuclear power to account for "unknown unknowns". Meanwhile even today coal plants pump carcinogenic exhaust directly to atmosphere and people judge it as an acceptable tradeoff because the damage is constant.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  The two sites experienced different levels of ground acceleration and inundation (with the newer one experiencing less of both). If you want to insist that the design made a difference, you should probably do more than just wave your hands. The fact that Dai-ni only almost lost backup power was probably a major boon. If they had lost active cooling, things probably would have been just as tenuous as they were at Dai-ichi.

onemorepassword 14y ago

I was with you up until the nuclear part. I don't know about the US, but most resistance in Europe is not "prejudice" about plant safety, but educated concerns about waste and waste-storage safety. As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns but tries to make the other side look like dumb scared peasants, I'll be on the anti-nuclear side. For one reason and one reason only: I may not be able to judge how safe modern nuclear energy is, but I'm damn well able to perceive which side is being the most dishonest. If I can't trust people to have an honest debate, I'm definitely not trusting these same people with nuclear plants, however safe it may be possible to do in theory.

nawitus 14y ago
Waste is a solved problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repos...
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. Congrats. Edit: Just to be clear, I belong to the part of the population you can convince of nuclear energy, at least as an intermediate solution. But not this way.
  - nollidge 14y ago
    > You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL. I'm sure the proof is obvious to you, but how about explaining it for the rest of us?
    - thoughtsimple 14y ago
      This might help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository It is anything but a solved problem. And of course none of this talks about decommissioning reactors and what to do with the low level nuclear waste that is the decommissioned reactor.

nawitus 14y ago

You can create oil from oil shales and the price won't be that high ($70 using current tech, maybe $50/barrel at larger scale). There's massive amounts of oil shales to be used. I agree that the real problem with oil is not peak oil but global warming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics

lobster_johnson 14y ago

> You have to hang-dry your clothes; you get used to that stuff. Just FYI, hang-drying is a poor metric for comparing standards of living. It's very common all over the world, in affluent societies such as Germany, the UK and Scandinavia. It's not about whether you can afford modern dryer technology, it's about whether your apartment has the space for one. I know mine doesn't.

dredmorbius 14y ago
You'd be amazed how little space a drying rack needs. Though if you're really cramped for space and clothes don't dry in the course of one day, they can be a bit annoying (I'll assume you're out of your apartment for most of the day). Setting a fan on the clothes will dry them much faster, and it's still much more efficient than a heated dryer.