On Sat, 30 Aug 2014 13:20:34 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 30/08/14 11:58, Huge wrote:
On 2014-08-30, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 30/08/14 10:59, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

If as seems increasingly likely, space, matter , energy and time are
simply emergent qualities of a quantum level reality, we may be able in
some sense to circumvent their restrictions by so to speak stepping out
of them altogether.

Sorry, that is gibberish.

Its not, but you might need a bit more education to understand it.

Ask a physicist in a university near to you to comment on this,
and publish his response here.

well that is broadly where *I* got it from in the first place.

e.g. http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/...roff/cajal.pdf

Ok Penrose is a mathematician working in Physics not a physicist as such.


And he should stick to his specialism. Quantum effects in microtubules in the
brain, my arse.


well of course there are such effects. There have to be, but the point
is that he is engaged in a circularity.

I've noticed this with Penrose several rimes. He starts off describing
levels of reality beyond the physical, and of which the physical is an
emergent property, an then goes looking in the physical world as if he
hadn't already demolished its primacy.

Its a massive cognitive dissonance IMHO. Theoretically he can accept
alternative descriptions of reality, but when he looks at his hands, he
cant accept that means they are a bloody illusion, and a figment of his
imagination based on an OR interpretation of quantum reality.

Putnam is better: he understands the metaphysics..Quantum theory is very
challenging: we may not yet know what is more real that ordinary
reality, but we now know that ordinary reality is less real than we had
supposed.

Such metaphysical thinking arises from our scientific discoveries of
quantum physics and radioactivity around a century ago, along with the
dual nature of em radiation and Chaos theory and the red shift first
observed by Hubble in the thirties which led to what became popularly
known as "The Big Bang" (a phrase, incidently, that was popularised by
one of its greatest opponents, Fred Hoyle - Oh, the irony!).

The scientists are still trying to get to grips with the idea that,
contrary to Einsteins forlorn hope that, "God does not play dice with
the universe." and given all of that which leads to such metaphysical
questions about our very existence ("Why has the universe turned out
to be the way it is?"), they (the scientific community) are in danger
of proving the existence of God (or, at the very least, a supernatural
force, if not an actual entity with an uncomfortably close
resembelence to that of a "God").

However, it would not be a God that any one religious group would
recognise today, more a God that lays down rules more associated with
"Murphy" than any of those of the various (essentially benign)
flavours of God invented over the previous millenia by the many and
varied competing religious groups.

Metaphysics is all fine and dandy as a means of generating
speculative theories about real observed phenomena in our scientific
studies in order to formulate appropriate actions in regard of further
scientific study and development but when it's appropriated to support
political and activist views being held up for public consumption by a
largely ill educated electorate, it only gets in the way of the
business of developing safe and workable solutions to society's
problems of its own making.

Our modern Western Civilisation has developed as a direct result of
the scientific findings being used to develop technological wonders
that facilitate (powers) our living in town and city concentrations of
the populace, enabling a more efficient co-operative working required
to maintain the greater production of products and services required
to allow such cities and towns to function. IOW, we're in a "Catch 22"
position thanks to our technological wonders.

We seem to all be at a stage in our civilisation's development
process where we're faced with a stark choice as to how we should
satisfy our ever increasing energy demands. It's as if we're stood in
front of a branch point in a maze of civilisation's road to Nirvana
with one path marked "Renewables" and the other marked "Fossil fuels
and Cold War Nuclear Power[1]".

At the moment, we seem to have an already established traffic into
the "Fossil fuels and Cold War Nuclear Power" branch which now seems
to be stalled at the next branch point marked "Safe MSR Nuclear
Powe[2]" causing the traffic behind to fork off into the branch marked
"Renewables" - sadly an unaffordable[3] dead end with our current
technology and scientific understanding.

For better or worse, the majority of the human population on Planet
Earth has become an Energy Junkie. The question now looming in the
collective conscousness of this Energy Junkie is "Where are we going
to get our next fix?" as it slowly becomes apparent that the current
energy pushers (Fossil Fuels and a smattering of Hydro) are falling
short on supply, threatening to cut us off completely and consequently
charging more for their services.

The 'eco green' pushers are charging even higher rates for their
'special brand' of supply so cannot offer any meaningful amounts of
energy to satisfy our cravings.

If we don't wish to disamantle most of the trappings of civilisation
that we find so endearing, we need to make a stark and pragmatic
choice in regard of our next energy supplier and to do so tut suit if
we want to avoid the current pushers 'leaving us all to hang out to
dry'.

Sadly, I think it'll require actual energy shortages to awaken the
current electorates to the stark realities of 'Doing Nothing' and
motivate them into pushing their governments into facilitating a
massive LFTR Nuclear power station development and building program to
return to the status quo and then permit renewed advancement of our
global civilisation to the point where, according to one statistician,
the global population would finally settle at a stable 20 billion
figure when everyone on the planet could enjoy a level of 'luxury'
previously the reserve only of the 1st world country's populations of
today.

[1] All of the current nuclear power stations have been based on
nuclear reactor technology designs intended, primarily, to generate
stockpiles of weapons grade plutonium in order to create a credible
nuclear deterrent against the west's percieved enemy, Russia, who were
likewise engaged in the same program during the Cold War period.

These power station reactors weren't inherently safe by design so
required extremely expensive 'Safety Add Ons", notably in the form of
massive and expensive presure containment vessels along with a whole
raft of secondary safety features such as emergency cooling with
backups in duplicate or even triplicate as well as fuel handling
equipment with its plethora of safety measures and so on.

The expense was only accepted on account the Cold War climate allowed
the military to make a strong case for such expenditure to address
what was then seen as a matter of national security where it was vital
not come second in the Nuclear Arms Race.

The production of electrical energy from these Plutonium Factories
just happened to be a useful sideline in both getting the respective
populations to accept these factories for their peacetime use of
nuclear energy and to disguise the fact of what their primary purpose
was (neither side was going to 'Blow The Gaff' so this 'secret' was
kept safe).

Even with all the expense of added safety features, there have still
been some serious accicents involving potentially lethal releases of
radionucleotides (and, in the infamous case of Chernobyl, releases
that did prove lethal, admittedly to the emergency workers involved in
trying to minimise the danger to the wider world).

Even with all of these nuclear reactor accidents, including
Chernobyl, over the past 40 years or so, it's a sobering thought that
the main culprit for raising the environmental background radiation
levels turns out to be coal fired power stations.

One reason to account for this counterintuitive finding is that there
are far more coal fired power stations than there are nuclear power
stations worldwide and no 'combustion products' going up a flue to be
vented to the atmosphere in a nuclear power plant (at least not in
normal operation).

[2] MSR or LFTR nuclear derives from another secret nuclear program
that was being run by the US military back in the sixties at the
Oakridge site. They even got as far as building a couple of test
reactors before the plug was pulled on the project.

The military's interest was only motivated by the possibility of
developing a fleet of nuclear powered bombers which could stay aloft
for weeks or even months at a time on instant alert. They lost
interest very rapidly with the advent of the ICBM and quietly buried
the project in a veil of secrecy.

The secret nature of the Oakridge project wasn't so much to do with
stopping the Russians from stealing a march on this technology so much
as to hide the fact from public view that nuclear power stations could
be built far more cheaply and operate much more safely than the
current plutonium factories ever could.

It's been about a decade since MSR has emerged, slowly at first, into
the public domain. The stockpiling of weapons grade plutonium has long
since reached a useful stocking level for an all out nuclear
conflagration to wipe out our existence several times over.

The need to keep those 'Classic' Nuclear power stations running has
now vanished and the time has finally arrived where we can now design
and build nuclear power stations based on electrical power generation
capability alone without the safety compromising features of a
Plutonium Factory.

As if properly safe nuclear power wasn't an attractive enough
inducement to build up a viable alternative to fossil fuels and
renewable energy sourced power generation, there's also the fact that
the Thorium fuel used by LFTR is at least 3 times as abundent as
Uranium in the Earth's crust and can have over 90% of its nuclear
energy extracted before it is considered spent (unlike Uranium fuel
rods which need reprocessing after only having had just over 1% of the
nuclear energy extracted by the reactor).

If you care to google "LFTR", the first hit takes you he

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

[3] Renewables: Contrary to what the 'Green Brigade' think, the costs
of extracting power from wind and tide are far too high for the return
on investment, let alone the "Blot on The landscape" and ecosystem
damage incurred by the likes of tidal barrages.

It seems nobody in the green party wants to calculate a realistic
investment and ongoing maintenance costing exercise for even a modest
averaged 33% share of demand on the grid. If they did, they'd drop the
whole subject like a red hot cannonball.

Just because it's possible to extract useful electrical power from
wind, sun and tides in modest amounts subject to the vagueries of the
tides and weather, this doesn't mean you can do so on the scale of
demand served by the National Grid without disasterous financial
consequences to the UK economy.

Suggesting that fossil fuelled power stations (let alone Nuclear) can
be replaced with 'Green Power' is simply an impractical Pipe Dream.
--
J B Good

On 31/08/14 02:03, Johny B Good wrote:


Suggesting that fossil fuelled power stations (let alone Nuclear) can
be replaced with 'Green Power' is simply an impractical Pipe Dream.

Agreed BUT you are not 100% right that civil reactors can produce
weapons garde plutonium - thats better produced in a rather different
reactor altogether.

Not to say that there wasnt a big link up between civil and military
nuclear power.

Also Thorium is not the godsend some claim it to be. Its still got lots
of nasty by products that need to be dealt with and the breeder reactor
itself is more expensive.

The good news is that nuclear power is an about 1000 times safer than
the greens think it is, so re-education and ratinalisation of risk could
make it very much cheaper than it is.





--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. €“ Erwin Knoll

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

I don't think he works in quantum theory at all.
In fact he seems to share Einstein's doubts about that theory.

Oh dear. Try a bit of research

When I say "works in" I mean "works in quantum field theory".
All of Penrose's work in mathematical physics has been
in the geometry of space-time as defined by general relativity.

Penrose certainly speculates - at great length - about
the foundations of quantum theory.
His views are very similar to Einstein's.
Both agree that quantum theory has been very successful
in its predictions of particle interactions, etc,
but both believe the theory is incomplete,
that the development of physical systems is determined,
and is not completely represented by wave functions.


--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

ALL the evidence is angaints LNT as a scientific theory.

"In 2013 a data linkage study of 11 million Australians with 680 000 people
exposed to CT scans between 1985 and 2005 was published.[22] The study
confirmed the results of the 2012 UK study for leukaemia and brain cancer
but also investigated other cancer types. The authors conclude that their
results were generally consistent with the linear no threshold theory."
(British Medical Journal)

It is absurd to say that ALL the evidence is against LNT,
or that the scientists that support it are all "fools".
There are a large number of reports like that above.

It is true that there are people who dispute the theory,
but I haven't seen any large-scale studies with this conclusion.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

On 31/08/14 11:25, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

ALL the evidence is angaints LNT as a scientific theory.

"In 2013 a data linkage study of 11 million Australians with 680 000 people
exposed to CT scans between 1985 and 2005 was published.[22] The study
confirmed the results of the 2012 UK study for leukaemia and brain cancer
but also investigated other cancer types. The authors conclude that their
results were generally consistent with the linear no threshold theory."
(British Medical Journal)
#

Since the actual CT scan tests are so low dosage its impossible to say
statistically whether or not they have any effect. Likewise the BIG
usage of cat scans is in cancer patients who are more likley to suffer
further cancers than any other sort.

So its a VERY dubious study IMHO.


It is absurd to say that ALL the evidence is against LNT,
or that the scientists that support it are all "fools".
There are a large number of reports like that above.


Look how many reports there are 'confirming' climate change.

MOST people doing research are simply not in the business of challenging
the orthodoxies. Especially when there is a massive political element
involved and they need government funding.


It is true that there are people who dispute the theory,
but I haven't seen any large-scale studies with this conclusion.


Well Chernobyl was a pretty large scale study, when all is said and done.

Or did you miss it somehow?


--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. €“ Erwin Knoll

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Look how many reports there are 'confirming' climate change.

So you don't believe there has been any climate change?
Jeez.

MOST people doing research are simply not in the business of challenging
the orthodoxies. Especially when there is a massive political element
involved and they need government funding.

That shows you know nothing at all about scientific research.
Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any conclusion
would probably lose whatever position they had,
and would certainly find it very hard to get further funding.
It wouldn't matter whether their conclusions were ones their funders liked
or did not like.

If you looked at any medical journal you would find many articles
by authors who have found that vaccines or other medicines
did not have the sought-for effect.
In fact there are probably more that say that than the opposite.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

On 31/08/14 18:46, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Look how many reports there are 'confirming' climate change.

So you don't believe there has been any climate change?
Jeez.

MOST people doing research are simply not in the business of challenging
the orthodoxies. Especially when there is a massive political element
involved and they need government funding.

That shows you know nothing at all about scientific research.
Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any conclusion
would probably lose whatever position they had,

Milikan's Oil Drop experiment...

Timothy Murphy wrote:
That shows you know nothing at all about scientific research.
Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any conclusion
would probably lose whatever position they had,

I would suggest that you go away and do some reading. For example the
mass of the electron was determined by throwing away the answers which
didn't fit IIRC.

On 31/08/14 18:46, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Look how many reports there are 'confirming' climate change.

So you don't believe there has been any climate change?
Jeez.

MOST people doing research are simply not in the business of challenging
the orthodoxies. Especially when there is a massive political element
involved and they need government funding.

That shows you know nothing at all about scientific research.
Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any conclusion
would probably lose whatever position they had,

Unfortuneatly it seems to be a regular occurrence these days.

and would certainly find it very hard to get further funding.
It wouldn't matter whether their conclusions were ones their funders liked
or did not like.

You really are touchingly naive..


If you looked at any medical journal you would find many articles
by authors who have found that vaccines or other medicines
did not have the sought-for effect.
In fact there are probably more that say that than the opposite.

That IS the orthodoxy, dear.

--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. €“ Erwin Knoll

Capitol wrote:

That shows you know nothing at all about scientific research.
Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any
conclusion would probably lose whatever position they had,

I would suggest that you go away and do some reading. For example the
mass of the electron was determined by throwing away the answers which
didn't fit IIRC.

I suggest you do some reading, and tell me where you found this.

The mass of the electron cannot be "determined", for a start,
as it is a real number.
It can only be approximated, and the first person to do this
was J J Thompson, in 1896.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Tim Watts wrote:

Milikan's Oil Drop experiment

1. This was in 1909.

2. Millikan explicitly said that he excluded some drops
because he had not completed his measurements with these.

3. How could he "cheat" since the charge e was not known
with any accuracy?

4. Even if he excluded results that were far from the mean
(which seems to be the general claim)
I would not call that fraud.

5. It is very difficult if not impossible today
to fiddle with data, since there are statistical tests to see
if the numbers are coherent.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

That shows you know nothing at all about scientific research.
Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any
conclusion would probably lose whatever position they had,

Unfortuneatly it seems to be a regular occurrence these days.

Give an example.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

On 31/08/14 19:56, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Tim Watts wrote:

Milikan's Oil Drop experiment

1. This was in 1909.

2. Millikan explicitly said that he excluded some drops
because he had not completed his measurements with these.

3. How could he "cheat" since the charge e was not known
with any accuracy?

4. Even if he excluded results that were far from the mean
(which seems to be the general claim)
I would not call that fraud.

5. It is very difficult if not impossible today
to fiddle with data, since there are statistical tests to see
if the numbers are coherent.

its actually easier, because you can write a program that will generate
a beautiful set of data samples scattered around whatever mean you want.

You want Gaussian? we can do that..


Of course then there is the 'normalisation' of data. Like the
temperature series from Australia where they 'knew' that the earth has
been warming up for 60 years so the fact that the weather stations
didn't show it must have been down to the new equipment not being
calibrated against the old, which must have been over reading. Hey
presto, a data set showing falling temperatures now shows a steady rise,
just as the models predict!


And lets not get started on the infamous hockey stick, where a
particular statistical smoothing would give a strong uptick at the end
to ANY data series.

Or the Piltdown man, in all the sciency books I read as a child and only
finally debunked in the 1950s. The 'missing link' appeared where
expected, of the form expected and nobody bothered to look to closely
.... a scientific fraud that lasted 40 years or more.

Or Lysenkoism, so in tune with Communist thinking that a whole nation
starved to death because it simply didn't work.,..shades of 'renewable
energy' there.

Selective data cherry-picking, illogical conclusions drawn from correct
data, the record is full of junk science carried on by apparently
perfectly respectable scientists, because often the faults are so subtle
that almost no one notices, or the result is so desirable no want wants
to look too closely...

90% of all science is funded by either governments or government
sponsored quangos, or by large corporate interest.

Success consists in getting it published in science magazines. It would
be hopelessly naive to pretend that that doesn't turn a selfless pursuit
of truth into a massive search for suitable subjects and techniques that
will reinforce the prejudices of those who need to be pleased to get the
funding in the first place and to publish the results.

The optimal strategy is to find a subject just novel enough so that no
one knows anything about it, fill it with just enough maths and
statistics to be convincing, and then develop a result that confirms the
orthodoxy. Such a study excites and interests, but does not disturb,
any vested interests...

And that's what builds careers if you are at best a second rate
scientist, in academia.



--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. €“ Erwin Knoll

In message , Timothy Murphy
writes
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

That shows you know nothing at all about scientific research.
Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any
conclusion would probably lose whatever position they had,

Unfortuneatly it seems to be a regular occurrence these days.

Give an example.

Wasn't it the University of East Anglia?
--
bert

bert wrote:

Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any
conclusion would probably lose whatever position they had,

Unfortuneatly it seems to be a regular occurrence these days.

Give an example.

Wasn't it the University of East Anglia?

I don't think anyone at the UEA _modified_ data.
Some people there behaved stupidly, but they weren't fraudulent.

If you claim data were altered, tell me which.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Tim Streater wrote:

No dear boy you are missing the point. Which is that the value that
Millikan got was incorrect. Not by much, but noticeable.

Sigh.
You cannot give the _correct_ value of the mass of the electron.
It is a real number, so every estimate is incorrect.
Millikan's was the best estimate at the time.

In any case this was over a century ago.
The claim was that there is widespread scientific fraud _today_.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

5. It is very difficult if not impossible today
to fiddle with data, since there are statistical tests to see
if the numbers are coherent.

its actually easier, because you can write a program that will generate
a beautiful set of data samples scattered around whatever mean you want.

It is difficult to _modify_ a large quantity of data
in a way that does not show statistical inconsistency.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

On 01/09/2014 00:10, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Tim Streater wrote:

No dear boy you are missing the point. Which is that the value that
Millikan got was incorrect. Not by much, but noticeable.

Sigh.
You cannot give the _correct_ value of the mass of the electron.
It is a real number, so every estimate is incorrect.
Millikan's was the best estimate at the time.

In any case this was over a century ago.
The claim was that there is widespread scientific fraud _today_.

There probably is, but that'll be in areas where there's real money at
stake for the people funding the science, ie pharma.

"Clive George" wrote in message
...
On 01/09/2014 00:10, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Tim Streater wrote:

No dear boy you are missing the point. Which is that the value that
Millikan got was incorrect. Not by much, but noticeable.

Sigh.
You cannot give the _correct_ value of the mass of the electron.
It is a real number, so every estimate is incorrect.
Millikan's was the best estimate at the time.

In any case this was over a century ago.
The claim was that there is widespread scientific fraud _today_.

There probably is,

I doubt it.

but that'll be in areas where there's real money at stake for the people
funding the science, ie pharma.

Don't buy that either given how easy it is to catch real
fraud in that area.

Even just fraud that involves not revealing significant
medical downsides with a new drug will be found out
once it gets used widely.

Corse you can certainly claim that claims that its
much better than what is currently available is
significant fraud when it isnt actually significantly better.

On Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:45:07 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 31/08/14 02:03, Johny B Good wrote:


Suggesting that fossil fuelled power stations (let alone Nuclear) can
be replaced with 'Green Power' is simply an impractical Pipe Dream.

Agreed BUT you are not 100% right that civil reactors can produce
weapons garde plutonium - thats better produced in a rather different
reactor altogether.

True enough but the uranium/plutonium solid fuelled designs for civil
reactors were simply modifications based on the 'Plutonium Factory'
designs. IOW, they had a cold war legacy.


Not to say that there wasnt a big link up between civil and military
nuclear power.

Also Thorium is not the godsend some claim it to be. Its still got lots
of nasty by products that need to be dealt with and the breeder reactor
itself is more expensive.

I think you might change your mind if you can spare the 2 hours to
view this video presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P9M__yYbsZ4

I'm naturally assuming you haven't seen any of this material going by
that response.


The good news is that nuclear power is an about 1000 times safer than
the greens think it is, so re-education and rationalisation of risk could
make it very much cheaper than it is.

And that's true for all the existing reactors based on designs
derived from technology with a cold war legacy. The risks could
ultimately become another 3 orders of magnitude safer again with a
mature LFTR technologically based design of reactor.
--
J B Good

On 01/09/14 00:13, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

5. It is very difficult if not impossible today
to fiddle with data, since there are statistical tests to see
if the numbers are coherent.

its actually easier, because you can write a program that will generate
a beautiful set of data samples scattered around whatever mean you want.

It is difficult to _modify_ a large quantity of data
in a way that does not show statistical inconsistency.

dont be silly.

What are computers FOR?


--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. €“ Erwin Knoll

On 31/08/14 23:54, Timothy Murphy wrote:
bert wrote:

Any person or group who deliberately modified data to support any
conclusion would probably lose whatever position they had,

Unfortuneatly it seems to be a regular occurrence these days.

Give an example.

Wasn't it the University of East Anglia?

I don't think anyone at the UEA _modified_ data.
Some people there behaved stupidly, but they weren't fraudulent.

If you claim data were altered, tell me which.

Well they erased the holocene optimum the little ice age and the
mediaeval warming period completely.




--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. €“ Erwin Knoll

On 01/09/14 01:59, Johny B Good wrote:
On Sun, 31 Aug 2014 02:45:07 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 31/08/14 02:03, Johny B Good wrote:


Suggesting that fossil fuelled power stations (let alone Nuclear) can
be replaced with 'Green Power' is simply an impractical Pipe Dream.

Agreed BUT you are not 100% right that civil reactors can produce
weapons garde plutonium - thats better produced in a rather different
reactor altogether.

True enough but the uranium/plutonium solid fuelled designs for civil
reactors were simply modifications based on the 'Plutonium Factory'
designs. IOW, they had a cold war legacy.


Not to say that there wasnt a big link up between civil and military
nuclear power.

Also Thorium is not the godsend some claim it to be. Its still got lots
of nasty by products that need to be dealt with and the breeder reactor
itself is more expensive.

I think you might change your mind if you can spare the 2 hours to
view this video presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P9M__yYbsZ4

I'm naturally assuming you haven't seen any of this material going by
that response.


The good news is that nuclear power is an about 1000 times safer than
the greens think it is, so re-education and rationalisation of risk could
make it very much cheaper than it is.

And that's true for all the existing reactors based on designs
derived from technology with a cold war legacy. The risks could
ultimately become another 3 orders of magnitude safer again with a
mature LFTR technologically based design of reactor.


Thus proving you haven't understood a single word....



--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. €“ Erwin Knoll