Maybe nuclear is the answer?

Yeah, it is nice. Like for example, when you're swimming in a lake, you can just drink the water while you're swimming coz it's so clean. My parents have a summer cottage and they have no electricity there, only solar panels. That's pretty cool, I think. And have you seen those panel thingys? They're so pretty! hehehe.

 

Nuclear energy doesn't require uranium or produce nuclear waste, if fusion reactions can be sustained.

multinational team is scheduled to begin constructing ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a project designed to demonstrate that fusion can generate almost limitless amounts of electricity without the risks and long-lived radioactive waste linked with nuclear fission reactors.

Fusion reactions power the sun and stars. ITER aims to re-create that energy here on Earth by heating hydrogen gas to 100 million˚C. In this inferno, hydrogen ions smash together, fuse into a larger ion—helium—and release energy. Physicists have already built reactors that can achieve fusion, but none has yet produced more energy than it consumes.

If all goes as planned, ITER will change that. By building a bigger, more powerful reactor, scientists hope to produce 500 megawatts of power from just 50 megawatts input. Fuel in the form of the hydrogen isotope deuterium is extracted from water, and the small amount of radioactive waste it yields decays to a safe level in decades. In contrast, today’s nuclear fission reactors generate waste that can stay hot for thousands of years.

The project will take 10 years and cost $6 billion to complete, with the goal of producing fusion electricity by the middle of the century. There’s just one holdup. As we went to press, the international collaboration backing ITER—China, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the U.S.—was still arguing over where to build it. For the past year it has been split between sites in France and Japan (China and Russia favor France; the U.S. and South Korea back Japan), and no amount of negotiation seems able to break the impasse. It’s an inauspicious start to a collaborative endeavor second in scope only to the International Space Station.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1573450.stm
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,20967,1021090,00.html
http://www.iea.org/dbtw-wpd/textbase/techno/technologies/index_fusion.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power

 

That sounds amazing.... It must truly be a beautiful place..

 

Yep, Finland is great. WHEN you're living in UK, I'll invite you to visit Finland with me.

 

Sometimes I wish I had been born in Europe rather than here... I almost was, but ended up here...
I especially like the northern countries... Just something about the scenery...
Damnit, now I'm all off topic.

 

So how did you end up being born there?

SEE? Now you know what it feels like to have your thread hijacked.

 

I guess I just almost got lucky, but not quite... When my dad got out of the military he had originaly planned on living in Spain, but for whatever reasons he ended up coming back to the U.S. That would have been so much cooler...

 

Oil will not last us until the middle of the century. So, if we don't have access to oil, how will something of that scale be built and maintained? Well, I suppose they could use very expensive oil, but that would only further the cost to create the thing.

Plus, that whole idea is based on the possibility that Multination Team will be able to harness the power of fusion. What if they're unsuccessful? The scenario, as of right now, is based on predictions, hopes, and dreams. I'm not saying that it will not work, but you can't jump the gun, you know?

 

We may be out of oil by then, but couldn't they just use fission?

 

Well, I don't know... it is possible to use nuclear power to power machinery and whatnot? I actually don't know. I've never looked into it.

 

Nuclear power could fit effortlessly into the current power grid, and like my original quote says, has the perfect conditions for creating hydrogen, to fuel whatever else. Even if it's not the answer, it can at least buy a decent amount of time.

 

Well as of our current consumption and known supplies, we have about 50 years left... if production increases, which it will, thats still 30 years.

How do you feel about browns gas?

We already can control it in labratory experiments, thats why planning has moved on to this phase. I agree about not jumping the gun... thats why this project will take 50 years.

 

What happens if none of this peak oil stuff is true.. no i don't want to go into it all right now to be honest i have done it twice already..


Just another point of view (being a contrarian, sort of want to believe)

Mostly we think of propaganda as the ham-handed work of dull fascists or bright, amoral neoconservatives and boot-licking journalists protecting their paychecks and prerogatives among the lower level agents of the Illuminati and the New World Order. Their focus was defined by George W. Bush, joking at a Gridiron Club dinner, Washington, D.C., March 2001: “You can fool some of the people all of the time and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”

The rest are probably leftists and progressives who consider themselves too smart to fall for the crap that comes out of Townhall, Newsmax, WorldNetDaily, National Review or The Weekly Standard not tomention the mainstream corporate news. These come with so many holes in their facts and information that any fairly well informed progressive intellectual can easily see through it. When it has more holes than Swiss cheese and its twice as moldy as Limburger, I don't need it. If it was in my fridge I would get rid of it before it stunk up the house. If it's full of holes and can't be held up to the light, I call it a lie. When it stinks, I hold my nose and scold the liar who brought it in.

Progressive liars are more elegant, more subtle, cerebral. By constantly referring to our responsibility to change the way we interact with the world, the Gate Keepers of the Left attempt to control the debate and focus the action to maintain the fracas. Huey Newton, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were among those icons of the 70's who would lead their followers into protest after protest to set up the reaction that Spiro Agnew could sneer about or the police could crack down upon with a vengeance. Hard hats against college kids, National Guard rifles against innocent students. This set the visual memory of a generation and factionalized America. Divided we are conquered. Set into opposing camps and stirred with incendiary rhetoric we vent our anger against our countrymen while the Hand of the Illuminati steals our life, livelihood, and freedom one paycheck at a time and quietly runs a monetary scam that would be the envy of any counterfeiter or conman.

Now is a good time to notice who among the progressives is really a shill for the Illuminati agenda to establish a New World Order. Three years ago we had the opportunity to sort out the hidden hand from among the "progressives" and the "left." Those who blindly followed the Official Conspiracy Theory with limpid qualifications stood out like a sore thumb. Progressive icons like Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon, Counterpunch, and many others could be seen as the self-appointed Gatekeepers of the Left.


http://www.the7thfire.com/peak_oil/is_peak_oil_a_myth.htm

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1717

all kinds of other antedeluvian ideas have been dragged into the debate, especially the totally discredited Malthusian population rubbish of plus-200 years ago, global warming, 2 billion Chinese with a car and a fridge, 1 billion Indians with a car and a fridge and so on and so forth (only Euros and Yanks are allowed these 'luxuries' and fortuitously for us, we've already got them and understandably, are extremely loathe to give them up or share them with anyone else!) and finally, oil wars. Have I missed anything?

Yet in spite of all my efforts to show that 'peak oil' is an invention, it seems to fall on deaf ears with immense tomes landing with a thump on my virtual desktop that attempt to show that the Huppert 'peak oil' hypothesis is the only true and righteous path and anyone who dares challenge it is either burying their heads in (should it be oil-bearing?) sand, or defending an oil-based economy.

I ask myself how can this be so, for on the hand, I am being accused - by
default - of defending an oil-based economy, something I've been at pains to
show that I'm not and on the other, of simply ignoring the 'facts', namely
that shortly there will be oil wars as the countries of the planet seek to
make sure they've got their fix.

I've already pointed out that we've been going to war over (and with) oil
for the past century, that going to war over valuable resources is the
bedrock of capitalism and has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of
whatever resource it is, but its location and who ostensibly owns it. So
'oil wars' are, as they say, par for the course (see my review of William
Engdahl's excellent book on the subject).

Now I'm not an oil expert (my most intimate connection to oil is cooking
with it) so I have to rely on the 'experts' and my own intelligence and
knowledge of political economy in order to arrive at what seems to be a
rational conclusion on the issue.

First (and hopefully for the last time), there is no doubt that at some
point in the future we will effectively 'run out of oil', that is,
economically viable recovery of the stuff, assuming that is, that it's still
central to an industrial economy. This assumes that all recoverable reserves
have been discovered, itself a contentious issue (see below).

The one thing missing from these allegedly 'left analyses' of the oil debate
is the political economy of capitalism and the inevitable fall in the rate
of profit, a fact so fundamental to the issue, that one must ask the
question why alleged lefties rarely, if ever mention it. One must assume
that it muddies the (oily) waters to bring up such a crass subject, as it
would mean actually looking at the nature of capitalism. In my last essay, I
quoted from S. Artesian's excellent series on Venezuela, who commits the
'sin' of actually dealing with the nature of capitalism rather than the
appearance. And, as comrade Artesian felt compelled to repeat his view, and
as I did also in my last piece, I'll bloody well do it again, Goebbels-like,
until it sinks in.


http://www.theuniversalseduction.com/articles.php?subaction=showfull&id=1105775728&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&