Reducing my carbon footprint

cpurvis

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Really, Professor? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukishama all come to mind. What event that could never happen happened there? Not to mention waste sites which are toxic for how many thousands of years?

If you want to live by one, be my guest. I'll pass.

Give me fossil fuel which is the best thing that ever happened to mankind. Not only has it raised the living standard of virtually every human on the planet, ask any climate change billionaire how else could their personal jets get from one meeting after another on How To Save the World (and Get Even Richer At the Same Time)?

You can ride your bicycle; I'll take my Dodge Cummins diesel. You can also keep your ultimately fossil fuel powered electric weed eater. Mine's an old 2-cycle and I feed it 16:1 gas to just to make it smoke more!

As far as meaningful conversation, there is none in this thread, including yours. It looks like trolling to me.
 

MowerMike

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No professor here, just a technical professional who has experience and facts on his side.

Chernobyl and Fukushima were completely different types of power plants than are used in the USA, so those types of catastrophic accidents could not occur in the USA. Three Mile Island was due to preventable operator error in ignoring safety system alarms and as bad as it was did not result in a single death or overexposure, or loss of farmland and animals. Since Three Mile Island, all USA commercial nuclear power generating stations are required to have automatic reactor shutdown systems that do not require human intervention. Nuclear power stations have duplicate redundant safety systems, such that if one fails the second one can be used to bring the plant into a safe shutdown mode. So, basically it is nearly impossible for there to be a significant nuclear power accident in the USA.

As far as waste disposal, it is not a problem if it is simply left onsite and entombed in the plant building when the reactor is decommissioned.

I gather that you are some sort of climate change denier, but please correct me if I am somehow mistaken. :laughing:

Oh, and it is you, my friend who decided to troll my thread with inflammatory nonsense.
 

bertsmobile1

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Actually, as someone who has worked for nearly forty years in the nuclear power industry, I have found that there is a massive amount of ignorance on this topic, as demonstrated in this forum. If you are really interested in making a meaningful contribution to this discussion, I suggest you better educate yourself before making silly uninformed remarks.

Yes, I did Science at Uni and back in my Uni days Australia was debating weather we should open our second Uranium mine and even look at Nuclear energy.
Thousands took to the streets in protest.
All of them were humanities students who had not done any science since they were 12.
So we decided to ship Uranium as Yellow Cake which is both toxic & water soluable .
I piss myself laughing whenever I start to recall all the bull **** debates that raged through the media at the time .
And usually it was from people whose only knowledge of Nuclear energy came from a Mickey Mouse cartoon.
Spent Uranium fuel rods are not a problem.
They decay at the same rate as naturally occuring uranium decays and short of grinding them up to a dust & either breathing them in or swallowing them they pose little actual problems.
Our first uranium mine was in an area called the " Rum Jungle "
It was called that because it litterally glowed in the dark and in all sorts of funny colours & patterns.
When people reported this they were considered to have drunk too much rum.
The indiginous people have been living in this area for 40,000 years and AFAIK none of them have grown 3 heads or 10' long penises.

OTOH I had an isotope lisence for around 20 years .
Used mainly Co 60 & Na 24.
The Na24 has a 1/2 life of 14 hours so you had to order it a month ahead of time & use it the second it was available for pick up as after 2 days it was 99% decayed to Mg.
You can use Na 24 to take X ray images through 4' thick iron castings ( which is what I used it for ) or through 100' of earth which is what the pipeline authority used it for.
Cobalt was plain lead weave gloves & usual radiology gear.
Sodium was pressurised full air suit behind screens using remote handleing gear whenever the isotope was out of the camera
Uranium is fine , I would happily live in a fuel dump.

As for coal, it would be fine if coal was just Carbon, but it is not.
There is more radiation leaked out of a coal fires boiler in a day than from a Nuclear Power plant in a year due to the fact that most black coals are radio active themselves C 14
Now while the amount of C 14 in coal is very small, a very small percentage of a very large tonnage is a lot and radioactive C 14 is the C used in radio carbon dating. The Radio bit is radioactive.
Then there is Thorium, Ceasium, Strontinum , all in coal.
Then we have the toxic stuff like Tellurium, Sellium etc,
In fact so much toxic material is in the ash left over it is not allowed to be used anywhere that it will come into contact with food plants, including cattle feed.
The flue gasses are also toxic in themselves and then you also get , Sulphuric acid, Phosphoric acid, Fluroboric acid and Nitric acid, all in the flue gasses.
And with Powder River coals, Mercury and I suppose the reason why so may Americans are as "mad as hatters" is all the mercury they have been breathing in or eating as mercury bioaccumulates in both plants & animals.

Most of the "carbon footprint" stuff is trash science at it's worst. Foistered upon the general pubic by the self richious to make them feel even more better than every one else.
The amount of carbon produced in mining, transporting then generating the electricity used to recharge a battery trimmer is about 4 times more than what would have been created by using a petrol powered trimmer in the first place.

If you really want to reduce your carbon footprint then get one of the specialist companies to come & do a full thermal image of the the complete exteriour of your house on a hot summer day when you have the air con on and mid winter when you have the heater running flat chat.
Using this information plug all of the thermal leaks in your house.
Not only will you save the planet, you will also save yourself a lot of money
Set the air con to 20 C in summer or better still re-engineer your house to be solar active and thus turn off the heater & air con except in extreme days,
Home care equipment make almost zero impact because they are small engines that get used for small hours a year.
We worked out that is every house in Australia ( 10,000,000 or so ) ran ran a "dirty" 160cc 2 stroke Victa lawn mowers all day they would consume the same amount of fuel as 1 jumbo jet taking off.
At that time Sydney airport was running around 150 planes a day, yet to reduce pollution we were banning 2 stroke mowers and working out how to bump the airport up to 200 flights a day.
 

bertsmobile1

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Actually, as someone who has worked for nearly forty years in the nuclear power industry, I have found that there is a massive amount of ignorance on this topic, as demonstrated in this forum. If you are really interested in making a meaningful contribution to this discussion, I suggest you better educate yourself before making silly uninformed remarks.

Yes and the other problem is politicians.
Back in the cold war days they wanted lots & lots of plutonium so we could have more bombs than them cause whoever fires the last missile wins.
Thus fast breeder reactors were the only thing any government would look at & the Thorium Salt reactor programe was shut down.
No one was willing to use a nuke because eventually the full consequences of the two dropped on Japan became common knowledge and since that time the bombs had increased in power by orders of magnitude.
Then the French came up with the Neutron bomb which was a game changer cause it killed everything that was living but did not affect the real estate so it could be used effectively.
This made most sane politicans scarred shitless so non proliferation & decommissioning became the order of the day, apart from that increasing the stockpiles of Nukes is primarily what sent the USSR broke, nukes are really expensive.

As for accidents, the big problem is the high pressure water used to cool the reactors and chynobal was a strait water gas explosion cause by water at very high temperatures ( around 400 C from memory ) depressurizing thus converting to high pressure dissassociated dry super steam followed by hydrogen gas explosions ( from the dissassociated steam H & O ).
All of the explosions at Japan were from hydrogen gas accumulating because the water pumps had failed and then there were some electrical explosions due to high voltage short circuits.

Last year China fired up it's research salt reactor and if things go as planned, they will be generating power with them big time in a decade or so.
India is also running a thorium salt reactor as a research instrument and they plan to go nuclear asap.
Germany is due to go on line in 2018 with their reactor.
 

TonyPrin

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Getting back to the original post, reducing emissions is an admirable objective but several other posts show taking one fuel away doesn't always mean improvement. MowerMike, what about letting the grass grow or just skipping a few mowings. You'd save on energy plus the taller grass would eat up more CO2.
 

bertsmobile1

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Really, Professor? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukishama all come to mind. What event that could never happen happened there? Not to mention waste sites which are toxic for how many thousands of years?

If you want to live by one, be my guest. I'll pass.

Give me fossil fuel which is the best thing that ever happened to mankind. Not only has it raised the living standard of virtually every human on the planet, ask any climate change billionaire how else could their personal jets get from one meeting after another on How To Save the World (and Get Even Richer At the Same Time)?

You can ride your bicycle; I'll take my Dodge Cummins diesel. You can also keep your ultimately fossil fuel powered electric weed eater. Mine's an old 2-cycle and I feed it 16:1 gas to just to make it smoke more!

As far as meaningful conversation, there is none in this thread, including yours. It looks like trolling to me.

Every change in the energy density of the fuel burned was a great benefit to mankind
And every one created problems
Animals replacing people power made a massive difference to productivity.
Wind replacing animals was even better ( where applicable )
Wood replacing wind. same story
Coal replacing wood , same again
oil replacing coal same again
'Nukes replacing oil will be the same again

In 20 to 30 years time when China & India are pumping out electricity at 3¢ / Kwh, coal will look stupid at 15¢ / Kwh
As for solar being a non entity, buy yourself a ticket to Dezhou city in China and see for yourself.
A totally self sufficient solar powered city.
Built with private money that was not chained to coal mining or oil production to prove it can be done economically.
Last time I checked the Chinese government was looking into building 5,000 more city complexes built along identical lines.
 

bertsmobile1

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Really, Professor? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukishama all come to mind. What event that could never happen happened there? Not to mention waste sites which are toxic for how many thousands of years?

If you want to live by one, be my guest. I'll pass.

Give me fossil fuel which is the best thing that ever happened to mankind. Not only has it raised the living standard of virtually every human on the planet, .

Only if you consider the USA to be the entire world.
2/3 of the people on the planet are living in the 3rd world without fossil fuels and these people are subsidising the increase in your living standards, theirs has either not changed or gone down.
 

MowerMike

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Getting back to the original post, reducing emissions is an admirable objective but several other posts show taking one fuel away doesn't always mean improvement. MowerMike, what about letting the grass grow or just skipping a few mowings. You'd save on energy plus the taller grass would eat up more CO2.

My first post was a bit tongue in cheek, and designed to provoke some discussion on this somewhat moribund forum. The real benefit of replacing gas tools with battery powered is reduced noise and not having to deal with the transport, mixing and storage of gas. If you disect my original post, you see that I really did not reduce emissions overall, since I gave my gas tools to my friend's son, who will no doubt use them just much as I did. Also, I still use a gas blower and pressure washer, so I'm really a hybrid power user. As to letting the grass grow more to increase photosynthesis, I suspect that my trees are far more useful for this task. I already let my grass grow over 3" long to protect the roots from the hot Texas sun.

Finally, I'm not Al Gore or a tree hugger. I use a bicycle for short distance travel, and on average use my car only once a week. I haven't flown on an airplane in nearly twenty years. So, I try my best not to polute within the confines of living a first world life.
 
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MowerMike

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Only if you consider the USA to be the entire world.
2/3 of the people on the planet are living in the 3rd world without fossil fuels and these people are subsidising the increase in your living standards, theirs has either not changed or gone down.

We Americans seem to forget this fact, and unfortunately our current president wants to take us back into the glory days of the 19th century. Countries like China realize this, and if we are not careful the USA may be heading to being second banana to China.
 

TonyPrin

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Only if you consider the USA to be the entire world.
2/3 of the people on the planet are living in the 3rd world without fossil fuels and these people are subsidising the increase in your living standards, theirs has either not changed or gone down.

Seldom do I see comments as upside-down as this. The idea that 3rd world countries are subsidizing US living standards is cookoo. The US government plus private charities and foundations give well over $50 billion to these countries annually, not the other way around. The fact that other countries aren't keeping pace with the US is neither our fault nor something we should be ashamed of.

Beyond that, 3rd world countries exist for many reasons none of which has anything to do with what fuels we use. I mean do you really think any 3rd world country's economy would change in any way if we used less fossil fuels.
 
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