Your comments have been serious and encouraging. You are all awake, alive and aware to the problems humankind faces.

Pity about ANSTO. They need to name and crucify the underling, so that top management can be publicly cleansed.

See you all on the next thread.

“ANSTO apologises for poll changes

ANSTO is interested in stimulating public debate and discussion about nuclear science and technology. In so doing, it recently began a web poll on whether nuclear power should be part of Australia’s future energy mix.

As a result of a dramatic change in poll voting patterns over the weekend, a staff member, without authority, modified the poll by changing the “I am against it” answer to “It is one of the options” at around 7.30am today. This was an unauthorised change. ANSTO acknowledges that both making a change and changing the answer “I am against it” to “It is one of the options” was a serious error of judgement by the staff member. This gave misleading and incorrect results to web visitors and poll participants.

Following an approach by an online news service, the staff member then changed the answer to “No” in a bid to correct the situation.

When ANSTO management became aware of the situation, it took action to restore the poll to the original answer and also included “No” to ensure all voters in the intervening period would be included in the statistics.

As the CEO of ANSTO, I wish to apologise unreservedly to stakeholders and participants for this unauthorised intervention in the poll results. The poll is on the front page of the ANSTO website at http://www.ansto.gov.au.

Dr Adi Paterson

Chief Executive Officer

Posted: 26 October 2009”

(He must be mighty pleased with that Argentinian mob INVAP too. How dare those pesky greenies refer to our esteemed colleagues as ‘the dodgy brothers of reactor construction’ when we went to tender. It’s only been 2 years delay on medical isotope production due to a minor technical hitch. Why are people so unkind?)

As for ANSTO, if it was vote-spammed, serve them right for conducting web polls. On an intellectual level with radio stations polling “should Brad apologise to Ange?” or similar.

Following on from D-T fusion, where the colliding particles only have one proton to repel each other, subsequent designs plan Li-T or Li-D fusion. Ignition is more difficult due to the three protons in lithium, however the spallation of lithium is exothermic and provides energetic tritons and neutrons into the plasma.

However, the modern world will never run out of coal or uranium (or coal to make oil). Ironically, it is quickly running out of soil to support farmers, firewood, biofuels, bio sequestration or bio anything. When you hear the word “offset”, you’ll know that money is changing hands on a false promise.

What we are running out of even more quickly is places to put our waste. Singapore is creating a new island out of its rubbish. India recycles all of its rubbish and bans plastic bags. Dwarfing all of these wastes is the wastes from burning hydrocarbons, amounting to 1.6 kg of CO2 above every single square metre of land, sea and ice. The atmosphere is full!

Provides some clues. Looks like they might use lithium to creat tritium.

What’s dry geothermal? Presumably not using water….

In any case, I thought the heat source was renewed with radiogenic heat? Again, outside my expertise.

By the way, I don’t consider dry geothermal to be renewable, either - it’s basically mining heat.

Law changes not feasible? Then I’m sorry, there’s not a chance in h*ll we’ll go close to meeting the targets we are supposed to. Let’s look forward to Venuses ‘searing black calm’[1] for the future.

[1] thanks to Larry Niven for that description.

In the short term at least, it will require mining lithium.

I have checked your references. They are somewhat deficient when it comes to thermal storgae of thermal solar heat collected from NS arrays. Thus out of date and useless. I stand by my assertions re points 1-3 and suggest respectfully that you widen your view.

Also, give it a break - law changes re nuclear power generation are simply not feasible in Australia at present. Tough luck, but them’s the breaks.

I could could cite refs for thermal storage for solar thermal arrays, but commercial imperatives prevent me from doing so. I have stayed with publicly available information. Perhaps there is costed info out there, but not to my knowledge. It comes with a big capital cost, though. The current trend towards solar thermal installation as an input to an existing (coal fired) thermal power station appears to me to be an ideal starting point to sort out the main issues, before trying to construct a solar thermal only power station, with or without thermal mass storage.

Thanks for the references - these sites appear to be more serious than some others on these topics.

And your assertions re points 1-3 are arguable to say the least.

That is: a nuclear apologist (Roger), a waverer (me) and an antagonist (Stephen). Lovely! However, sh_t waits for no man.

Sad, really.

That’s just a matter of time. Eventually, our energised climate will begin to deliver disasters on a scale that by comparison Hell will seem to have frozen over. The most hopelessly ignorant of our politicians and their voters will be so impressed that their fears of nuclear will be forgotten.

It may happen earlier. The Renewable Energy Target legislation will certainly get consumers demanding “what energy are we going to use instead?” Without massive supplies of energy (or massive cheating), the MRET simply cannot be met.