[SFX]

The other day i watched a program about the discovery of a sunken German submarine. The episode was quite fascinating and perhaps a bit macabre..there is something about deaths at sea especially submariners that really disturbs me

Anyway what happened was a German uboat U864 was on a "secret" mission to deliver jet engines for the Japanese air force, the Brits had used enigma and were fully aware of the subs movements and intentions

A British sub Venturer managed to track it down as the uboat was having engine problems and was giving off a distinct audible , via headphones, signal. well the Brits sunk the sub using a volley of 4 torpedoes, one doing the sinking. this in itself was remarkable as it was all done by hydrophones and guesstimating though every now and again the uboat did show it's periscope, the only known case of one submarine destroying another while both were submerged

Thing that really got me thinking was that even today the shipwreck area contains a letla cargo, no fishing is allowed there. the sub was also carry large amounts of mercury which is still leaking today.The wreck now lies, in two pieces, 152 metres (500ft) beneath North Sea waters off the Norwegian coast, and contains 65 tonnes of mercury in 1,857 corroding canisters. It is a toxic time bomb, and today the Norwegian Government will announce plans to entomb it in a sarcophagus 12 metres thick

The Norwegian Coastal Administration monitors about 2,500 wrecks, 400 of them from the Second World War, but this is the most threatening, Gunnar Guellan, the project manager for U864, said. Fishing and boating in the immediate area have been banned and islanders have been told not to eat local seafood. Attempts to dig into the half-buried keel using robotic vehicles were abandoned when the unstable wreck shifted.



But hold on, there were countless sinkings of merchant and naval ships during ww2, and of course ww1. Just how much and of what type of pollution is there out there?

I am on a quest to find out !!

The South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), under its Pacific Ocean Pollution Prevention Programme (PACPOL) formulated a Regional Strategy to address the issues related to World War II wrecks in the Pacific. Here is some of the stuff i have found out so far

The SPREP WWII Shipwrecks of the Pacific database currently stands at 3855 vessels sunk in the Pacific region during World War II. This equates to over 13 million tons of vessel sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

In the sea battles around the Solomon Islands of Guadalcanal and Savo, hundreds of vessels were lost and the straights between the islands renamed Iron Bottom Sound because of the number of WWII shipwrecks littering the bottom of the straights. In the Federated States of Micronesias Truk lagoon, over 60 vessels were sunk in a 40-mile wide lagoon. These are the two main concentrations of wrecks but they are distributed throughout the region with a significant number still lying undiscovered

The oil, chemicals and unexploded ordnances still on board many of these vessels pose a grave and imminent danger to the people, marine and coastal environments and fisheries of the region.



The USS Mississinewa was an oil tanker (Auxiliary Oiler) supplying a range of aviation fuel and heavy marine fuel oil to the US Pacific Fleet anchored off Ulithi Atoll, Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia in November, 1944. On 20 November, 1944 the vessel was attacked by a manned Japanese torpedo and sank with more than 50 personnel in 40 metres of water


In early July, 2001 a tropical storm passed through the area disturbing the 57-year old wreck and causing an oil spill that was not contained until late August, 2001. The leak was estimated as occurring at a rate of 300 - 400 US gallons per day, an estimated total of 18,000 - 24,000 US gallons (68,000 - 91,000 litres) over the 60-day period. The US Navy contracted dive team, estimates volume of oil remaining on the wreck at approximately 9.6 Million US Gallons (36 Million litres)

Now that is just an example from the pacific, what about the Atlantic ( there was massive sinkage of shipping here) the indian ocean etc. and of course the Med

And oil may be only one of our worries i am sure there were far more toxic chemicals lost at sea, may of them carried in secret missions that we may never know about, I would imagine that a lot of chemicals used by the US and germany for their atomic programs would have been carried secretly and i believe the Japanese had a nuclear program as well

Of course since the brits have been continuously dumping nuclear waste ans munitions in the Irish sea perhaps we should not expect our government to be to concerned about WW2 pollution !!

Quote

Beaufort is now known to contain hundreds of thousands of tonnes of a vast range of material, 'simple' ordnance, chemical munitions and (now with this admission) nuclear material. Do we leave the dump undisturbed and wait until a problem arises? This is what happened with the chemical devices which still periodically drift to shore in N. Ireland. SW. Scotland and the Isle of Man.

Quote

In 1986 the Celtic League revealed that the American nuclear submarine "Nathaniel Greene" had struck the sea-bed in the area, about fifteen miles further west off Anglesey.

The submarine of the 8,500 tonne "Lafayette" ballistic missile class was so severely damaged that it lay on the sea-bed for two days whilst a salvage operation was mounted in the strictest secrecy. It was eventually able to surface but had to be towed back to its base at Holy Loch. Damage was so severe that the submarine subsequently returned to its home base at Charleston in South Carolina where it was de-commissioned.

The US authorities maintained that there was no pollution but the extent of the damage sustained and the subsequent immediate decommissioning raise questions about just what did happen off the North Wales coast in March 1986.

Quote

Urgent need for complete list of dump sites and inventory of contents - 22 MOD dump sites already known should be checked for possible radiation waste disposal

The confirmation given in the UK Parliament (06-11-97) that radioactive material had been dumped in the Irish sea off Anglesey is alarming.

Quote

The decision to progress a electricity cable interconnector between Scotland and N. Ireland taken by Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar this week is bad news for coastal communities around the N. Irish sea.

The route for the interconnector is certain to involve excavation work through the infamous Beaufort Dyke munitions dump which contains all manner of deteriorating conventional and chemical munitions dumped over a fifty year period.

Quote

New information mirrors early exposure of lies over chemical and nerve gas disposals.

The news released today (20/5/97) that the United Kingdom has disposed of three thousand drums of radioactive waste in the English Channel off Alderney is a worrying development.

http://www.manxman.c...hive/bombs.html

You know this brings me onto another of my pet grievances. No one seems to give a dam about nuclear pollution any more ( previous links excepted). the anti nuclear lobby seems all but dead and buried it makes me highly suspicious of the global warming paranoia that is sweeping the world

Granted i do not deny that global pollution is having a damaging effect on the environment but i have a sneaking suspicion that those who would have us adopt more and more nuclear options for our energy are responsible for a lot of the global warming hysteria

you see the thing is climates change.. the deserts of the world were once lush and wet, if you dig in the soil around london you will find sea shells embedded in the chalk ( itself made from marine life0

We live on a dynamic planet. Comments like the "last ice age" are misleading, we are still in an ice age but in an interglacial period

Quote

Many glacial periods have occurred during the last few million years, initially at 40,000-year frequency but more recently at 100,000-year frequencies. These are the best studied. There have been four major ice ages in the further past

Quote

The present ice age began 40 million years ago with the growth of an ice sheet in Antarctica, but intensified during the Pleistocene (starting around 3 million years ago) with the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales. The last glacial period ended about ten thousand years ago

It seems that these interglacial periods last about 12000 years and since the last glacial period was about 10000 years ago we may well be about to enter a "new ice age" there is of course argument that the interglacial period may well last another 50000 years

As no one really knows what causes ice ages your guess is a good as anyone's. einstein was one who believed in the possibility of perhaps earth crust displacement and this may cause ice ages not because the ice sheets move bur because the "skin" of the earth moves, driving equatorial regions into polar regions and visa verse

It is also a fact that the earth's magnetic fields switches on a regular basis

Quote

The Earth could be about to turn upside down. The planet's magnetic field is showing signs of wanting to make a gigantic somersault, so that magnetic north heads towards Antarctica, and magnetic south goes north. Compasses will point the wrong way, and migrating birds, fish and turtles are going to be very confused.

Just when this will happen, how long it will take and what the consequences will be, is difficult to fathom. What is not in doubt, though, is that it will happen. About every half a million years or so, the Earth's magnetic field flips upside down.

So as i said the earth is a very dynamic place, yes we should be concerned about pollution, the loss of the rain forests and the ozone layer and probable global warming, but lets not allow our concerns in these areas to allow the nuclear fuels industry to gain carte blance on the world energy provision..if anyone knows about pollution they do !!!

Oh dear i seem to wandered far out of my original shipping lane !! Hope i don't have a coll......

[SFX]

I have just finished watching a very interesting documentary on Chanel 4 about Global warming. It put forward the possibility that man made global warming is not as prevalent ( in fact it called it a Myth !!) as many suppose.

Now i watched this with a wry grin as you see my thoughts as mentioned in the earlier posts were just speculations and hunches albeit based on my limited geophysical knowledge

The program included interviews with some of the worlds foremost scientists including heads of major universities including MIT, Nasa, the International Arctic Research Centre, the Institut Pasteur, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Winnipeg, Alabama and Virginia

You can read a quick summary from the programmes site

http://www.channel4....mp=docpage_box2

They agreed with my findings that most of what we see as the "results" of man made global warming are in fact actually due to natural and regular changes in the earths climate and periodic changes in the polar ice makeup.

many of the so called official documens that support the man made global warming "theory" have these eminent scientists mentioned as contributers, howver many have not had their concerns mentioned in the reports, and in fact many have had their contributions removed or misquoted. It has taken the threat of legal action by one eminent scientist to have his name removed from one such report

The program also put forward some interesting ideas such as the fact that the "global warming culture" is now responsible for a multi billion dollar "industry" and many thousands of people are making a comfortable living out of it

More alarmingly the program also investigated the premise that the west, specifically the US, has now jumped on the global warming bandwagon to justify it's desire to stiffle development, more precisely industrial development, in the third world

Africa, for example, with it's vast oil and coal reserves, is being discouraged from exploiting these resources for internal use ( though of course the west is happy to import oil from africa !!). Without coal and oil generated electricity African can never industrialise on a large sacle and will never "develop"

The alternatives of solar and wind power are far to expensive and inefficient even for the wealty west to exploit and there is no way the west will alllow african countries to go nuclear

howver the program never mentioned my other theory that the nuclear industry are responsible for a lot of the global warming misinformation, the aim being to make nuclear power acceptable to the masses

[SFX]

Today our prime minister Tony Blair announced his intention to promote the increased use of nuclear power in britain. Those of you who have been watching this thread should not be suprized.

I have maintained all along that though carbon pollution is and has always been a issue that must be tackled i honestly believe that the global warming "frenzy" is being hijacked by pro-nuclear "parties"

I remember vividly the campaigns against nuclear weapons and nuclear power over 30 years ago. Public opinion was so strong that the pro-nukes were held at bay, however i don't think the youth of today have the same fears as we did, the cold war apperas to be over and the threat of a nuclear holocaust is not one that worries the average 18 year old. The nuclear debate has been off the agenda for some time now, laws have changed as well as atitudes and to be honest i don't think the youth of today have the same drive to fight the system as we had in the 70's and 80's.

So unfortunately the pro-nukes may well have a clear run, at least for most of the time and by the time the alarm bells are ringing and the masses are stirred into action it may be too late.

So carbon based emmision is evil and causes massive pollution, Mr Blair want's to increase our reliance on nuclear power.. is it so clean? has anything changed ?

The term nuclear waste is a bit deceiving. Wsate implies something you throw away, it degrades and as long as it is kept away from you it is not really harmful. This is in no way true of nuclear waste.

There are 3 main grades of nuclear waste:

1. Low level waste

Gloves, overalls, plastics, paper some gasses and liquids etc generally buried in shallow trenches ( we used to dump it at sea)

2. Intermediate Waste

More hazordous but stil contains relatively low levels of plutonium, This catergory has in it larger more solid items such as glove containers, boxes, sludge from tanks resins etc Used to be dumped at sea but now usually stored at the power staion or at sellafield ( our main reprocessing plant)

3. High level Waste

This is extremely dangerous, it mainly consist of the spent fuel and plutonium taken from the reactors and in the UK some of it is transported to Sellafied for reprocessing mainly into nuclear bomb material. The journey there is on standard rail lines well esposed to terorists. Most is not procssed into bomb making material and what we do with it has never been quite worked out.

A typical load carried on our railway network my contain:

Heat Production : 3-10 watts

Radioactivity: 1600 curies

Weight: 12 Kg

Depleted Uranium: 99% by weight

Caesium-137: 0.0125% by weight

Strontium-90: 0.06% by weight

Ruthenium-106: 0.001% by weight

Plutonium-239: 0.12% by weight

Plutonium Total: 0.2% by weight

One 30-millionth of a gramme of Ruthenium in the lung will cause terminal cancer, a typical consignment of waste has 6 grammes.

I was at university in east london in the early 80's and this was a main route for these nuclear flasks. Some people took a fake bazzoka ( rocket launcher) onto the staion at stratford and did a mock firing at a flask, they were not challenged. If a flask leaked ( not exploded) then the whole of london would be a "dead zone" for at least 100 years.

There have been a number of derailments of flasks in transit but information about these events is hard to come by - no suprise there !!

So you have got the waste from A to B ..what now ? It has been suggested that we can bury the low level waste in trenches some 8 meters below the surface and intermediate waste some 16 meters below the surface ( sealed in concreate coffins). The word " leakage" leaps to mind !!

Getting rid of high Level waste is far more difficukt. If we shut down all our power staions today we woud have around 60 years of high level waste to deal with. It is possible to vitrify ( solidify) the waste but it does not go away we still have to deal with it.

Basically all we can do at present is store it ( well we could make it into nuclear bombs and nuke a few countries but we are still left with waste from that process)

Thing is we need to store and guard high level waste for thousands of years, civilizations rise and fall, who is to say that in thousands of years time we will have the infrastructre of even the commitment to keep guarding these storage depots ?

Closing down reactors themselves is tricky, look at chernobyl and three mile island, you need to encase the cores in concrete and guard them for hundreds of years

I suggest those interested should do a google on the contamination at the Hanford Reservation in washington state ( caesium, strontium and plutonium released)

Also check the release of waste at West valley New york state

Chelyabinsk

Not to be confused with Chernobyl. This is a forgotton or more precsiely secret disaster which happened in the 1950's creating a wasteland 100's of miles square so contamiated that towns and villages were destoyed so as to stop people from returning. What happened is a bit of a mystery but it seems that nuclear waste "exploded"

Do some research on Canonsburg south west of Pittsburgh, in the second world war uranium was processed here for the manhatten project. In 1960 the factory closed down and in 1965 some 4,500 tonnes of urnaium contaminated material was burried right next to the town in a swamp where for years previously radiocative sludge had been dumped.

The swamp was then filled in and concreted over and later became the site of a recreational facility and a baseball pitch was actulay used on it !!

it wasn't untill 1963 that anyone bothered to take any readings for radioactivity and the readings went off the scale !!

I quote from the 1975 Royal Commision On Pollution and Enviromental Health, paragraph 338:

"there should be no commitment to a large program of nuclear fission power untill it has been demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long lived, highly radiocative waste for the indefinate future."

Nothing has changed since then. The half life of plutonium is 24,000 years

[Dark Crypto]

Nuclear winter is coming, but i dont understand how that waste will make it winter...

i wonder if we could send nuclear waste out to space, out there its safer, not in the way but it would cost alot, we need an actual way to possibly convert nuclear waste... without making it into a bomb

[SFX]

Nuclear winter occurs after a global nuclear war when there is so much debris thrown into the atmosphere that the sun is blocked off for a long period of time. Temperatures plumet, radioactive acid rain falls and the plants die.

As far as sending the waste into space..space shuttle explosions on take off ?

[Dark Crypto]

Oh yeah! i forgot about that, but either way we must stop the waste somhow!


all i dont see is why cant we produce a black hole scientifically somehow and just throw it inside of it, if i remember correctly they where already attempting to recreate a black hole, only problem i can see with that is then you have to contain the black hole cuz that would be a bigger dissaster :P

[SFX]

I think the physists are coming to believe that we can create blackholes however they will be extremely small and ver short lived, not sure exactly what use they will have apart from scientific advancement.

Unfortuantely the nuclear waste is with us and will be for many years to come, the only thing we could do is perhaps develop fusion reactors

http://news.bbc.co.u...ech/4627237.stm

[Dark Crypto]

well now days almost everything is bad for our environment, but nuclear waste must be the worst, if only we could contain it in a vacuum of some sort, and THEN encase it in very thick concrete, because it would be safer then just encasing it

[SFX]

A vacuum is no use as particles can travel through a vacuum and radiation is basically sub atomic particles. For instance light which is electromagmetic radiation can travel through a vaccum.

Strictly speaking, the radiation from nuclear waste is not made up of particles but sub atomic particles producing "rays" such as gamma rays. When a decaying nucleus emits an alpha particle ( very weak) and / or a beta particle ( fairly weak) the remaining nucleus is often unstable and can "jump down a state" to stabalise and in doing so can emit a gamma ray which is the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation

An alpha particle is composed of 2 protons and 2 neutrons and is identicle to a helium nucleus it is easily stopped by a thin sheet of paper or even the layer of dead skin cells on you skin

A beta particle can be either positive or negative , the negative emmision can create the deliciously named antineutrino, This kind of decay is common in nuclear reactors.

Not to be outdone positive beta decay can create an equally delicious pi-meson ( or neutral pion). This sort of decay occurs inside stars

[SFX]

More on global warming

Some quotes from Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Quote

I must state at the outset, that, as a scientist, I can find no substantive basis for the warming scenarios being popularly described.....Many aspects of the catastrophic scenario have already been largely discounted by the scientific community. For example, fears of massive sea-level increases accompanied many of the early discussions of global warming, but those estimates have been steadily reduced by orders of magnitude, and now it is widely agreed that even the potential contribution of warming to sea-level rise would be swamped by other more important factors.


Predicting what will happen to carbon dioxide over the next century is a rather uncertain matter....An improved model developed at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg shows that even the "business as usual'' scenario does not double carbon dioxide by the year 2100

The main absorbers of infrared in the atmosphere are water vapor and clouds. Even if all other greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) were to disappear, we would still be left with over 98 percent of the current greenhouse effect.

It is still of interest to ask what we would expect a doubling of carbon dioxide to do. A large number of calculations show that if this is all that happened, we might expect a warming of from .5 to 1.2 degrees centigrade. The general consensus is that such warming would present few, if any, problems

Many studies from the nineteenth century on suggested that industrial and other contributions to increasing carbon dioxide might lead to global warming. Problems with such predictions were also long noted, and the general failure of such predictions to explain the observed record caused the field of climatology as a whole to regard the suggested mechanisms as suspect. Indeed, the global cooling trend of the 1950s and 1960s led to a minor global cooling hysteria in the 1970s

One of the earliest protagonists of global warming, Roger Revelle, the late professor of ocean sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who initiated the direct monitoring of carbon dioxide during the International Geophysical Year (1958), coauthored with S. Fred Singer and Chauncy Starr a paper recommending that action concerning global warming be delayed insofar as current knowledge was totally inadequate. Another active advocate of global warming, Michael McElroy, head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard, has recently written a paper acknowledging that existing models cannot be used to forecast climate

The answer almost certainly lies in politics. For example, at the Earth Summit in Rio, attempts were made to negotiate international carbon emission agreements. The potential costs and implications of such agreements are likely to be profound for both industrial and developing countries. Under the circumstances, it would be very risky for politicians to undertake such agreements unless scientists "insisted.'' Nevertheless, the situation is probably a good deal more complicated than that example suggests

Moreover, some industries have become successful at profiting from environmental regulation. The most obvious example is the waste management industry. Even electric utility companies have been able to use environmental measures to increase the base on which their regulated profits are calculated. It is worth noting that about 1.7 trillion dollars have been spent on the environment over the past decade.( up to 1992) The environment, itself, qualifies as one of our major industries.

You can read his full article here:

http://www.cato.org/...2/reg15n2g.html

loads more info here :

http://www.cato.org/...=10&topic_id=87

[SFX]

Quote

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush said Thursday that nuclear power represents the "best solution" to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and stressed he was serious about fighting climate change.

"If you are truly serious about dealing with greenhouse gases, it seems like you should be a strong supporter of nuclear power," he said.

"I certainly am, and applaud efforts by members of the congress to provide incentives for the construction of new plants ... It is the best solution to making sure we have economic growth and at the same time be good stewards of the environment."

http://news.yahoo.co...mfE1pwLuLfPOrgF

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth.

These experts believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon, and they point to reams of data they say supports their assertions

http://news.yahoo.co...6qiqnDrNyrPOrgF

[SFX]

Quote

The U.S. Senate has released a truly groundbreaking report that busts the Al Gore "consensus" myth over global warming: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007. The report is monumental in size and scope considering it's focus. We expect this report to be quoted by those disputing man-made global warming for years to come.

What follows is mostly excerpts from the report and Senate press release. The report pretty much stands on it's own merits. We believe this report to be an important piece of evidence showing that most of the hype about global warming is pure fabrication and crowd hysteria. Perhaps now the media will stop its policy of not admitting that there is even another side to the issue. We encourage everyone to read the entire press release and report, it is long but worth it.

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

“Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, the Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking." Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears “bite the dust.� �

“This blockbuster Senate report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007. This new “consensus busters� report is poised to redefine the debate.�

“Many of the scientists featured in this report consistently stated that numerous colleagues shared their views, but they will not speak out publicly for fear of retribution. Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, explains how many of his fellow scientists have been intimidated.

“Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,� Paldor wrote. [Note: See also July 2007 Senate report detailing how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation �

“Paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, recently converted from a believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. Patterson noted that the notion of a “consensus� of scientists aligned with the UN IPCC or former Vice President Al Gore is false. “I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority.� �

“The distinguished scientists featured in this new report are experts in diverse fields, including: climatology; oceanography; geology; biology; glaciology; biogeography; meteorology; oceanography; economics; chemistry; mathematics; environmental sciences; engineering; physics and paleoclimatology. Some of those profiled have won Nobel Prizes for their outstanding contribution to their field of expertise and many shared a portion of the UN IPCC Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Gore.�

Additionally, these scientists hail from prestigious institutions worldwide, including: Harvard University; NASA; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the UN IPCC; the Danish National Space Center; U.S. Department of Energy; Princeton University; the Environmental Protection Agency; University of Pennsylvania; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the International Arctic Research Centre; the Pasteur Institute in Paris; the Belgian Weather Institute; Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; the University of Helsinki; the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S., France, and Russia; the University of Pretoria; University of Notre Dame; Stockholm University; University of Melbourne; University of Columbia; the World Federation of Scientists; and the University of London.

“The voices of many of these hundreds of scientists serve as a direct challenge to the often media-hyped “consensus� that the debate is “settled.� �

Here are but a few quotes from scientists in the Senate report:

Norway: Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC: “It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.�

Czech Republic: Czech-born U.S. climatologist Dr. George Kukla, a research scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, expressed climate skepticism in 2007. “The only thing to worry about is the damage that can be done by worrying. Why are some scientists worried? Perhaps because they feel that to stop worrying may mean to stop being paid,� Kukla told Gelf Magazine on April 24, 2007.

Italy: Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists and a retired Professor of Advanced Physics at the University of Bologna in Italy, who has published over 800 scientific papers: “Significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming."

Britain: Dr. Richard Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant: “To date, no convincing evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with AGW model predictions.�

You can read the full Senate press release here.

You can download Complete U.S. Senate Report here

[SFX]

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=BWdiHtv6T6s

[SFX]

Nuclear Power Rebirth Spawns New Worries

I told you so !!!

Global warming and rocketing oil prices are making nuclear power fashionable, drawing a once demonized industry out of the shadows of the Chernobyl disaster as a potential shining knight of clean energy.

Britain is the latest to recommit itself to the energy source, with its government announcing support Thursday for the construction of new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants produce around 20 percent of Britain's electricity, but all but one are due to close by 2023.

However, some countries hopping on the nuclear bandwagon have abysmal industrial safety records and corrupt ways that give many pause for thought.

China has 11 nuclear plants and plans to bring more than 30 others online by 2020. And a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report projects that it may need to add as many as 200 reactors by 2050.

http://www.redorbit....ries/index.html

[SFX]

I think it is worth repeating my view that although i agree that man made pollution is a crime and must be controled i do not think that man made emission of so called green house gases are the cause of so called global warming

As stated earler in my posts we live on a dynamic planet constantly changing and suscepatble to cycles whitin cycles

I always cringe when i hear people talk of "the last ice age", we are STILL IN AN ICE AGE but in an intermediate "warm period", this suggest that the earth is due to cool not warm up, so why the global warming ?

Well as i keep saying the earth is dynamic and the cycles have cycles whin cycles that are incredibly complex, it is not just a case of hot cold hot cold. And more importantly the changes from one period to another effect a myriad of cascading effects of the system as a whole which can give wild fluctations. I am sure you have all heard the old truism " it's too cold to snow" and " it always gets warmer before it freezes"

For example:

Quote

World to cool slightly in 2008: British experts

LONDON (AFP) - World temperatures will cool slightly in 2008, but it will remain among the top 10 hottest years on record, British weather experts predicted Thursday.

The impact of a strong La Nina climate pattern over the Pacific will help keep temperatures down, according to the annual forecast by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia.

Overall the global temperature is expected to be 0.37 degree Celsius above the long-term average of 14.0 degree, making it the coolest year since 2000 when the value was 0.24 degree C above the average.

The cold periods of the ice ages tend to last for around 100,000 years followed by warmer intergalcial periods of between 8000 and 12000 years

The warm interglacial period we are now in started about 11,800 uears ago and we are due to enter a colder period. As we enter that period there will be wild fluctuations, changes in weather patterns and possibly short term global warming..it is not a smooth transition

[SFX]

BEAUMONT-HAGUE, France - Thousands of canisters of highly radioactive waste from the world's most nuclear-energized nation lie, silent and deadly, beneath this jutting tip of Normandy. Above ground, cows graze and Atlantic waves crash into heather-covered hills.


The spent fuel, vitrified into blocks of black glass that will remain dangerous for thousands of years, is in "interim storage." Like nearly all the world's nuclear waste, it is still waiting for the long-term disposal solution that has eluded scientists and governments in the six decades since the atomic era began.

http://news.yahoo.co...r_waste_worries

[SFX]

What Dangers Lurk in WWII-Era Nuclear Dumps?

Here’s one direct and obvious effect of the economic stimulus package passed in February: The toxic sites where scientists ushered in the nuclear age are getting cleaned up. In Los Alamos, New Mexico, a dump that contains refuse of the Manhattan Project and that was sealed up decades ago is finally being explored, thanks to $212 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

But experts aren’t sure what they’ll find inside the dump. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II [The New York Times]. It may also contain explosive chemicals that could have become more dangerous over the years of burial.

While the Los Alamos dump was alone on a mesa when it was established in 1944, the town has since grown up around it. Today several businesses are across the street from the site, so experts took extra precautions before starting the remediation effort. The team members pored over wartime classified documents and interviewed old-timers to learn what materials might have found their way into the dump, and took soil samples to test their estimates of how much plutonium might be buried there. They debriefed a laboratory worker who, as a young man, once fell into it [The New York Times].

Stimulus money has also gone to other facilities that worked on nuclear weapons. About $1.9 billion has gone to the Hanford site in Washington, where an earlier stage of the cleanup unearthed a metal safe with a glass jug inside. Inside that jug was plutonium left over from the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. Another batch of Hanford plutonium was used in the nuclear bomb that fell on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Another $1.6 billion has been dedicated to cleaning up the Savannah River site in South Carolina, where nuclear materials were processed in the 1950s.

[SFX]

As I predicted in this thread, climate change is being used as an excuse to push forward nuclear energy, many will make billions if not trillions of dollars out of this. We still cannot deal with the waste, we cannot guarantee the security of nuclear power stations and we have no concept f what to do with them if say in a thousand years western civilization collapses, who will maintain them then ?

Quote

WASHINGTON – Nuclear energy, once vilified by environmentalists and facing a dim future, has become a pivotal bargaining chip as Senate Democrats hunt for Republican votes to pass climate legislation.

The industry's long-standing campaign to rebrand itself as green is gaining footing as part of the effort to curtail greenhouse gases.

Nuclear power still faces daunting challenges, including the fate of highly radioactive reactor waste. Reactors remain a tempting target for terrorists, requiring ever vigilant security measures.

But 104 power reactors in 31 states provide one-fifth of the nation's electricity. They also are producing 70 percent of essentially carbon-free power and are devoid of greenhouse gas emissions.

It's something the nuclear industry has hammered away at in advertising and in lobbying on Capitol Hill for nearly a decade. Only recently, however, has the message begun to resonate among both industry supporters and skeptics.

"If you want to address climate change and produce electricity, nuclear has got to be a significant part of the equation," Marvin Fertel, president of Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade group, said in an interview.

Not unexpected from a top industry lobbyist. But the same is heard from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, from a growing number of environmentalists and from the White House, where nuclear power otherwise has received tepid support.

The Senate this week will kick off three committee hearings on legislation to cap greenhouse gases from m power plants and large industrial facilities. The goal is to cut them about 80 percent by 2050.

The House has already passed a bill. Its chances in the Senate could hinge in part on whether demands by a few GOP senators, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, that the legislation provide help to build new reactors.

"Nuclear power is pivotal to both a low carbon economy and to generate a bipartisan coalition to pass a carbon cap," says Jason Grumet, executive director of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan group of experts created in seven years ago to advise government officials on energy matters.

He says all economic models on climate legislation "assume significant increases in nuclear power" — an expansion binge unseen since the 1970s, before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident brought new reactor orders to a halt.

A study by the industry-supported Electric Power Research Institute says 45 new reactors are needed by 2030. The Energy Information Administration puts the number at 70. An analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency assumes 180 new reactors by 2050 for an 80 percent decline in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has applications for 30 new reactors. Only a few probably would be built over the next decade, the earliest in 2016 — and then only with the government guaranteeing the private financing.

Democratic sponsors of the climate bill are far short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster. They hope a compromises could bring along uncommitted centrist Democrats and some Republicans. Along with talk of opening more waters to oil drilling, support for nuclear energy is seen as the carrot that might attract Republicans.

The prospects of such a compromise appeared to brighten recently when Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., the climate bill's principle sponsor, and Graham collaborated on a new bid to build consensus.

"Nuclear power needs to be a core component of electricity generation if we are to meet our emission reduction targets," they wrote. They called for ending "cumbersome regulations that have stalled" new reactors, measures to help utilities secure financing and expanded research to resolve the waste problem.

They outlined a framework that other Republicans might follow. GOP senators such as McCain, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Conn., have shown an interest in climate legislation — if nuclear energy plays a greater part.

To many environmentalists, it remains a choice of dealing with one overriding environmental problem, while accepting another, to some degree.

"You can't dismiss nuclear power's potential as a climate solution," says Susan Vancko of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Yet, she says, with reactors costing upward to $10 billion apiece, "this is one of the most expensive options out there" to cut greenhouse gases.

Vancko cautions against providing "almost unlimited loan guarantees" for reactors that could go bust.

A group of 14 environmental and anti-nuclear groups expressed concern in a recent letter to senators that easing licensing requirements and rushing to build new plants "would fatally undermine public confidence in the safety of U.S. reactors."

Atop the nuclear industry's wish list — 26 items covering two single-line typewritten pages — is an expansion of loan guarantees for new reactors. But it also mentions eliminating some speed bumps in the road to reactor licensing, new efforts to deal with reactor waste and an array of other items.

Some are in the Senate bill; others are likely to be added.

The goals of those calling for aggressive action on climate change have become intertwined with those pushing for more nuclear energy.

"I don't think it gets you there alone," industry official Fertel says about nuclear's role in combating global warming. "But you can't get there without it."

[SFX]

Go-ahead for 10 nuclear stations

The government has approved 10 sites in England and Wales for new nuclear power stations, most of them in locations where there are already plants.

It has rejected only one proposed site - in Dungeness, Kent - as being unsuitable on environmental grounds.

A new planning commission will make decisions on the proposals "within a year" of receiving them, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told MPs.

Nuclear was a "proven and reliable" energy source, he said.

http://news.bbc.co.u...ics/8349715.stm

[crobin]

i agree with most of what you have written in this posting but the trouble
as i see it is there are so many people saying that they do not want wind farms etc in their back yard. Then go out to a meal in a converted wind mill.