[LMB] [OT] May I do this?

[James Nicoll]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006, queenortart wrote:

>> About the only thing I can think of that could make that kind of change 
>> would be a huge number of religious conversions say to LDS or Islam.
>
> I read that as LSD to begin with and it was an interesting image I tell you!
>
> I'm worrying about Power Sources. Has something been done to dispose
> of nuclear waste safely so that it can be used, or is everywhere
> covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Or are we in a throw back
> time society where we don't use power anymore and instead we exist at
> a subsistence level. (It seems unlikely given the population size, I
> would think we have to get more technological rather than less.)
>
 	Don't think of it as waste. Think of it as improperly burned fuel 
:). A waste problems means the fuel cycle used is a wasteful (but if U and 
Th are cheap, the incentive to close the cycles is probably low).

 	If you use breeder reactors to recycle waste, a lot of the waste 
problem goes away. Actually, if you do something with the waste rather 
than sticking it in drums and hoping someone else will deal with the 
problem, a lot of the waste issue goes away. Note that "something else" 
should probably exclude "anything the Soviets thought was a good idea".

 	Someone pointed out to me recently that if we're stuck with the 
D-T reaction for fusion and if we stick to getting T from transmuted 
lithium, the total amount of energy that we can generate from fusion using 
terrestrial resources isn't that much larger than the energy we can 
generate using fission. Both are essentially infinite as far as mammalians 
species go, though.