Subject: Fission waste (was Re: Global oil production could peak in as little as four years!
From: dietz@interaccess.com (Paul F. Dietz)
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 12:29:39 GMT
Doug Bebb wrote:
>> Yeah, but the dzngerous stuff has half lives measured in terms from
>> seconds to two-digit years. One thing you can't deny: the total
>> amount of dangerous energy is less when it's been used once. :-)
>This is just plain wrong. While I forget the exact data on all of the
>vast array of nuclear by-products, I believe that the half-life of
>Cesium137 is about 16,000 years.
The half-life of Cs137 is 30.2 years.
If you recycle the actinides, then the fission products from a thermal
reactor has roughly the same biohazard as the original uranium ore
after 600 to 1000 years. Most of the longlived component of
spent fuel (after a few centuries out to some fraction of a million
years) is actinides. There are a few very longlived fission products
(Cs135, I129, Tc99) which may be good targets for destruction by
transmutation or space disposal. Their low activity, however, implies
that the quantity made so far is (in curies) not that high. If we use
fission for millions of years, of course, then large quantities of
these would build up, and the number of decays per second for each
will approach the rate at which these nuclei are being created.
Paul
Subject: Biodegration 1/2 lives
From: "eci"
Date: 24 Oct 1996 15:46:41 GMT
Trying to calculate BTEX 1/2 lives for a passive remedial feasibility
assessment
The only formula I have, because I haven't done this for a while, is as
follows
t= 3.32(t1/2) log No/Nt
with t1/2 for Benzene = 10 to 730 days, 7 to 29 for toluene, 6 to 228 for
ethylnenzene and 14 to 365 for xylenes.
Can't find a reference for this, maybe Wilson??
I need to know if this is still the preferred method of calculation, who
the author, does the method and t1/2 values apply to soil and water.
please post or email direct to eci@netonecom.net
Thanks
Subject: Re: Major problem with climate predictions
From: tobis@scram.ssec.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Date: 24 Oct 1996 16:36:01 GMT
Paul Farrar (farrar@datasync.com) wrote:
: In article <329c6c71.375418763@news.primenet.com>,
: John Moore wrote:
: >On Tue, 22 Oct 1996 15:48:10 +0100 (BST), CDS4AW@leeds.ac.uk (A.
: >Whitworth) wrote:
: >
: >>In article <326C078B.72D@easynet.co.uk>, "sdef!"
: >> wrote:
: >>>John Moore wrote:
: >>
: >>>> Clue: climatologists study global warming.
: >>>
: >>>So do ecologists...
: >>>andy
: >>
: >>So do political scientists. Get interdisciplinary!!
: >
: >Politicial scientists?
: >
: >I doubt it.
...
: >But I have heard of no economists digging ice cores or running global
: >circulation models.
: >
: >For that matter, a similar thing can be said for ecologists. They may
: >study the impact of global warming on environmental systems, and they
: >may detect ecological changes that must be weight when looking for the
: >(so far absent) signature of global warming.
: Very, very wrong. Ecological processes play an important role in the
: climate system. Ecology, soil science, forestry, etc are necessary
: elements of climate research.
...
Ummm, I guess it depends where you are sitting. People who play with
GCMs a lot consider biogeochemistry a boundary condition. As for land
surface cover that's interactive in some models, but I think that as
far as predicting the next few decades or centuries, as opposed to
understanding the climates of the past, these are also best treated as
inputs to the climate system rather than participants in it.
You could equally consider the economy to be a player in the system,
but that makes matters even worse. I think it's very useful to draw
the boundary around atmosphere and hydrosphere, reducing the problem
to pure physics and thus within the realm of plausible progress on
the time scales of interest.
It's true enough that there are feedbacks between the climate system
so defined and the biogeochemical, ecological, and economic systems.
But at that point we end up with literally everything under the sun
in the system, and it becomes difficult to make conclusions.
Understanding of the atmosphere alone is a mature science, and of the
ocean somewhat less so but still quite advanced. The next step is to
work out how these interact with each other and the ice. I consider
this to be the program of physical climatology. I would be the last
to trivialize the importance of the neighboring systems or of the
feedbacks between them and the climate system, nor of the sciences
attempting to resolve them. But I think it's useful to think of them
as separate systems and separate disciplines, certainly as far as
understanding our present and future situation (on decadal to century
time scales) is concerned.
This approach can be called "reductionist" by those who don't quite
understand it, but it certainly has its advantages. If we had tried
to understand the coupled ocean-atmosphere system before getting a grip
on how each behaves when the other is specified, we would never have
made as much progress. Trying to understand everything at once may be
good philosophy or maybe not, but it certainly isn't good science.
mt
Subject: Help! Source for Air Quality Data
From: jordan@research.inland.com
Date: 24 Oct 96 11:42:17 CST
Advice, please.
I need to know where I can find information about air contaminants in various
cities. In particular, the high/low/average levels of acid rain, ozone, NOx,
UV, etc. at various times of the day during various seasons. Target cities
are Chicago, Boston, Montreal, Miami, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Des Moines,
Seattle, Detroit, Nashville.
Is there a government or other office I can call? How about published
periodical data? Anything else?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Don Jordan
Inland Steel R&D;
East Chicago, IN
jordan@inland.com
Subject: Re: Global oil production could peak in as little as four years!
From: dlj@inforamp.net (David Lloyd-Jones)
Date: 24 Oct 1996 17:09:08 GMT
Doug Bebb wrote:
dlj@inforamp.net (David Lloyd-Jones) wrote:
>>
>> Yeah, but the dzngerous stuff has half lives measured in terms from
>> seconds to two-digit years. One thing you can't deny: the total
>> amount of dangerous energy is less when it's been used once. :-)
>This is just plain wrong. While I forget the exact data on all of the
>vast array of nuclear by-products, I believe that the half-life of
>Cesium137 is about 16,000 years.
Touché on the cesium, which is of course nasty stuff because the human
physiology ikes it. On the energy, however, note that the whole
purpose of the cycle has been to extract a great deal for our own use.
>The fact that it takes hundreds of thousands of years for this stuff
>to decay to background levels pales in comparison to the dangers
>posed by its toxicity.
Doug, I am not proposing that we add it to babies' formula. I am
proposing that we glassify it and dump it thousands of feet
underground.
>Take radium226 or plutonium as examples. Both are poisonous if
>ingested.
Nobody is suggesting that you ingest any, silly bunny.
>The amount of a radioactive substance which is lethal when ingested is
>called its body-burden. A handful of radium226 comprises the
>body-burden to off about 100,000 people.
>Perhaps you can begin to understand why long-term storage of radioactive
>waste is a problem. Any plan to do this must provide protection against
>groundwater leaching for hundred of thousands of years.
Seems to me you are saying that long term storage is the solution.
Rocks, glasses, salt domes, and dilute solutions have all been around
for billions of years so far. Why should the next few million be any
different? You seem to me to be working yourself into a fret-frazzle
over no big deal.
>PS. The idea that terrorists might make atomic bombs seems a foolish
>worry.
>Why would they bother when all they have to do is to throw the stuff
>into
>the water reservoir.
So far the two or three people who have tried to steal stuff for
purposes of blackmail have tended to die of radiation burns. There
will no doubt be many horrible occurances in the future of nuclear
power. Some, no doubt, may kill as many people as that molasses tank
that collapsed in Cincinatti in the last century. Somebody should
have told them to keep that particular million barrels of molasses
underground for "hundreds of thousands of years."
-dlj.
>Doug Bebb
Subject: Re: More on Tragedy of the Commons
From: dlj@inforamp.net (David Lloyd-Jones)
Date: 24 Oct 1996 17:09:17 GMT
ksahin@best.com (Koro) wrote:
>Sure, they could invest in that "distribution mechanism" so they could
>begin to turn higher anual profits and be able to sustain the profit
>for many years (while a clear cut only gives you profit once, a
>sustained harvest will just keep on giving).
>Gee, paying money now so you can turn a profit in the future.
>Investment, what a concept!
>
Koro,
The point you are missing is that most of the putative values involved
in these calculations are not captured, nor capturable, by investors.
If you plant a forest in the Himalayas -- a pretty good idea -- who
are you going to send a bill to a thousand miles downstream for the
fact that you have reduced flooding on their famland?
Who is going to pay you for the oxygen your forest puts out, or for
the carbon it has impounded? Nobody.
It would be nice if these values automatically turned up in the sale
price of the wood discounted by the many years it takes to grow, but
the fact is it doesn't. This means that simple-minded private
property pleas don't get to the nub of the problem.
The problem is this: specific actions very often have general
benefits; since the general benefits cannot be charged for directly by
the person carrying out the actions, it is necessary to invent
intermediate structures to assess the benefits and identify the causes
and costs wich bring them about.
This is the basic problem of socialism -- of creating an artificial
economics which serves social ends. The fact that socialism doesn't
work very well yet is an indicator of how difficult the problem is.
Fortunately there have been enough big and obvious successes -- public
health, general literacy education, forest conservation -- that some
of the directions are clear.
-dlj.
Subject: Re: Ice Age Predictions
From: JSCHLOER@rzmain.rz.uni-ulm.de (Jan Schloerer)
Date: 24 Oct 1996 17:28:23 GMT
In <326CE6DA.1EC@facstaff.wisc.edu>
jim blair included:
> As for the Daansgard Cycles, see the article by Wallace Broecker
> in Science 189 p 461, 1975. He tries to combine the cold spell
> expected from the historic pattern with the CO2 effect to predict
> the resulting actual temperature. Gribbin's claim is that the
> 1990 Panel on Climate Change just ignored the historic pattern
> when making their predictions.
Yes, looking for the true natural climatic baseline makes sense,
it's unlikely to be flat. There may well be decades-to-centuries
long regional oscillations. Sadly, these are hard to track down [1].
Broecker based his 1975 hunch on the Camp Century ice core [2].
Meanwhile it turned out that the stories told by other Greenland
ice cores differ from what Camp Century says. Stable oxygen
isotopes aren't that good at recording small (decadal-to-century
scale) temperature changes; some confounders are local temperature
variations, changes of seasonal patterns of precipitation, or
shifts in atmospheric circulation (e.g., storm tracks) [3].
The notion of oscillations or fluctuations involving the North
Atlantic is still around [4]. Again, these are hard to pin
down, given the dearth of sufficiently long and detailed records.
By the way, don't just stare at the North Atlantic. The recent
climatic history of much of the Pacific or of Antarctica, for
instance, aren't too well known and may hold surprises.
Minor nit: Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles usually means millennial-scale
oscillations during the last glaciation. These _are_ real :)
[1] William James Burroughs, Weather Cycles: Real or Imaginary ?
Cambridge University Press 1992
[2] S.J.Johnsen, W.Dansgaard, H.B.Clausen, C.C.Langway,
Climatic oscillations 1200-2000 AD. Nature 227 (1970), 482-483
Wallace S. Broecker, Climatic change: are we on the brink of
a pronounced global warming ? Science 189 (1975), 460-463
[3] Wallace S. Broecker, Global warming on trial.
Natural History 101, 4 (April 1992), 6-14
[tells, among others, how Broecker's beautiful theory built
on the Camp Century core was slain by ugly facts. Nice, if
a little dated: no tropospheric aerosols yet, e.g.]
[4] Michael E. Schlesinger & Navin Ramankutty, An oscillation
in the global climate system of period 65-70 years.
Nature 367 (1994), 723-726
Jan Schloerer
jschloer@rzmain.rz.uni-ulm.de
Subject: Re: terraforming conflict between body and mind
From: Anders Sandberg
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 19:09:08 +0200
On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, Shadow wrote:
> someone wrote:
>
> > One of my hypotheses regarding "the big picture" is that humans are
> > "reproductive cells" that have evolved for the purpose of carring Earth's
> > life to other planets.
>
> Sounds like the definition of a virus to me.
Rather, it is close to most definitions of life. But one could of course
view life as a kind of virus that invades a 'host' (matter) and uses it
to reproduce and spread. Interesting idea.
> Regarding interplanetary colonization: would any of YOU want to go live on
> Mars or Venus? If not... why not? And would you then FORCE others to do so? Or
> leave it up to the adventurous "conquerors"? (hey, there's a good idea, get
> rid of the aggressive warlike types that way.)
Exactly. Europe got a bit more staid after the emigrants left for America
(or perhaps it is the contrast?), and the same may happen if we spread
into space (*reasonable* people won't be the first on Mars, that is
sure).
> Mars & Venus are so unsuitable for humans that if we acquired the skill to
> adapt to them... why not use that same skill to adapt to our problems on Earth
> in a constructive way (i.e. in harmony with the planet.)
Actually, it is likely that technologies we create to live on such planets
will be useful on Earth (after all, Biosphere II is telling us interesting
things about ecology), and terraforming would be extremely useful to
terraform/heal the Earth. It is really a kind of symbiosis: what we learn
on Earth is applicable in space, and the technologies and problems we find
in space are applicable on Earth. Just working on one side will slow down
the development of useful 'ecotech'.
(Of course, some of us transhumanists reverse the problem and try to find
ways to adapt or modify ourselves to live in space or in other
environments. If this is possible time will tell).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
Subject: Re: Major problem with climate predictioRs
From: tobis@scram.ssec.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Date: 24 Oct 1996 17:09:33 GMT
charliew (charliew@hal-pc.org) wrote:
: BTW, if you want to convince me that global warming is real,
: just show me three independent studies that give evidence of
: a substantial increase in global average temperature. Tons
: of paperwork, with very many references that reference other
: references by many of the same people just prove to me that
: most of these people are of the same opinion - not that they
: are right.
Pleasure.
Hansen, J. and S. Lebedeff, 1988: Global Surface Temperatures: Update
Through 1987. _Geophys. Res. Lett._ v 15 pp 323 ff.
Jones, P.D., 1994: Recent Warming in Global Temperature Series.
_Geophys. Res. Lett._, v 21, pp 1149 ff.
Vinnikov, K.Ya., P.Ya. Groissman, and K.M. Liguna, 1990: Empirical
Data on Contemporary Global Climate Changes (Temperature and Precipitation).
_J. Clim._ v 3, pp 662 ff.
American, British and Russian respectively. You can also get separate
independent raw data by considering northern and southern hemispheres,
land and sea surface temperatures. These give four trends, all upward.
These aren't independent in the statistical sense, but they do constitute
distinct data sets obtained by disjoint sets of measurements.
Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.
mt
Subject: Re: Population Control
From: c_nelson@dial.pipex.com (Chris Nelson)
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 09:44:13 GMT
charliew wrote:
> Apparently you just don't "get it". I have (in the U.S.) a
> Constitutionally guaranteed right to life, liberty, and the
> pursuit of happiness. I take these words seriously, and I am
> not about to let ANY government authority tell me how big my
> family must be, or what my family values will be. I intend
> to raise my children as conservatives, with conservative
> morals and ethics, whether you or other liberals like it or
> not. If laws are passed that make this illegal, I will still
> pursue this policy, whether you or other liberals like it or
> not. And by the way, there isn't a whole hell-of-a-lot you
> can do about it, either.
This is an area were I have been unable to find a good solution. There
are three entities with competing rights -- Charlie, his child, and the
rest of us who are affected by this child (and Charlie).
I agree with CharlieW that he should have the right to do whatever he
wants (within reason). He should be able to decide how many kids he
wants. However, kids are really expensive -- in food, clothing, education,
and the rest. If Charlie wants to have kids then he can pay for the
education system. I have no kids, why should I pay for education?
But there is the problem. IF Charlie does not care enough about his own
kids to educate them, do we (society) punish THEM by not educating them?
If we do punish them in this way, then they grow up (statistically speaking)
to be unemployed and a further burden on society.
We are at an empass. When do the child's rights begin to supercede Charlie's
rights as a parent. If a parent sexually assaults a child, society separates
them -- the rights of the child prevail. If a parent fails to educate a
child, society educates them -- the rights of the child prevail.
When do society's rights (i.e. my rights since I do pay for part of the
education system) begin to supercede Charlie's rights as a parent. If I
know that some parent is going to raise his kids to be murderers, don't
I have a right to stop him? Can't I insist that he (or she) be neutered?
If I know that some parent is not going to pay for the education of his/her
children, can I insist that he/she be neutered?
IF you are about to say that society never has a right to interfere with
a parent and their right to have and to raise children, then let me paint
an even more absurd example.
I have a son. I teach my son the Law of the Jungle -- kill or be killed,
rape or be raped, steal or have stolen from you. As the child is growing
up, I constantly complain about you, Charlie. I say that you are evil and
bad for the world. On my son's 10th birthday, I give him a gun (to make
a man of him). He goes over to your house, shoots and kills you and your
sons, raped your wife and daughters, and steals all of your possessions.
Your rights have been infringed. What are you going to do about it?
Who do you punish -- the son or the father? What if the son was 5? or 18?
or 30? What right do you have to prevent the assault? If you say that
you will simply make a fortress of your home, then isn't that an infringe-
ment of your rights (liberty and the pursuit of happiness) too? Would you
say then that other people (you) have some rights to regard to how an
individual (me) choses to raise my children? Would you say that you have
some rights with regard to whether I chose to have children at all?
Obviously these are extreme examples, but I have always found that reducing
things to the absurb clarifies the issues involved