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The Forum > Article Comments > Evolutionary suicide? A matter for survival > Comments

Evolutionary suicide? A matter for survival : Comments

By Marko Beljac, published 2/3/2007

We are a seemingly intelligent species that has created a system of industrial civilisation that contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

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VK3AAU, all I can say is that writing a post in a hurry on a Sunday morning isn't the ideal way of making a point. Perhaps in hindsight, I should not have mentioned the mining aspect without a little more thought, although I believe there's still an issue with neuclear fuel at the production end. Oh, and the name is AIME not AIRNE.
Neuclear energy is a horrifying path to take and by my point of waste disposal I'll stand, but at the same time, should other countries decide they want our uranium at any cost, there will be nothing to stop them from coming and simply taking it by force. Neuclear energy is a genie that should never have been let out of the bottle, but it's too late now.
Ev, nanosolar cell technology looks like a brilliant breakthrough and with the new generation of batteries that are coming on line, who knows? We might even be able to achieve something clean and planet friendly in the not too distant future. Electric cars are making some sort of comeback in the States although thanks to John Howard and his lack of commitment and outright animosity against ev's and therefore a cleaner environment, I doubt we'll see them in Australia for a very long time yet. Nanosolar and electric vehicles could save a magnitude of problems.
Posted by Aime, Monday, 5 March 2007 11:31:55 AM
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Recently read that 1 million people could survive in the USA if industrialised manufacturing and agriculture were not available.

The dislocation would be nothing like 90% of our population has ever experienced. Where are the other 300 million going to go?
Posted by Cowboy Joe, Monday, 5 March 2007 5:22:05 PM
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Cowboy Joe, do you also realise that if the US were not at war in Iraq, something of the order of 10 million more Americans would be unemployed. Think of the flow on effect that would have.
Posted by VK3AUU, Monday, 5 March 2007 9:17:39 PM
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The evolutionary process has blessed us with the title of "The Big Brtained Mammal", but it does not divorce us completely from other species.
We have the capacity, if we choose to get it into gear, to use our brain-development to make a most important difference. If we did, we would side-step those urges which bring about plague-numbers, and their unavoidable subsequent crashes, in fellow species like rabbits, mice, and lemmings.
But, our society as a whole chooses not to get its collective brain into gear. Rather, it limits its cerebral capabilities to no more than developing the means to maintain, for a while longer, the ongoing proliferation of our plague-numbers - which must eventually crash.
Whether a love-affair with the experiment of nuclear energy, and its side-kick - military/terrorist weapons - will be the first to bring human numbers down; or maybe our continuing attachment to the great atmospheric pollution experiment, is an almost irrelevant academic debate.
Is it "too much truth for the human brain to handle" to admit that the evolutionary process has not made us immune from the fundamental population-limitations imposed upon our fellow species?
Posted by colinsett, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 4:42:29 PM
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VK3AUU. Don't uranium mine managers grant tours of their projects to employees? If they did, you would understand that some 75% of the radioactive compound ends up in the tailings dam after mill processing.

In Australia, the dam's casing must endure for a thousand years. That's a bit of joke since one radioactive compound in the tailings dam is thorium 230 which has a half-life of 75,000 years. These dams must be monitored for perpetuity long after the mine has shut down.

This month, Spain's wind energy generation hit 27% of the country's demands with Spain having double the population of Australia. The Spain project occurred without any grid instability despite the sceptics' criticisms on "wind fluctuations".

Singapore announced last week it is investing $136 million to develop a solar power plant and Abu Dhabi has begun construction of a 500MW solar power plant where their government has already dedicated US$350 million towards this giant project.

I imagine that not too far into the future, proponents of fossil fuels and nuclear power may indeed need to live in burrows to escape the wrath of the masses when evolutionary suicide becomes even more apparent.

Bear in mind that America has more nuclear power plants (103) than any other nation and remain the largest polluters on the planet. What is also interesting is the high rate of cancers in the USA. Is there a connection here?

You can guarantee that as coal and uranium are mined out, this energy source will become prohibitively expensive.

Wind and solar, after the initial construction, will always remain free and will not be depleted. And as you say VK, that's no "BS".
Posted by dickie, Saturday, 31 March 2007 6:56:40 PM
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Dickie, your estimate of 75 percent of radioactive material in tailings is probably a bit conservative, but it is in a fairly large bulk of material, and at the end of the mine life will be covered over, so you only have to worry about the radon, which would have been produced anyway, mine or no mine.

The Chinese seem to be getting on top of the Pebble bed nuclear problems and the South Africans are also well on the way there too. I note that the Chinese are building 30 conventional Nuclear stations at the present with plans for perhaps a total of 200 so that should help to clean up their pollution. It was pretty bad 13 years ago when I was in Beijing.

I note that the Portuguese have in the last few days, completed an 11 Mwatt solar power station and also that South Korea hopes to have a 14 Mwatt station going next year. They don't come cheap, but the running costs should be quite low. Pity they don't work a night. It is just plain delinquency that our government isn't more enthusiastic about solar, instead of all the clean coal BS.

It is interesting to note also that at the present rate of increase in world population of about 1.5 percent per year, that we will have four times the current number by the end of this century. rather frightening, isn't it.
Posted by VK3AUU, Saturday, 31 March 2007 8:35:25 PM
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