Very interesting stuff, LTjim. 

When people talk about the WWII bombing of Japan, they never mention what the consequences would have been otherwise.

I'm in favor of nuclear power.  I totally agree the issue is mostly political.  Though it's understandable.  People are scared by nuclear waste and the potential for nuclear accidents.  It's interesting that when the technology was developed, scientists expected that all power plants would be nuclear in a short time.   They never realized the political obstacles that would be in the way.

I'm all for biofuels, but I don't think people always realize how massive our consumption really is.  To feed our appetite for fuel in the US, it would be pretty hard to cultivate enough biomass.  They do it in Brazil, but they have a hugely higher percapita acreage.  Then there's all the logistic and political issues.  Those oil companies are not going to just hand over an industry.  It's not just an industry, it's a whole infrastructure.  They'll use every means at their disposal to protect their interests.

Thank you, CraigHB! 

There have been some who claim that the US should have let a high-level delegation witness a nuke bomb test and that they would then have convinced the Japanese military to surrender.  I have always regarded that as one of the most preposterous assertions ever committed.  The real and feasible alternatives facing the US and Allies and Japan in Summer 1945 were pretty much what i stated - - horrible, all of them.  One should never be ashamed to choose the least harmful option if the others are truly worse, and they were.

The theme of alternatives, viable ones, feasible ones, permeates this little thread.  The US and world have plenty of fossil fuels to burn for many more decades.  In fact, that's precisely what will happen absent alternative energy sources, so comparisons should start there.  All that combustion might screw up the weather, will screw up the air, and might screw the forests and seas (acidity), but that's what will happen. I recall a couple decades ago when a top theory was that a host of breeder reactors would be built that would make hydrogen for vehicle fuel use and distribution, and maybe desalinization while they were at it.  That is technically feasible, but I doubt it is politically practicable.   Still, let brown-outs keep interrupting folks HD TV shows, blow driers, and microwaves, and nearly anything could become politically viable. 

I do think nuclear power is a far better option than fossil and even most bio-renewables.  There seems a basic problem in making fuel out of food when so many are hungry.  Switchgrass seems better than corn, for example, for such reasons but, heck, maybe hemp would work.  I think corn was chosen and works as well as it does because the US already grew lots of it and knew how to harvest, transport, etc.  Nonetheless, if PV solar or fusion or something else shows up, I'd go with it as long as it did the job.  Nuclear would do it and do it well, but there are probably other solutions with better technology.  I am not wedded to any one solution, but simply to the need for one.

One pet peeve of mine is when folk point out what they see as bad things about a course of action and use them as bases for arguing not to do it, when they offer no alternative because they know that the others are worse by far.

If some biofuel gets grown in great volume, I suspect the oil companies will do fine anyway.  The fluid fuel would still need to be processed, transported, distributed, and sold, and the oil companies already have the infrastructure to do all of that.  In short, the oil companies would make money selling it, even as their legacy wells and refineries continued to churn out products for those unable to convert.  If anything, they would grow richer, as exploration and drilling costs would drop off their books.

You'd stick your head in a waste container of nuclear waste that was 30 years old! Idiot.

If it has gone through 5 half lives as you claim, you do realise that does not mean it is gone. That's the nature of radioactive material. A half life is the time it takes for it to decompose to half it's amount. SO the radioactive waste would HALVE in one half life, halve again in 2, halve again in three and so on.

So if you start with 100kg of nuclear waste, go through 5 half life cycles - you would end up with 3.12kg of radioactive material. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.....

Mankind is stupid as dogshit. We WILL go nuclear. It's inevitable. We WILL destroy the earth. It's inevitable. It's a matter of time.

No matter how many people argue for or against nuclear, it is already here and here to stay. Like a disease it spread over time until we're all happy with our limitless power, and then when world war 3 happens, there will be plenty of people like LTjim that will argue the idea that dropping a nuke will save millions of lives. Then watch as everyone nukes everything and we're all F**ked.

I hope I'm not around when that happens.

I made this post to enlighten people of the benefits of biomass energy, which, though it normally suferrs many drawbacks, could be very effective with the use of hemp.

And now it has just become a back and forth arguement about nuclear energy;