What If We Never Run Out of Oil?

Some clothes — if taken care of properly when worn — actually barely need any washing but merely being swapped regularly and ventilated. In fact washing and drying them can dramatically reduce their lifetime. Unless I end up soaked one way or another (rain, running...) I don't wash hoodies and jean's trousers as much as I did.

I think he's being very generous to the author by not laughing out loud at the suggestion that hang drying clothes is a measure of progress.

"better off" == "has more money"

UK GDP per capita is about 75% higher than Hungary.

I'm in the UK as well, we also hang dry our clothes in a laundry room - using a dryer is only for emergencies!

I would stake money on the fact that more Hungarians migrate to the UK than British people migrating to Hungary.

It isn't for my family of four, even with our rather damp UK weather.

It becomes very difficult and often impossible seasonally in some climates. But we might get a lot of mileage by improving the efficiency of these things, and reducing their usage when the weather is nice.

Line-drying also may not work well in high-density housing.

Never was an issue for a family of four, when I lived at home. Tumble dryers normally ruin most clothes quicker anyway. I always air dry mine.

We, a family of 5, do this in the humid Dutch climate all year round. In the summer clothes dry in an hour outside, in the winter in 1 or 2 days inside the house. An electric dryer uses huge amounts of energy, so this is about the most effective thing you can do with the least impact on your life.

Many moons ago, families were larger and clothes dryers did not exist. With enough motivation and wherewithal, you'd be amazed what you can do. You just believe that it'd be a nightmare because a) you don't have any desire to make the necessary personal or familial sacrifices to make it happen and b) you don't know anyone that does it. (And both of these reasons aren't unique to you, so please don't consider this a personal attack.) However, if everyone in your "world" suddenly started doing it, a new "standard" would be set and the practice would no longer seem impossible or nightmarish.

In my family we were 6 and hang drying.... the main thing was that everyone did their laundry separately so there's almost always things on the line but at least we were able to organize ourselves.

Living on the Texas Gulf coast, we line-dry clothes in the summer, when it isn't too humid. Our nosey old blue-haired neighbor had to comment to another neighbor about how unfortunate it was for us that our clothes-dryer had obviously broken, and we must not be able to afford a new one. What's really funny is that we have a privacy fence around three sides of our fairly large back yard. Due to the part of the yard where the clothes are hung, the view of the clothes is very limited from the street.

Not joking. But I had my suspicions, I think I might have seen a clothes dryer in American movies or something.

BTW. We have -30°C winters and we still get by without them. We just hang our clothes indoors, next to a radiator.

You're actually blowing out a significant amount of the fabric.

Where do you think dryer lint comes from?

I don't disagree with your sentiment. I do have practical and moral objections though to policies which couldn't possibly mitigate the issue in question but still involve the societal sacrifices. In the end, cheap clean energy like fusion, thorium fission, solar ("burning" the water/rocks/sunlight) is really the only solution to both peak oil and global warming.

Eh? If global warming was not real, and there wouldn't be any negative sides from CO2 emissions, then it would of course be bad to reduce Co2 emissions by lowering the standard of living (assuming that you're an utilitarian and not a psychopath).

On the other hand, maybe you're talking about other negative environmental effects that are linked to activies that cause CO2 emissions.

I think well being of people should be maximized, and in the optimal situation there shouldn't be any lifestyle changes or "austerity" measures to reduce CO2 emissions if there's no reason to reduce CO2 emissions. If they're required, then of course it's reasonable to adopt them.

The two sites experienced different levels of ground acceleration and inundation (with the newer one experiencing less of both). If you want to insist that the design made a difference, you should probably do more than just wave your hands.

The fact that Dai-ni only almost lost backup power was probably a major boon. If they had lost active cooling, things probably would have been just as tenuous as they were at Dai-ichi.

You've managed to prove my point in four words and a URL.

Congrats.

Edit: Just to be clear, I belong to the part of the population you can convince of nuclear energy, at least as an intermediate solution. But not this way.

Have you by any chance seen the Futurama episode "A Big Piece Of Garbage"?

A few points:

Onkalo is in Finland, and the storage facility is ONLY for waste from Finnish nuclear plants. It also isn't complete as far as I'm aware. I see that Sweden are also building the same style of storage facility in Östhammar, but I don't see any similar construction going on in the USA, France, UK, Japan etc. It may be happening, but there definitely isn't a lot of press about it. This leads me to agree with the grand-parent's point about honesty. Surely, if this form of storage is actually a solution, everyone would be doing it and advertising loudly that they were.

Secondly, the KBS-3 standard's final step involves storing the waste for 100,000 years! And, according to the Wikipedia article on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3, linked from the article you provided the URL for) there were some questions raised about the copper capsules used as one of the storage layers, and the fact that the Finnish company building the Onkalo facility (Posiva, owned by the 2 main players in Finnish nuclear plants) seems to be being duplicitous in the way these questions are being dealt with. From the article "independent research conducted in Finland has supported the results of Szakálos's group. However, in public, Posiva dismissed the independent research in Sweden and Finland, referring to its own safety studies."

So, to quote the grandparent comment, "As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns ... I'll be on the anti-nuclear side."

>When we start talking about material that remains dangerous for 10,000 years, however, typical corporate mediocrity (in ethics and execution) is no longer acceptable. When we can't trust the players it gets unpleasant.

The "radioactive for a long time" thing is really hopelessly misunderstood. The unique thing about producing something which is dangerous for a long time is not that it stays dangerous, it's that it ever stops being dangerous.

You mine "coal" and you unearth ore that contains elements like arsenic, cadmium, lead, antimony, selenium and thallium. The same goes for most mining operations. You want your rare earth metals for your wind turbines and hybrid batteries, same deal. Geological deposits are rarely elementally pure. That is some awful stuff, and it never decays. It sticks around until the end of time. So if you're worried about the future, worry more about "until the end of time" than "for thousands of years."

But let's keep talking about nuclear. Where does 10,000 years come from? What you're referring to is the half life of Plutonium-239 at ~24,000 years. Pu-239 is weapons grade. The problem with it is very much not that we don't know what to do with it. The problem is we do know what to do with it. But you can't stop Iran from getting the bomb by not building new reactors in Virginia. Moreover, if you have no desire to blow up a city you can mix Pu-239 with Pu-240 which makes it useless for bombs but great for reactor fuel, and using it as reactor fuel destroys it in a lot fewer than 24,000 years. The other byproducts with multi-thousand year half lives are the same thing -- reactor fuel. Isotopes of Uranium and Thorium. They're actinides which are either fissile or can reasonably be converted to fissile isotopes.

If you like irrationally scary numbers, Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 BILLION years. The thing is, Th-232 isn't produced by reactors, it's the most common isotope found in the ground. It's fuel, not waste. And it's not even very radioactive -- the longer the half life of an isotope, the more stable it is and the less radioactive it is.

The most problematic components of "nuclear waste" are isotopes of Strontium and Cesium that have half lives of a few decades and are things you very much do not want to get into the soil or the water. But that is no different than any of the variety of poisonous and toxic chemicals we deal with on an industrial scale every day. And they have significant commercial value as radiation sources e.g. in nuclear medicine. You do have to be careful in handling and storing them, but how is that different than any other sensitive industrial use chemicals other than OMG NUKULAR?