Would you rather have solar cells or a nuclear reactor on your roof? Think about it honestly especially if you have kids.
QuantumPion
Diamond Member
- Jun 27, 2005
- 6,010
- 1
- 76
The problem with political discussions on AT is that they inevitably get "moonbeam'ed", which is somewhat akin to Godwin's Law. Borrowing from Feynman, Moonbeam's posts are tantamount to a Cargo Cult discussion. While his posts have a superficial appearance of an actual argument, upon any closer examination, their meaningless nature becomes readily apparent.
So, now that Moonbeam has had his fun, we can let the grown-ups get back to the actual debate.
Our society is dependent on affordable, reliable energy. Conservation is great, but is only a method of temporarily reducing demand. It's true that nuclear power has high startup costs, but they are far less then other experimental or renewable alternatives. I think solar and wind power are great in the locations where they are feasible. They have very high installed power cost and aren't reliable, but once they are built they provide a nice margin to the baseload capacity. But that's all they do. China isn't going about building a million wind turbines to power their growing economy. They are building big coal and nuclear plants, by the dozens.
Nuclear power offers competitive energy costs, large baseload capacity, and production that is not dependent on the price of fuel. The industry has decades of experience, new technology constantly improves safety and efficiency. The only downsides are political in nature. The main objection is what to do with the spent fuel. We already have a technological solution to this -- waste reprocessing. The only problem with this is that the general public associates reprocessing with a risk of proliferation.
Considering the political climate today -- where most people are adamant against any kind of intervention of countries that are actively and publicly creating nuclear weapons and weapons-grade material, the point is moot. In other words, if we aren't willing to stop Iran from enriching Uranium or N. Korea from producing plutonium when we KNOW they are doing it, what is the point of complaining about western countries -- which already have nuclear weapons -- from reprocessing spent fuel?
So, now that Moonbeam has had his fun, we can let the grown-ups get back to the actual debate.
Our society is dependent on affordable, reliable energy. Conservation is great, but is only a method of temporarily reducing demand. It's true that nuclear power has high startup costs, but they are far less then other experimental or renewable alternatives. I think solar and wind power are great in the locations where they are feasible. They have very high installed power cost and aren't reliable, but once they are built they provide a nice margin to the baseload capacity. But that's all they do. China isn't going about building a million wind turbines to power their growing economy. They are building big coal and nuclear plants, by the dozens.
Nuclear power offers competitive energy costs, large baseload capacity, and production that is not dependent on the price of fuel. The industry has decades of experience, new technology constantly improves safety and efficiency. The only downsides are political in nature. The main objection is what to do with the spent fuel. We already have a technological solution to this -- waste reprocessing. The only problem with this is that the general public associates reprocessing with a risk of proliferation.
Considering the political climate today -- where most people are adamant against any kind of intervention of countries that are actively and publicly creating nuclear weapons and weapons-grade material, the point is moot. In other words, if we aren't willing to stop Iran from enriching Uranium or N. Korea from producing plutonium when we KNOW they are doing it, what is the point of complaining about western countries -- which already have nuclear weapons -- from reprocessing spent fuel?
BoberFett
Lifer
- Oct 9, 1999
- 37,562
- 9
- 81
Is your home going to have 10,000 mirrors on top of it? Exactly how large is your roof? Or are you back to talking about those inefficient, expensive photovoltaic panels that are full of nasty chemicals? I thought you were talking about CSPs, but now you're changing the subject again.
Do you have a coal plant on your roof? Why would I put a nuclear reactor on my roof? I'm not a nuclear technician, are you? That's what power plants are for. I don't have an oil refinery in my bathroom either, how about you?
Apples to apples, please. Stop obfuscating and stick to a single topic. You say that we're not reading the thread, but apparently you're not either.
Cargo Cult Science", by Richard Feynman
(Adapted from a Caltech commencement address given in 1974; HTML'ed from the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!")
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very little of it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"
"Sure", she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.
I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it", he says. "I feel a kind of dent -- is that the pituitary?"
I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"
They looked at me, horrified -- I had blown my cover -- and said, "It's reflexology!"
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down -- or hardly going up -- in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress -- lots of theory, but no progress -- in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way -- or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing", according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school -- we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty -- a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will -- including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes don't land -- but they don't land.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of -- this history -- because it's apparent that people did things like this: when they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong -- and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well", I said, "there aren't any". He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind". I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this -- it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.
Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment being done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on a different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying -- possibly -- the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on -- with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using -- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.
Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms -- and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments -- they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the para-psychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated -- that you can do again and get the same effect -- statistically, even. They run a million rats -- no, it's people this time -- they do a lot of things are get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that is is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?
This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of things they have to do is be sure to only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent -- not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching -- to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.
So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
===============================
You are the nuclear engineer supporting nuclear power telling me about integrity. I paid for my integrity by dying to every belief I had that I held sacred. What kind of thinking mind has the gall to suggest to an audience regarding my arguments "upon any closer examination, their meaningless nature becomes readily apparent." Really? What I find odd is that all you can do with your engineering degree is to blabber about closer examination with out providing any. "The bastard has a sophisticated cargo cult argument I can't wrap my mind around but let me tell you it's meaningless. This stealth bomber here just can't fly, I tell you. Damn you Moonbeam, you just have to be wrong. Tomorrow we are going to solve the problem of waste, tomorrow, trust me."
Well I don't trust you cause I know that pigs don't fly. Your the real cultist who says they will, I'm afraid.
(Adapted from a Caltech commencement address given in 1974; HTML'ed from the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!")
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very little of it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"
"Sure", she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.
I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it", he says. "I feel a kind of dent -- is that the pituitary?"
I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"
They looked at me, horrified -- I had blown my cover -- and said, "It's reflexology!"
I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down -- or hardly going up -- in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress -- lots of theory, but no progress -- in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way -- or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing", according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school -- we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty -- a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will -- including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes don't land -- but they don't land.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of -- this history -- because it's apparent that people did things like this: when they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong -- and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well", I said, "there aren't any". He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind". I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this -- it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.
Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment being done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on a different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying -- possibly -- the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on -- with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using -- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.
Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms -- and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments -- they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the para-psychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated -- that you can do again and get the same effect -- statistically, even. They run a million rats -- no, it's people this time -- they do a lot of things are get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that is is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?
This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of things they have to do is be sure to only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent -- not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching -- to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.
So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
===============================
You are the nuclear engineer supporting nuclear power telling me about integrity. I paid for my integrity by dying to every belief I had that I held sacred. What kind of thinking mind has the gall to suggest to an audience regarding my arguments "upon any closer examination, their meaningless nature becomes readily apparent." Really? What I find odd is that all you can do with your engineering degree is to blabber about closer examination with out providing any. "The bastard has a sophisticated cargo cult argument I can't wrap my mind around but let me tell you it's meaningless. This stealth bomber here just can't fly, I tell you. Damn you Moonbeam, you just have to be wrong. Tomorrow we are going to solve the problem of waste, tomorrow, trust me."
Well I don't trust you cause I know that pigs don't fly. Your the real cultist who says they will, I'm afraid.
How many people with 10 toes growing out of their forehead have you run into today. Nuclear energy is extremely safe. They know loons like you and Harvey will jump all over any incident and scream how it is hurting our children. It's almost like a broken record with you people, everything is Think About the Children. All you look at is now, you are unable to see down the road. You want lower gas prices, but you don't want to do anything about it. you want to lessen the US's dependence on foreign energy, but you don't want to do anything about. Someone proposes a new safe way to cut our dependence and you scream THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
Originally posted by: palehorse
well damn... it's going to be very hard to argue with this point. About the only thing Obama could do to counter this absolutely brilliant idea would be to double the number (I hope he does!). If he comes out denouncing this idea, that's not going to go over very well at all.
Nice move McCain! :thumbsup:
Harvey> I wouldn't have guessed that you'd be against increasing the number of nuclear power plants... Why are you against this proposal?
Of course you want Obama to say open more, because then all his supporters would follow him even more like he is the Messiah for coming up with the idea all on his own.
I propose we kill 2 birds with one stone. We offer illegals amnesty if they pedal a bike for 2 years that sends power into the grid.
Well shit, looks like we're done with that rod, go throw it in the river so some school boy can catch him some 3 eyed fish.
Oh yeah, don't forget to go picket all the hospitals because they produce the most low level radiation waste out of any industry INCLUDING power generation.
A few comments about the nuclear fallout. My country, Norway, was one of the countries with a lot of fallout from Tsjernobyl. Some parts of Norway got relatively high doses. Most of it was washed away by rain and disappeared, but some of it was taken up by vegetation, and then by plant eaters, and also lake fish. Mushrooms also concentrate up the waste when they break down plant material, and animals (and people) eating mushrooms could get high doses if not careful. So the government issued warning about how much could be eaten of fish and mushrooms in the affected areas. The main problem however was that most of the stricken wilderness areas were used for gracing by sheep and reindeer. During a season their nuclear content became to high for human consumption, so they had to be fed hay from uncontaminated areas for a long period after gracing to come down to legal levels before they could be eaten.
Now most of the problems are gone, but some hay feeding was necessary as late as 2006 since this year there was particularly much mushrooms.
All this said, as far as I know there has not been a measurable amount of increase in cancer in my country because of the accident, and I?m of the impression that the implications of the accident were heavily overstated. And I?m definitively pro nuclear, especially thorium power.
Btw, it seems humans are a much larger threat to wildlife than radiation is:
Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation
Regards
Jostein
Part of the problem the United States has with nuclear energy is that we have outlawed nuclear waste recycling processes because they produce enriched uranium (which can be used in weapons). That is why we end up throwing lost of material that could be recycled into mountains in Nevada.
Many of the current Nuclear power in the united states is built on very old technology. Current generation reactors are much cleaner and more efficient.
Daily Tech Nuclear Power
Many of the current Nuclear power in the united states is built on very old technology. Current generation reactors are much cleaner and more efficient.
Daily Tech Nuclear Power
K1052
Elite Member
- Aug 21, 2003
- 52,635
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The byproduct of principal concern from spent light water reactor fuel is the abundance of Plutonium 239 that has been bred by the reactor during fuel burnup.
The reprocessing ban has been coming down. The DOE has contracted for the construction of a new MOX fuel fabrication facility at Savannah River. This facility will mix surplus weapons grade Pu-239 into the commercial reactor fuel stream.
What remains is to re-establish a means of separating the plutonium from the spent fuel. We shuttered our PUREX facilities many years ago.
QuantumPion
Diamond Member
- Jun 27, 2005
- 6,010
- 1
- 76
MOX fuel is not the same thing as fuel reprocessing. MOX fuel is as you said -- fuel mixed with recycled weapons-grade plutonium as part of a swords-to-plowshares program. Waste reprocessing is the chemical separation of different nuclides from spent fuel, to reuse the leftover fuel and concentrate the short lived isotopes.
In order to create weapons-grade plutonium, a specialized reactor design is required. Plutonium-239 is created when depleted uranium (U-238) absorbs a neutron in the reactor. However, Pu-239 will absorb another neutron in time, becoming Pu-240. Pu-240 causes the plutonium to no longer be able to be used for a weapon, and it cannot be chemically separated from Pu-239. So in order to make weapons-grade Pu-239, you have to have a reactor that can shuffle fuel in and out frequently. Western LWR's don't have this ability.
Normally, Pu-239 is created using small research reactors. Only the RBMK (Chernobyl type) power reactor had the ability to make power and weapons-grade plutonium (which is why it was a crappy design. The Canadian CANDU HWR might also have the capability, I can't remember off the top of my head, but there might have been some characteristic which made it unsuitable for Pu production).
Terrorists can't simply steal spent reactor fuel and get Plutonium out of it. It requires a special type of reactor, running at specific conditions, and requires specialized industrial facilities. If a country wanted to develop nuclear weapons, they would just do it using U-235 enrichment (Iran) or a plutonium reactor (N. Korea). They wouldn't even have to worry about the US or the UN intervening, because of public criticism (at least as long as a republican is in the white house. If Obama gets elected, the media will just portray him as doing the right thing, even though they rallied against Bush for it, etc etc).
The original concerns with waste reprocessing were because Carter didn't want some countries (like Israel) to make a reprocessing plant to create weapons-grade material under the guise of civilian nuclear power. But we now know, if a country wants to make nuclear weapons, they don't have to be covert about it, because no one will stop them anyway (Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, N. Korea, and next up Iran).
So to sum up: Plutonium is created in nuclear power reactors, but you can't use it for a weapon. And even if you could use it for a weapon, you couldn't separate it out from the fuel. If you had the capability to separate the fuel, then you wouldn't bother reprocessing spent fuel to begin with, you would just make your own plutonium reactor.
K1052
Elite Member
- Aug 21, 2003
- 52,635
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You still need a MOX fuel fabrication facility to put the recovered Pu-239 into a commercial fuel blend after reprocessing. As I said 1 part of 2.
The Indians ripped off a CANDU precursor design that had online refueling as a feature to get their weapons material.
The analogy I'm referring to is the one about the shit and lemonade.
For the 10th time: Solar may be beneficial for California and Nevada. But don't expect it to be efficient for everyone else. You know why? Because not everyone is near a fucking desert. Why is that hard to understand. On top of that solar power is currently THE MOST EXPENSIVE.
Again, you keep going in circles. We've been through this. Nuclear waste CAN be stored properly as it already has. We have the room and the time to wait until technological developments allow us to dispose it.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Why would anyone ask soccer moms what to do with waste? LOL. Where do you see kids being contaminated with nuclear waste in the United States.
Damn - I didn't know this. I'm sorry that your country experienced this. Did the soviet union help with the cleanup?
This is exactly what I was talking about. The fallout from the fallout was managed by the nuclear info handlers - not that any other big business wouldn't do the same. There are ramifications almost 20 years later. It seems that nuclear side affects is the gift that keeps on giving.
Comparative expenses can't really be discussed yet since we don't know the true expense of disposing nuclear waste. The way technology is advancing for solar, a reassessment must be done every six months or so. The same can be said about nuclear but it's more mature and not advancing quite so rapidly.
You're right he was talking about thermal. Its hard to keep track when his senseless arguments keep going in circles. He keeps claiming how solar-thermal is greater than nuclear but ignores the fact that not everyone is near a desert.
Have you seen the new CHEAP 10 by twelve ft. steel melting solar mirrors from MIT? And 150 degree sterling engines will work at home too.
Bitek
Lifer
- Aug 2, 2001
- 10,676
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I think moonie may be onto something saying you don't really read posts you are criticizing.
Cellulosic ethanol: Ethanol derived from cellulose. Cellulose is the tough woody material plants and trees are made of. Even starving people don't eat trees. Neither do they eat corn stalks, paper, grass or cardboard. You break cellulose down into its sugars then ferment to EtOH. There is a vast supply of wasted or burned plant material that could be made into useful energy. Carbon neutral and endlessly renewable. Not going to be a basis for a new E economy, but the finishing research should be funded to become a very important part of the puzzle.
Besides, are you really all that concerned about all these starving people? Do you stay up at night worrying about the Haitians? Most of the grain goes to feed animals for meat. Are we proposing as a nation to become vegetarians to save the poor starving people around the world? Get back to us on that.
Lawsuits vs Nuclear: People will sue the shit out of proposed developments bc no one wants to live near a nuke plant. They don't want nuke waste driving it on their roads going to warehouses waiting for "space elevators" to be built. The whole world would go ape shit if you try sending it off on a rocket. See the Galileo launch for a preview. Maybe you can stuff a few plants in poor communities that need jobs, but g/l finding enough sites for the scale of nuclear energy we would need to have meaningful FF replacement.
Your criticisms don't make sense. We already transport water and elec all over the place. Michigan to Washington is one complex inter connected grid shuffling power all over as demand dictates. The entire SW is watered by the CO river already. Water is easy to move around.
Adding solar tech to the mix makes total sense. From large solar "plants" to local generation. How much E do you spend on heating and cooling? Water heaters are needy as well. It sounds far more logical and responsible to put solar cells on the roof to capture energy than build a s-load of nukes to make electricity to cool that hot house off. Sometimes you get what you pay for. I don't buy my toothpaste from China even if it costs $1.
FYI Canada does not power the entire US and neither does the hoover dam. Also, I'm still waiting for a reference for that number
Never heard of cellulosic ethanol. I know you can ferment sugar into ethanol which is what I thought moonbeam was referring to. AFAIK It takes a long time for fungi to break down cellulose into sugar. I can't see this as being practical but I could be wrong.
No, I'm proposing that food prices will go up for people that can't afford the increase.
How can they sue developments before they cause damage? As I've said the amount of waste produced is tiny, it can be packed away for later use.
I'm not saying that it's hard to move around. I'm saying that it costs money and the greater the distance the more money it costs. When you factor that in solar-thermal may not be efficient.
Solar panels are expensive at the moment. It is a very big investment that may take as long as 20 years to break even, depending on the house.
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