[pp.int.general] Environmentalists and pirates, free information perspective

[Andrew Norton]

2009/10/27 Félix Robles <redeadlink at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Philip Hunt <cabalamat at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> The think to do is generate electricity without incurring carbon
>> emissions, e.g. using nuclear, solar, tidal, hydroelectric, wind, etc.
>
> Nuclear energy, as of now, generates nuclear radioactive waste, which lats
> thousands of years, so it's not a good alternative. Also, in order to create
> solar panels, you have to pollute several liters of water. In my opinion,
> radioactive waste is worse than carbon emmisions, and carbon emmisions are
> worse than polluting water. Anyway, I think the way to go is investigating
> solar panels that do not pollute the water.
>
Radioactive waste seems bad, but it can be reprocessed, to make new
fuel from high-level waste. Also, it seems that a lot of the time,
people over-hype the danger of nuclear waste, and how bad
radioactivity is. I worked, a few years back, on some systems for a
company, concerned with telepresence in a nuclear environment. I spent
time at Sellafield and THORP (the associated reprocessing plant) and I
don't glow.

There have also been other projects, such as a proton-based
accelerator. the idea was to fire at waste, either making new fuel, or
at least making it safer (either by converting gamma producers to
alpha/beta or to shorter hl isotopes, if not to stables in general)
Needless to say, funding was cut before even theoretical models could
be properly developed (I only heard about it because I know the people
behind the Distributed Particle Accelerator Design project at RAL, aka
muon1)

As far as computers go, I have two computers here of nearly equal
power. One is from 2002, the other is one I bought in March. The 02
one is a dell poweredge 1650. 2x1.1Ghz P3s, 4gb ram, and an 8Mb ATI
rage video card, in a 1U case. It also has 17 fans in it. The March
one is a Compaq CQ50-210Us laptop, with a dual core AMD-64 chip at
2Ghz, 3gb ram, and a 8200M graphics card. The server uses 2x300W hot
swappable PSUs. The laptop has a 65W charger. Newer can run on less.
Although my 1ghz athlon IRC box, and my q6600 desktop (both compaq/HP)
both came with 350W PSUs

The enviromental impacts of most things are usually overlooked though.
The majority of a car's lifetime pollution comes from it's manufacture
(doubly so for something like the Prius) and modern cars are not all
that great (at least here in the US, although thats mainly a function
of the extremely low standards for getting a license - a Finnish style
test would fail most of the cops for starters). I can get economy
figures similar to that posted+boasted for the Prius, with a 20 year
old civic.

This is, again, where I think one of our main points can shine through
- TRANSPARENCY. We need to push people, governments, companies etc to
be as transparent as possible in their figures, their data, and their
claims. A hybrid might have better fuel economy, but what about the
extra energy cost in making the batteries, what happened when they
have to be replaced etc. I for one always tried to be as enviromental
as possible, by recycling things where possible (although I reasoned
it as being 'cheap') - 95% of our 1998 and 1999 Championship winning
Robot Wars entry, Hard Cheese, was made from British telecom scrap.
The other 5% was old car and wheelchair parts.

People tend to ignore the possibilities in older things, especially as
planned obsolescence becomes more and more common.

Also, to get back on Felix's point, when I was at University, I
remember being told that Solar wasn't any good at that time for energy
generation, because each panel took more energy to create, than it
would generate in tis whole lifetime. It should be used only as a way
to produce energy it was unfeasable to get from elsewhere (such as
recharging calculators, or streetsign batteries). I've not kept up in
that field though, so it may have changed.

> Also, I think RMS is pointing at the right directiont: Environment shouln't
> be an issue of the Pirate Parties.
>
>
>
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