yup… energy = food

while we might not to want to take it in, that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of critters who will metabolize a bit of hydrocarbons to pluck energy out of it. even more so if there is a bit of sulfur in it.

I kind of like to think of oil energy along a spectrum, from simple sugars through to complex sugars, then oils as more stuff is packed into the molecules.

not kosher, but kind of serves the purpose when talking to someone about food consumption (and how weight is lost through the nose as this same process is reversed all the way back down to the gasses it started with)

Their vulnerability to terrorist attack, it’s the ultimate ‘dirty bomb’. If we build lots of nuclear power plants, they will be a ‘high-value’ target in an exceedingly ‘target-rich’ environment.

I do have a possible solution however. Locate the reactor pressure vessel and any other critical parts underground. Not only would that make a terrorist attack much less likely to succeed but the ground would naturally contain any breach, accidental or otherwise.

Looking at diagrams of the nuclear reactor process, there doesn’t appear to be any reason not to do it, other than a relatively modest cost.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6407

Irony:

“In light of the massive oil spill in the Gulf, an awards ceremony to celebrate the safety of offshore oil drilling has been postponed. ”

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20003638-10391695.html

Looks like this reccession/depression is going to have to get much worse than any of us could have imagined to get this expected perfectionism out of immature people’s system.

While there are large oil deposits off shore, we also have large deposits on shore (i.e. ANWR). It is so much easier and cheaper to access, develop and transport oil from dry land locations.

As Neo, and many others have said, we need to be developing more nuclear power capability as quickly as possible because at the present time, it is the best technology for producing the large quantities of energy required by modern society. Some promising advances in nuclear energy can be found here, here, here and here.

While we need to pursue nuclear, there are still significant niche opportunities for wind and solar. Let’s not abandon them, we need all the energy we can get.

The indisputable fact is increasingly coming to light that B.P. was woefully unprepared to react to any disaster. This is becoming a recurring problem for B.P. Several years ago on the north slope of Alaska, B.P. pipelines leaked significant amounts of oil onto the tundra due to pipeline corrosion. The lines themselves predated B.P.’a acquisition of them, but B.P. knew of their conditions and did little to mitigate the problem. Once B.P. acquires a field, their philosophy seems to be to put minimal effort into maintenance and to seek to maximize production until the field becomes less profitable than they want and/or deferred maintenance will require major capital investments. At that point they off load the field and move on. B.P. puts more energy into their commercial effort to show how ‘green’ they are than they do in actually trying to be clean. Now the Gulf Coast and American taxpayers are going to shoulder the bill for cleaning up their mess. They need to pay to help clean up this mess.