You CAN make a difference.

FrothyChimp- I agree with you on most of your points, if not all of them. I'm glad that you see the light in what I am saying instead of just falling into the "sheep" category and calling me a hippie or saying I am off-base.

kendon said:

the question is who makes us pay in the end, me by living the easy (and not always environmently correct way) or you by desperatly trying to save the world and thereby destroying it in the end by believing false prophecies.

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Explain. If you post flamebaiting crap like this, you defend it. You've baited me. So get defending.

-Mark

I will, but not for another week, gone for a skitrip actually posting this from my phone on the highway heading for the alps B-)

drew said:

[quote author=digital_blue link=1233789309/0#7 date=1233800860]Nuclear is one of the safest forms of power generation...

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tell that to the people that lived in chernobyl in the 80's... it can be safe and better than most but not the BEST.[/quote]

That was more of a Russian problem than a nuclear one. Even so, I'd say 30 years fatality-free in Russia and totally fatality free in the US is a pretty good record. We plan on tossing the waste under a mountain. A LARGE reactor produces a cubic meter of waste per year. How many years worth of spent fuel fit in a mountain? A mountain's worth

Also, hydrogen is no more of a fuel than batteries.

kendon said:

so you already admitted the solar panel controversy, in my opinion it is a total hoax that you can run a computer one hour by the power you need for making one pepsi can.

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I think you'd be VERY surprised. It takes HUGE amounts of energy to make aluminum from bauxite, and very little to turn an aluminum can into another aluminum can. People just don't understand how much energy the Bayer process and the Hall-Héroult process actually consume. It's A LOT of energy, entire power plants. Do the math: here's an example with wiki numbers, if you get better ones, by all means report them.

~50 MJ/kg to make new aluminum, and ~5% of that much to recycle it, giving 2.5 MJ/kg for recycled aluminum.

A beverage can has about 15 g of aluminum in it, so for a can from NEW aluminum, that's 750 kJ of energy; for a can from recycled aluminum, that's 37.5 kJ of energy. Difference: 713 kJ of energy difference between recycled and new aluminum.

If you have a computer drawing 300W full time, that's still 40 minutes of run time. My laptop has a maximum draw of 90W, so I could run my laptop for over 2 hours on the energy saved by recycling ONE, SINGLE aluminum can.

So yeah, you can't chastise other for being incorrect when you yourself are incorrect.

Yes, as far as I know, aluminum is the only lucrative recycling service. That's why you can get money for aluminum cans but not for old newspaper or glass bottles.

Cyparagon said:

Yes, as far as I know, aluminum is the only lucrative recycling service. That's why you can get money for aluminum cans but not for old newspaper or glass bottles.

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It's all about the money, isn't it? Glass saves a lot of energy, and newspaper saves a decent amount, too.

Plus, is it any harder to recycle than to throw things away?!

Thank you PullBangDead for putting that up there. Thank you very much.

-Mark