Why we have to start living more like the Na'vi now

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Clarke

[attacks on nuclear power plants in a conventional war]
Not a lot? Radiation shielding works both ways, after all. Conventional bombs don't do much against metres of solid concrete. Fukishima would have worked perfectly had there not been a tsunami. It was correctly designed to withstand an earthquake of that size, and bombs are a lot smaller than earthquakes. [...]
Unfortunately I can't find a specific one, which is rather annoying. Have a general article on it instead. Considering there's redundancies on top of redundancies in an almost Yo-Dawg fashion, it certainly looks secure enough for almost everything except the perfect disaster.

Wait - you have not even looked into this truely? You just look at Wikipedia when the topic comes up? I am a bit annoyed now. I can tell you a number of the safety systems off my head and I can assure you that in case of a war, they would not suffice. For once, no one would be so stupid as to try and bomb the containment vessel. I can imagine that even that can be broken with several good sized precision guided missiles, but it is much easier to blast the surrounding buildings to smithereens and wait until the containment blows itself.
So I urge you seriously to look at how a nuclear power plant is constructed, how it works and what the safety features are.
Some hints: The spent fuel pools containing more radioactive materials than the core are under a regular layer of concrete (the hydrogen explosions in Fukushima blasted that away, exposing the pools to air). Even in shutdown mode, the core has to be cooled, which needs pumps, electricity and water, which needs working diesel generators and enough diesel, a working pipe system and working power connections. Those are not all inside the containment vessel. Many plants have a "single point of failure". A close friend was talking to a nuclear engineer the other day and he knew these points for a handful of reactors in Germany. These are places where a small missile would have to be targeted at and the whole plant would go critical without strong intervention from the outside. This is of course true for all of these scenarios - a catastrophe can be prevented always by putting in rescue efforts, but do you think that this is an easy task in a warzone?

Self-fuelling reactors are hardly necessary. We can get plenty of fuel out of the sea. (And I don't know where you'd get the idea that it fuses lithium, since that'd be very much harder than fusing deuterium.)

The next near future project to create viable fusion uses it. Basically it is needed to make tritium, which is not as abundant as deuterium. There is as of yet no technology planned to actually use seawater to fuel fusion reactors.

Type I civilisations don't. To the future?

- I am going to stop argueing with you I think. You are completely immersed in a SciFi fantasy world to a point that its hopeless.

Originally Posted by Dognik

Energy Efficiency has always to be compared to the absolute Energy Consumption. And as you see there are every day more new and more efficient engines and other stuff, but the Energy consumption has never become less

It is called Jevons Paradox. The problem is not that its not possible to make more efficient use of electricity and then actually use less, the problem is that people chose instead to use more uses. So if your bill for power is 30$ a month and you get more efficient appliances, you may reduce it to 15$. Then you have $15 that you can use for example to get more appliances. The prime example of this is light sources. Whenever there was in increase in efficiency - from burning candles to natural gas to electric bulbs to halogen bulbs to fluorescent bulbs to LEDs the reaction of people was not to keep light usage at a constant and save energy, but to increase light usage and keep energy usage at a constant (or even increase). This leads to a long path from people using candles only when needed at night to have some light on the way to the bathroom, to read a story or therelike to people now having permanent lights at their homes that illuminate the path to the house, the staircases or people just leaving lights on when not needed because it does not cost somuch anymore. People get larger christmas decorations, build computer casemodding with light effects or use groovy indirect background illumination. All of these are certainly cool, nice and in a way worth something, but instead of reducing consumption, the benefit of increased efficiency goes into having more luxuries, amenities or fun stuff. That doesnt have to be bad, but the point is that it does not really save energy in the end.
Same is true many many other times. For example with cars - people now buy cars that are twice as large but only use as much gasoline as their old small one. What would make sense would be to get a new small car that uses even less gasoline. But people dont do that.
Or computer power - it would certainly be possible now to build a computer that has the capabilities of a desktop PC from 10 years ago that uses a fraction of the resources and energy than 10 years ago. But that rarely is done (except in speciality cases and then usually as a "second computer", for example a mobile one). Instead the increase in efficiency is used to build even more powerful computers that in the end use up more energy than the one from 10 years ago. Consequently nowadays Desktop PC power supplies have 300 or 500 Watts compared to 200 Watts some years ago and Graphic cards have water cooling systems to get rid of all the heat that comes from that more efficient graphic processors...

These are just examples but the problem is widespread enough - end especially it applies to industry in which case the choice between saving energy and increasing production is a no-brainer for the management...