The one thing about nuclear power I don’t like is that the waste (depleted uranium) are used in bombs to make them explode stronger. The waste then just lies there for 10 000 years and gives cancer to innocent people.
I think Sweden is the only country in the world that has a real underground facility that stores the waste in a leak-free environment.
That’s why alternative energies are more important than the ones that leave some kind of waste.
bigbad, see my link 
There are methods to actually use the “waste” that lies in storage as fuel, and this was getting pretty close as a viable solution until it was shot down by a certain administration (to keep it politically neutral) because of the nuke tag, and who knows what other special interests.
So I guess in a way it can be seen as an alternative energy.
Actually, apparently winddfarms can pose the threat of an oil leak- in particular offshore ones, which is a big deal lately; their transformers are full of mineral oil. Hey, you didn’t say what kind of oil
I’m surprised they are even still using big turbines, remember this? http://www.blendernation.com/wind-turbine-demo-by-bassam-kurdali/
Technology moves painfully slow at times
(jay): Believe it or not there have been companies that have started to make little portable wind turbines that can supply some juice to any building that’s connected to it. (Like one model named Turby), the advantage is that these little turbines can utilize the space in cities like parking lots and rooftops.
Fusion power… now THAT would be great!
Already in the works
Yea, but it’s still Kansas.
So you would dismiss everything innovative and cutting edge from Kansas just because it’s from Kansas? I guess those from this forum who go to our state’s new eco-town (Greensburg) and take note of everything green there can fill you in once they get back. It’s easily in reach for us because it’s only an hour or two away. 
As far as alternative energy goes, this is my new favorite, thorium reactors:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
It does at times, and stakeholders often hesitate to implement new ideas for fear of risk. Another major hurdle for wind farms is that it is a lot more expensive than oil which seems to be gushing non-stop out of oceans at the moment, given how common it is. But by expenses, I mean the cost of raw materials versus up keep costs. It was that long ago when I read an article about native inhabitants of a certain region against wind farms because it would be in an area that is in a certain sacred direction as to where they perform their ceremonies. I can understand their point of view, but what I was emphasising was how the stake holders react.
That is a very interesting view. is it really a just a “big deal”?
My question is why should we even want, or plan to deal with it again. In my opinion spills like this are entirely avoidable given enough desire/effort to move forward into the future and solve the problems that face us today.
BP says it may be 2-3 MONTHS before it MAY be able to be blocked or funneled or whatever. At 5 thousand barrels per day, or 250K gallons per day, (there’s 55 gallons per barrel). Each gallon is 2.7 cubic feet. Oil spreads out to about 1/16-1/8" inch thick tar, but not in a continuous sheet, it breaks up into balls. But lets just do the simple math assuming a continuous suffocating sheet of oil, shall we?
Let’s review: There are 5280 feet in a mile. Valdez, one tanker, contaminated 1300 miles of coastline. The Gulf is 800 miles wide, with a circumference of about 2000 miles - Florida, Alabama, LA, MI, TX, Mexico. It’s basically self-contained, an eddy in the Gulf Stream.
1 gal=2.7 square ft which is 500 square feet at 1/16" thick, which is a strip, say, 6" wide and 250 feet long.
That’s one gallon. Lets say it takes 100 days to plug. That means 25 Million gallons, which would be a strip 6" wide, 1/4" thick that is 1 million miles long. So that strip could wind around the entire Gulf 500 times.
That means we will have enough oil swirling around in the gulf to cover the entire coastline with a 250 foot wide strip of oil, 1/4" thick, or 1000 foot wide strip 1/16".
Basically, a football field’s length strip. The whole way around the entire Gulf of Mexico. Goodbye shrimp, coral reefs, tourism, ecosystem.
Imagine you go to the beach. At the high tide line at the beach, the beach turns solid black goo. Standing at that line, you throw a football as hard as you can, out to sea. It lands in oil.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/science/earth/04enviro.html
Would someone check my math please, I hope I plugged in an extra zero somewhere.
I heard of a temporary solution where they put a concrete sarcophagus on the leak, going to be shipped out in less than a few days. It could actually hold until the leak is fixed if it works.
What a wonderful world you must live in! It’s not a spill, but a leak - it’s continuously spewing. This has never happened before and never at this depth. When you think about it (as PapaSmurf alluded to), there’s no way of saying how long this could last and not only the Gulf will be affected - Cuba, ABC Islands, and from Venezuela and Colombia all the way up to the Yucatan, then thru the Keys to the Bahamas, Hispaniola, and the Caribbean Islands and up the East Coast and on to Europe. Yeah, it’s just a spill and we’ll put a sarcophagus on it!
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Yeh fusion is the way and for more than just energy. (see sig)
Sucks when it gets a bad wrap just because its a nuclear source of energy. Fission is the bad one, and a lot of people dont realize that we will run out of Uranium soon enough to make it a waste of time anyway. I see fission as a temporary and extreme ‘hack fix’ between running out of fossil fuels and getting the world running on fusion+solar+wind power etc. Its only necessary if we really get into trouble. Which is why so much money needs to be put into fusion development, asap. And if I was a petroleum company with no future (because lets face it, none of them have a longterm future) I would be pouring money into Fusion and alternate power production processes, or at least try to work out how to ‘mine’ and produce the new fuel types needed on a large industrial scale (say Deuterium and Tritium for example)
And yeh windfarms are ok, I wouldnt call them visual pollution unless they were right out the front of my house.
To those saying like the world’s oceans and everything in it and near it are doomed to a oily end then it’s still too early to conclude that will be the case. If the leak is stopped by the temporary solution like what the media is saying then it won’t quite be the apocalypse for the entire gulf.
Or, you could keep all the money, and keep raking in even more over the next several decades, because as the oil reserves get lower and lower, the oil prices get higher and higher.
You think oil company profits are outrageous now? Give it another ten years, and watch it triple.
No, I just implied, ever so subtly, that Kansas is a shitty state, and that a few wind turbines won’t change that fact.
And that baby http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoco_Cadiz spilled 70M gallons of crude at once, not in 100 days, and it wasn’t the worst one. But as the current “spill” is close to the USA for once, medias are making it sound like it’s the end of the world.
oh great, so you’re saying our gulf beaches are going to look like this. Wonderful. Well, at least we won’t need to bring any tanning oil 
This isn’t very nice, Social.
Last week I gave a Blender presentation to 150 University of Kansas art and design students. I audited their classes during the day, and their art is awesome. Hallmark sponsored the lecture series, and is headquartered there. They have Blender integrated into their program. I think you should apologize. No need to be rude and Off-topic. And you should know that some of Ace’s artwork made it into a Blender showcase reel that I presented; stuff he has posted in the Finished Projects forum.
One thing you have to wonder is, does this type of event ever occur naturally, considering the amount of volcanic activity/tectonic plate movement that occurs in the ocean every year? I’m not trying to say the BP incident is justifiable, but these kind of events must occur on some scale naturally every so often.
As a side note, it’s also pretty annoying that sooner or later taxpayer dollars could be paying for this, more corporate welfare.
And another thing, nuke plants have several factors of safety, all offshore drilling rigs have is a giant concrete cork hooked up to a rube goldberg mechanaism? Come on!Well, ok, if that’s true than there’s still hope for Kansas, but even now, Kansas is basically the epicenter of all the Dragon Porn content currently in existence. They have dedicated server farms for the unending supply of Dragon Porn that the local population both produces and consumes, in mind-boggling quantities.
So, I guess we must ask ourselves a new question: Is the good blender curriculum, and a few “green initiatives” enough to offset the Dragon Porn craze, and therefore the implied shittiness of Kansas as a state?
Are you “down with the dragon”?
@Social - it is the Gulf of Mexico’s oil crisis that is of pressing concern. In this particular thread, energy should be better allocated to either giving ideas on limiting the damage caused by the oil slick, or preventing this from happening in the first place. I am quite hard studying methods for this concern - using a slick 3d program I have in my hard drive, I am making some design cubes that I will arrange in a fashion to plug the hole in the ocean, and then some more to store the oil floating in the sea. You can help, by making some other shapes that may be more feasible. Sorry, I can’t let you know the know slick 3d program I am using, so you may have to draw some instead.