[ExI] Two Japanese reactors on red alert

[Richard Loosemore]

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 08:02:40AM -0400, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> 
>> Actually it's the facts as determined by statistical naifs -- turkeys on  
>> Christmas eve who look back at the statistical likelihood that anything  
>> bad will happen, given how swimmingly things have been going so far....
> 
> It is worse -- looking just on safety of electricity-producing
> systems is a complete strawman. 
> 
> We need to substitute oil, gas and coal 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Energy_consumption.png
> (see that irrelevant pink line?) *sustainably* and
> *quickly*.
> 
> There is no Moore's law working for us here. Doubling from
> 1% to 2% is "easy" (it actually costs a lot of money), but
> further doublings take almost double the financial resources,
> and face production and installation bottlenecks.
> 
> Infrastructure issues like production and distribution of
> synfuels and syngases as well as grid updates are not even 
> addressed there.
> 

Agreed.  We may disagree about a bunch of other issues, Eugen, but here 
we are on the same page.

Perhaps my only point of difference is that I believe that upcoming AGI 
(or pre-AGI) systems will be useful for helping us to manage very 
complex systems.  Thus:

First application of AGI:  organic husbandry (with simple, low-energy 
robots, an organic farm can run with little or no use of outside fuel, 
and be more productive and less ecologically damaging than a 
petro-farm).  The idea here is that *intelligence* is needed to get 
things done organically, not petrochemicals.

Second application of AGI:  safe nuclear energy.  Similar arguments, but 
on a larger industrial scale.  Most of the problems with nuclear are the 
need for extreme amounts of sustained intelligence, in the design and 
running of the system.


Richard Loosemore