Archive for Our Scotland - www.our-scotland.org Scottish Politics Discussion Forum / Messageboard - Dedicated to online discussion about Scottish Politics and an Independent Scotland, as well as Scottish Society today. We also have a section dedicated to Banter, Sport and Recommended Sites.
 


       Our Scotland - www.our-scotland.org Forum Index -> Scottish Politics and Independence
October1974

New Poll in the Herald today - SNP -it's highest lead

http://www.theherald.co.uk/politi...s_for_SNP_after_year_in_power.php

Shocked
Lewis

Quote:
The Scottish National Party is marking the first anniversary of its election to power today, as it hits 45% in an opinion poll - its highest-ever rating and a stunning 14 points ahead of Labour.


Surprised

Never thought this was going to happen so soon. they really are doing a brilliant job, and it's being helped by all the rubbish going on in Westminster.
William_Cleland

If the calculation was that the SNP would implode when handed the reins of power it definitely appears to be off base so far. I'd wait a year or two, though, before seeing it as a permanent change in the political landscape. Could still be a prolonged honeymoon effect.
Lewis

I think it has a lot to do with anger at Westminster, but it's certainly something which is bringing a new look to Scottish Politics. Scottish Politics is no longer being overlooked, I think the SNP are bringing a lot of dignity back to it.
Alasdair

Personally I wouldn't be surprised if we see the SNP run into severe difficulties in the next few years.  If, as many suggest, they are running a purely populist government then the cracks will begin to appear soon enough.

Also, there are plenty of folks chucking mud at them, some of it's bound to stick eventually ... if it hasn't already begun to do so.  It is rather irritating that they use their poll ratings to answer questions, I think we'd all have a much clearer idea if the main opposition was in some way competent, sadly I don't see it happening.
Red Justice

I think the SNP could well run out of steam if they think that relying on popularist government is all that is required. It would be typical of a gradualist party to go this way. What is required is revolutionary change in Scotland to liberate all workers, the poor and pensioners from their chains. A fair deal and society that is just and deals with obscene wealth in Scotland. This can only come about by supporting a party committed to a socialist republic for Scotland. The SNP merely want to tinker with capitalism alongside their reformist approach.
agentmancuso

Red Justice wrote:
I think the SNP could well run out of steam if they think that relying on popularist government is all that is required. It would be typical of a gradualist party to go this way. What is required is revolutionary change in Scotland to liberate all workers, the poor and pensioners from their chains. A fair deal and society that is just and deals with obscene wealth in Scotland. This can only come about by supporting a party committed to a socialist republic for Scotland. The SNP merely want to tinker with capitalism alongside their reformist approach.


It would seem that in my absence the circus has rolled into town.

How do you intend to 'liberate all workers'. Giving them extended lunch breaks? As for pensioners in chains?!? Where did you see this?
Red Justice

agentmancuso wrote:
Red Justice wrote:
I think the SNP could well run out of steam if they think that relying on popularist government is all that is required. It would be typical of a gradualist party to go this way. What is required is revolutionary change in Scotland to liberate all workers, the poor and pensioners from their chains. A fair deal and society that is just and deals with obscene wealth in Scotland. This can only come about by supporting a party committed to a socialist republic for Scotland. The SNP merely want to tinker with capitalism alongside their reformist approach.


It would seem that in my absence the circus has rolled into town.

How do you intend to 'liberate all workers'. Giving them extended lunch breaks? As for pensioners in chains?!? Where did you see this?


Nothing like an agent to keep us all entertained Laughing
agentmancuso

Red Justice wrote:
Nothing like an agent to keep us all entertained Laughing


Are you able to provide an answer to the questions raised, or do I just put it down to a "fighting the demons in your own head" type situation?
Red Justice

Short of a revolution vote Solidarity to liberate the working class.

I was speaking metaphoricaly about the groups such as pensioners being in chains. ie: chains of slavery in capitalism check out how the income of pensioners is not linked to inflation and how their standard of living as gone down eg: fuel poverty all under a Labour government.
Abieuan

Those kind of metaphors seem like something from a bygone age.

People are free to travell elsewhere, Spain, Germany, even Poland if they wish.
It sounds more like some kinky club than real life in the 21stC.
agentmancuso

Abieuan wrote:
It sounds more like some kinky club than real life in the 21stC.


Cupids!
agentmancuso

Red Justice wrote:
Short of a revolution


What, like, breaking stuff?

Quote:
vote Solidarity to liberate the working class.


Presumably a liberated class would no longer be working at all?
Quote:

I was speaking metaphoricaly about the groups such as pensioners being in chains.

Not so much metaphorically as hysterically.

Quote:
chains of slavery ...income of pensioners is not linked to inflation ...standard of living as gone down

It may not be much fun when your income fails to keep pace with inflation, or your standard of living goes down, but it's an insult to people who do live in slavery to equate the two.
William_Cleland

Abieuan wrote:
Those kind of metaphors seem like something from a bygone age.

People are free to travell elsewhere, Spain, Germany, even Poland if they wish.
It sounds more like some kinky club than real life in the 21stC.


What happens when the oil finally runs out as is likely to be the case in the second half of the 21st century? Europe has very little in the way of readily exploitable coal left so if the hydrogen economy based on renewables and nuclear energy doesn't take off in a big way things may return to the type of scenarios that Marx critiqued 150 years ago where human muscle power was the key energy source driving much of the economy for the benefit of only a small pampered elite, while most of the population tended to live out their lives in drudgery within a 20 mile radius of where they were born.
chicmac

William_Cleland wrote:
Abieuan wrote:
Those kind of metaphors seem like something from a bygone age.

People are free to travell elsewhere, Spain, Germany, even Poland if they wish.
It sounds more like some kinky club than real life in the 21stC.


What happens when the oil finally runs out as is likely to be the case in the second half of the 21st century? Europe has very little in the way of readily exploitable coal left so if the hydrogen economy based on renewables and nuclear energy doesn't take off in a big way things may return to the type of scenarios that Marx critiqued 150 years ago where human muscle power was the key energy source driving much of the economy for the benefit of only a small pampered elite, while most of the population tended to live out their lives in drudgery within a 20 mile radius of where they were born.


Not going to happen, there are umpteen viable projects for producing energy out there.

Fusion - first commercial prototype is being built in France right now.

Hydrogen - Iceland has been running public transport on this for some years.  Hydrogen is ideal for storing energy from all manner of renewables, wave, hydro, wind.

Tidal - Scotland best placed in World for using this, could supply ALL of our electricity generating requirement.

Algae - There is an algae which when in water and exposed to sunlight produces large volumes of hydrogen.  The volumes produced, currently quickly tail off, however genetic engineers are confident this can be modified so that the tail-off does not occur.  Estimates are that pipework covering just 100 square miles of otherwise prettu useless desert would supply enough hydrogen to fuel all the cars in the USA.

Helium-3 Fusion, even safer and cheaper than 1st generation fusion if the expected mining potential from Lunar regolith is borne out.

The main future value of petrochemicals will be cheap plastics production.
Scott2006

chicmac - very well made comments.

Anyone who thinks Marxism is a prospect in the next fifty years is deluding themselves.

Is a nuclear free Scotland a country that bans sunshine? Or just an ignorant slogan?

Nuclear power from fusion energy or hot fusion energy in the first instance will by 2050 to 2070 be contributing the lions share of power to Europe.

The processes of radioactive decay when completely understood and a fully formed theory which can explain which conditions are able to facilitate or curtail the energy transformation - then the prospect of cheap cold nuclear fusion will provide even relatively poor countries with nearly unlimited energy.

Processes at present beyond us will be commonplace in the late 21st century.
If you have near unlimited energy which can be safe enough and near eliminiate radioactivity harmful to humans, then you have enough energy to transform salty sea water to drinking water, and can grow sufficient crops to feed the world population if politicians break the habit of a lifetime and co-operate to achieve that.

If a form of utopia ever really arrives - I doubt the first thing they'll do is turn the world into a Marxist commune.

Marxist control freaks would replace one elite with another. Only in most cases they need to kill the figurehead before they misrepresent and lie about what's happening for years.
Holebender

Scott2006 wrote:
The processes of radioactive decay when completely understood and a fully formed theory which can explain which conditions are able to facilitate or curtail the energy transformation - then the prospect of cheap cold nuclear fusion will provide even relatively poor countries with nearly unlimited energy.


I'm not sure how to interpret this gobbledy gook sentence so I'm not even going to bother trying. I will simply ask if you realise the difference between radioactive decay (also known as fission) and nuclear fusion?
William_Cleland

Scott2006 wrote:
chicmac - very well made comments.

Anyone who thinks Marxism is a prospect in the next fifty years is deluding themselves.

Is a nuclear free Scotland a country that bans sunshine? Or just an ignorant slogan?


I'm not a Marxist for what it's worth. I was just pointing out that the future isn't necessarily rosy and that capitalism needs a source of cheap energy to make the sort of world that Karl Marx critiqued truly a bygone age. Getting from where we are now to a sustainable future with a comparable standard of living that is not based on the rapid exploitation of finite resources like fossil fuels and high grade uranium ore is potentially doable but no sure thing yet.

Nuclear fusion is still a long way off and a lot of work still needs to be done on the hydrogen storage technology that would be required to make renewables a viable replacement for fossil fuels in many contexts. If the world hits peak oil, peak coal and peak gas in the next 20 to 30 years as some are suggesting then Europe will be in very deep trouble. Other parts of the world like Russia and North America would be able to keep going longer with fossil fuels at a reduced level of consumption in the absence of an alternative but probably wouldn't be in a mood to share out scarce dwindling resources with anybody else. There are reasons why the EU countries push the Kyoto Protocol so hard, while others do not, that go well beyond levels of concern about the environment in other words.

Hopefully a new bout of exploration driven by higher prices will identify new resources and provide the time needed for a smooth transition in technology terms. On the bright side, the Brazilians seem to be making headway in that regard:-

http://www.abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=4680076&page=1
Scott2006

Holebender: In nuclear fusion as put into a nuclear power plant has a by-product which is radioactive - the half-life, decay, is only 12.26 years - but the same process as fission also occurs.
The fission of Uranium has a more complex structure and is more toxic for longer than humanity could possibly exist and cannot really be justified with present technological understandings and constraints.

The ultimate aim for nuclear reprocessing is to alter the depleted uranium and plutonium by getting beyond the quantum level of understanding and realising the structure of the forces acting within the multiple layers of sub-atomic particles.
I think safer cold fusion will occur before the damage caused by nuclear fission of uranium on this planet will be reversed.

William_Cleland: Fewer resources is a problem - I can see your position and in the timescale of the next thirty years periods of lack of food and fuel might occur in parts of the world. I just don't think a Marxist reductionist position would succesfully explain never mind deal with such a situation at all well.
Scotland should invest more in tidal and wind here. By the time it would be economically viable for every house that can using a wind generator oil and gas would have to be many times higher in price than they are today.
What today may take 15 years to pay for itself in wind-electric generation would be viable large scale if it only took 3-years to pay for itself.
Whatever happens the rich and upper middle class will look after themselves and leave the Marxist view as one of envy and vanguardism. Always looking forward to the day when trading as capitalism conforms to their partial world view and fails to allow people to feed themselves.
It gets less and less likely every year - in my opinion.
chicmac

Scott2006 wrote:
chicmac - very well made comments.

Anyone who thinks Marxism is a prospect in the next fifty years is deluding themselves.


Just pointing out I made no comment on the Marxism angle.


Scott2006 wrote:

Nuclear power from fusion energy or hot fusion energy in the first instance will by 2050 to 2070 be contributing the lions share of power to Europe.


I wouldn't like to put an exact timescale on it.
If ITER at Cadarache goes to plan, or exceeds expectations, things will move very fast, if there are more issues than expected, the opposite wll happen.

ITER is hoped to produce more energy out than in by a ratio of about 10:1, to sustain a 500 MW output for several hundred seconds and to do proof of concept on plasma 'burn' (self-heating).  

Viability of He3 mining will also be a future factor into how qickly fusion attracts investment.


Scott2006 wrote:

The processes of radioactive decay when completely understood and a fully formed theory which can explain which conditions are able to facilitate or curtail the energy transformation - then the prospect of cheap cold nuclear fusion will provide even relatively poor countries with nearly unlimited energy.


Cold fusion is regarded with skepticism by the vast majority of scentists since the initial reported results have not been replicated.

The 2nd generation fusion I referred to, was He3 fusion which is also thermonuclear.  The advantage of He3 fuelled fusion over Deuterium and Tritium, is that there are much less high energy neutrons produced, so the containment vessel becomes much less radioctive.  Typically a decommissioned D-T reactor will take 10s of years to decay to safety, whereas a He3 reactor would take <10 years.  Both of course, are much better than the hundred thousand years or so for fission.  There is also the possibility that He3 energy can be converted directly to electricity as the ejecta is charged.  D-T will require conversion from the heat generated in the containment vessel walls.


Scott2006 wrote:


Processes at present beyond us will be commonplace in the late 21st century.
If you have near unlimited energy which can be safe enough and near eliminiate radioactivity harmful to humans, then you have enough energy to transform salty sea water to drinking water, and can grow sufficient crops to feed the world population if politicians break the habit of a lifetime and co-operate to achieve that.

If a form of utopia ever really arrives - I doubt the first thing they'll do is turn the world into a Marxist commune.

Marxist control freaks would replace one elite with another. Only in most cases they need to kill the figurehead before they misrepresent and lie about what's happening for years.


Well I think a reasonable extrapolation from the technology we actally know about, is that, in time, all the wealth required by humanity could be provided by technology (energy + food and manufactured goods produced by robots).

This would be a form of socialism, as there would no longer be a work force to exploit, and if folk have all they need, however greedy they are, then it is difficult to see how capitalism as we know it could be sustained.

Human talent and endeavour will be altogether more academically and culturally oriented, in one form or other.

Of course, this will be resisted by oligarchs - for a while.

Not going to happen in our lifetime though
chicmac

William_Cleland wrote:

Getting from where we are now to a sustainable future with a comparable standard of living that is not based on the rapid exploitation of finite resources like fossil fuels and high grade uranium ore is potentially doable but no sure thing yet.

Nuclear fusion is still a long way off and a lot of work still needs to be done on the hydrogen storage technology that would be required to make renewables a viable replacement for fossil fuels in many contexts. If the world hits peak oil, peak coal and peak gas in the next 20 to 30 years as some are suggesting then Europe will be in very deep trouble. Other parts of the world like Russia and North America would be able to keep going longer with fossil fuels at a reduced level of consumption in the absence of an alternative but probably wouldn't be in a mood to share out scarce dwindling resources with anybody else. There are reasons why the EU countries push the Kyoto Protocol so hard, while others do not, that go well beyond levels of concern about the environment in other words.

Hopefully a new bout of exploration driven by higher prices will identify new resources and provide the time needed for a smooth transition in technology terms. On the bright side, the Brazilians seem to be making headway in that regard:-

http://www.abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=4680076&page=1


I think you are being too pessimistic.

Regarding hydrogen.  It is not the technology which is the current stumbling block.  Iceland runs its buses off of hydrogen produced by its geo-thermal energy resource.  Car manufacturers have produced hydrogen cars of both the fuel cell and gasseous burn varieties.  The hydrogen cylinders used for storage are actually smaller than petroleum tanks with the equivalent mileage range. While I would never describe such a young industry as optimised, it certainly has already been developed technologically to the point of usability.

The main current stumbling block with hydrogen is the cost of producing the fuel.  However as the cost of fossil fuels rise, this changes.  Also hydrogen production methods using GM algae and/or high temperature hydrolysis produced at off-peak times by nuclear installations should bring the costs of hydrogen production right down.

BTW where you say "Getting from where we are now to a sustainable future with a comparable standard of living that is not based on the rapid exploitation of finite resources like fossil fuels and high grade uranium ore is potentially doable but no sure thing yet." I disagree with as well.  In fact I think that the more brakes we put on fossil fuel usage (via pricing and taxation) the faster will be the development of those other alternatives - financial incentive + capital for industry and government investment.

When the fuel cost cross-over point comes I think petroleum as a fuel use will quickly end.

Regarding fusion.  The ITER project at Cadarache is due to come on line in 2015.  It is expected to produce around 500MW with a Q of 5-10 and a sustained thermonuclear plasma lasting several minutes.  It is also expected to proof of concept the 'burning' (self heating) capability theorised for the installation.

The roadmap for fusion (all going well i.e. the fast track roadmap) is that commercial reactors will be on line by 2050 with a full scale roll out by 2080.  While there may be unforeseen problems that may impact negatively on this, there is also the fact that this road map has been produced without assumed input from China.

China only signed up about 6 months back.  China, as you know has, and will soon have even more, massive amounts of money to spend, it also has virtually no nuclear power currently and has a massive and growing air-pollution problem.  China will be very highly motivated to pursue this project, if not right now, soon.

In fact the multi-national pushed trade agreements between the West and China which have overseen the relocation of a huge portion of Western manufacturing to coal-fired China has been the single biggest contributor to Global GGE increase.
William_Cleland

Belated thanks for all the info, Chic. Turns out my knowledge of nuclear fusion was a few years out of date. Definitely looks like the major power are gearing up for that as all the manned lunar missions planned for the 2020s are not going to be about making astronomical observations and the like:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...t_and_future_lunar_missions#Human

Interesting story to watch on the hydrogen economy.

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news5.20.08d.html
chicmac

William_Cleland wrote:
Belated thanks for all the info, Chic. Turns out my knowledge of nuclear fusion was a few years out of date. Definitely looks like the major power are gearing up for that as all the manned lunar mission planned for the 2020s are not going to be about making astronomical observations and the like:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...t_and_future_lunar_missions#Human

Interesting story to watch on the hydrogen economy.

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news5.20.08d.html


No problem.  It was the Russian design tokamak containment system which made the 'breakthrough' (took over 40 years engineering though).

Yes the new-found scientific zeal (NOT) to get to the Moon is I suspect, down to the potential commercial value of the Lunar regolith (He-3 for fusion power and Titanium too may be commercially worth recovering.)

A few years ago this got the SF loonie-tunes treatment whenever it was brought up in public and derided as such by Government scientist spokespersons from all sides, meanwhile of course all the real strategic planning went on in secrecy.  Now it is gradually coming out, but it is pathetic the way 'those in charge' always have a first instinct to keep anything major from the public.  BTW, bizarrely it was the Chinese which came clean on their motivations first.

Are totalitarian States generally more or less honest than Hip-sorry-Dem-ocracies? - Discuss.

There are still new engineering problems to be solved regarding Hydrogen as a transport fuel. The fuel storage (Hydride tanks) and power generating side(fuel cell or gasseous burn) elements are OK, but can be improved, but one new issue which has not been addressed yet is the fact that the water emitted tends to become steam when it hits the air.  Not a problem with the odd bus or so, but when an entire street of vehicles is H2 powered it may well generate a dense (and corrosive to ferric materials) fog, especially on cold days.  Vehicles may have to have an inbuilt (as yet undeveloped) condenser.

       Our Scotland - www.our-scotland.org Forum Index -> Scottish Politics and Independence
Page 1 of 1
Create your own free forum | Buy a domain to use with your forum