Slashdot Mirror

They wouldn't need to claim ignorance. The claims the whit house said was that according to the IPCC, we were leading less. This study as well as the initial version of the report gets it's data from a different source. There is no lie, and what was said it true. As for cherry picking, this so called report specifically uses a different data set in order to make a claim of misleading and wrong doing. Nothing could be further form the truth.

Here is the link to the numbers the pacinst uses. and here is the link to what the white house used.

Three things to be noted. One is that the IEA publication costs a lot of money so unless some one is willing to pony up the change and do the actual comparisons, we won't know for sure. Using numbers from another study or data set does nothing to show anyone mislead anything. If anything, it is misleading of this study to suggest something that doesn't exist.

Second, the IEA numbers don't cover the same numbers the other report does. It used numbers from fuel combustion were as the EPA numbers account for all use including purpose full manufacturing of Co2.

Third and probably the most important is that the EU and the rest of the world have only been attempting to reduce Co2 emisiosn since 2000 when the kyoto accord was in effect. Comparing to anything previous is senseless and misleading. It implies there was an effort that isn't and attempt to say look, we are guilty because we done this before that.

In all, It would be note worthy to have numbers that come form the same source and cover the same data. This report doesn't do it and even attempts to use the disconnect from consistancy as a basis to refute the conclusions of a report that does use the same source and same data collections. I have contacted them by email about their apparent misleading and have not received a response from them. Also they have listed this second "refined report" after that.

According to the wikipedia article on the price-anderson act, the actual subsidy comes out to around $2 million per reactor per year. That seems fairly modest to me, considering the financial risk power companies invest in the plants and their benefit to the country via clean, reliable power.

That's extremely modest, given a 1 GW reactor running at 80% duty cycle nets over $200 million per year (assuming they are making $0.03 per kW-hr). Note that this is an extremely conservative estimate--it is easy to find estimates of average electricity price at $0.12 per kW-hr, and data suggest that bus-bar generation costs are in the range of $0.05 per kW-hr. Even given the (very substantial) transmission losses (up to 40% in Canada due to our heavy use of hydro) an estimate of $0.03/kw-hr net does not seem unreasonable. Note that the generation cost I've cited above is at the very high end of the range, and that it already accounts for the discount rate.

In fact, if the subsidy is really only $2 million per year per reactor, it is so modest that I propose a 1% increase in power rates and an absolute elimination of the Price-Anderson subsidy. Such a small and irrelevant subsidy is clearly not in the least important to our brave new nuclear future, so no one who is an honest supporter of nuclear power could possibly object to eliminating it.

This subsidy issue has hung over the head of nuclear supporters for decades. "If it's so safe why does it need this artificial protection?" the anti-nukes ask again and again, and you have to admit it's a pretty hard argument to answer. Now that we know the subsidy is in fact trivial compared to the money being made in the industry, it is clearly time for it to be eliminated.

Obviously, all companies who are pushing for new nuclear capacity will be pushing for the elimination of this trivial subsidy as well, since it would make it so much easier to sell new plants to the public at such a negligable cost. Think of the marketing bonus pro-nukes would get out of such a move, "Yeah, old tech required subsidies, but pebble-bed reactors are so safe we don't need it."

Oddly, I can't find any information on companies that are pushing to eliminate the subsidy, but they must exist if it is really as trivial as Wikipedia says.

Quite timely this, as I've just finished my own energy page, testing loads of appliances. If there's one thing I've found above all else though, it's this one thing:

Heat swamps Light swamps Sound
(here's the article I did on it)

Anything which involves heat (washing machine, heater, cooker, microwave, kettle etc.) will eat an order of magnitude more power than anything involving light (monitor/TV, light bulb, lamp), which itself will eat up (by an order of magnitude) anything involving sound, which you practically get for free.

That's okay though, because if you spend $3,500,000 on space-age aerogel insulation for your home, then practically no heat will be lost, and your energy bills will plummet.

The other thing I learnt is that standby power consumption vastly varies from device to device (and even from manufacturer), which is why ideas such as the "One Watt Plan" are a Good Thing.

It is actually even worse than that. It uses the data from BP and the ASPO:

This assessment uses as data sources the Statistical Review of World Energy, published yearly by BP, and the monthly newsletter published by ASPO, where assessments for future oil production are available for more than 40 individual countries.

Now, why would a site that seems to be focused on a scarce energy outlook use these two sources? Probably because BP and the ASPO both have huge energy holdings. Their reports will show that energy is going to be more valuable in the future. The only way for it to be more valuable is if it is scarcer.

The real question is, why didn't they use data from the IEA or EIA? (I know, very similar letters)

The EIA suggests cheaper energy prices long term and a probable energy glut short term because we've had unreasonably high oil prices (high prices means that you drill for more oil... but our consumption has been basically flat = too much oil!) and the IEA is more moderate.

Not saying that this slam dunk bullshit but you have to question the source.

I know everyone loves the "running out of oil" story, but if that were true then why is oil barely above $60 when we have 2 huge suppliers threatening to cut back production, and North Korean bomb tests? If we were really running out of oil and some people threatened to cut us off plus some negative diplomatic news, we would be over 100 easily.

Unfortunately, your vegetable oil utopia is unlikely to arrive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel#Efficiency_ and_Economic_Arguments

"...it is likely that the United States, with one of the highest per capita energy demands of any country, does not have enough arable land to fuel all of the nation's vehicles.", and that's if you use all the land that's currently being used to grow food. When it comes down to it, production of oil from plants is pretty much just an inefficient (for our needs) way to gather solar power (all that energy wasted producing seeds, growing upwards, looking pretty, etc). Much more efficient to have a solar gathering mechanism that is not distracted by reproduction and evolution.

It all depends on the length of the term you look at. In the long-term (read, hundreds of years), it's likely that the only source of energy that'll keep arriving is energy radiated from the sun. So at some point, on average, we're going to have to match our consumption with that incoming rate (factored by how efficiently we can harvest that energy). The amount of energy the earth recieves from the sun is pretty big. A quick search finds info on just one country (India):

Energy from Sun: 5000 trillion kWh/year
http://www.auroville.org/research/ren_energy/solar .htm

Current energy production: 5.3 trillion kWh/year
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/stats/nmcbalancetable. asp?nonoecd=India&SubmitC=Submit&COUNTRY_LONG_NAME =India

I couldn't find a calculation for the global energy from the sun value to compare with. Numbers are probably very different for highly industrialised nations. We probably don't want to absorb all the energy from the sun for our own purposes though, it does all kinds of useful things, like makes plants grow (which we eat) and keeps things warm (admittedly most energy we consume will probably be re-emmitted as heat and will keep us warm anyway, energy in = energy out and all that).

Things like oil represent long-term storage of energy gathered from the sun. We're reaping the benefits of having these pre-prepared batteries lying around at the moment, but when we've used them all up, it'll be back to only using as much as is being supplied.

My prediction is that we're going to have to back-off on our energy consumption. Short term solutions might arrive for a while (new oil reserves, nuclear power material deposits, etc), but long-term, it'll be back to depending on the Sun (and even that'll run out in a few billion years).

Best to prepare for it now I say. Stop living so far from what you need, don't expect to be able to travel where you want and when. Don't live in a manner that demands lots of energy and you won't be affected as much when there isn't as much energy to go around (live in a village, not a city, grow your own food, don't truck it in from Brazil. You *don't* need to eat bananas in Canada in the middle of winter).

Nuclear is not that easy to set up and then switch off again, that is... the nuclear waste will always be there and after switching off the reactor it will stay hot for years.

bullshit. Nuclear plants have construction times of 3 years these days, equivalent to coal plants. They are also cost competitive, and are modular in design so they can be mass produced, and passively safe.

If I had to use one of the current technologies that provides most of our power (by no means all, Aussieland has quite a bit of wind power and solar these days) I would use natural gas, there's more of it than there is oil and it burns cleaner than coal.

wrong again. Look at that statistical energy review from bp. Reserves of nat gas are about 1 trillion barrels oil equivalent, and are by *far* harder to transfer than oil, coal, or especially uranium. Its also peaked in the US, and the world will soon follow. Burning natural gas for electricity is like burning money for the heat.

Also, while we are at it, the article got it wrong. The cost of wind, etc. is about 3-12+ *times* the cost of coal or nuclear, not even taking into account the cost of backup power source for base power. Reference here.

Ed

Sure:
      Annual solar energy received by the Earth: 5.44x10^24 Joules (1)
      Estimated annual 'extra' energy absorbed by the earth due to human increases in CO2 levels: around 2x10^22 Joules (2)
      Annual energy use by humanity: 4.31x10^20 Joules (3)

The actual heat produced by combustion is fairly insignifant at the scale of climte--it's around a 50th of the change in Earth's energy balance due to human activity.

Sources:

(1) from http://marine.rutgers.edu/mrs/education/class/yuri /in_energy.gif)
(2) forcing value of 1.4 W/m^2 taken from standard IGCC reference at http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/climate.html, multiplied by surface area of Earth, which might not be exactly right.
(3) from http://www.iea.org/Textbase/stats/balancetable.asp ?country=World&SubmitA=Submit&COUNTRY_LONG_NAME=Wo rld

You didn't specify what you wanted me to give you references to.

On September 2, the 26-nation International Energy Agency agreed to make availabe to the U.S. 2 million barrels of oil per day, half petroleum and half gasoline. In other words, when the gasoline shipments start arriving from Europe in the next week or so, along with 1 million barrels per day from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve the U.S. will be swimming in oil. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) estimates that $7 billion per month are stolen by the major oil companies. Also, the Department of Energy is aware of the fact that Saudi Arabia has significant refining capacity and could send a supertanker a day to the U.S. with 500,000 to 750,000 barrels of gasoline. The price of oil is being set by two institutions: the London-based International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). These two institutions is controled by the same oil cartel.

Most of what I originally wrote I think you can find in The New York Times. I know... it's hard to trust them too.

Regarding the paradigm shift in the U.S. politics I mentioned, just check out what some of the senators in Washington are saying. Harry Reid for instance.

China: 2.75
India: 2.06
US: 0.63
UK: 0.41
Germany: 0.31
France: 0.21
Japan: 0.2

China: 0.65
US: 0.63
Germany: 0.44
UK: 0.42
India: 0.37
Japan: 0.36
France: 0.28

One of the first sources quoted by the reviewer is the International Energy Agency, a forum for 26 industrialized countries. For those wo want to tap deeper there are a lot more - and diverse - statistics out there. For example the IEA's statistics on world consumption vs reserves are different from those of OPEC, and even different from state-run BP's Statistical Review of World Energy, which I consider more moderate than either of the two previous sources. The US Energy Information Agency site is also very comprehensive. Check out their Country Profiles section for comprehensive info on oil operations the world over.

http://www.energyspot.org