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Creator of the Gaia Hypothesis Urges Nuclear Power
SteamyMobile writes "Professor James Lovelock, creator the Gaia Hypothesis and long-time intellectual leader of the Green movement, says that global warming is a dire threat, more urgent than was previously realized. He compares the threat of global warming with the threat of the Nazis in 1938, and says that in both cases, the Left was not able to grasp the urgency of the situation and see the necessary solution. What is the necessary solution to stop the global warming problem? He says it's nuclear power. Needless to say, the Greens don't agree with him, and he chides them as having irrational phobias of a safer, cleaner energy sources. Even if the "Left" isn't fully aware of the urgency of the world's energy problems, it seems like Slashdot is."
Does this guy know how much energy that goes into mining the Uranium? (Clue: Quite alot) We have to forget all the nonsense in mining our energy from the ground, and start putting some research into renewable stuff like plant-oils, wave and wind energy.
Totally off-topic Nazi comparison made. Thread closed.
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If a guy like him advocates nuclear power as a way to avoid global warming, the risks must be enormous indeed.
Even if global warming is not as bad as predicted, the about face is certainly interesting.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
FOr the most part nuclear engery is not a bad solution to the ever growing problem of increased fossil fuel prices and declining stocks of oil reserves. Burning coal -- no way. Sure, nuclear power got a bad deal when 3 Mile Island and Chernoybal had their problems, but then those designs were old to begin with. There are reactor designs that are safer and more efficient. I think it's time to start bringing back nuclear power plants again. You need energy to power your computers ... what's the problem.
I really like it when people involved in saving the planet and all that are still able to think rationally use see things like nuclear power as useful. And it is useful, even if only for a few generations nuclear power is one of the best options available. That said I want an array of satellites collecting solar energy and sending it down to earth via microwave as soon as is feasible. And then after that I want feasible fusion damnit.
vampirical
The recent movie The Day After Tommorrow makes global warning seem like a more imminent threat than it probably is. Could it be that those more concerned about the risks have taken its release as a good opportunity for sounding their views (since people will be more receptive?)
overheard in springfield, ??:
excellent!
What about solar towers, like this one. What keeps us from plastering earth's deserts with these things?
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
The sun? We've been harnesting the sun for thousands of years for our energy, why not keep going? We know we can grow things with the sun, we know the sun's rays can be converted into heat to turn a turbine, we know that the sun's radiation can be converted directly into electrical energy. From that alone, we have enough to power ourselves for quite a while.. Question is, when will everyone be convenced there is a problem, and when they are convenced, how willing will they be to give up their SUV's?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
At how those against nuclear power like to cite the Chernobyl accident, as apparently they feel it is proper to equate a plant that was a zillion miles from a water source to the San Onofre plant which is cooled by the Pacific Ocean.
Burning coal in the midwest has caused horrible acid rain in Canada. People really need to rethink how "unclean" nuclear byproducts are.
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While the analogy of threat of global warming to threat of Hitler can be argued, if nothing else, non-conventional means of energy shall soon be required since there aren't that many natural resources available anymore.
:-
Maybe it is urban legend, but we all keep hearing about the number of years after which gasoline would be unavailable. No matter how inaccurate that claim is, the current gas prices do seem an indicator of that
Nuclear energy has always been safe and a lot less polluting than the conventional means. Coupled with the almost limitless harvestation of it and the relative safefy with which it can be produced, I think it is time the world woke up to it.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
...he'll be telling us we have to collect eight "spirits" to "heal" Gaia, while the military will be advocating the use of a giant orbital laser. Pffffftt.
These green people are ultimatly interested in saving the human race...not the planet.
Do we really think that we, with a few fossil fuels and other environmental crap we throw into the air and water over the past 150 year, can really change the Earth?
The Earth will shuck us off like a bad case of fleas. 1 million years from now...which is but an eyeblink to the Earth...we'll be long gone. A footnote as it were. The Earth will heal itself.
So please, stop with the "Save the planet" high-horse. The planet isn't going anywhere...WE ARE! So say what you really mean...save the humans.
(paraphrased quite a bit from George Carlin btw)
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Not a great deal more energy than mining fossil fuels.
I tend to agree that nuclear fission is a pretty good interrim solution, particularly when coupled with aggressive conservation measures.
The problem is, it's got a lot of problems that we are simply deferring. Two big ones: risk of disaster, and what to do with the dead fuel rods. The first is controllable, the second is a pain in the ass. Both are suffer from the 'not in my backyard' mentality.
But nuclear power is NOT a long-term solution. There probably isn't even a long-term magic bullet. Some of the things that can save us: high-temperature superconductors (for zero-loss transmission lines), nuclear fusion, alternative energy sources, and reduction of power use.
The latter needs to be taken seriously with the others. If it's too hot to live where you are in the summer, the right answer might be 'don't live there' rather than 'turn up the A/C'. This is easy to manage: simply let the price of power rise to match how much it actually costs to make.. INCLUDING the environmental cleanup costs of the technology you use.
---N
While it's true that nuclear power is one of the best int the short term but I think in the long term renewables are preferable.
With renewables:
- You don't have to mine
- You don't have to pay except initial investment and maintainance
- You don't have to take care of waste.
- It's distributable. Everybody can have it in their houses.
- Recent breaktrhoughts in solar cells will make them efficient and cheap.
Ok, we all know that the sea levels will rise, the weather will be come (even more) unpredictable, etc,etc. But every documentary I have seen on this subject, seems to use 2 different sources for its data. At first, they use data gained from antarctic ice cores that show that this has happened ("global warming") time and again over a considerable amount of time. Then suddenly, the doomsday scenario is based on the fact that the changes in the global climate have happened in the 400 or so years since records began.
How can you accept both points of view ? It is misleading to suggest that humans are the cause of global warming. I fully agree that we as a race should seek some non-polluting energy source over one that has shown to be bad for us, let alone the planet, but to use misleading information to achieve social indignation is wrong.
Global warming is a catch-phrase, being used to describe potential doom. Even if we all stopped using electricity and cars etc, then the planet would still go through immense environmental changes, as it has done since the beginning. News flash, the sahara used to be green and pleasant, and before that it was under water. Are we as humans responsible for that too ?
> He compares the threat of global warming with
> the threat of the Nazis in 1938
He makes the same mistake Einstein made: choosing the lesser evil in the face of a greater one (Einstein wrote a letter to the US President urging the development of the atomic bomb to stop the Nazis...a step he later regretted as the greatest error of his life).
Nuclear power is not clean by any means or even resource-smart. It's not even the possibility of an accident that's the main issue: the amount of radioactive waste *before* and *after* the power generation is simply staggering. We don't have the luxury anymore of "solutions" that aren't. There is no magic wand in any case, nuclear power included. Any resolution will have to be a combined framework of multiple approaches, aforemost all of them is energy conservation which alone could slash current energy demand by a third if not half if thoroughly addressed on all levels.
Wow, the OP compared global warming to nazis, thus invoking Godwin's law before the discussion even started.
I have no choice but to declare this thread officially closed...
The Environmental Movement needs to be kicked into reality, and this sort of announcement might get things moving.
Unfortunately for us in the UK, the "environmentalists" coupled with weak-willed and short-sighted politicians have squandered away our nuclear exeprtise and brought about the decline of the civillian nuclear industry, much to my personal dismay and that of former colleagues and friends.
As with many things, the UK once lead the world in nuclear power technology. Now we mearly run our stations into the ground, defuel them, and tidy up. We're burning gas hell for leather, and peppering the countryside with ugly, intusive and pretty feeble wind turbines.
I made the decision to leave the nuclear industry 5 years ago, and I'm glad I did. They were talking of building new capacity maybe in 50 years' time. What good is that?
Stick Men
Question is, when will everyone be convenced there is a problem, and when they are convenced, how willing will they be to give up their SUV's?
...
This is a good question, but unfortunately it appears that the answer to this question is that people just will not do it (take their fat asses out of their SUV's) unless there is some catastrophic reason to do so...
The SUV syndrome is mob mentality at its utter finest. "If no-body else is going to stop driving SUV's, why should I stop" is really one of the biggest problems with this issue, a typical Consumerican viewpoint, derived directly from the callous mob mentality currently perpetuated by "consumerist" ideals
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Don't get me wrong -- the Nazis were bad, bad men. But raising the "Nazi bogeyman" at every turn is really the sign of intellectual laziness.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
we can barely cope with it now resorting to hiding it in caves (Yucca mountains in USA) which is the equivalent of sweeping it under the carpet, a potential timebomb for 10,000 years
so if we suddenly convert everything to nuke power we really are going to have to think of something better than hiding it while we create massive quantities of radioactive sludge
Even if the "Left" isn't fully aware of the urgency of the world's energy problems, it seems like Slashdot is."
In other news:
By the "Right" means of total information awareness on all it's readers, Slashdot makes urgently an evolution advance to self-consciousness.
There you are, staring at me again.
The problem with environmentalists is that they should be the ones defending the right choice! I mean, ppl are used to the current situation, but it is akin to having medical doctors poison and try to kill you when you check in sick at an hospital. We have a problem, some ppl devote their lifes to studying it, some ppl interest themselves in the subject and keep informed, and then all that ppl advocates the wrong choice! Who in hell is going to save us?
Environmentalism is a failure on all levels as it exists today. It is THEIR fault that we are in the current situation, not some industrial company who does what it is supposed to do: profit! It's the environmentalists that failed us.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
Come on, we're already up to 75% of our electricity from nukes.
Oh, you're not in France.
Get with the act you luddites.
This message submitted with the help of the friendly atom.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I don't know very much about three mile island, but as I recall, the Soviet reactor designs were all quite unreliable. At the time, I guess what the Soviet Government really cared about was the electricity plutonium that the reactor produced. I think Chernobyl melted down around 82? In the 80s I think. I'm only 14, so I don't remember the Soviets, but being towards the end of the Cold War, the Soviet economic situation would have been quite poor, and they could not have afforded maintenence, etc. as well as we can now.
Since technology has improved, I would have thought that today's reactors would be safer and more efficient than designs from 20 years ago. I'm from Australia where we don't have nuclear rectors (except for Lucas Heights, near Sydney, but that is used for research, producing isotopes for radio-medicine, and producing more pure silicon (neutron bombardment doping, i think) by using neutrons to turn 1 in a billon silicon atoms into phosphorus, producing N-Type silicon. Lucas Heights has 15% of the world market, and I would like to see how well a processor made of this would overclock).
Nuclear power will be the way of the future, but Australia will take time to adopt it, with a supply of coal to last hundreds of years.
For those who doubt the effects of global warming, I recommend taking up SCUBA. Not only is it a great sport, you'll get to see first-hand the effects of global warming, and it WILL scare you.
The Seychelles reefs are just about gone. What was once arguably the best reef to dive in the world outside the Great Barrier is now a graveyard.
And this knowledge isn't from reading an alarmist's evaluation of the situation, it is from seeing it with my own eyes on dives I did last year on Mahe, Praslin and La Digue. A conservative estimate would be that 90% of the reefs are dead. Probably closer to 95%, but as I didn't dive every square inch, I can't say there aren't some pristine patches somewhere. There very well may be, I just didn't see them.
As for the Florida and Great Barrier reefs, I can also attest to their ailing health. I live just above the Keys and dive them regularly, and I dove the GB Reef about 10 weeks ago. The destruction is real.
Don't take anyone's word for it. Go strap on a set of tanks and see it for yourself. It's a wake-up call.
Tal
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Nuclear fusion is getting there slowly but surely.
Stick Men
Who is "the left"?
I have been very impressed with the diverse range of opinions many people have.
The only place where I haven't seen this is in people who buy their ideas wholesale in a package deal from talk radio dj/cranks like the author of this thread has.
Who is "the left"?
If you eat tofu are you "the left", and are you against atomic energy?
Now that this person supports atomic energy does that mean he is a republican?
Oy!
Steve
I recently saw the 'fusion roadshow' by our national plasma research institute. Although it was actually targetted at highschools it was great fun to watch with a whole audience of physicists. Their predictions were however a little bit negative: almost all of the fossil fuels will be used up in the next century when we achieve a maximum population of around 10 billion. Renewable energy sources such as wind power and hydraulics will be used more, but they will never be able to supply more than 25% of total demand. Their obvious answer was to invest in nuclear fusion now, all the other types cannot be scaled up enough.
Apparently the current best fusion reactor, JET, is close to break even point (energy in versus energy out). The future project ITER, to be built in France/Japan/Spain (depending on politics), will be the first to actually be a net energy producer. This will still only be a research plant. Production type plants are expected around 100 years from now, mightbe just in time to save us when the oil dries up.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Nope, I've read this three times and I still can't see your point. How are environmentalists to blame for high gas prices and pollution?
Enviro-nuts scream about this problem... from every side! We have blackouts in California and NYC that made world news over the last couple years, yet the local energy companies can't build new power producing plants to keep up with demand... whether it be coal, gas or nuclear. Why? Enviro-nuts!
It seems these groups have campaigned against ANY type of energy plants in the last few years, and in fact, are responsible for our high gas prices right now. The main factor in the $2.07 national average for unleaded gas is that we do not have enough refineries to turn crude into usable fuel. Our refineries are at 95% capacity.... all attempts to build additional plants in the last few years have been destroyed by these Enviro-nuts.
I know this is a rant, and will probably get modded down... but hey, life is all about risks. My point is that these people on the left, these Enviro-nuts, have hindered Americas ability to recover from the Clinton-Gore recession by limiting oil refinement and limiting the building of new power generation stations (of all kinds, including Nuclear) forcing the U.S. to take huge hits to the economy when the price of gas goes high or when we have blackouts that take out our nation's largest business sectors.
And the worse part about it, these same nuts will be the first people to complain when they couldn't have their morning latte's or moca's because there was no electricity to heat or cool up their drinks!
My guess is that many of us need to update ( or get ) an education in energy issues.
:
I would like to call on people in this thread to recommend books
- that discuss the pros of nucelar energy
- the case against nucelar energy
- the pros and cons of various forms of energy
The books should be written by experts and when possible relatively recent.
Let use our geekness to learn.
Public opinion changes in part from the public......people talking to other people.
Steve
oh, now things become a lot clearer!!!
...
i thought that global warming (if really induced by humanity) was a cause of combusting fossile fuels and thus releasing previously bound CO2. not to forget our (european and american) incredible waste of energy and ressources!
how exactly do we have the problem of global warming due to nuclear energy?? the environmentalists haven't really proposed going back to fossile fuels but instead have campaigned for regenerative energy sources like wind, water, sun,
disclaimer: blaming global warming on the environmentalists is the most stupid thing i've ever heard!
Hey - If we go nuclear we can all get irradiated and end the curse of sitting in the dark forever, having become our own personal light sources...
Seriously, I think that there is far too much FUD about nuclear energy. Yes, the consequences of an accident are horrible, yes the spent fuel is very nasty to deal with, but is it really any worse than the current fossil-fuel systems that we rely on now?
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Please don't replicate the "every SUV must have bad fuel economy" meme. It's just not true. I drive a SUV and it's fuel economy is better than that of many ordinary 2WD vehicles (22-27 mpg). This meme is dangerous, because many Americans believe that and therefore American companies see no reason to improve the fuel efficency of their horribly heavy, clunky and obsolete 4x4 behemoths. Japanese car companies do not have this luxury and it shows - Subaru Forester, Mitsubishi Outlander, Honda CR-V or Nissan X-Trail are great family machines and they are as environment-friendly as regular (non-SUV) vehicles. So you don't have to give up anything, if it's really that important for you to have American company badge on your car, buy a Subaru rebadged as Chevrolet.
Its the environmentalists fault?
Jesus fucking christ you're an idiot. You're a Bush voter right? More polution = clear skies, all that bullshit?
Sure the environmentalists can be criticized for some things, but "its all their faulr?"
Are you really this stupid? Is anyone?
not much else to say than that. seems like a pretty bleak future is ahead if we cant figure this out.... maybe even if we can
This is Slashdot, where all futures are bleak. Kill yourself now (but give me your boxes first)
The amount of energy produced from wind is proportion to the speed of the wind cubed. Power companies run on tight margins of error and cannot afford going from 100% power to 12.5% power simply because the wind blows at half speed that day.
Power storages, even some of the more creative solutions involving them, are stopgap solutions at best. In most areas of the US the wind isn't overly reliable.
Wind makes a great backup, but I wouldn't want to depend on it as a primary source.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Lovelock has been advocating nuclear energy for a while now.
From a September 2000 article in the Guardian:
"And then they say: what shall we do with nuclear waste?" Lovelock has an answer for that, too. Stick it in some precious wilderness, he says. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of rainforest, drop pockets of nuclear waste into it to keep the developers out. The lifespans of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the animals wouldn't know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the mutations. Life would go on."
Guardian article here
While Lovelock is correct about life on the planet being in great danger due to global warming, his solution is foolish.
As Icarus found out the hard way, the sun -- yes, THE SUN -- provides quite a bit of energy to the blue planet.
It would be great to see mankind embrace clean and safe energy vs. yet another form of highly toxic pollution. Nuclear power is a foolish short-term band-aid. There is no cure for radiation poisoning and producing gigantic amounts of nuclear waste absurdly stupid.
I do hope Icarus did not die in vain.
Get a Clue: Building and running a nuclear plant requires LESS energy than it takes to build and maintain a solar or wind farm of the same capacity. The energy payback time for building a nuclear plant is less than a month. The energy payback time for building a wind farm is 2 months to 2 years and 2 to 7 years for solar.
Also, what is not frequently mentioned is the difference between baseload and peaking power plants. Nuclear, coal, hydro are baseload power stations that provide constant energy throughout the day. Natural gas and renewables are peaking plants that cover periods of peak demand - though renewables are less reliable even here. Therefore, renewables are not an attractive option for a large fraction of our energy use since they cannot compete for the baseload market.
I have experienced that debates on nuclear tend to go over to irrationality quite fast. According to Godwin's law Lovelock has already lost the argument, but whatever.
First, oil use produces waste that causes moderate, gradual modification of the environment. Nuclear can cause much worse effects. Ok, I know, this side of the world we have super-duper-safer reactors; but the main consumer of energy will sometime soon be China. I personally don't trust anyone with nuclear power anyway.
However bad an accident is in a refinery, there's no way a city can be obliterated by it, or a continent poisoned. The damage is intrinsecally limited. A nuclear reactor (maybe supercritical?) can do much worse, and these things do happen at some point--No matter how good security can be, there is no such thing as 100% safety.
Right now only a fraction of world energy is being produced by nuclear, and thus you hear people boasting about "hundreds of years" before depletion of the sources. Of course what many forget is that, if all energy were to be produced by nuclear, this time would shorten to a few decades. This also means that less economical fissile fuel sources would have to be used, driving up the already high prices of nuclear power.
Many nuclear plants means more people working on nuclear tech. Many planes in the air means also more people training to become pilots, and some might get by unobserved studying only how to fly, and not how to land. See where it's going?
Please go to a university library and look up this article: Paine, Jeffrey R., "Will nuclear power pay for itself?", The social science journal, vol. 33, n. 4, pages 459-473, 1996, JAI press. Paine analysed the real (as opposed to speculated) data about nuclear power production, to conclude that nuclear power may at best be economically marginal, paying back for itself only after large times and only in the most optimistic conditions. RTFA before saying it's crap; it's also available on ScienceDirect if you have access to it. I have heard often, in the academic environment, that nuclear in some cases is not even producing enough energy to pay for its cycle: what you get out at the power plant can be less than what you put in extraction, purification, enrichment, transport and security.
And, after this happened (Fish for non-Italian speakers, but there are surely plenty of English articles, I'm only being lazy), the very last thing we need is more fissile material going around.
IMHO, until someone cracks fusion, nuclear is a very interesting technology that had however better not be applied. It's immature, expensive, easily misused. Maybe the positive attitude towards nuclear power by many Americans is due never being hit by something like the Chernobyl cloud. Yet, I read somewhere that new reactors have not been built in the US since 79.
Short term: natural gas.
Mid term: solar, wind, tide, hydro, other renewables.
Long term: fusion.
That's how I see it at least. All these sources can be converted to hydrogen.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
current situation:
we use oil for energy. Problem, oil is a finite resource, it WILL run out. Alternatives are needed. Okay, we agree so far.
What about using the most obvious Nuclear Energy..The Sun?
No viable alternatives exist yet. To quote verbatim:
Direct conversion of sunlight to electricity by solar cells is a promising technology, and already locally useful, but the amount of electricity which can be generated by that method is not great compared with demand. Because it is a low grade energy, with a low conversion efficiency (about 15%) capturing solar energy in quantity requires huge installations--many square miles. About 8 percent of the cells must be replaced each year. But the big problem is how to store significant amounts of electricity when the Sun is not available to produce it (Trainer, 1995), for example, at night. The problem remains unsolved. Because of this, solar energy cannot be used as a dependable base load. And, the immediate end product is electricity, a very limited replacement for oil. Also, adding in all the energy costs of the production and maintenance of PV (photovoltaic) installations, the net energy recovery is low (Trainer, 1995).
If you can think of a way to store this energy, fantastic, please share. Otherwise, back to the drawing board.
Do you need a website upgrade?
WhooHoo! I mean totally rad. Literally.
Say it ain't so...
What are vi and Emacs? I use Microsoft Word meself.
I'm a west australian, and I'll tell you this. Solar is ready to go NOW.
Up in the north of WA, we have a fair amount of mining, and reeeeeeealy remote towns (like towns with 500k spacings between each one and just desert in between) , and many many aboriginal communities with perhaps 20 members and the like.
Through necesity, alot of these places are using solar energy, simply because it isnt feasible to stick all that copper around the place. This includes mining btw which is verry energy intensive.
There are folks up there also using 'bio diesel', which is basically canola oil + ethanol + an agent to 'crack' the oil (dont ask me what that means, cos I dont know either!) since its cheaper to make diesel then to drive it there.
You can get a handfull of large solar panels , chuck it on the roof, stick it thru a 240w inverter and blammo. You dont have to pay power bills again (factor in 10 batteries every 5 years tho).
It can be done, we just need to get off our ass and do it. In some parts of the north west of australia, solar is the rule, not the exception.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Wired did a good article a few issues ago called 'Eco-traitor' about another environmentalist, Patrick Moore, who (according to the article) is "a firm believer in James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis".
This is great as a complementary solution. The problem is that the solar energy could only be affordable on countries like mine (Spain), with loads of solar light every year but what about nordic countries? Wind harvesting is great, but you need huge amounts of terrain to do that (think about Holland). My hope is on hydrogen fussion, but I think that we're not specially near of using it on a regular basis. And I fear the huge amounts of energy we could launch to the planet with such a (supposed) cheap energy source... we're not kind enough to avoid soiling our own environment.
Your head a splode
Here in Spain in the region of Navarra they have 65% of their power supplied by the wind and sun.
By 2010 they will have 100% and they will export power to the rest of EU.
There is more to these things than meets the eye.
Technologies stemming from nuclear research have legitimate uses, from producing power, to radiotherapy. Bad things have been said about the space program too, but benefits have come out of it - safer aircraft designs, better treatment for heart disease and diabetes, and many other things which I haven't heard. Nuclear energy is not just a slightly radioactive substance comes in, what comes out will kill you instantly, and always will thing. While I wouldn't want to come near it, there are other types of nuclear power (other than fusion). One method which is being investigated (or was a few years ago) is the use of Theorium as a fuel. While this would still make radioactive byproducts, the half-life would be less than 300 years, meaning that the waste from a theorium reactor wouldn't stay radioactive for ever (1000s of years), and the fuel is probably easier to find (lamp mantles use it, as well as the infamous "Backyard Nuclear Reactor"), and it could be more widespread, not just because it is safer, but because the government doesn't need to keep a tab on who is using their home nuclear reactor to make Plutonium for their "Home Atomic Bomb".
And now, for only $49.95, upgrade from home nuclear power source, to Tritium/Lithium Deutride maker. Produces 50% more power as well as Tritium, Deutrium, and Lithium Deutride!!! Don't be forced to use old, out of date first generation fission weapons, make a thermonuclear device at home today!!!
There is one prominent natural resource that we still have plenty of....
Unfortunately that resource is coal. And burning coal is some of the nastiest shit we've ever done.
That is a whole 'nother worry about the oil situation: at some point, oil prices will start to go up, and won't ever stop. Maybe that's happening now. We'll have a choice - do we supplant our flagging energy sources with clean, risky, expensive nuclear... or clean, inadequate, expensive wind/solar... or dirty, plentiful, cheap coal?
We as a species have made decisions like this before and it doesn't look promising. Frankly, the problem of dealing with spent rods is a lot more palatable than a resurgence in coal burning....
(Aside: let's not forget, nuclear critics... 'threat of terrorism' is not a good reason to stop doing anything worthwhile)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
> And what happens with French waste?
They go into politics.
Why does he mention that "the Left was unable to notice the urgency of the situation" (or some other crap like that) Why single out the left, and not the right? Is he suggesting that nazis were right-wing? Hell, Nazis were more left-wing that right-wing! The name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutche Arbeitspartei for crying out loud!
Just take a look at their program! It has numerous leftist points in it (among others, nationalization of companies, profit-sharing, communal control of department-stores etc.). I really fail to see why Nazis are considered to be right-wing.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The potential for wind energy (in the UK, at least) is much greater than you think. In fact, it could supply three times the UK's electricity usage. This is just offshore wind farms; it doesn't account for all the various other environmentally-friendly sources.
While there would always be a need for balance in the energy supply (so solar power and wave/tidal power should also be looked into) is it really necessary to go rushing off to fusion just like that?
is politics and economics, nuclear, sun, coal, oil it doesn't matter. 'Interest and greed' is what is killing the global ecosystem, nuclear plants will not make it better, just more radioactive.
What's in a sig?
What's in a sig?
bringing Nazis or Hitler into an argument on a completely unrelated subject is the hallmark of weak debate skills and/or a weak case.
first of all terms such as "left" "right" "liberal" and "conservative" have little meaning anymore, any even less when comparing the 1930's incarnations of these poorly defined groups to their contemporary counterparts.
it was the "right" in classic terms that viewed itself as against empowering federal the government and against military interventionism, trying to blame hypothetically preventable actions during the second world war on one political party or ideology is a cheap shot and pandering for emotions. I agree a lot of time was wasted and many lives could have been saved had countries gotten involved sooner but as with everything in government, politics played a large role in the decision making process of both major parties.
On the issue of nuclear power, there are some obvious advantages to other energy sources but one disadvantage that is often overlooked is that the total lifetime cost of nuclear power is practically impossible to measure. The relatively low cost of power generation while the plant is operational is offset by the large initial cost of construction, and the absolutely enormous costs of decommission and cleanup. When a nuclear power plant goes out of service it leaves a massive complex and surrounding area that is all contaminated to various degrees, no one wants to live near it and no one wants to pay for the cleanup.
Are you really trying to make make a comparison between the amount of energy it takes to mine a quantity of uranium as opposed to the energy output released by the same. Please take your green logic back to the commune or at least respond with something semi scientific.
It's time to start shipping all that radioactive waste up to Moonbase Alpha while we still have a chance. Commander Koenig will know how to handle any issues they run into taking care of it up there ;->
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Anybody here working/studying in the nuclear field can comment on the state of these reactors and why we do not hear much from them? If the nuclear industry wants to come back, its not by proposing the old designs it will succeed.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Global warming has absolutely no link to anything of any scientific merit. Yes it may be getting warmer but WAKE UP the earth has cycles where climates change for some(many?) years then revert back. To say its all caused by humans or cow farts is the REAL idiocy.
BTW. For environmentalists causing problems: when was the last time an oil refinery was built in the US? When was the last power plant built in CA? Tip( Reagan edministration )
Then the same left wing morons complain about oil prices and power shortages.
Actually, from what i understand the brakes were put on nuclear power when the Carter (?) administration banned uranium reprocessing and all the power companies were stuck with finding a place for accumulating dangerous waste with no end in sight.
It doesn't take some radical green giant to know that nuclear waste is dangerous, and it doesn't take an economist to know that storing it is too expensive for profit-driven companies.
just a thought or two.
There was an interesting article in the Minneapolis City Pages (a leftist-ish free publication) about this problem, which may be found HERE
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
The SUV syndrome is mob mentality at its utter finest. "If no-body else is going to stop driving SUV's, why should I stop" is really one of the biggest problems with this issue, a typical Consumerican viewpoint, derived directly from the callous mob mentality currently perpetuated by "consumerist" ideals .
SUV owners are subject to supply and demand just like anyone else. As gas prices go up demand for SUV's will drop. I think I read somewhere that it is already happening. Do we need nuclear energy? Well... define "need". In my opinion "The Great Transition" [away from oil as a primary energy source] might be painful but the predictions of disaster are greatly overblown. Between belt tightening and alternative sources I think we can make it. As for global warming, again, the "new" environment will be different, it will suck in some ways and be better in others. Lastly, in all of this, the simplest and most powerful solution for making a transition is almost never mentioned. Tax oil (BEFORE refining). Try this thought experiment. Tax oil. Consumption goes down (supply/demand etc.). Competing suppliers respond with lower prices barrel prices in an attempt to keep market share. We (as a nation) effectively pay *less* for our oil AND our consumption rate decreases AND new markets are created for energy effiency AND alternative sources of energy become more attractive AND greenhouse gas emmisions decrease.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
"Let's go burn down the observatory so this will never happen again!"
The Simpsons, "Bart's Comet"
The most sustainable option still has to be to decrease our combined energy consumption. You know, simple things like using low-energy lamps and turning off the lights when you exit a room. Perhaps even (gasp!) walk or bicycle instead of going by car.
How long do nuclear power plants take to produce energy from the moment that you press the big red button?
One of the largest wastes on energy going at the moment with coal & gas stations is that they have to stay on 24/7 to be able to provide energy when it's actually wanted.
to take an example two power stations in my country. One is coal, the other is hydro-electric.
The coal one takes ~12 hours to start producing energy. The hydro-electric takes 12 seconds!
That is what we need in this day and age - If we need 1300 watts per house at the end of an episode of Corrie, with the coal systems we actually have to have the 1300 watts x 5 million houses being produced all the time, which is being wasted.
Spare capacity being produced is not what's needed. Spare capacity that can be created when it's needed, and switched off when it's not is the requirement.
Unless nuclear can provide this, it's still going to be contributing to the energy-drain of electricity produced that doesn't get used.
Hey! What pretty widgets?
The sun? We've been harnesting the sun for thousands of years for our energy, why not keep going?
Lovelock's answer to this is that there isn't time. Yes, the long term solution is solar power, directly or indirecly. But he says that Global Warming is so large and so imminent a problem that we mhave to reactivate nuclear as a stop-gap until we can ramp up solar.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I thought there was only economy-friendly global-warmth-effects?
Isnt that why dubya didnt sign Kyoto?
"/Dread"
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible."
"There is a worldwide market for perhaps five computers."
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
"Flying faster than sound is impossible."
"Landing on the moon is impossible."
"What makes you think anyone will want to buy that product?"
"What makes you think you are qualified to work here?"
All famously repeated statements and questions by skeptics.
"It is impossible to meet the demand for electrical energy with wind, solar or tidal power."
No difference at all.
Take a group of university students and give them this problem: "we need to replace the power generation capabilities of one electrical plant using only solar, wind or tidal energy (or all three) with a similar or lower operating cost by investing no more than $1 million"
The problem would be solved within six months.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I'm sorry to tell you, but sometimes numbers _do_ matter. It's true, we can get energy from sun, wind, biomass or tides, but it's the order of magnitude that kills you.
I didn't do the math, but try to think: what can you get from sun energy? 5% growing crops? 60% fotocells? Even at 100% it's just not enough. Covering square miles with cheap reliable high-efficiency solar panels would (maybe) get us close, but we don't even have that. From 1 square meter you can maybe boil a glass of water, but you can't heat your house in winter, nor make cars or computers.
There's more energy in the wind and in the tides, but 1. it's still not enough and 2. how much energy goes into melting 1 ton of steel? not to mention processing of ore etc. It takes years for such technology to break even (wind turbines have a lot of steel in them).
The real answer (not counting truly non-conventional approaches) is fusion, but nobody pretends it's closer then 50 years.
What we have left is classic nuclear power, or fission. It has its problems, mainly radioactive waste, but has a big hidden advantage: currently all nuclear power plants use old technologies, sometimes even ancient. Why? because the political climate is against innovation in this field, and sometimes greed: it's expensive to update a power plant that still works.
New plants can be cheaper, more efficient and a lot cleaner then what we have now, _if_ we give them a chance.
And another aspect: we, as a species, will never reduce our energy consumption in the forseeable future. SUVs or not, a lot more power goes into industry then cars and air conditioning. _And_ there's two thirds of the planet that still has to reach the level of cars and air conditioning, and they're not going to care about ecology until they do (nor should they, truth be told).
A guy like him? This is not some hippie. (well, he actually has a lot in common with your Bjorn Lomborg types, hippies of a sort) People trying to come up with reasons why global warming doesn't exist use his theories far more often than environmentalists do. How many times have you seen the "as CO2 increases more plants will grow to compensate you filthy liberal!!!!" right here on Slashdot? That's the Gaia theory, straight from this guy's book.
Of course, they also manage to combine that with a belief that deforestation and extinctions don't effect that moderating effect, but that's beside the point. Lovelock never had any problem with nuclear power. He's an environmentalist, not a anti-nuke activist. People that hate nukes hate them because they hated the cold war and extended that into a hatred of nuclear chemistry in general. That or they just took phyics in college and don't like all this stuff about hurtling beta particles penetrating their precious organs. They don't hate nuclear power because it somehow disrupts the balance of nature.
This is just a weird article. Sure, he's right and all, but I don't get this crap with the big capitalized "Left", whatever the fuck that is, and just the random politicization of what's mostly just a pretty straightforward factual point. Of course, Mr. "Steamy Mobile" doesn't really help with trying to make "nyah nyah you liberals suck!" the core point and trying to claim Slashdot is on the forefront of scientific progress. I seriously have been busting out laughing all through writing this over that one. Holy shit.
sure, after ya dispose of the bird carcasses... environmental group sue two wind energy companies
If the government were to decree today that a national program with federally subsuized grants would be paid for every homeowner to put solar cells on their house at an extremely cheap price, than there might be hope. The current programs actually penalize a homeowner for producing excess capacity. If the government did that, then the middleast would begin to rethink some of their strategies. Most of the people in the US would be off the grid and mostly seof sufficient. Other alternatives could be fuel cells, wind power and new nuclear reactor designs. Of course, fusion research too...
is slashdot left or right?
I had an imaginary sig once, he said I was a loser and ran off.
Obviously never heard of Godwin's law, then.
Still leaking radiation, still poisoning the Irish Sea, but now we needn't associate it with the near-fatal meltdown or the hole linking the nuclear-waste chute with the chimney!
Now, if your honour will allow, I present exhibit B: the waste facility at Douneray.
A large shaft was dug during construction to allow the pumping of seawater to the construction site. After construction finished, the sea end was plugged, and permission given to use it for the disposal of remaining building rubble.
This shaft, half full of water and of rubble, was then used for low level waste, both radioactive and non radioactive. Until one day there was a fire in it and the solid concrete lid was blown several yards away (who puts magnesium in a pit filled with water?)
Subsequent safety checks determined that the heat generated by the amount of radioactive materials was breaking up the pit and the sea cliff and would result in an environmental disaster as all this material leaked.
They had to empty the pit that they should never have been using in the first place.
Expertise? I think not. The prosecution rests, your honour.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The solution is to stop using so much fucking energy. Look at your pig wastage lifestyle. Do you still get new plastic bags each time you go to the supermarket? Wake up. Clean up your own habits. Study some permaculture.
Let me just say that I am hoping my dream will someday be realized. I imagine a future where the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will allow the one organization in the United States which is still making Nuclear Power Plants...to make some for commercial power production.
It would overjoy me to see the Department of Naval Reactors called in to work with government contractors in the design, construction and staffing of Naval Nuclear Power Plants (built on a larger scale) for civilian power consumption.
The plants themselves could easily be a logical evolution of those plants which are used in Nimitz class aircraft carriers. They already produce a considerable amount of power, combine 4 in one location (instead of the normal loadout of 2) and you have a very respectably sized power plant.
Furthermore, while the Navy would sell this power to other utility companies, the Navy is not charged with making a profit. Corners are not cut. Risks are not taken. The plants themselves would be guarded by Marines along with well armed civilian private security teams.
Is it the perfect solution? No...maybe not, but a Navy nuclear power plant can operate for over a decade without the need to refuel, something no civilian plant can come close to boasting.
Oh well...I keep hoping...
As for oil, we do not have an unlimited quantity of uranium at our convenience. When the mines will be empty, the same old problem will come again.
Maybe the real solution would be to lower energy consumption ? But, oh my god, this require people to do some efforts... Are you ready to get rid of your car ? To use less electricity ? To share all that energy with other people ?
they standardized on 1 design & worked out the bugs, reducing costs & risks, not 2 mention opposition;-) unfortunately, in the u.s. every new nuke is a unique design, with a new set of bugs to be discovered during and after construction:-(not to mention the hassle of unique regulatory approval)-: a guy i knew was hired to draft as-built blueprints of a nuke in michigan(? memory fades after 20 yrs; and, yes, as-built != as planned)-: he said he didn't want to be in the same state when it went online:-}
I don't know about you, but I say "better dead than shitting uranium".
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
You pay a fraction of what everyone else pays for fuel. Here in the UK we're now paying 0.82/L which is roughly $5.2 a US gallon. Now if that were the price of gas in the US THEN you would start to see a reduction in SUV usage.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
"Lovelock. What is that, German?"
"He changed his name; it was originally Liebeschloss"
(Paraphrased from Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelock")
i can't believe "your score" :-) is only 1
What's really frustrating about nuclear power is that the Greens are so vehemently opposed to it, and they're exactly the people who should love it and embrace it. They fear it because they think it's bad 'for nature', when in fact it's only bad FOR HUMANS. Humans are uniquely vulnerable to radioactivity. Most(all?) other species are not.
:-)
Consider Bikini Atoll. It was the site for many, many bomb tests, including the first hydrogen bomb. You probably think of it as a blasted desert, but in actual fact, it's a tropical paradise. It is in BETTER shape now, ecologically, then it was when humans lived there! It's even safe to visit, but you wouldn't want to eat the bananas.
In other words, nuclear power is WONDERFUL for the environment; the more radioactivity, the better (within reason at least), because it chases nasty humans out of the area and lets normal plants and animals live in (relative) peace.
The primary beneficiaries of nuclear power are also the ones who are hurt most by it, which seems eminently fair. We need to be very careful with nuclear waste for OUR OWN sake, but as far as Nature is concerned, it just doesn't matter all that much. This is exactly backwards to our existing power generation, in which we get all the benefit but pay virtually none of the cost.
Additionally, although many people simply will refuse to hear this, we have made many improvements in nuclear power since we last built plants. We had a tendency to grandiose engineering in the 70s, and we paid for that. There are much cleaner and simpler designs now. Materials science has improved enormously as well. Couple that with our much improved ability to monitor remotely, and we should be able to build plants that are nearly failproof. And if they DO fail, well, it's only humanity that will suffer.
I just don't understand why the Greens aren't all over this.... if they don't embrace this idea, it seems likely to me that their true motivation is less about "loving Nature" and more about "hating humans".
to these people;-)
Wow, you don't know much about solar at all. I suggest you do a little research. People have solar houses that are in use today that not only provide 100% of their normal electrcity needs but also run airconditioners. One guy has two of them running that I read about last year.
As a sidenote:
The winner of the Shell Eco-Marathon got as far as 3410 km on one liter of petrol. Thats more than 8000 miles per gallon.
Cars can be a lot more efficient, but there would have to be compromises in speed, comfort and safety.
threat right away. After all, wasn't taking control of the means of production, nationalizing businesses, and launching major work programs all done in Nazi Germany? (and coincidentially, tenets of most major leftist organizations?). Don't forget, Nazi meant National Socialism. They took great care of their poor (the ones they didn't send to the ovens, that is).
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
SUV owners are subject to supply and demand just like anyone else. As gas prices go up demand for SUV's will drop. I think I read somewhere that it is already happening. Do we need nuclear energy? Well... define "need"
Well, if you read the fucking article, you would realize that supply and demand is completely, utterly IRRELEVEVANT to the story.
There could be an infinite supply of fossil fuels, but the man would still be arguing to adopt nuclear power quickly. It has to do with the environmental impact of fossil fuels, not their projected future scarcity.
Right now, the environmental impact of SUV's is sufficiently abstracted such the average consumer will likely never appreciate their small contribution to the destruction of our planet until it is too late.
Tax oil (BEFORE refining). Try this thought experiment. Tax oil. Consumption goes down (supply/demand etc.). Competing suppliers respond with lower prices barrel prices in an attempt to keep market share. We (as a nation) effectively pay *less* for our oil AND our consumption rate decreases AND new markets are created for energy effiency AND alternative sources of energy become more attractive AND greenhouse gas emmisions decrease.
supply and demand. supply and demand. supply and demand. supply and demand. supply and demand. supply and demand. supply and demand.
You are like a broken record. Like most democractically minded people, you don't understand DEMAND ITSELF IS IRRELEVANT.
The people could demand SPECIFICALLY to destroy this planet, it doesn't mean we should let them. There is a very simple way to eliminate the demand in 99% of cases for fossil fuels: criminalize their possession.
Make it a capital offense, and that will be 99.9%.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Didn't you read the first post? Manufacturing solar panels creates toxic metal waste, so solar panels are unacceptable until they can be made solely from soy. And don't even start with wind power. I don't want them destroying my view of the ocean from my multi-million dollar Martha's Vineyard mansion.
Only on this planet. Orbiting at a different distance from the sun changes *ALL* that.
of alternative fuels is cow brains i kid you not there are some people looking at this seriously.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
This Article shows the temperature and CO2 concentration changes for the last 400,000 years taken from the Ice core in Antartica... Anyone else see a pattern? Anyone else think that the rise in temp in the last 20,000 years is actually less than previous changes? If you look at the length of time mankind has been having an effect on the planet, it's a tiny blip on and otherwise large and spiky graph. a
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
You can find it on the BP website and specifically look here: BP reports
While there is a LOT of energy falling on planet earth and alternate energy forms can yeild a significant source, it is unlikly that these sources combined with reduced wastage can make the kind of difference we need.
The BP reports show 2002 oil ouput in ALL middle eastern countries has been in decline since 2000 and that Norway and North Sea have been in a rather serious decline since 1999.
The 2004 report showing 2003 production is expected shortly. What I hope this report shows is an increase in production in certain countries like Saudi Arabia. I suspect it will not show this. This will put us more than 3 years past the peak.
If within the next couple years we do not see an increase in world oil ouput then I supect we can conclude that looking through the rear veiw mirror we have seen the Peak of World Oil Production. THere is a lot of information to be found at the Hubbert Peak Website
If one assumes a 5% reduction per year and this might be generous, then consider how much the world consumption is cut back within say 10 years or 20...
I am sure slashdotters can do this math and can add the number of years to their age. The bottom line is they may be growing old in world without oil.
However you slice it, do not expect Alberta to be able to pick up much slack with Tar Sands, even though we have about 1.8 trillion barrels in resources. The trouble is our tar sands reserves are only about 300 billion barrels and our TOTAL natural gas supplies (which are needed to supply hydrogen so the bitumin can be chemically lightened) are not even sufficient for 10% and North America is already in a Natural Gas crisis.
WE NEED nuclear plants (CANDU, not enriched, because CANDU burns natural uranium unlike the stoopid USA enriched reactors which I think were designed that way to justify enrichment facilities so bombs could be made)
Not only this, we needed to start building them 10 years ago. We are going to have some major power problems over the next few years.
Some of the newest, most advanced nuclear reactors are being used in the US's Navy on board submarines and aircraft carriers. I'm a mechanical engineer at Electric Boat, and every day I'm surrounded by submarines with nuclear reactors on board. Most of them are developed by General Electric and Westinghouse, and not the product of some "secret" organization that would cause the public to be dubious about.
These things are clean, safe, and reliable. Old reactor technology was shaky at first... heck, I'm amazed people were able to design them without much for computing power.
I'm a fairly skeptical person, but I have more fear of a doctors or dentist's x-ray unit malfunctioning than I do of nuclear radiation.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
It's funny. In Belgium they are reducing the use of electricity generated by nuclear plants (because the politicians think that nuclear power is bad). This loss will be compensated by buying electricity from France, which is generated by nuclear powerplants :-).
Stefano
I drive two cars: a 3L 24V 96 Taurus with 130,000 miles and a head gasket oil leak in its "Duratec" engine, which I drive in winter, a 2.2 L 16V 97 Camry with 100,000 miles and a power steering leak which I drive in summer because I bought it in Florida and was not exposed to direct road salt, only salt ocean air. Last year I ran 7800 miles on the Taurus at an average MPG of 25 and 7500 miles on the Camry at an average of 31. Just as they put low miles on the Concorde fleet to keep them in service, my theory is that I can keep this "fleet" going until more high gas mileage cars are available to chose from. There are no "beater" Prius cars on the road to give experience on how their battery ages.
The EPA on the Taurus is 20/29 -- the 96 Taurus had rather tall gearing, and later model Tauri have lower EPA numbers, in part from being regeared. At one time I thought I got around 22 in summer driving in town, 32 on the highway, but I don't have records to back that up. The Camry EPA is 23/30. Last year (I have records) in town was 25 and on the road was 35.
There are raw EPA numbers, and then there are consumer EPA numbers. In the 70s and early 80s, the sticker gave raw EPA numbers, and no one ever got those. I had a 2.5L 8V Chevy Celebrity with EPA highway of 38, and the best I did was around 35. You can look up all this info at www.epa.gov and as it turns out, the raw EPA highway on the Camry is 38. EPA highway also represents driving in moderate traffic on an LA freeway (EPA city is on LA "surface streets", more representative of suburban driving than downtown Manhattan), and there is a lot of 50 MPH running in it -- I imagine if I drove highway at a strict 55 and had people stacked up behind me trying to pass I could do 38 in the Camry.
Now there was a recent Slashdot article about how no one seems to get 60 MPG out of a Prius. I drive to get good gas mileage (steady speeds, no faster than 65 on the highway, anticipate traffic as best I can to coast to slow down), but the consensus seems to be that hybrids are even more sensitive to driving technique and EPA numbers on those things is an elusive goal. If the EPA numbers on the Prius are that high, the raw EPA numbers must be proportionately higher, which means there is some driving condition where you could probably get 70 MPG in a Prius, but good luck achieving that.
You're right, and now I did a little research. In about 10 minutes on google I found out:
- there are air conditioners that work on solar power. They consume about as much as a PC and it's a safe bet they're quite expensive
- to power a regular air conditioner by solar panels only would be "prohibitive" (the word came from my research
Anyway, my point was that you can't expect people to save energy if that implies disconfort or expences, especially in countries where energy savings would mean not just disconfort but poverty. You could (maybe can right now) build a house that would be completely solar powered even up north, but who'd afford to buy it at four-ten times the price?
There are some non-conventional power sources that are competitive, like river dams. They're still more expensive then nuclear power, and they tend to disrupt more environment, but still are probably second best (and better then OLD nuclear power plants).
SUV hopefully means car for those who don't know/hate TLAs.
People will give up their SUVs when they are too expensive to run. Which will happen when oil prices get stupidly high (because the US govt is not going to impose any significant pollution tax on cars). In other words, within 50 years.
"As gas prices go up demand for SUV's will drop."
Nice thought, but naive. In the UK, gas (petrol) prices are $6/gallon and there have never been more SUVs on the road as there are now. People regularly fill up spending 80 ($150) or so, that's how much it costs to fill up a Rangerover.
SUVs are a *status symbol* which means, like perfume, the more it costs the more desirable it is.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Finnish TVO (roughly translated "Industrial Power") just ordered a new nuclear power plant from french-german Framatom. A private company is building a nuclear power plant with private money in an EU nation right now! So maybe the situation is not so dark after all. The dumbasses in Sweden and Germany still think they can close down their plants, but Finns have faced the reality and realized that the fossil fuels are not a long-term option and the alternatives are not going to cut it yet either - we need power in the middle of a cold, still winter night too.
The waste is going to be buried in the stable groundrock, and we know it'll stay there until the next ice age in 10000 years. What happens then is a bit of an open question, though...
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
A friend of mine is a huge nuclear fusion advocate. Virtually no radioactive waste (less than a coal plant), little fuel required, which is easy to harvest (hydrogen - it's all around us).
Unfortunately, mankind has not been able to build a fusion reactor that produces more energy than it costs (because the ones that have been built are too small-scale), and nuclear fusion has a bad name, because it's associated with nuclear fission, which has problems and hazards that remain unsolved.
My temporary solution is just not using a lot of energy. I cook hot food, I take warm showers, I use my iBook, I travel on trains, and that's about it. I don't use electric light a lot, and use low power lights when I do.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Try this thought experiment. Tax oil. Consumption goes down (supply/demand etc.). Competing suppliers respond with lower prices barrel prices in an attempt to keep market share. We (as a nation) effectively pay *less* for our oil AND our consumption rate decreases AND new markets are created for energy effiency AND alternative sources of energy become more attractive AND greenhouse gas emmisions decrease.
Tax oil. Keep taxing it for several months, maybe years. Lose elections. Stop taxing oil.
Call yourself a geek? boxen dude, boxen
supply and demand, just like anyone else ...
... but right now, nobody seems to care, everyone just wants to profit from the crowd, or be in the crowd, or seems to think that just because they are part of the crowd, other crowds can't exist economically, etc.
... one can only wonder, and wait and see ...
Right. Mob mentality. Utterly.
The moment someone makes it cool for mobs to be green, then we'll see the Mob turned against this problem
the predictions of disaster are greatly overblown
Are they, though? Or is it perhaps more relevant that the attention given to guaging just how accurate these predictions are, is itself an overblown process, rife with mob view
In the meantime, I'm preparing for another stinking hot summer in Europe. What a game.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
And if you weren't an ecoterrorist you would have stopped to read his post. What did you do, search the thread for "supply" and then deliver a prepaid rant? He was responding to the poster ABOVE him, not the story. The grand-post asked what would get people out of SUV's. He delivered a response that was a hell of a lot more reasonable than killing people.
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
..... putting millions back to work in the manufacturing industries inside the US? Two and a half million manufacturing jobs lost in the past few years, how about just start building and deploying the technology that we have now, that works? Ask any of them guys currently out of work "hey, you want your old job back, same pay, but now you'll be making a model A wind charger instead?" What do you think they'd say to that?
When we decided to mass produce "stuff",instead of custom build it one at a time method, it took off, all of a sudden joe average not only got the benefit of having modern tech, he had a job that let him afford that tech! Why is it that anytime we see any sort of big government solution to a problem it revolves around a handful of giant international corporations making even more profits?
Smaller scale, distributed energy production means more jobs for more people,practical jobs, too, less points of energy failure or political machinations, more national security, not less. What's wrong with all that? There are millions of roofs inside the US just sitting baking in the sun every day, accomplishing not much other than wearing out the shingles. A million hilltops all over, the breeze just blowing on by, untapped. Hundreds of thousands of farms still not collecting and using the methane that could be garnered. How about as simple an idea as mandating tougher INSULATION standards on new buildings? 2x4 crappy built butt joint r-18 insulated walls are like ancient technology, but are still being made brand new, banks still pop for 20 year mortgages for that sort of non-quality construction, and it "passes code". Why, it's ill thought out and ridiculously energy wasteful. Modern building techniques at the medium and lower scales are teh suxs, really, they are pure crap. I'm amazed people even buy them, they certainly aren't going to last and people are buying guaranteed energy hog homes, or leasing energy hog commercial space. Dollar for dollar, just better construction efforts and more insulation results in a better energy savings and over all savings to the economy than any scheme, nuclear or anything else. I'm a solar and wind advocate, but I'm the first to admit that just better designed and more insulated buildings are the best deal out there to drop energy demand. If you don't NEED the massive constant energy input in the first place, isn't that a better idea? Here's another, how about mandating more recycling, force these international profiteers to take back their old worn out stuff for recycling, instead of just dumping it? And for more R&D and deployment of the renewables, how about bringing back 100% tax credits, not a deduction, a pure credit? When we had that, adoption of renewables was just proceeding great,interest was up, people were getting them, the small companies out there doing the new work required were making some decent inroads on improving the various technology, but then it ceased and it slowed down, just when things were looking good. Perhaps a few giant monopolies got scared, they saw their generations long dominance being disrupted. I don't know but that is what it looked like to me back then.
Nukes have some place in the scheme of things, but really, incredibly complex and dangerous and expensive tech to basically produce a heat source. That's all they do, make "hot" that not only is hot now, the resultant stuff stays hot and has to be literally guarded with military forces for the next several--whatever thousands of years it takes. That's critical mass societal arrogance to think we can do that. Ye gads, we got millions and millions of acres of "heat source" hanging around doing basically nothing in the south west. And all over any place else that gets even a modicum of normal rainfall we got several million more acres of land that could be put to use with such cross-useage practical crops as industrial hemp, a HUGE untapped resource that has energy and manufacturing useages. And the frozen methane hydrates locked into place all over the planet, sur
Lets not forget about the pebble reactor's when talking about nuclear technology. They are supposed to be a lot safer and a lot more efficent than most of the reactors used today.
As murphy said "If there is more than one way to do something, and one of those ways results in catastrophe, someone will do it that way". It is not "If anything can go wrong, it will.".
But the lesson is the same. The perfect nuclear reactor is the reactor that accounts for human error. Until then, we just need smarter people.
Its not the SUV problem I care about, its this problem:
... should I be any less concerned about those people than I am right now?
...
Maybe they just don't give a shit what people like you think.
What if, actually, what I "think" is correct, and the world is going to shit because its full of people who just don't care
In the big picture: What the hell difference does that 10 years make?
I dunno, lets find out shall we, Consumerican
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Well if you're going to choose that path then why not just drop pockets of nuclear waste in the middle of a "precious wilderness" such as New York City?
Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot, you believe you're somehow more special than the rest of the life on this planet.
I am sure the "Left" are completly aware of the energy problems in the world today (being a member of that group myself). Nuclear power is a very efficient way of generating energy. But obviously the problem is when 'Things Go Wrong'. If nuclear plants could be developed that would attempt to control any type of meltdown (Note - not a nuclear expert so no idea if this is even possible) and eliminate the change of environmental catastrophe, I'd support it. I'd rather have that uranium go to nuclear power than weapons.
But also another part of the solution is conservation. The excessive waste (of energy) that is present in society today also needs to change.
Do you honestly think that a few scattered dumps of well-sealed nuclear waste would be enough to keep developers out of the wilderness? These guys don't care. Just bury it and forget it until the foundations of their 30-years-then-tear-'em-down buildings fill up with krypton and radon. Put them under the parking lot. Hell, leave them on the neighbor's doorstep and let him take care of it. This solution neglects to take human shortsightedness and greed into account.
As an SUV Owner, I feel someone needs to respond to the hype surrounding the choice to drive an SUV. While these statements may not apply to other SUV owners, they do apply to a significant percentage.
I was drining a fuel efficient compact car before the SUV. It was easy, just me to haul arround. Then things changed. I now frequently have from 2-4 people with me on any givin trip. With the exception of going to work and back (5 mi each way), I rarely have less than three people in the vehicle.
Add to that that I am normally carrying either tools and equipment, or other gear, and I have little choice in efficient vehicles. I can either drive the SUV with space for me, my passengers, and the concomittant gear, or we have to split and take three vehicles.
Also, I find the SUV is great for towing boats.
I would love to own something smaller for the work commute, and when I don't need the SUV, but given the seriously inflated rates for vehicles and insurance here, I cannot afford two vehicles, so I drive the one.
Not all SUV owners are in it for the 'I have a big car' syndrome, although I will agree that many are. Some of us actually need the size and capacity of an SUV, and cannot afford to have a second pollution machine for everyday commutes.
Give me an affordable alternative, and I'm on it like white on rice, as they say.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
Go and take an economics lesson ;)
The idea behind supply/demand is that if you increase the price, its the same as a decrease in supply (kinda like restricting)
Now petrol (oh sorry, GAS) and 4WD's (oh sorry, SUV's) are supplimentry goods. That is, they go together. Make one expensive and people will use less of the other.
I cant explain it all (and I havent done economics for a while, so I may be a little bit off), but when we refer to "supply" of oil, we arent talking about how much of it is in the ground.
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
Pretty irrelevant considering The Left isn't represented in the major parties of the western world. Democrat or Republican (US), Coalition or ALP (Australia), Labor or Conservatives (UK); each of these parties is completely committed to laissez faire free market economic rationalism with little concern for society or the longer term.
The only policy differences (where there are any) are whether or not there will be cushioning programmes to soften the change and whether these pork barrels will be fed more to citizens or to big business.
Here in France around 80% of the electricity is nuclear (15% hydroelectric ...), it's not cheap but it's possible. EDF , the french monopoly, is actually the world leader (45 € billions, 22 % of the electricity of the European Union), so it can even become profitable (despite the huge investments). There's however a problem with nuclear waste, which is vehemently debated here. All nuclear plants are using the same technology (pressured water) and the MOX fuel, so on a large scale, they reduce costs and increase security.
This post is displayed with recycled electrons
Today, the US waste energy like there is no tomorrow. In contrast to developing countries, they have no good excuse for not employing more energy efficient technology/insulation. And the last thing the world needs is blaming environmentalists for the lack of options against the green house effect (that is still denied by the present US government AFAIK).
And "high" gas prices have already caused a fall in SUV sales.
From this article:
But even more interesting;
So much for the "fuel efficient" cars...Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
I reply to you and all others that ask the same and to the retards who mod me down as troll because they can't tolerate a dissenting opinion.
3 words: Delaying nuclear development.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
"rewriting of the constition"
...or maybe you don't because you're version of critcal thinking comes to you from the fuck'n TV...
I think you mean constitution...and if so...what 'rewrites' are you referring to?...i've yet to see the current admin take the white-out to that particular paper...
"...exert greater control over the population is some form of left-wing ideaology?"
yes...it is...but you already knew that, troll....
either way, you lose the bet, commie
energy is not measured in watts.
if the windmill generates power at a predictable rate, it will eventually pay off its initial energy expense.
imagine you buy a house for $100, and get $5 a month from letting it out. It takes 20 months to pay for itself. There are similar figures for every type of investment made, including renewable energy sources.
and when calculating the environmental impact of a renewable energy solution, its environmental cost of manufacture (how many plastics were used for example) has to be compared to the average environmental cost of the alternative methods the target area is using.
--dK
You associate an opinion different from yours to voting for bush. So "I must vote for Bush" so that you can easily fit everyone into the groups that agree with you and "the others". Us vs them, right? Where have i heard that before. And then you insult. Several times. As an AC. I feel flattered.
Maybe now you can reply to your own last question.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
Why should we have to give up our luxuries? Just put enough nuclear plants on-line to generate electricity so cheaply that it gradually displaces oil fired facilities and powers practically everything that doesn't move. That would reduce America's dependence on oil so much that the price of oil would drop enough to provide cheap gasoline for SUV's! ;-)
Note: I don't drive an SUV, and in fact I have a 4 Kw photovoltaic "net-metered" array on the roof that generates about half of the electricity I consume (it uses the power grid as a giant storage battery!); however, I think it's fair to say that the attitude of a typical "greenie" is for everyone to sacrifice and use less. All else being equal, I would much rather increase production and produce more, so that everyone could have as much of everything they want very inexpensively. Sacrifice that is pointless and unnecessary is without virtue.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
I love his idea of taking the nuclear waste into his own backyard (anti-nimby) and using it to heat his home and water :)
...
and then, think of the money you could make selling it to certain groups
But isn't world oil production determined by the large cartels -- OPEC et al -- and not by the amount of oil left? Is there any oil-field in the world being mined at maximum speed?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Yes, we are. However, I have no love for New York City and quite frankly, I don't see anything wrong with your suggestion.
I guess not. Would you mind finding out and posting the answer here?
Stick Men
jeeeeeez! didn't he see Godzilla?
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
I agree, but I don't think that, even then, you will see a dramatic reduction. People are paying a lot more for SUVs than they would be paying for a fuel efficient economy car. Over the course of a year, they may be paying hundreds of dollars more for gasoline, but they generally have already payed thousands more for the upfront cost of buying an SUV over an economy car.
Moreover, there are other significant costs to owning an SUV (and other luxery cars) that aren't always obvious at first; tires for example. Often enough a single tire for a large SUV can cost four or more times than a single small tire for an economy car, and only last half as long. Higher insurance, maintenance on the larger engines (more cylinders, more spark plugs, more oil). Often enough it even costs more just to get it washed.
So money is not the object here, for all but a small portion of those who buy SUVs. Personally, I'm not the anti-SUV zealot I may once have been. I still think it's a stupid buy, but if someone wants to waste their money then, well, it's their money. There's a lot of other big luxery cars that are just as bad on gas mileage yet, for some reason, we don't complain about those.
Frankly, my next car will not be an economy car. I'm getting old, I spend a lot of time in my car, and I want it to be more comfortable.
Anyway, to stay on topic, I've always supported nuclear ("Nuculer... it's pronounced new-cue-ler...") power, and was hoping 15 years ago that fussion would have been more advanced now than it is.
While there is a definate possibility of disaster with fission, the truth is that instead of releasing pollutants in the air, it's right there - ultimately in barrels. So there's your choice... you have pollution using fission or fossil fuels, but with one of these two methods the pollution is immediately released in the air, and with the other it's right there, in that barrel.
Yes, we need to deal with the barrel, but it's a better dilema than trying to deal with pollution that's already been released into the atmosphere.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
--the two techniques I am aware of that can store energy without using batteries are large capacitor banks, and just pumping water uphill someplace with the off-peak demand generated power. It's stored there as a potential, released on demand to fall back down and run something like a small pelton wheel or something. It's already being done for that matter, on big scales anyway, several large power plants do this. I've also seen some references to those air powered cars, just compressed air as an energy storage potential.
And batteries aren't bad, sane useage and they last for years and years, and can be rebuilt. So far, my storage batteries that are from 1998 are still working just fine. Plain old flooded lead acid, just I slapped a piece of modern gear on them, called a desulphator. That and never draining them dry works just great.
I think if the problems are approached from two directions it makes more sense. You have to put just as much effort into reducing demand as possible, along with increasing production, from various sources and in a more localised manner. Every time you can eliminate a watt demand, through a better built appliance or use, you reduce the amount of production needed. Instead of an incandescent light, a compact fluorescent or an LED array. Instead of a computer that needs liquid cooling, how about just being happy with a smaller processor that can struggle by with passive cooling? On a bigger scale, instead of having your furnace or AC kick on every 15 minutes from massively underinsulated homes, how about having them only kick on twice a day? I've SEEN that in the superinsulated houses I've worked on in the past. The energy savings are simply incredible. So, they just need less energy to work, and they work even better than traditional construction.
We have solutions, a few changes in the way people think can do wonders. The deal is, there is no "one"solution, there are hundreds of them, because each situation is slightly different. You plan out what is best for you, then do it. Waiting for government to do it, or waiting to see if the big guys are just gonna cut you some deal that is a better deal for you than it is for them is the true "wishful thinking" that is impractical and isn't going to work.
More taxes!
I bet we could lower the price of heath care that way as well!
It's almost too easy...
I heard that here, the uk, global warming will divert the gulf stream, leading to the uk getting a lot colder, not hotter.
"Actually, from what i understand the brakes were put on nuclear power when the Carter (?) administration banned uranium reprocessing and all the power companies were stuck with finding a place for accumulating dangerous waste with no end in sight."
You are obviously refering to the USA. But the problem is widespread. I'll give you an example of the attitude i see. In the country where i was born, a poor EU contry who couldn't be further from developing anything nuclear at all, we burn fossil fuels for energy. We have some dams as well. However, about 10 years ago there was a national campaign that produced some street signs (like ads) with the message "$CityName: Zone free of nuclear energy", which would be like posting a "zone free of fish" in the moon. But ppl voted for spending part of our small resources into those fucking signs. Why? Because of the green propaganda. While irrelevant for our future, this example shows the reigning attitude. And then the environmentalists claim to be "scientific". Hah, they are nothing but witch hunters, hunting whatever is called a which in the 21st century. Nuclear? Burn it down!
Of course there are real environment problems. That need to be solved, urgently. But the current crop of environmentalists won't cut it, at least the ones we hear about. It's like asking a shaman to remove a brain cancer. Solving the environmental problems requires a level of pragmatism beyond these ppl's wildest dreams. Maybe even beyond mine, i'm afraid.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
I always said that safety was over-rated anyway.
Is there any validity to the idea of generating Hydrogen from water by using a nuclear reactor? Everyone always talks about the difficulty of generating hydrogen for fuel cells etc, but if a lot of the electricity generated by a nuclear reactor is wasted it seems like it would make some sense.
Nuclear energy be clean and safe! If you don't beleive look into breader reactors. When the fuel rods are spent so is thier radioactivity (i.e. you can handle it with your bare hands!). The only problem is that due to the politics around this issue of nuclear power all most all research dollars are diverted else where, rather than into what is (potentially) a very high efficiency (supply on demand - unlike wind and solar power) energy source.
Yes a lot of energy goes into the mining of uranium but how much energy goes into mining the raw materials to produce and the production of batteries to store the engery of wind and solar systems? A breader reactor could run for over 50 years on the one set of fuel rods (and your bi-product is safe to use as land fill - you can't say that for current battery technologies).
Nuclear energy is disturbing the sun. Just check out the statistics behind solar flare outburst after nuclear bomb testings. The statistics speak for themselves, although we don't have the science yet to explain it.
What's scary is most of the "global warming" we're experiencing is really coming from the sun.
No, nuclear energy is disturbing life and the universe around us in ways too subtle for us to detect yet. In the future, we will abandon it for much better alternatives (both natural, more efficient and can be used for everything).
Turns out that your former president Clinton didn't fancy nuclear energy, so he shut down a lot of innovative nuclear energy research projects. Including the EBR-II / IFR thing you linked to.
...until there is a lot more pressure by voters to do something and it's very unlikely that will happen.
At the end of the 70's we had the Oil Crisis and the U.S. started the Department of Energy which began many programs designed to free the U.S. from dependance on foreign oil and find alternative energy supplies. That program has been dismantled by conservative governments beholden to oil interests. Our current president certainly isn't going to do anything to harm the industry that gave his family it's wealth.
Over the past 30 years, I've seen a fundementally sensible environmental movement painted in the colors of radicalism by special interests. Tell someone that you are pro-conservation and you are instantly labeled a "Tree Hugger", "Hippy", or the catch-all, "Communist." Lately, if you express concern that our actions may be making irreversable changes in the climate, you are an alarmist or you are trying to scare people in order to gain political advantage."
The planet Earth doesn't need saving, humanity does. The planet and life will most likely survive the comming changes just fine, but there is no guarantee that humanity will. A species that destroys it's habitat will go extinct.
There is no simple answer to the problems we face. A lot needs to be done. We need, first and foremost, to raise educational standards around the world, because our children will ultimately pay the price for our folly. They need to be prepared. Next, we need to reverse the world population growth. There are too many people. Every additional person means a greater energy requirement and that energy means waste heat which will contribute to the problem. We need to conserve the resources we have. That means using ALL the means that have been developed to replace our dependence on fossil fuels: wind, solar, tidal, geothermal... the list goes on.
The most important element that we have to have to succeed, though, is a willingness to badger our politicians and make our own personal sacrifices to help. We need to use less hot water in the shower. We need to buy fuel efficient vehicles, or better yet, use the train; or better yet, ride a bicycle and convert some of your own mass to energy. We should be using solar energy where feasible and trying to find ways to efficiently store electrical power for the power grids so that power plants can be run at energy conserving rates rather than constantly varying there output to match demand, something that wastes a tremendous amount of energy.
All of the developed countries should be investing in research on new ways to attack these problems as if our very survival depends on it. It may.
Finally, we need to remove the hysteria and fear politics from the issue. We need to look at what needs to be done with clear calm eyes and make the choices that are sensible. We need to tell people the truth rather than scaring them with inflated stories or telling them placating lies. This last part demands a lot more of the world's press than seems likely.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
I can't speak for the UK, but since gas prices have gone up in the US for the past few months, SUV sales have dropped considerably. I also just heard a story about how the price of the criminally large and gas guzzling Hummer dropped recently because of low sales.
With gas prices so high in the UK I could see how increased prices wouldn't affect the very wealthy. In the US, however it's the middle class that own these evil, gas guzzling, more-likely-to-kill-people vehicles.
AccountKiller
What about using the most obvious Nuclear Energy.. The sun?
Lee Raymond, CEO of Exxon, appeared on Charlie Rose on May 5 and in my opinion effectively debunked the solar power myth.
He said if you covered the entire state of New Jersey with solar panels, they would generate enough energy to supply only 10 gas stations. He went on to say that the proponents of alternative energy do not seem to appreciate the magnitude of the energy problem.
And the conservatives already control you....
You, sir, are correct. I don't need a car at all. It might be handy to have one, but I don't need it. And they do lots of nasty thing like polluting, making noises, cost money, and so on.
So guess what? I don't have a car. Now I do have a bike, but I don't use it. That's because I can take the time to walk the 30 minutes to work every day.
The real reason ofcourse is that I'm just too lazy to fix my bike, but then again that is kinda fit of me or what? :)
Damn us green liberals or what? *grin*
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
This reasoning really isn't too surprising, if you understand what his Gaia hypothesis is all about. The earth, as a living organism, will "adapt" to the insult of a little nuclear ("nucular", if you're a Bushie) waste scattered about, through some sort of homeostatic mechanism. Apparently this doesn't apply to rising CO2 levels, however...
There is a catastrophic reason for doing it. An absolutely catastrophic one. If we don't get good at using much less energy soon, we're going to have a very hard landing when the oil gets too expensive to pump. Think total melt-down of the economy. Even in the grain-rich United States, people can and will starve in huge numbers if the grain can't be moved economically from where it's grown into the cities.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
"He compares the threat of global warming with the threat of the Nazis in 1938, and says that in both cases, the Left was not able to grasp the urgency of the situation and see the necessary solution."
He obviously doesn't know that the Social Democrats were the *only* party to vote against Hitler. (The communists, by that time, were already forbidden.)
And the first Hitler government was a coalition government with the middle-right parties.
Nazis weren't socialists - they just liked to use the label. They were far right extremists.
You irresponsible fuck. No wonder the world hates you and your people!
If you can think of a way to store this energy, fantastic, please share. Otherwise, back to the drawing board.
Even a partial solution to a problem is better than no solution at all. If solar can reduce dependence on coal and oil by one quarter to one half, that goes a long way to helping out.
Why don't we jump start the whole process and send a free compact fluorescent light bulb (or voucher for same) to every taxpayer on the IRS rolls? Ask folks to replace the most-used incandescent bulb in the house.
If my math isn't terribly off, that will save the equivalent power output of 3-5 average-sized power plants in one year.
You know it is real bad when This becomes the BEST available choice.
no god is good
Imperial Gallon = 4.54litres
Therefore 22-27mpg(US) = 26.4- 32.4mpg (UK), not quite as bad as it appears - though hardly 'economical' in European terms..
dieoff.org - This site offers a lot of useful references, and a thought provoking synopsis about oil production and how transition to declining energy availability signals a transition in civilization as we know it. The associated mailing list is also informative.
The "consumption goes down" step corresponds to the "then a miracle occurs" in the famous S. Harris cartoon. You'll see a little blip. Consumption will go down by an insignificant amount for an insignificant length of time and then return to pretty much the former trend. And then the tax disadvantage will be eaten away with a dozen abatements.
People can't afford to junk working vehicles just because fuel prices are spiking. They won't do it. Not for long, anyway. They hold onto older cars *longer* because the money they'd spend on new ones is being swallowed by the gas pump. Once they find a way to bring fuel prices down, the people who were *forced* to accept something smaller than they wanted will go back to bigger models and the manufacturers will be happy to supply their demand for premium merchandise. The only ones left driving small efficient cars will be those of us who prefer small efficient cars.
That's the way things work outside of repressive dictatorships -- people are free to make their own choices according to their own values. You won't make lasting changes in behavior without making lasting changes in values.
hmm... beter post this anon.
"...but before I start taking advice from an 84 year-old, I want to see them either in person or on TV to get a feel for how together they are."
Is that really how you judge people? Like they're all on American Idol?
Based on your reaction to him, I'd say you're young and stupid.
We are often told that nuclear waste is unavoidable, massively dangerous and has a very long half life. This is not strictly true.
We are quite lucky with fission products, because they all have half lives under 35 years. This site gives an overview of the common ones. Sr-90 and Cs-137 have the longest half lives, at around 30 years. The relatively small amount of genuine waste only needs containing (or recycling into nuclear batteries) for a few hundred years, instead of the tens of thousands usually quoted.
The other products should be recycled back into fuel; without reprocessing, nuclear waste does become a major problem. Breeding of fuel - which reduces the amount of uranium mining and the amount of depleted uranium you end up with - should also be used; this extends the fuel supply to over a hundred years (assuming you use it for everything and grow by 5% per year).
Nuclear plants are easiest and most economic to run on a 24/7 basis. This could be achieved by providing an alternate load, in the form of a methanol plant (or choose your favorite liquid fuel); instead of the hard task of regulating the electric grid by switching electric plants on and off, you just vary the rate of liquid fuel production. The fuel than keeps your SUV on the road. With such a set up, even more variable sources such as wind, solar and hydro could easily be plugged in to make more fuel.
[begin standard green rant]
Yes, but the Sun is a non sustainable system. The Sun is losing energy! We must not waste the Sun's Energy. We will lose our source of Solar power in a few million years. We must develop a better solution. We need an energy source that will last billions of years and is completly sustainable and produces zero waste products. The sun just isn't a viable solution it will burn out in a few million years, then where will we be?
[end standard green rant]
You know, it seems very true this year that the sun is never seen over the UK.
I've got several solar mini-projects on the go this year and unfortunately it is dense-overcast too often to get any good charging hours in the day.
I've already got a large 7ftx7ft panel which 'in theory' should have been able to charge my deep-cycle bank enough to keep a low-current webserver running overnight. This summer makes it look like I'm going to need a panel twice the size.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Banning trades unions, killing communists, socialists, feminists, gays, union leaders; cosying up to big capital a la Krupps. Very left wing, fuckwit
Plenty of the British left realised the threat of fascism as they were fighting them in the streets while the middle classes were reading headlines like "Hurrah for the blackshirts" in the Daily Mail.
And no, the poor were not well treated under the Nazis.
As for storage, deep cycle marine batteries are the quietest and relatively inexpensive small site storage option, and running lighting and small appliances from a DC chain improves efficiency even more.
You can even lose the wasteful AC-DC converters used by so many appliances that are designed for DC but have to run in AC wired households.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
While it is true that both fossil fuel energy and nucelar energy produce extremely dangerous waste products, one is expelled into the atmosphere and one is packaged into a convenient block that can be dealt with. The pollution from fossil fuels is incredibly more damaging than that from nucelar sources because it can't be controlled. Sure, some scrubbing can be done before its expelled, but eventually you have combustion gases being expelled to the atmosphere. With a nucelar source, all of your waste is in the form of a pile of fissile material and a tank of radioactive water. The water can be reused and the fissile material can be sealed up, immobilized in something like Synrock, or perhaps used for more energy extraction (after all, if this stuff is putting out radiation, it seems there should be *some* way to harvest it)
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
> Apparently this doesn't apply to rising CO2 levels, however...
Which is ironic since as CO2 emissions increase, plant growth increases....
Yup, and the likelihood of that happening anytime soon is 1 in 999999999999999999999999999999999999.
The oil supply is not diminishing. I have seen "serious" academic studies quoting the fact that domestic production of oil decreasing is due to diminishing supply. Nothing is farther from the truth! The reason why domestic production is slipping is because of regulations, particularly the environmental kind. Take ANWR, for instance. The oil industry sees a huge cache of oil in one of the remotest and uninhabited spot of American soil - the arctic tundra. However, we aren't able to access it because people are worried we might injure some poor fox or caribou.
Another reason gas prices have spiked recently is due to California regulation of the refining industry. Recently some new regulation went into effect that basically shut down a large segment of the industry. They can't get permission to build new refineries, and the neighboring states won't allow it either, so that whole section of the country is seeing huge gas price increases, all of it manufactured.
All that we need to do to fix this energy "crisis" is to open up the regulations so that we can have a significant supply of our oil coming from domestic sources. Then, we need to relax the burdens on the refineries to lower the cost of refining and reopen existing refineries.
There will be two added benefits. With domestic production outpacing foreign production, we won't be so interested in maintaining a stable Middle East in the short term. In other words, we will tolerate social uprisings in Saudi Arabia, perhaps a civil war or worse, rather than cowtowing to every possible disruption in the supply. Also, loosening the regulation on gasoline will immediately lower the prices of it, allowing poor people to once again attend to their jobs and perhaps work themselves out of poverty.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Nuclear power is awesome. It is true that no nuke power plants have been ordered since 1979, but Plant Vogtle only came online in 1987/89. Check the link: "The total net generation for both units in 1998 was 18,549,806 mwh...". That is 18.5 *TERA* *WATT* *HOURS* . Unit 2 alone did 10.3 in 2000. Do you know how much coal/oil it would take to replace that? Neither do I, but I'll bet its a more than a few train-loads or tanker-fulls.
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
I always felt that the AGR was a much better idea than the PWR, because in the event of accident convection would keep the core cool.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I am not willing to give up my SUV.
I AM (or will be), however, willing to buy a hybrid engine SUV, or a fuel cell SUV.
I wonder if all these "safety" arguments will go out the window once these machines arrive, and they WILL arrive. There are some interesting things you could do with respect to design of hybrid SUVs and car companies will make them.
The answer to this is not to try and make SUVs illegal, it is to bring them along in the move to alternative fuels.
Indeed, and the main problem with nuclear waste is that so many people simply don't want to think about the barrels.
And there's many new design concepts on drawing boards around the world. All it takes, as Col. Kurtz said, is the will to do it.
--- Ban humanity.
If we were to shift over to nuclear, we'd run out of *it* in less than 50 years. We really, really need to develop alternate energy sources!
An aside -- Did you know that it's possible (with a process involving very high temperatures) to de-radiate nuclear waste? If we were to do so, however, we'd soon run out of radioactive material, which is actually quite useful stuff.
The oil isn't really cracked, per se, you've merely switched one book cover for another. It's sort of like taking a big thick hardbound book, and turning it into 3 paperbacks, and then discarding the old cover.
You have to be really sure you don't have any water in the rxn, or you get soap or nothing, if you're using ethanol. It's much easier to make the rxn go with methanol than with ethanol.
As far as I can see, biodiesel is the only stopgap measure we have that's halfway realistic to meet the Hubbert Peak.
However, it's probably going to take a Mad Max trilogy before we stop using oil as a main source of energy.
...it's where I keep all of my stuff!
For one thing, it turns out a major problem with nuclear energy is the cost of building plants - nobody in the West seems to have been able to build nuclear power plants for a capital cost that comes close to competing with the fossil fuel plants or even almost all hydro-electric installations. Wind can be installed cheaper than nuclear now. But lots of other issues there too.
Energy: time to change the picture.
We have the technology to make safe, efficient, and clean nuclear plants in the United States. We haven't had an accident. Even Three Mile Island, oft-quoted as a disaster, completely contained the malfunction and it is safe to tour the site today as it was right after the incident.
m l
The only problem with Nuclear power is that the plants take years to build. There is no hope that after investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build a plant that politics will shut it down once it starts up. In effect, no investor will approach it.
The United States needs to start a campaign to educate its citizenry about the benefits and real drawbacks to the nuclear power industry. We need to teach in our schools the facts of nuclear power from where we obtain the raw materials, how they are processed, how much waste is produced, and how efficient it is. If we laid out the facts, including how long the isotopes will last and where we will store them, then maybe we can get some serious private investment and some serious growth in the industry. Perhaps we can totally replace our coal and natural gas burning plants with nuclear ones. Maybe we can retrofit our commercial ships with the safe reactors that our submarines and battleships have.
The bottom line is that there is so much misunderstanding about radiation, nuclear isotopes, and the like. The restrictions placed on background radiation on the Yucca Mountain was more severe than the restrictions placed on granite statues in the capitol building. A smart researcher brought his geiger counter with him and demonstrated that some of the statues we adore are actually more radioactive than the Yucca Mountain would be allowed to be!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,21015,00.ht
I for one am still hoping our 1950's utopian dream about nuclear power will be realized.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
hear hear. mod parent up
The total energy/environment picture can sometimes be a funny thing...
:)
I just read a rapport (not "sponsored", no, this was academic, and a surprise find) that found a very large demographic of city people without cars to actually be a worse threat to the environment than the people driving around in their (big) cars - because they tended to travel more with airplane. And that tipped the scale completely the other way.
So sitting there without cars feeling good about themselves and bitching about the drivers polluting, they (I should say we, I'm one of them) actually was a bigger problem.. Because we like to travel, see the world, etc. Not staying home driving SUVs
This may be looked at different ways of course, and may be completely different in other places, but this concrete find was not the point. Just an anecdote for thought really...
use it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and store it as fuel cells...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Please don't consider this posting being anti-american per se but could somebody please explain this to me:
Why is stopping the wasting of energy (ac/ SUV/ electrical heating etc. pp.) and starting to save energy as a possible solution such an incredibly frightning idea especially to US-Americans?
I just don't get it.
k2r
...but so does plant cultivation. It takes quite a bit of diesel to grow an acre of anything...and quite a bit more energy to render the product into usable form.
Style? I couldn't care less about style. Try fitting two tall, beefy teenagers in the back seat of a typical econobox.
A year ago I took my eldest son with me to the auto show and we tried on a lot of vehicles. The Grand Cherokee was cramped. The &%&^%& *Hummer H2* was cramped! The Dodge Ram Crew Cab half as big as our house was cramped!!! The smaller models caused him to emit sounds of pain as he tried to get in and out. He didn't even attempt the VW New Beetle.
The only two vehicles we tried that had enough room in back were the Ford Windstar van and [applause!] the tiny Toyota Echo. I'll be buying the Echo, but if you don't like Toyota and have big kids then you're kinda out of luck unless you are willing to accept something huge.
(Interestingly enough, Toyota had a *far* larger, SUV-type model there too, and it was *too small*! Much less roomy than the Echo. Dunno what the Echo engineering team did, but I hope they do a lot more of it. "Stood up to the stylists and insisted on a practical design" gets my vote.)
"I get 40mpg in my fairly sporty car"
Sigh. First a few things:
1) The imperial gallon is much larger than a US gallon, therefore, its closer to 30mpg.
2) sporty is not a "kia".
3) My BMW 330i gets 22MPG around town. it is "sporty". Anything with less power than that thing is hardly "sporty".
Still: 2-4 passengers, several CF of tools, you could probably get by in a VW Jetta wagon or be comfortable in something just a little larger.
A diesel Jetta wagon would get you 38-48 MPG on your commute, and still get you good mileage with 4 people and a bunch of tools in the back.
But did you even think about getting something smaller than you did? How often do you use the full capacity of your vehicle? Is it really worth it?
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Also inherently flawed, since when was the last time a world super power listened to the U.N. when it strongly urged them not to do something?
Besides, Lovelock should know that it's easier to pump gasoline from an underground storage tank than it is to pump uranium. Not to mention the fact that you have to dispose of the remaining materials somewhere. Not nuclear, I don't know what aside from it, but not nuclear.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Real numbers, but it happens to be a motorbike, and one I specifically chose because it was efficient. I'd ignore the figures quoted by the EPA or manufacturers, they are only vague indications.
Ask people who actually own a vehicle what sort of milage they get and how they drive. Pure petrol cars get crap milage if stuck in traffic all day, if they are out on the motorway sitting at 55 all day it will be near the optimal. With the hybrids on the other hand it's the other way around, you'll probably get the highest mpg figures if it rarely uses the petrol engine, i.e. crawling about in urban traffic all day at 15mph. If you use it on the motorway it uses the petrol engine rather than the electric motor and so will reduce the efficiency.
BTW, there are now on the market, fully battery powered vehicles which can sit at motorway speeds with a range of 250+ miles and there are 4 person prototypes which can do 373 miles all on a single charge.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Your former president? First, we have a prime minister in Canada, not a president, and Clinton made american politics, not canadian.
:)
You made a quick assumption about my citizenship.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
I don't think there is any natural water-course anywhere near me :)
Luckily my little vertical wind generator works reasonably well so I might scale it up at some point. (problem being that you can hear it at night)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
you crack me up. reminds me of college. i had this girl accuse me of being "speciesist" once. hilarious.
Well, the problem is NIMBY. Nevada would have been a good place, I used to live there, I visited the site, and it seemed like it was a good choice for long term storage. I worked at the NSCEE (National Supercomputing Center for Energy and the Environment), and I've seen the simulations of what would happen with a leaky barrel and so forth, and none of it scared me at all... I'd have felt perfectly safe.
The only dangerous part, IMO, would have only been getting the barrels to the facility - but I've also seen the tests they did on the transportation containers - getting hit by a train at full speed and not breaking. IOW, IMO, the most dangerous part is not particularly dangerous.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
What good does it do to tax oil more when the price is passed through in the forms of goods and services. Consumers would spend more on gas upfront, and more on everything in the long run. Also, your assuming that there is no price fixing in the oil industry. OPEC doesn't truely compete. The good news is, the more we pay for gasoline, the cheaper alternatives look. Alternative fuel 18-wheelers will make for interesting talk. Has anyone seen one yet?
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
"If Pu239 is left in the core for longer, it can capture another neutron or two to make Pu240 or Pu241 which dramatically affect reliability of the weapon."
In a positive or negative way? That is, if I use pu241, does this make the weapon all the more likely to explode? Or does it shorten the useful life?
Sounds interesting. Any links?
This is probably too late to the discussion, but has anyone seen any good analysis in terms of environmental risk and damage between Oil (or even coal) and nuclear?
My problem with the whole debate between fossil fuels and nuclear is that people are scared to death of what nuclear power could do them, but the are perfectly okay with the effects of burning fossil fuels.
My point is, is nuclear any more dangerous than burning gasoline every day to go to work?
Sometimes I wonder if it's just people over-reacting to a new technology because its related to the a-bomb or big green-glowing pieces of metal which help kill you in a gruesome way.
Slowly killing all life over the next 150 years doesn't scare us enough, it seems.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Firstly, it is highly questionable if the "Left" failed to stop Nazism, or even logically could have, as Nazism was an outgrowth of socialism combined with nationalism. The economist F.A. Hayek, in "The Road to Serfdom," noted that socialism would almost inevitably grow into a nationalist ideology. It is worth noting that the full name of the Nazi party was the "National Socialist German Worker's Party." Only those who deny the reality that socialism has a strong tendency to evolve into a totalitarian government, especially as the private means of production allows one to direct their own life as they see fit, and the state appropiation of this would lead to total control over the populace, if the program of socialization was utter and total.
As for global warming, the consensus among the scientific community is by no means solid. Perhaps 10% at most are convinced that global warming exists, that it's effects would be harmful to humanity, and that this could not be checked by human innovation. The vast majority of the scientific community, on the other hand, is either not convinced of its existence, or believe that the effects of global warming would be far less catostrophic that the Cassandras would have us believe. Indeed, it has been theorized that slight global warming would lead to longer growing seasons and greater crop production. As for the claim that such diseases as malaria would extend its reach beyond its current reach, we must remember that malaria was once widespread among the United States, and that it was public health initiatives, not a more temperate climate, that eliminated this scourge from the nation. Others point out that we are still coming out of an ice age, and that tropical conditions once existed far north and south of the Equator as at present, and they believe global warming is only a result of the natural cycle of the Earth's climate.
Let me make clear that I am in no way stating that those who believe otherwise are flawed or otherwise of poor character. The vast majority who hold views contrary to my own no doubt hold good intentions, but are in my opinion, due to the lack of diversity of thought throughout much of the common media, misinformed, or at the very least not confronted with alternative viewpoints that may challange their preconcieved notions of the world. However, let it be made clear that while one can disagree whether Nazism was on the "Left" or the "Right," it was an outgrowth of socialist thought of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Likewise, regardless of where one stands on the theory of global warming, the fact of the matter is that the scientific community as a whole is divided on this issue, with the current consensus of the vast majority that it either does not exist, is occuring naturally, or is occuring naturally and/or is man made, but will overall be beneficial to humankind.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
You worry about mining costs, but you assume wave and wind energy is free.
It's not. Converting waves to energy takes energy from the movement of the ocean. Enough such change will have (unexpected) impact somewhere.
The same goes for wind. Wind seems free, and sure it's not likely that we'll take much, but we will affect weather subtly (or not so subtly).
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Oops. Sorry, I don't know where I got that idea from.
In the oil market, even the economists (who love simplicity more than engineers) have to begin to look at inelasticities over time periods. Look at the oil shocks in the 70s and then follow the rise of Japanese (a proxy for smaller and more efficent cars) in the years following that. Also keep in mind that the ideal cartel strategy is to prevent prices from rising to a level where either consumers become rapidly more efficient or E&P picks up signficiantly (after that fixed costs become sunk costs). The oil market is interesting mostly because it's highly inelastic in the short term (I can't drill a well or buy a new car (or factory)next week to take advantage of gas prices), but very elastic in the long term (I can do both in the next 5 years).
You are exactly correct in your final statement, and there are a host of tradeoffs an oil producer must make between pumping faster vs pumping longer. You can run a well at many pumping speeds but you reduce your overall yield from the well if you deviate from the ideal pumping level. A simple case is drinking a slushee if you slurp quickly you exhaust all the flavor from an area (and get less flavor than if you slurp slowly over a period of time. Unlike your slushy you can't pull your straw and resink it or stir the mixture around in an oil field (I always thought that presented an interesting mental picture).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Every few years, it seems, a new climate-change scare is publicized in order to keep the parade of emissions regulations rolling along. The scare is eventually debunked, but the debunking is never as widely disseminated as the original tale of woe. The end result is an erroneous public perception that, much like Saddam's supposed connection to 9/11, drives public policy toward a particular outcome, no matter what the real science suggests. (Draw your own conclusion.)
For quite a while now. Solar II in California generates electricity at night be storing the energy as heat during the day. It heats salt up to 500+C and stores it as a molten liquid in big tanks. It then generates power from the stored heat as required.
There are compressed air power stations which store energy in underground caverns, natural and man made. They can use the solar and wind power to compress the air for later generation on demand.
Both of these mechanisms are in use *now*.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Style? I couldn't care less about style.
Yet none of your tests were of minivans.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Large-scale photovoltaic farms supplying power to grid system, simultaneously electrolysing sea- and waste water for hydrogen storage. Hydrogen is used in fuel cells and gas turbines for nighttime power generation, and becomes mobile fuel of choice for gas turbine-powered trucks, trains, eventually personal transport. Large-scale hydrogen-burning plants condense exhaust reclaiming fresh water for reticulation. Provincial communities either pipe or ship in hydrogen for local power and water generation. Produces many new industries, high latitude countries import cheap hydrogen to supplement nuclear power.
Hmmm, maybe they should read old Popular Science backfiles. Considering the ruinous conversion rate and the nassty byproducts of refining so much silicon, PV doesn't look so good. But there have been a lot of ideas that show up and then disappear, and we never hear why they wouldn't work out.
You can pump water with excess energy and recover much of the energy later by letting the water flow back and drive the pump in generator mode. Do something similar with compressed air. (They wanted to pump the air into abandoned oil wells, IIRC. Re-use!)
You can get energy densities similar to nuclear power cores from big arrays of mirrors focused on a common collector -- more than enough to extract the energy as heat.
You could use the electricity to electrolyze water and store the energy as molecular hydrogen, or couple it to a hundred other energy-consuming but readily reversible reactions.
We know a lot about storing vast quantities of energy. We need to learn more, but we know enough to get started.
I think the suggestions on nuclear power are good thoughts.
First, Chernobyl had a graphite core which when it over heated caught on fire. All modern Nuclear power plants in the US use water.
As far as waste, there should be 1 world location for disposing nuclear waste. Lets just say yucca mountain. If it is centralized it would reduce the waste problem.
Solar is starting to look promising. New solar cells with 3 band gaps are being developed. Other cells are being developed with better organized nano crystals. Thus, solar cells are do for a 40-60% increase in power output.
The nuclear call is wise. If oil runs out ( which it will ) half of eatth's human population is going to die because it depends directly on oil. No oil equals no fertilizer and no tractor for mass farming ( 4 passes over a plot of land ) and no transportation of food to people.
Somolia is a good example of no food transport. That is, the rebels prevented food distribution.
How about the most obvious/sustainable energy of all, muscle energy? It works like this: You grow food, harnessing the sun's (and other) energy. You feed that food to a horse, and eat some yourself. If you need to go somewhere, you ride the horse. When it wears out, you get a new one. Putting two horses of each sex in a barn together almost always results in more horses. It's a brilliant idea, one whose time has come.
Supply and demand only works for elastic demand.
If the demand is inelastic, it doesn't work.
Example: if your choice is take this pill every day, without fail, or die, you're going to take the pill, because if you don't take the pill, you die. If there are only so many people who need the pill, and only so many suppliers, it won't pay anyone any more to make more pills, so the existing suppliers just cruise along. When there are more people who need the pill than there are pills, you can get interesting economic effects.
Change "pill" to "food" in the above paragraph, and you get "wars" where it says "interesting economic effects".
If there are only the existing suppliers, and the existing customers are getting older, the suppliers have to find new customers or start losing money. Think "tobacco" and "RJ Reynolds".
When demand is elastic, so some people can go without the pills, but there are still more willing buyers than there are sellers, you get auctions, and the buyers with more quatloos bid the price up. In a free market, when the bid price gets high enough, other people notice that there is unsatisfied demand, and money to be made, and they start making more pills, and prices drop.
THIS IS FRESHMAN MACROECONOMICS, PEOPLE. GET A FSCKING CLUE!!!
Does this guy know how much energy that goes into mining the Uranium? (Clue: Quite alot)
Do *you* know how much energy goes into mining Uranium? (Clue: No, because if you did, you would post it for all to say instead of making uninformed, childish jabs). Now go google it, find out how much energy it takes to mine uranium (good luck) then come back here and compare that with the energy output of a nuclear power plant. And learn to present actual facts in an argument.
Mine is Good
Well good, I'm glad you think so. That means that you probably don't have any objection to the millions of tons of toxic waste already being dispersed throughout the environment by various corporate entities throughout the world.
Hey, it's building character for Mother Earth! Suck down all that toxic swill, that will certainly secure our future!
By the way, for those who didn't get it, I'm being sarcastic. Oh yeah, and I have nothing against capitalism or large corporations. I'm just trying to point out the irony that a group of people will think an idea such as this is somehow brilliant, but raise hell when it is pointed out that it's basically already being done.
global warming alarmist, nuclear proponent... man I'm ticked I came in late on this one...
I'm a big conservationist/environmentalist, I think the hypothesis that current trends in global temperatures are caused by human activities is a decent one, worth worrying about and taking seriously. I'm not automatically opposed to nuclear. I live in Minneapolis and I get a LOT of my electricity from nuclear. But there are a few serious issues with nuclear. First and foremost is the waste. It's dangerous in several different ways and NOBODY wants it in their backyard, or indeed within several hundred miles of their backyard. Anybody wanting to say there is a simple solution to this can just shut up right now. There ain't. A look at the whole Yucca Mountain fiasco about sums it up. The waste casking issue from MN's Monticello plant is just a constant, constant source of political dust-ups. Dealing with waste (a problem that jumps by an order of magnitude when you eventually have to decommission a plant) is THE unsolved problem of nuclear. There is also the issue, still present in all active nuclear plants, of the possibility of catastrophic failure. Finally, producing masses of CO2 free electricity is not an automatic solution even if we assume the greenhouse gas issue is the major contributing factor of short-term global warming. You have to consider all the massive infrastructure that results in greenhouse gas point sources - namely, internal combustion vehicles and buildings that burn fuel for climate control (like my house. Who's gonna pay to replace my gas furnace with an electric one. I'm not made of freaking money, you know).
It's easy to say, oh, nuclear is the answer. Having any kind of a plan would help. But having a hugely simplistic one that glosses the details and underestimates the infrastructure intertia factor could be worse than just bumbling along.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Talk about fringe, talk about a flawed concept for modeling. Oh man, you just dropped off the clue radar.
Blar.
If the reality of global warming is so grave -and I believe it is- we need solutions that can be deployed much faster than your average nuclear plant.
You can put up a Wind turbine in 2 years, including 1 year to determine the area's potential. Add planning and siting for a nuclear plant, and you're looking at least 5 years.
Not only that, it will take a bit longer for each solution to be energy positive. To build and transport anything, you need energy... and IIRC, a nuclear plant has to produce for at least a year before producing as much as was needed to build it and mine the uranium. Even assuming 2 years for a wind turbine, it's producing energy before the nuclear plant is even built.
So call me a crank, but notice that Lovelock has been opposed to wind energy because it just ain't pretty, and is a notorious flake that posits the Earth as a self-aware and self-healing organism (getting rid of us pests). Occam's razor, anyone?
The most mind-boggling part of this debate, of course, is that there are much faster ways to reduce our energy consumption than we can produce more. A compact fluorescent lightbulb is a cliche example, but you can reduce energy consumption by 75%, with a payback of less than 1 year. Just like you would pay off your debts starting with the highest-interest bearing credit cards, if you want to find the cheapest way to balance energy consumption you start with the 100% return investments (lightbulbs) before the 5-6% ones (nuclear plants).
If you understand global climate change to be a serious problem, start with conservation. And please, help discredit these green scientists that are neither green nor scientists.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
That's no fun.
Don't tell Mad Max!
The only problem I see with that is "Stop" and "Tax". In the eyes of the gubmint, I think those words cannot exist together in the same universe. :)
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
Um, you realize if we can't get enouch energy from the Sun to support our lifestyle, we're doomed. It's the ONLY source of new (not stored) energy for trillions of miles. Then again, if a 360 trillion terawatt fusion plant in the sky isn't enough for us, maybe we all deserve to die.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
To make nuclear a truly global energy source, 3rd world countries without training will have to start up their own facilities. Given that both the US (3 Mile Island) and the Soviets (Chernobyl) couldn't do this successfully, what makes us think that the world -can-.
... if the price goes up another dollar then alternative portable energy becomes much more cost effective. Go ahead and ramp the price now and keep it there. Anything over what is required for the gas gets put into a research fund for the alternative energy. Once those fuels are effective enough that there are mass-market alternatives to gas combustion, then the price of gas should be fixed to be slightly higher than the alternative fuel, with all proceeds going a clean-up fund (we know there are technologies that can begin to scrub the air, and if nothing else planting trees is cheap).
.95Euro per -liter- ... that's almost 4Euro per gallon and that translated to almost $6 with conversion. Other people can get by with fewer cars and less gas, why can't we? Build out mass transit. Get down to 1 or 2 family vehicles. Geeks are often in a prime position to help this by working from home if your company allows. Or car-pool.
... we've seen on /. recently that solar cells may be about to get a doubling of efficiency. Where I live we can buy 25% of our electricity from wind power for less than an extra $5/month. Make that $20 and go to pure Wind. Does that mean that the amps you suck down actually got created by a Windmill, not necessarily, but it does mean that for every amp you buy there has to be a Windmill producing that much clean energy. Not every part of the country can use Wind, and not every part can use Solar, but most can usually use one or the other, and those who can't could probably use hydraulics. There are vast areas that could be converted to Solar or Wind production.
... use it to develop renewable technologies (I think a colony would probably need that, anyway) even if it delays things. There are many ways we could be encouraging such research.
I wholeheartedly agree, global warming and global dimming (perhaps we should just say "the results of global air pollution") are larger threats -in the long run- than nuclear catastrophy. However, what we should be doing right now is:
a) getting off gas/oil for vehicles
People will argue that the cost of gas will be too high to go anywhere. I say that we will adapt and overcome. In Ireland recently I noticed that gas was
b) research alternative mass production
c) Additionally, the government should start subsidizing traditional oil/shale/peat/coal manufacturers with research funding so that those companies that would normally be fighting for their existence can instead lobby for the funding to convert themselves into green companies.
And ya know, people have said this until the 70's. If no one is going to listen then sure, build nuclear, but be prepared for the U.S., China and the EU to subsidize the oversite for the world. And be prepared for a few more uninhabitable places. Do some research into just how bad Chernobyl was. That place is -STILL- falling apart and is about to have to undergo one of the most expensive construction projects in HISTORY to re-cap it. Even then it is a wasteland for thousands of years.
I was all for the space race, but we should be making the trip to Mars mean something
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Rule of thumb is 1kw strikes each square meter of the earth's surface. My estimate for home size in the US is 2000 sq ft (~200 m^2) which could generate 200 kw of power (at 100% efficency) at current effeciencies it's more like 40-60 kw. This is usually enough to cover a home's needs (~600kWhrs per day) but you have to have a good method of storage and either convert your electrical equipment to run of DC power or use a lossy inverter. However designing homes with some thought to air currents and fans (rather than air conditioning) and using suplimental solar heat to preheat your water heater would put a dent in our energy usage. That's not really the problem though (we have plenty of coal) it's finding a good fuel that can be burned in small engines and safely carried in quateties small enough to allow individual transportation (which gas is really good at but other fuels are much more expensive or not as good at).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The idea of making wind farms is so absurd. It is a remant of big business. Wind mills should be on the top of skyscrapers! Get the power, very close to the users. What better way to say F-you to the arabs than a NY skyline covered with power generators. 40+ stories up, you get lots more wind than at ground level. No miles of copper from some off shore wind farm. No miles of copper from a desert solar array.
We need to user fission,
it is a step on the fusion.
You got it wrong. It's James Lovecock.
Toyota plans a hybrid version of the Highlander for next year. Thing is, it won't be all that great - still less than 30mpg on the highway. The thing is, they're designing it to have V8 power with a 3.3L V6 and big-ass electric motor. Will be interesting to see if that sells - but they ought to make another hybrid model with the 4-cylinder for those of us who want to save gas, not tow boats.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
The purpose was to build a proliferation-proof breeder reactor, with the fuel so highly radioactive at all stages that it would be impossible to remove it from the "hot cell" areas around the reactor proper. The only thing that would ever leave the reactor would have been the processed radwaste. However, this scheme can be used in a somewhat modified form to process and separate UO2-based PWR fuel as well. The advantage is that there are no organic solvents or water-based chemistry involved, so the problems evident at Hanford become impossible.
The US taxpayer paid for this, but nobody will be benefitting from it; the anti-nukes have succeeded in killing any consideration with a well-orchestrated scare campaign.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
They don't understand it, and since they are emotionally driven, they are not willing to take the time to understand it.
Greens are not into compromise. They want ideal solutions, but these solutions are impractical (even if people made concessions).
.sigs are for post^Hers.
The mirrors don't heat up significantly and you don't want to be anywhere near the focus points.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
One of the most efficient ways to utilize solar energy is to grow willow trees (grow fast, easy to harvest) and then turn them into energy (variety of methods). Many of these energy products can be consumed at will with no loss over time.
Of course it's still land intensive, but any solar energy scheme is going to require a lot of light, which translates into a lot of land.
I always think back to the one science fiction book I read some time ago where the sun was dark because the civilization had sourrounded it with an orbit of mini-planets in a shell. Complete conversion of all the available solar energy...
Look up willow tree biomass for more info. The university of michigan studies has shown it to be a viable self-sustaining resource for quite a lot of energy.
-Adam
It seems to me it would be elastic, because "some people can go without" oil, or at the very least reduce their comsumption of it. It is far from "Take this pill (oil) once a day or you die". Changes in lifestyle can reduce your dependence or need, and once those changes in lifestyle become financially feasible in comparison to an increase in oil costs, people will do it. Transportation in modern American society is a necessity. Transportation via SUV is not. Taking the pill once a day is a necessity, washing it down with Vintage port is not.
In the inelastic scenario, imagine a new pill came out, one that did the same job, but had to be taken only once a week, and cost abot twice as much per pill. It would quickly take over.
If I missed something, pardon my ignorance. I was taking organic chem while you were taking macroeconomics, and it's been a LONG time since I took any econ stuff of any sort.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
"Yet none of your tests were of minivans."
A hollow voice says, "Ford Windstar". Read the post again.
We tried on a lot more than I mentioned, because it's a lot more than I remember. And the Windstar was about the only van there.
Except for the windstar
Username taken, please choose another one.
Do you know how much energy goes into mining U compared to the massive amount of energy liberated from it? Clue: Damn near none. Nuclear is the best energy source we have right now, uneducated NIMBY morons notwithstanding.
We have to forget all the nonsense in mining our energy from the ground, and start putting some research into renewable stuff like plant-oils, wave and wind energy.
And if any of those were viable, we would. Wind and wave are useful in such a small area of the country, it's laughable. As far as plant oils, the production of them is so inefficient that energy prices will have to increase an order of magnitude to make them competitive. You figure out how to get terawatts of energy from marginal technologies like that. Won't work.
Bottom line is, over the short and long term, nuclear's the answer. Fission over the short term and hopefully fusion over long term.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
SUVs are a *status symbol* which means, like perfume, the more it costs the more desirable it is.
A Hummer, BMW X5, Land Rover, etc. Those are status symbols. Honda CR-V, Honda Pilot, etc. are not. They're SUVs for people who can appreciate the extra carrying capacity. Sportscars are status symbols that get low milage, but you don't see a holier-than-thou attitude about those. Curious.
"Question is, when will everyone be convenced there is a problem, and when they are convenced, how willing will they be to give up their SUV's?"
But first we need to shut down the public transportation system, with all those mostly empty public buses running around wasting diesel and polluting the environment. Those bastards.
Just the World? What about the Universe you insignificant little twirp. People have to think bigger. Just like getting rich while reducing our probability of surviving the next 500 years.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
I bet you let your half-senile grandfather drive a motor vehicle too!
A few hundred years ago the 'old = wise' idea was valid...'cause old was only about 60! Now when you can easily live into yous 80s or 90s....unavoidable phsyical effects steal the mind.
The original poster is just.
Blar.
I don't understand this at all... I've heard all the justifications before, and the only one that is even remotely reasonable is towing a boat, and even then it boils down to how big a boat you are towing.
Any reasonable car, even economy or compact, will carry 5 passengers, but for comfort you are not going to get more passenger space in an average SUV than you will get with an average mid-size car. If you are using a third row, then a minivan is going to give you more comfort and just as much, if not more cargo room than an average SUV. Most can also tow. A van or minivan is just as safe, if not safer, and is more utilitarian than an SUV.
Unless you're going off road, or needing a lot of power to tow a REALLY big boat uphill, then an SUV is still not the best choice.
Still, I'll believe you when you say you tow a boat, and put you in the tiny minority of SUV drivers that can actually justify it - I don't believe that includes a "significant" percentage of SUV drivers.
Now, the bottom line is that nobody needs to justify it to me at all - if they want an SUV for stylish looks or to be trendy, then go ahead, I'm not an eco-terrorist, I don't really care. It's just that, after agonizing over my last vehicle purchase (for a family car), a minivan satisfied more requirements than any other vehicle. And after studying the problem for some time, I discovered that the vast majority of reasons people give for buying SUVs are simply wrong - other vehicles will do a better job.
The only two logical reasons I can think of to have a LARGE SUV are towing LARGE payloads and offroading. That immediately disqualifies about 90% of the SUVs being sold, which are qualified to do neither.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The Windstar is the old name of the current Freestar.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
A hollow voice says, "Ford Windstar"
A slap and a hollow echoing sound accompany "D'oh!"
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
My personal beef with solar power is that, where I live, we statisticly receive around 150 days of sun a year, disproportionally in the warmer months. We've gone 30 days with grey, overcast skies in the winter. And no, I'm not from Alaska.
Wind and tides are out. Solar isn't a particularly good choice here except as a secondary source. (But it could possibly be used to separate and store hydrogen and oxygen. Don't know what the efficiencies are.) So we're back to "traditional" sources like natural gas and nuclear.
And that's how it should be really, one size doesn't fit all. Let the places like Arizona (with >300 days of solar a year) do solar power. Kudos. I say we up here build some small Gen IV nuclear plants (which can also generate hydrogen) and suppliment with renewables where we can. Flywheels make sense for industry (even homes sometimes) to store excess energy. Systems with magnetic bearing have crossed the 90% efficiency threshold. No hazardous materials and high maintenance costs as with batteries. Let's also put more money into fuel reprocessing and go for a closed nuclear fuel cycle to reduce waste.
The big problem in the US regarding nuclear innovation is, IMHO, that the power companies are all privately owned. They won't risk the capital to do anything innovative. That and so many environmental groups spread disinformation about the technologies that Joe Average gets freaked out by the word nuclear. Nuclear is the only way I see us ever making the bridge to a hydrogen economy...every other means of hydrogen production is far too inefficient, dirty, or wasteful.
Fusion...hmmmmm. Experiments have reached break-even and have even produced excess power. It is basically now a scaling problem, with some materials and containment problems tossed into the mess. If they ever stop vacillating on ITER and actually start construction on the damn thing, it will be easily be 10 years before it goes online, with about 20 years of experiments and tweaking planned. Then if it all worked they can begin with commercial plants. If anyone will pay for them.
Here's an explanation (read - Public Relations Piece) of IETR for the less-technical.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Because we have devices like blenders and DVD players that require more energy than, say, a mortar and pestle.
we know the sun's rays can be converted into heat to turn a turbine
Horribly inefficiently. I know of no full-scale power plant that does this.
we know that the sun's radiation can be converted directly into electrical energy.
A few problems here. First, the energy density of sunlight isn't that high, and even that's only available in generally arid conditions. Also, single-crystal-based Si solar cells require quite a bit of energy to fabricate, so they have a rather long energy break-even point.
There are attempts to change this, namely with Graetzel cell technology that runs on poly-crystalline Si that is cheaper, but research is ongoing for these.
From that alone, we have enough to power ourselves for quite a while..
And no efficient way to harness it. To supply the country with solar energy, we'd have to cover something like half of Arizona with solar cells. This is not currently viable.
Question is, when will everyone be convenced there is a problem, and when they are convenced, how willing will they be to give up their SUV's?
I sympathize with you here - Wy wife and I drive a sensible, 4-cylinder, gas-efficient sedan. We carpool. I hate SUVs for everything they represent, namely careless, pointless consumption to convince their middle-aged owners they really aren't driving minvans/station-wagons. That said, screaming solar/wind/biomass isn't going to get it done, because these technologies won't meet the world's needs now, let alone when the rest of the unindustrialized world decides to get online.
Kid of Speed, coming to your backyard!
There is a very simple way to eliminate the demand in 99% of cases for fossil fuels: criminalize their possession.
WTF? Did you step in from Bizarro world or something? That is SO FAR from what is likely to ever happen that it's insane to even say.
Nuclear is a hell of a crazy technology just to boil water. It's time to move beyond the heat->steam->turbine generator model. After all, fresh water is used for everything from mining (coal, uranium, etc) to plant cooling, as well as the steam conversion process. And fresh water is also in short supply and may become as much of a flashpoint for wars in the 21st century as oil. In fact, its already a major reason why Israel is pushing the Palestinians around. we need to reduce the use of water for industrial processes and ration it for human consumption and farming (and even in farming, we need to learn to do more with less).
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Covering square miles with cheap reliable high-efficiency solar panels would (maybe) get us close, but we don't even have that. From 1 square meter you can maybe boil a glass of water, but you can't heat your house in winter, nor make cars or computers.
Hey, this sentence just hit me with an idea. Replace all the roads in the US with photovoltaic panels!
But, you might say..you can't drive on photovotaic panels! That's OK. To pay for this, everytime someone drives over one and breaks it, they have to pay double the cost of replacing it. That way you replace the broken one and pay to put a new one somewhere else. If all the roads had to be photovoltaic by law, drivers would have no choice.
An added advantage is that people would buy lighter cars in order not to break the road. Lighter cars==more fuel efficient.
To compensate people for the addded cost, you could provide free electricity to cars from the solar panels. You can have special cars that could tap into the power line that collects and transmits the electricity from the panels.
People who drive gas guzzlers would not get the benefit of the free electricty.
This is all a joke of course but do you know how much blacktop we have in the USA? Enough to change the climate around large cities like Atlanta. If someone could come up with a cheap paver that collected solar power and all parking lots used them we could be a long way toward getting rid of oil.
Hmmm... I wouldn't necessarily call it pointless and unnecessary.
I'd prefer to keep working on all fronts...
For example, I'm beginning to think that most houses should be built almost completely underground. I think most houses/housing can be built with super efficient insulation, which most people are ignoring for the short term monetary benefit.
Even computers and appliances are more efficient than they used to be, with things like LCD monitors becoming popular, and large screen TVs that don't use any more electricity than smaller models from years past (plasma being a notable exception). Cars should keep becoming more fuel efficient, that way they can add more features without using more gas.
People should try to get solar panels on their houses, but hey, that'd ruin the way they look. Whatever.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
No one comments about the fact that almost everywhere there are nuclear reactors there is weaponization of nuclear technology.
Nuclear weapons spread when the USSR broke up.
Nukes were used as a reason to invade Iraq.
Israel's "peaceful" nukes? ask that dude that
converted to be a Christian and just got out of
jail.
When was the last time you were attacked by
a windmill?
Your feul is expensive not because of supply and demand, but because of taxes. Unfortunately we suffer from large taxes on our energy too, but I guess not as bad as you.
I looked into the VW Jetta, but the prices are far too high new, and I was looking for reliable used.
Also, I frequently use the full capacity of the vehicle. The CF of tools often includes ladders, work horses, toolboxes, power tools, etc. That quickly adds up to a lot of CF.
Recreationally, four tackle boxes, a cooler, 8-10 fishing poles, personal gear, etc. adds up just as quickly.
I ended up with a 97 Izuzu Rodeo, slightly larger than the VW and runs on the far easier to find Unleaded. It has just the CF of cargo space I need, and seats 4-5 American sized adults comfortably. So I got exactly what I needed. The Cherokee was overly large, and anything in the Ford line read as gas guzzler.
I looked into Deisel, but the price per gallon is on par with Mid Grade unleaded, and the vehicles themselves are priced to eliminate any finanial advantage from the fuel economy. Unfortunate, but true.
Also, the Jetta is not too good for towing a boat up an inclined ramp.
The overall problem is not that people find that they need an SUV, but that they choose the biggest they can find, instead of tailoring to their needs and choosing a balance between need and big. Also, with the price of cars, the fuel efficiency can easily be lost in other costs, and us Ameries are driven by cost, doncha know!
So to summarize a long answer, yes, I looked into smaller, had a wagon that was not big enough. I use the full capacity often, almost daily. And yes, at the price point, efficiency, capacity, and performance, it is worth it to me.
Wonder how many others could answer like that, though?
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
I don't understand what the problem with global warming is. The whole Gaia hypothesis says that the system is self correcting.
So here comes this species that mucks with the environment, burns biomass to power a high energy civilization, and pollutes everything. Eventually global warming, or pollution, or something else, gets to the point where it threatens that species. Some catastrophic event occurs which kills off a quarter of that species. The entire civilization collapses and the species reverts to a more primitive society, which doesn't pollute as much. Problem solved.
Gaia can fix it all. Gaia doesn't care if a species is drastically reduced (or killed off). Life will go on.
Acronyms Obfuscate
seriously!
Who's right?
Well, those glaciers ARE melting back. That weather IS very weird. And Right-Leaning 'rationalist' geeks are VERY annoying, (any leaning being less than rational). But despite all of that, I don't think global warming is the problem. I think it's an indication of a globe gone topsy turvy, (to use a technical term). --That the human cycle of experience is mirrored by the universe. (To use a New Age bit of thinking.)
But whether or not you believe that, doesn't matter. --Why? Because Comet Impacts are the real things which hold the power here. Big Rocks From Space can cause significant environmental issues lickety-split where global warming is more ambiguous. And it's not a situation which is a million years away. But that's a whole other thread which I wont go into here.
The point for here and now is this. .
I hate air pollution. I lived in a city where after cycling around for half an hour, you'd be blowing black snot out your nose. That's just not cool. Living inside a brown smog cloud requires the body to spend a significant amount of its energy and resources just dealing with filthy air. While it isn't like hauling heavy stones, it's still a ton of work for your body to do, and it is exhausting. People have more energy out in the country? They don't look like pale ghost people? Gee. --While there are certainly more thatn the one reason for this, poisonous air rates right near the top of the chart of prime suspects.
I don't like car exhaust or industrial smoke because they're just plain disgusting and unhealthy to live beneath. Those are the reasons I'd like to see clean energy, and those reasons on their own ought to be good enough. Entire populations living beneath a cloud of brown is just not right.
So the Right-Leaning 'rationalist' geek boys can go suck an exhaust pipe. I want clean power.
-FL
"...He compares the situation to that in Europe in 1938..." :-)
Do you suppose this allusion allows one to invoke Godwins Law
charlie harvey's website
You're wrong. I lived in a home that got almost all of its heat from the sun during winter. From a greenhouse, no less. When that wasn't enough, we burned wood to get it to a comfortable level, or we put on warmer clothes. Heating and cooling costs for a year, all electric, was around $300. Most of our heat was from the sun or wood burning stove, which doesn't introduce any fossilized carbon back into the cycle.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
PV panels will win in the end (barring another breakthrough like cold fusion). Standard arguments against PV and rebuttals:
Doesn't making solar panels pollute? Not so true now, and if we don't solve the pollution problem for all manufacturing, nuclear power, solar space satellites, or any other energy source will still bury us in waste from consumer goods produced using that energy. So zero emissions manufacturing and recycling needs to be solved in any case.
Isn't PV is expensive? It is cost competitive in many situations right now, and it would be just about everywhere right now if the end user had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels (pollution, militarism, centralization, etc. which would mean the true cost of oil is now over $200 per barrel) And the costs continue to drop -- with no theoretical reason PV panels should ultimately cost much more than glass, shingles, or sheet plastic.
What about producing and storing power in nothern climates? No one says people have to be a purists at the start. Liquid fuels like ethanol or gaseous fuels like hydrogen can be produced in a variety of ways from PV in some centralized facilities and transported by truck or pipelines to be used for about 10% of a northern home's total energy use (mainly winter use) for northern climates which don't get much sun in the winter (as an alternative to solar arrays that are ten times larger to supply all power needs in the least sun winter months). These systems can also be used to cogenerate heat and power. Eventually energy storage techniques will continue to improve (better batteries, better hydrogen storage, PV systems that produce ethanol or other liquid fuels directly) and then even this minimal centralized assistance can be reduced.
Overall, decentralized power will be the future, just like we now have decentralized computing and decentralized printing. There may still be some use for centralized big power plants, despite various social costs of centralization (such as for making aluminum from ore), just the equivalent of the mainframe of today is still useful for big data crunching tasks. Still, as nanotech proliferates (leading up to the StarTrek replicator), decentralized power from PV will be able to handle more and more material production needs (including enabling people to make their own PV solar panels at home as they need them -- and probably enabling them to recycle PV systems locally as well).
So, no need for nukes! Don't underestimate what thirty or so years of continued innovation on PV and materials science and nanotech will produce.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
the "The Day After Tomorrow" is one of the worst movies ever made and is destined to become a cult classic in "Rocky Horror's" style.
"Everyone knows Lenin had to setup a police state," Chomsky
Here we see the invisible hand working! When gas price reaches some level, custormers vote with their dollars for the best choice. When SUV purchases go down because of gas pricing, manufacturers make cars more efficient.
We don't need government regulations to make this happen...lets get rid of other energy regulation.
Lets repeal the law that limits nuke plants liability, then let the market deceide which energy we should be using.
838K would only be ~65% Carnot efficient against room temperature, and that's *just* the thermodynamic efficiency. I can't imagine you'd beat 50%, just thermodynamically (all of the losses from heating the air, for instance). And those losses would *scale* with area, so making it larger (and hotter) would make it less efficient as well.
From the description on the webpage, it looks like the steam generator runs at 550 F? It's a little tough to tell where the "550" is. If that's true, the thermodynamic efficiency could be, at best, 48%.
Plus you're just supporting my point more when you say they have to defocus the mirrors - that's lost energy right there.
None of the web pages I've seen so far tout the towers as advantageous over solar panels. The main advantage is that you can store energy very efficiently, but there are other methods of doing this which aren't specific to this method and could be used with solar panels (like pumping water uphill, which is also 90+% effective!). Have there been any studies on this?
Remember that solar panels right now are ~15-20% total efficiency - that is, straight from the solar flux to electricity. I don't see any numbers on the total efficiencies of those towers, though here suggests a 2-mile radius (25 km^2 or so) needed for, say, 200 MW. So that's 25 million m^2, per for 200 MW, so that's 8 watts per square meter, or less than 1% efficiency. Even being nice, and assuming that the power generation occurs 5 hours out of a day, so that the actual efficiency is ~5 times higher, it's still only ~4% efficient.
The only advantage I see is that it's probably cheaper than a solar panel plant would be, right now. But it's in a thermodynamic bottleneck. You can't increase the efficiency without increasing the heat, and you can't increase the heat without causing more problems, as you stated (they had to defocus the mirrors). Photovoltaics don't have that bottleneck. Lab solar panels now hit 34% or better efficiency, and as we've seen recently, there's a lot of work being done to improve it. Build a solar panel plant of the same area, and
I fully admit the possibility of being wrong, but thermodynamics doesn't lie. Use a heat engine to generate electricity, and fundamentally, any process which avoids it will probably beat you in efficiency eventually. No one denies that hydroelectric plants are the undisputed kings of energy efficiency, and that's because they aren't heat engines.
Some kind of photovoltaic paint? That's an ideea...
Econ 101 -
You say price will go down and so will consumption(demand)? And you say econ theory backs this up?
Holland happens to be one of the best-case scenarios in the world for wind power. They have way more wind than anyone else.
"well-sealed"? the idea, AFAIK, is to dump the raw stuff in the wilderness, and give the developers the hmmm, will you want to try to remove the plutonium out of this area before cutting wood?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I read the article and supporting links with interest. It appears to be that the "green" movement dominating the world's population to serve the needs of an intangible "gaia" would be no different from Lenin/Stalin oppressing the massing in the name of "history".
"You can't destroy the Earth, that's where I keep all my stuff!"
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
(John McCarthy is known for being the man responsible for Lisp, and some AI research, among other things. I'm surprised that the pages I'm pointing to haven't been mentioned yet in this article.)
Also, you may be interested in his take on progress and sustainability.
Tax oil and our energy costs go up. The cost of food, homes, and everything that we produce goes up. Jobs go down and people go out of work.
Not saying that it should not be done but you need to look at all the reactions to that action. As to the cost of oil going down.. Maybe maybe not. The reaction of the oil producing nations could simply be to cut production and to keep there profits high. They figure that you are going to buy all there oil sooner or later.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
IIRC, temps peaked about 50 years ago and have been dropping since. It should further be noted that we haven't been keeping global temperature data all that long, and especially not in a uniform manner. How can we draw any conclusions yet, much less that global warming is happening? Besides, if it were, being that I hail from the state of Wisconsin, where our winters are less than enjoyable, I'd have to hail it as a celestial reward for good behavior!
Powering the vehicles and the dark-hours needs of the house requires batteries, which are a different technical problem.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Build a solar panel plant of the same area, and
.. it will generate significantly more power. It'll cost a lot more, too, of course, but we're talking about efficiency, not cost-effectiveness.
Sigh. Should've looked more carefully before I hit reply.
The boats in question range from a 24 foot pontoon (~1500 pounds w/ 800 pound trailer) to 28 foot sail boat (~2000 pounds dry, 1500 pound water ballast, 800 pound trailer), so the towing capacity of a minivan is far from sufficient. You are correct, that puts me in a minority as far as towing is concerned.
Short of a minivan, the five passengers in question are US of Americans, thus big about the midriff. So a mid sized for five is crowded to the point of discomfort. This leaves two reasonable choices: minivan or SUV. This is often the case, especially in US of America.
The cargo capacity between the SUV I chose and the minivan is on par. So that was not a decision factor.
While I can't speak for anyone else's process, the SUV was the logical choice, given the constraints. And it's nice to be able to put my boat in without a paved ramp, or drive out to camp.
(Well, there goes the last of my geek points, I just admitted to doing activities in the actual Sun!)
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
That number is outdated. A recently discovered new solar cell material is 50% efficient
I find it funny that the treehuggers immediately jump to the conclusion that it is us (humans) that is causing the planet to warm up. Because we know that has never happened before!
I am not saying that humans aren't responsible; rather that there is more than one possible explanation.
What if global warming was 100% directly correlated to the presence of more humans? Would we kill a bunch off "for the good of the planet?" Or would the 'you must live as long as possible' mentality take over? After all, humans walk around flatulating all the time (gas emissions are bad for the environment right?), as well as being mobile heat sources....
;-)
Them, too.
It's adherence to an ideology that's the problem, not the ideology.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
When society relies on wind and sun energy, it needs backup, because when the sun doesn't shine(for example at night or when there are clouds) and when the wind doesn't blow, it will NOT create energy.
And those backup-powerplants are burning... olie, gas and cole, which they have to do all the time.
It is very expensive.
like 40000 miljoen euros for 4% energy (atmost)in holland alone.
for that amount of money we can build 10 nuclear powerplant in holland alone and provide germany and france with enough energy
Well, the US government has massive reserves of oil for emergency purposes. A more likely scenario would be another Arab oil embargo like in the 70s. While it would greatly inconvenience many people, there wouldn't be mass starvation or anything like that. There's still untapped reserves in Alaska that could be used in an emergency, so it's pretty inconceivable that the US could suddenly be without even enough oil to ship food from farms to cities.
I just did some quick research on wind power
http://www.kilronanwindfarm.com/ is a state of the art wind farm in Ireland. It has 10 40 meter wind mills or Turbines if you like. It produces 500kw of power. I then looked up a nuclear power plant. It produces 1.7 Gws of power. It would take a 34,000 of those state of the art wind turbins to replace that one power plant! And what happens when there is now wind? As far as the impact on the enviroment. If you spaced those wind turbins only 20 meters apart they would form a line over 2,000 km long! if you tried to do a square arrange ment the total land use would be even greater since you would have to have to space the rows father apart.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Using per gallon costs (or per liter) without mentioning the fact that a high percentage of the UK petrol cost is a tax seems a bit cagey.
Apples-to-apples and all that rot... what would you pay without, or the American equivalent, in taxes?
Most people don't seem to be aware of the fact that coal power plants are more radioactive than nuclear power plants.
It is also now possible to design nuclear power plants so that they fail safe, unlike the poorly designed plant at Chernobyl.
Safety-driven memes are difficult to counter, but once we run out of options perhaps we'll do what we must.
Oil is a mined product like coal or gold, and as such we only access what is already there.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Umm... don't you remember the radioactive clouds that spread over almost half of the world a few weeks after Chernobyl? While the CANDU reactor does contain the nuclear waste within the concrete structure, the possibility of other reactors releasing radioactive clouds into the air is still there
That's warped. And how is your viewpoint different from Greens? How people can espouse darwinistic "survival of the fittest" theories and then turn around and contradict it with beliefs that nasty humans are ruining things for other species is beyond me. Now, don't rush to conclusions - it's not that we have the right as the "most evolved and adapted" species to lay waste to the earth as we see fit. On the contrary, we have a duty of stewardship - which certainly doesn't logically follow from evolutionary theory. In fact, Darwin himself recanted a good part of his evolutionary theory before he died. Might be a good thing to read up on. What if humans were created good, and aren't nasty after all? Sounds like a much more optimistic chance at life to me.
0.82/L * 3.78L/gal ~= $3.10/gal NOT $5.20/gal.
Now if we were talking imperial gallons (you are in the UK right?).
0.82/L * 4.54L/gal ~ = $3.72/gal
To see what's more precious. When something drops nuclear waste in your vicinity, if your species can figure out how to give it back to the originator, you qualify as precious.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Thermodynamics doesn't lie, but thermodynamics
doesn't know jack about economics. You keep waving
"efficiency" around like some sort of magic talisman.
99.999% thermodynamic efficiency doesn't mean *anything*
if the $$ in > $$ out.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
You know that oil consumption in China since 1990 has more than doubled Source. India's is growing rapidly too Source. I think it's time we realized that the rapid economic development of 2 countries containing a mere 2 billion+ people has something to do with rising oil prices in the U.S and the increase in Greenhouse gas emmissions. Guess what! The Indian government doesn't care to much about what the European/U.S centric green movement says and the Chinese care even less. That's why they demanded to be exempt from the provisions of the Kyoto treaty.
The sun just isn't a viable solution it will burn out in a few million years, then where will we be?
We'll be writing books about how the Sun burning out is contributing to global warming.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
"North America is already in a Natural Gas crisis."
What? Someone forgot to tell the resellers. Gas remains one of the cheapest energy sources available in North America. In contrast, those who heat their homes with heating oil in recent winters have been suffering (quite literally in some cases). Some local governments and energy companies even offer incentives for homeowners to replace their oil furnaces with natural gas ones.
"Nuculer... it's pronounced new-cue-ler..."
It's only pronounced that way by people who are either too ingorant or too bullheaded to pronounce it correctly. nü-klE-&r.
While i agree that solar power is not *the* panacea, i think you're forgetting about a few other storage technologies.
1. flywheels (or more generally mechanical kinetic energy storage). there are some good flywheel technologies out there that are pretty efficient.
2. electrolysis of hydrogen from water (or more generally chemical potential energy storage). yep, you can't have fuel cells without a fuel source. producing hydrogen from water is a form of energy storage.
3. "PV=kT" style energy storage, that is, create a potential energy gradient using pressure, volume or temperture as your free variable.
Vegetable oil and solar technologies are already sufficiently developed. You can plant and harvest more joules with oil seed crops, for example, than you can get from any nuclear technology in the same time span.
How long does it take to build a nuke plant and get it operational? For the local community's sake, I hope it's a fairly long time and is done very very carefully.
You can plant oil crops, especially rugged ones like hemp, right now in fallow land already available, and have clean-diesel presses built and useable before the crops are harvested.
I am not anti-nuke, but the "other technologies aren't ready" meme is total industry brainwash. They are ready, and working in many places around the globe (check on Kyocera's headquarters for a really high-tech example).
The biggest problem thus far with using the sun is the relatively low conversion rate. Solar cells work well, but they are terribly expensive. Solar collection used to heat a working liquid to drive a turbine is a proven concept, but I don't know how they'd work outside of the desert Southewest. Wind and tidal technologies have many proven cases, but without large-scale funding and rollout (read: taxes), they won't go very far.
>Does this guy know how much energy that goes into mining the Uranium? (Clue: Quite alot)
The mining companies pay for the energy. They also pay for the equipment and labor, which probably amount to more money. Then they sell the uranium to someone who buys it to sell the energy. No energy breakeven would mean no financial breakeven and the transactions just wouldn't happen. (ONLY if prices are undistorted).
The huge energy consumption happens during enrichment. Amusingly the US enrichment plant uses the entire output of a huge coal-fired power plant. Enrichment is a government monopoly and the economics are buried in government accounting, so you can't tell just from pricing whether there's an energy breakeven.
Fats (like vegetable oils) are esters of glycerol and fatty acids; as glycerol has 3 hydroxy groups, replacing them all with a fatty acid creates a "triglyceride". In the making of biodiesel, methanol and a catalyst (usually sodium hydroxide) are used to break the bond between the fatty acids and the glycerol backbone, re-forming glycerol (using the -OH radicals) and fatty acid methyl esters (with the -CH3 group of the methanol). The two form separate phases after settling.
If you want to see a real cracking reaction, look at a wood-gas generator (or just watch a fire - the flames are relaxing).
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Of course, winds don't blow constantly, so you have to rely on additional energy source when there is no sufficient wind. This additional energy source cannot be nuclear since you can't increase nuclear production on short notice. So you end up using fossile energy plants which release a lot of greenhouse gas :-(
/.
/.
Despite recent Slashdot articles (rehashing Chevron-funded propaganda) my 2002 Prius gets excellent mileage.
I took the kids to Sesame Place this weekend, and I got 45.6 miles to the gallon over the whole trip - that's with a carload of wet kids and luggage, all highway driving.
In my regular daily commute, I get 48 mpg, consistently for over two years now. That's because my daily commute happens to be very similar to the standard test conditions the EPA uses, I suppose. It's reasonable to suppose that I'd get around 60 pg with the 2004 Prius, although I am happy with my 2002 and don't plan to trade up any time soon.
I have validated the mileages reported by the on-board computer systems with pencil, paper and logbook over a six-month period. The computer is spot-on, unlike my old Colt's vacuum-triggered mpg meter which wasn't even close to accurate.
CLUESTICK, WHACK! The EPA mileage ratings are intended to be used to compare the fuel efficiency of vehicles. They are not and do not claim to be the mileage every single bonehead who can't read the EPA sticker (which clearly explains all this) will get in their real-life driving.
What part of YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY don't you people understand?
I can't comment on the Great Barrier Reef nor the Seychelles, but I can tell you from a lot of snorkelling in the 90s in the Red Sea that the reefs and sea life is still very healthy there.
The Red Sea does not have many big cities dumping sewage and industrial waste into it. There are only a few oil refineries and desalination plants.
The depth of the Red Sea does help too. It is up to 2 km deep in many places, and with that much water volume, pollutants do not affect it as much as the much shallower Mediterranean for example.
As some other posters said, it could be the normal cycle rather than anything man made. Seychelles are far enough out of nowhere, and not affect by any major industrialized areas that affect its environment.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
My BMW 330i gets 22MPG around town. it is "sporty". Anything with less power than that thing is hardly "sporty".
Dropping a big engine in a sedan makes it sporty, but hardly a standard of what's sporty... that depends on weight/power, not just power.
>There are no "beater" Prius cars on the road to give experience on how their battery ages.
Yellow Cab in Vancouver BC had a Prius in service. At 200,000 miles it still had the original battery. Toyota bought it back to study it.
> hybrids are even more sensitive to driving technique
For perspective, most attempts at changing your driving technique give you worse mileage than the "Just Drive It" approach. The balance between gasoline and electric is calculated realtime by a computer that's much faster than the driver and incomparably better informed. If you try to outthink that computer you're like John Henry trying to outperform a steam drill. One of the best ways to improve mileage on a Prius is to turn off the MPG display and remove the temptation to improve your economy.
Interesting that many fail to see how the socialistic affinities of the Democratic party in the U.S. are slowly leading down the same road. Government entitlement programs continue to grow and multiply, increasing citizens' reliance on government and decreasing self-sufficiency. The Republican party is not immune from criticism either: espousing unbridled capitalism leads without fail to subservience of the individual to the corporation, in a dehumanizing way. We have not yet reached these ends in their fullness, but certainly the effects are visible.
How do we rectify this? Limitations on corporate power/influence? Maybe ask ourselves individually what we're doing here on Earth? I personally think the only way to maintain a healthy view of the human person is to keep asking the latter question, with a realization that there's something after this life. But for those who don't agree, you can still come up with a better answer than "to party and have a good time"...realizing that real happiness isn't found in self-gratification but in doing something worthwhile for others.
Three Mile Island proved that you can have a safe nuclear reactor. Chernobyl was not only a different type of reactor, it simply did not have the safeguards that most countries require.
As long as week keep up on the redundant safety of our reactors, I am not worried.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
0.82 GBP/L * 3.78 L/gal * 1.79 USD/GBP ~= $5.55 US/gal
My exchange rate might be off, my source was last updated 4 days ago.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I don't know where Lovelock draws the line on the "Left", but the very "Left" Soviets (Stalin's Communists) actually defeated the Nazis, with the assist from the US-backed Allies distracting a western front. One could argue that the Soviets didn't understand the Nazi threat, forming the Hitler-Stalin Pact, until too late, but the entire affair served the Soviet purposes very well, launching them within grasping distance of global domination.
His entire "Hitler/Left" model discredits Lovelock's political theories entirely. Hitler himself might be called a leftist: the Nazis were the "National Socialists" (hence the name), internationalists... Hitler was a vegetarian and drug user. Of course the "Left/Right" model has never accurately described any political system, except the seating chart of the original French congress from which it is derived. It is only useful as political rhetoric, propaganda to divide people along lines useful to incumbent political masters, alienating us rather than associating us for constructive work together. Lovelock used to spout useful models which brought us together. Now he's splitting us apart, like the atoms he'd sacrifice for the climate. But he'll find the contamination and fallout from this nuke rhetoric just as toxic to the environment.
--
make install -not war
Many sports cars -- even some of the more expensive ones -- get 30+ mpg on the highway just like more economical cars. Even a 2004 Corvette with an enormous 5.7 liter engine gets 25 mpg on the highway, which is above average; the Pilot gets 22 mpg, the CR-V 25-29 mpg (depending on transmission configuration). A Hummer, meanwhile, gets only 14 mpg. Of course, if you could get people to live closer to work (failures in modern zoning have made this impractically expensive in much of the USA, but even incremental improvements would help), or to avoid commuting during rush hour, it would have nearly the effect of the whole country switching to hybrids (ones that work, even). But nobody's going to do that either.
As to driving speed there is the range from the law, custom, and the editorial position of Car and Driver magazine. If a person drives a strict cruise-control 55 MPH on high-traffic two-lane highways, one is quickly going to get a "tail" of cars with people taking dangerous chances trying to pass. I find that driving in the 57-59 range cuts down on the traffic backup.
Our major high-traffic 4-lane roads are 65, and I suppose I could drive well below the posted limit in the right lane to save gas, but that too will pile up traffic big time. The convention in these parts is that it is OK to drive a strict 65 in the slow lane and let faster cars (and trucks!) go by in the left lane.
The roads are a shared resource and social use of those roads is both a safety and a social issue. Yeah, we have all had the drivers ed lecture about drive your own speed, don't worry about the tailgaters. But there a lot more of us driving these roads more miles than the 30 years ago when I took drivers ed, and a good part of how these roads handle the traffic is that people are maintaining speeds at close separations and showing some skill in their lane changes in those conditions. Cars have much better brakes than 30 years ago, and I believe there are many fewer drivers who have never been on an expressway before and are clueless about merges, lane changes, speeds, lane usage, and separations.
Drivers ed said never let a tailgater pressure you, but my 30 year experience is that if you just click in a couple MPH into your cruise control, often times the person behind you will give you a little breathing space. I have also heard of people being pressured into speeding up and getting a ticket from a police car. Given the attitude of the police (the emphasis is on speeding ticket revenue, not safety), a patrol car will have me planted in front of it going 55 with the traffic piled up behind. It is not a safe condition, but people are less likely to pass the patrol car than ol' me going 55 just by myself.
Well, like I said... you are in a tiny minority, not a "significant" percentage of SUV owners.
So I'm anal retentive, easily annoyed, have a lot of character flaws, most SUV owners really annoy me because they simply don't admit they bought theirs to be trendy. So what happens is a lot of the reasons they give just end up making them look stupid.
Honday Odyssey can tow up to 3500lbs with the proper equipment (like the fairly inexpensive transmission cooler). That doesn't help you, though. Besides, if I were towing, I'd feel a lot better towing something a lot less weight than the maximum the vehicle is capable of.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Maybe we could shut down the sun and save the hydrogen for a rainy day
1. Oil companies in alaska spend big bucks pumping Natural Gas which emerges during the pumping process *BACK IN* to oil fields because environmentalists have blocked attempts to build a second pipeline for Natural Gas right next to the current one for petroleum. There is no shortage of Natural Gas that is not the direct product of the environmentalist movement's success at obstructing rational progress. This malthusian scarcity argument is as wrongheaded as it was in the seventies when many of these same pseudo-scientists were predicting global cooling and imminent starvation in India.
Finally, why does the author of this ridiculous "hypothesis" get a pass on its inability to be observed or tested (let alone reproduced) or even explain the world at large? Glad the guy is willing to rethink his religious dogma, but an unfounded theory based on speculative and unprovable premises might as well be a treatise on creationism. It's not a theory, it's a religious tract, and he's not a scientist, he's a theologian with a moderately successful book contract.
All of this discussion is great. However, many of us can do our jobs from home instead of making that one hour commute twice a day.
Also, get rid of the long-haul trucking companies and use more rail.
Both of these solutions would dramatically reduce fuel use in the US.
It's about time that 'environmentalists' started to understand that Nuclear Power is not as evil as the pictures that seem to have been painted for it over the past few decades. I will agree that it is not a perfect solution and that it has it's own set of hazards. If one looks at all of the facts though, it is extremely difficult, (if not impossible), to argue that Nuclear Power is the lesser of two evils. I have no intention of rehashing all of those arguements here, whereas they have all been publicized in many forums, over and over throughout our nuclear history. As a former engineer in the nuclear field, I do understand the facts and am hopeful that others can take a new look at this option under a fresh light. We don't have the time to wait for a new technology to become industrially sound enough to refit our power demands with it. In my humble opinion, the decades that would take will prove to be our end if we travel that road. We should never stop striving to that end, but we should also grasp the opportunities afforded us in the present, to provide our children with a cleaner, better, livable future.
Ok, 1,367 watts per square meter (W/m2) is the average intensity of solar radiation reaching the upper atmosphere. Assuming that on average 30% of that is blocked by the atmosphere, about 1KW reaches each square meter. To avoid all the lengthy calculations, we are going to accept this premise from the department of energy (http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumerinfo/factsheet s/v138.html):
t s/cb5.html), 1000 cubic feet of natural gas has about 1,025,000BTU. That means that 1 square meter receives about the equivalent energy of 4600 cubic feet of natural gas over the course of a year. That's enough to heat the average house for an entire month.
For example, a flat, horizontal surface facing true south in Topeka, Kansas (at 39 degrees North latitude), with total exposure to the sun all day throughout the year, will receive an annual average of 4.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 12,969 Btu, per square meter (10.76 square feet) per day.
According to this (http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumerinfo/factshee
Even at 25% efficiency that is ~3250 BTU/day. That's enough energy to boil ~40 cups of water or power a 150 watt lightbulb for ~20 hours. Per square meter. Per day.
Full-Featured GPL Web Hosting Control Panel
The plant went offline in 1997 when the Provincial government decided to overhaul it and bring it back up. The project has gone *way* overbudget and overschedule. The Green party's line has changed from 'Nuclear power is evil!' to 'Nuclear power costs way too much to build and maintain'. They've apparently done studies showing that nuclear power is not cost effective compared to renewable alternatives. Now, I'm well aware the study is definately biased, but after Pickering, it's starting to sound believable.
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
Now just prove to me beyond a reasonable doubt global warming exists and I'm sold. The natural tendancy of this planet is a so-called "ice age". In fact if you took a measuring stick to represent the timeline this planet has been "warm" measuring around 10-15 feet, the one representing the time it's been cold would be around a mile long. This planet has natural warming and cooling trends and our existence on it is but a mere blip on the screen. In the 70's these same people were scaring us with global cooling, now it's global warming and they justify all this nonsense with less than 100 years of dependable yet incomplete weather data. I'm so tired of these dull arguments and fear tactics that now I just tune it out, they have ruined their own cause with FUD and junk science.
You're absolutely correct.
However, I wasn't trying to argue cost effectiveness. The point was made that solar power towers are more efficient than solar panels, and they're simply not. Even in terms of *just* mirror area, Solar II would only be maybe 11%-15% efficient in converting solar flux to energy, which is what commercial solar panels already do.
Efficiency is not helpful for considering cost-effectiveness, but it is helpful for considering scaling effectiveness and future potential. Solar power towers can't operate much more efficiently than they already are - thermodynamics is the bottleneck. Any improvements will be incremental, and very small. So you'd be wasting your time trying to improve the conversion efficiencies - just try to get the cost down, and it'd be fine.
Solar panels are different, because they don't have that bottleneck - theoretically, their efficiencies can go much higher (and have - up to 34% or higher) and so it's a good idea to spend your time trying to improve their conversion efficiencies rather than trying to get the cost down (which is what they're doing).
Ultimately, however, solar panels have a brighter future (if you'll forgive the pun) because they don't have a thermodynamic wall in their path. The only roadblock is the cost to manufacture, which economies of scale can defeat.
Didn't you mean 9.35 - 11.48 kilometers per liter? Only we obtuse USians use those mpg measurements, right? Every other reasonable creature on earth uses metric because it is easily divisible by 10. Oh well, it's almost time for me to go... What Swatch Time is it? ;-)
UK Oil prices are a choice, and are that high due to taxes
One of the factors that allows taxes in that price range, and allows the effcient use of mass transit is size of the country and density of population
I'll gave you an example
I participate in what is in the US a fairly obscure hobby - Live Steam Trains - The CLOSEST place I can run those trains is 50 miles away, and for most of the US that is close
In England the hobby is MUCH more common. A few years back, the was a huge 100th year celebration, and I knew folks who would not go because it required a 40 mile drive.
The fact is, here in the US, we are more than willing to live 40 miles from work, and make that commute every day, where in England, that is fairly rare
If the government put another $3 of tax on Gas (which is why your at $5.20), we would simply vote them out of office
That said, in the average month, I drive about 100 miles, I take mass transit to work, and have a choice of 2 cars - a fairly fuel effcient Saturn, and yes, a Quad Cab Pickup - We use the small car except when we have to haul stuff around (a side effect of the hobby). If you made gas $5/gal, I'd bitch and moan, but it would not make any difference for what _I_ do, as the extra $180/year really doesn't mean much to me, and my wife's commute (in the Saturn) can NOT be done with mass transit in any reasonable period of time due to it being "reverse flow" - that would cost us $1500/year extra
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
An idea I've been batting around would be to toss the spent fuel into the sun. The coronasphere of the sun would blast the waste into atoms and scatter them across the universe. By the time the atoms got back to earth the density levels would be so low that we might encounter on or two atoms out of a multi-ton cargo. And if we lobbed the payload at the sun's poles we'd never see any of the waste again.
The problem, of course, is that rocket launches into space are not the most reliable ventures at this time and we'd still have to get the waste to the launch facilites. Though, we could use one of Dr. Bull's super guns to fire the waste into orbit and then collect them from there and push them into the sun.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
We're digging all this nuclear fuel up from somewhere in the ground already. It's already radioactive there, right?
Why don't we take the still-radioactive waste products of using that fuel, throw them back where the fuel came from and bury them again?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Do that simple homework and use your brains... you will see that your naive non-solution is pretty much useless. Same exercise can be used to pretty much prove that wind energy has same problem; and even if both approaches were combined, current technology is not enough to make that work as the solution. Maybe as PART OF the solution, but not the whole thing.
they are already having an effect on those sales. (look at the lastest sale pricess. they are trying to get rid of them cause no one is gonna buy them, because the people that buy them, cannot afford them
btw they are not status symbols. they are signs of zero taste.
its a station wagon for today. how cool is that, its a station wagon. oooooh arent i impressed
Hmmm, according to this months newscientist (not online yet, only in the print version) there is an article on page 16, in the "In Brief" section that mentions solar cells could become much more efficient due to a discovery of a way to make a single photon liberate two photons instead of one, it concludes that this could increase the conversion rate to 60%.
On the other hand, I don't see why we can't make polymers from natural materials- and the same for lubrication... were going to have to beat this oil addiction in the end, the more we need it the more we sound like the addicts we are.
Environmental issues aside, what are the real costs of nuclear power? In the early days it was sold as the cheapest energy source available -- "practically free." The question is, how cheap is it, really? How much of the cost is actually being carried by the taxpayer?
From research and development to mining and processing uranium to disposing of waste, everything is subsidized by government programs. Since many of these are high security defense programs, we'll never know the true cost. Furthermore, government contractors like Bechtel who do this work also do other government work, obscuring the true cost of the nuclear work. A similar example would be Boeing -- its cost of producing airliners is subsidized by cushy defense contracts, but we'll never really know by how much.
I'm not arguing that government subsidies are wrong. But we must know the true costs if we're going to make fair comparisons, and the true costs of nuclear power are very well hidden.
Weirdly, in the UK it's mpg that everyone speaks about, but the official specs are in kilometers per litre, and fuel is sold by the litre.
Ewan
Supercapacitors can store electrical energy
for short periods of time with very little
loss. There are some supercapacitors available
but they are expensive. Large amounts of
research and development are actively being
pursued to increase capacity/density and
lower cost. Cost effective solutions are
still years off.
Get your's today!
SUV owners are subject to supply and demand just like anyone else. As gas prices go up demand for SUV's will drop.
... it is, after all 'part of our culture to be this way'" ...
Yeah, this is just a pretty way of saying 'those who can afford to pollute the Earth with their oppulance, deserve to
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Something else along that line. Notice how over the last twenty years gasoline prices in the US seem to be immune to the effects of inflation.
35% -> 40% overall conversion efficiency is around about what you get for a good solar thermal system. Molten sodium as the coolant allows much higher temperatures than 838K, but has disadvantages over molten salt.
You're assumptions are just that. Assumptions. Pretty wild ones at that. Your first assumption is that they're making the receiver bigger and hotter rather than having multiple receivers and it just gets worse from there. You're making assumptions about the paper's assumptions over insolation levels. You're making assumptions about the heat being lost as waste heat after it's used, the very fact you mention the Carnot efficiency assumes this (hint: it isn't lost).
"Plus you're just supporting my point more when you say they have to defocus the mirrors - that's lost energy right there."
Um, yes, so? It means they need a bigger plant. Point the mirrors at another receiver, run the coolant faster. Solar II was an experimental plant. Proved it's point. That point is, you can make the thermal receiver as hot as you want, you can store that heat and you can use it to generate *lots* of power whenever you like. You can do it efficiently and you can do it cheaply.
"Remember that solar panels right now are ~15-20% total efficiency - that is, straight from the solar flux to electricity."
Yeah, that's solar flux to DC. Which is damned near useless on a large scale. Invert it and lose 10-20%.
"though here suggests a 2-mile radius (25 km^2 or so) needed for, say, 200 MW"
Now you're assuming that the words "2 mile wide" is a circle, and that it's the radius and not the diameter of the circle (though that doesn't tie up with your 25km^2 either).
"Even being nice, and assuming that the power generation occurs 5 hours out of a day"
And making assumptions about the generation time.
Your "bottleneck" is irrelevant. Photoelectic cells which are 30%, 40%, 50% efficient are fairy stories, they don't exist. The cheap ones are 10-15%, the expensive ones are 15-20% and the one in a million NASA can get their hands on are 20-30%. The cheap photovoltaic cells are still several times the cost of a solar thermal system.
Look. Go an read the literature on the subject, then come back and argue the toss.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
As an exercise, find out how many square meters there are in the U.S. (or the country you live in). Now subtract the areas that are currently occupied like farmland -- which is already using the sunlight for other purposes. Don't forget that you can't just willy nilly go covering large tracts of land. Cutting off sunlight from large tracts of land could have local ecological issues: reduced heat, retarded photosynthesis, etc. Therefore, you have to spread them out in most cases therefore further reducing your energy collection/conversion potential. Also remember that solar cells have about eight hours per day of useful energy collection assuming you have a tracker. Subtract for cloudy/rainy/snowy days. Also keep in mind that most cells out there today are 8-12% efficient. In order to get widespread adoption of the 50% Berkeley lab version, you have to replace all existing panels. Don't forget that you have to keep them clean -- dirt is not a good photovoltaic. And finally, remember to calculate into all of this that solar cells degrade by 2-5% every year; In the best case scenario, a ten year old cell is only working at 80% of its original capacity. (Now is your chance folks! A perfect example where integrals can be used for a real world calculation. Calc 2 wasn't a waste of time for non-physicists after all!)
Compare the number you get with >3.7 million megawatt/hours, the amount used by the US in 2001 (according to the Department of Energy). Do the numbers add up? No. If you cut the used electricity in half, would the numbers match up? No. Will people voluntarily cut energy usage substantially? No. Do energy usage trends indicate a future increase? Yes. It's not personal, it's just what the numbers say.
It's not even a question of more research into solar cells. "1.36 kilowatts" is the average of a hard limit. No cell will ever convert more energy than it receives. The whole "energy is neither created nor destroyed; It merely changes form." The solar cell debate has never been about if they can produce energy but rather if it produces enough energy. For a single home that doesn't waste much electricity? Usually. For the whole residential, rural, and industrial U.S.? Not even close.
-----
Now what about wind...because I know someone's going to bring it up. Allow me to direct you to The Earth Policy Institute, an organization with a decidedly alternative/renewable energy bias. (Not a bad thing, just making it clear that it has no reason to artificially lower their numbers to make wind look bad.) Their examination of wind power is quite optimistic. Pay special attention to their expectations: gathering hydrogen for fuel in cars, halting coal usage, etc. Now let's look at the data they used for that. They cite a total U.S. potential (not current, but potential) of 1,221,191 megawatts. Now let's assume that this number is constant and not a maximum output. Remember, watts are an instantaneous measurement, not over time. This is why our energy meters read in kilowatt hours. Let's look back at the total U.S. power usage of 3.7 million megawatts. Wind is short by a third; It can't even replace coal (52% of all U.S. power production) let alone meet EPW's expectations that "Wind power can meet not only all U.S. electricity needs, but all U.S. energy needs."
But what about wind along with solar? Well, you'd need to make sure the solar cells weren't shadowed by the windmills. Then y
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Last year I drove a volkswagen passat (model above Jetta) with the very fine 1.9L turbo diesel.
:-)
It has a 62 litre fuel-tank and most of the time I drove 1200 km
before refueling. That's 49 mpg for you.
Only on some smaller trips I got above 60 mpg (3.9l/100km).
But on the other hand, it has more space than some of
your typical SUV.
"...Even if the "Left" isn't fully aware of the
:^)
urgency of the world's energy problems, it seems
like Slashdot is."
My personal experience on Slashdot is that those
two things are one and the same. Everytime I
post ANYTHING even slightly Conservative, I get
moderated down...
As for the topic, I agree with him. We are MUCH
more advanced than we were when the lefties were
running around like chicken-little in regards to
Nuclear power. We can handle it, after all we
are Russian.
(kidding, I like Russians; took Russian in college)
Everyone should immediately bulldoze their house and build up a brand new solar home, eb? You obviously aren't a homeowner with a family and mortgage payments are you? And I hope you can reuse those building materials or else you will be cutting down a lot more trees. Oh, I guess you can use alternative building materials...which require energy to render it for building quality. I also hope your home gets direct sunlight. Many homes in urban and rural areas are not so lucky.
Perhaps you should do a little research. "Sunlight provides about 1.36 kilowatts per square meter, and most solar cells are between 8 and 12 percent efficient." - Wikipedia
With recent advances in solar cell efficiency (in the lab at least), this could definitely take a huge dent out of the residential power grid. But what about industry? What about farming? What about things like the phone companies and hospitals? What about the grand hydrogen economy? U.S. power usage in 2001 was 3.7 million megawatts according to the Department of Energy. Where's is the power for that? Hint: it ain't in solar.
It's not personal. It's just the numbers, and the numbers just don't add up with solar.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Thanks for the fusion info.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
According to the EPA the average miles per gallon is now just over 20, down from a high of 22.1 in the late 1980s.
That's probably because there's been an increase in the amount of water added to the gas. =P
I want to see some population control. Our problems will never be truly solved as long as we keep endlessly expanding. I think 6 billion people is plenty. Hell, 1 billion is more than enough.
Reaktory Bolshoi Moshchnosti Kanalynye
Reactor Bolshoi Moschnosti Kanalynyi
Reaktor Bolshoi Moschnosti Kipyashchiy
reaktor bolshoi moschtschnosti kipjaschtschij
reaktor bolshoi moshchnosty kanalny
Take your pick. Any Russian speakers have a preference?
gewg_
VW Lupo 3L
combined:
2.99 l/100km = 78 US MPG (94 Imperial MPG)
highway:
2.7 l/100km = 87 US MPG (104 Imperial MPG)
According to the EPA the average miles per gallon is now just over 20, down from a high of 22.1 in the late 1980s.
Considering the vehicles that were actually available back in the 80's, I'm not surprised. The auto industry was on this "create a little box of plastic" kick.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
As much as I appreciate Mr. Lovelock, I think he's wrong on power sources. For one, I'd like to ask him, or anyone here, if they'd care to host a nuclear waste facility in their county...and if they believe that they could convince a majority of their fellow citizens to do so.
I think biodiesel is a good interim solution for fuel shortages, but even that has to be superceded, and soon.
He is right, though, on global warming. Other than the reactionary right in power in the US, and the few paid scientists they keep, and the "Christian" scientists (not to be confused with Christian Science, the sect), *NO* *ONE* doubts that global warming is real, and a very serious threat.
*sigh*
And we should have started building solar power satellites 20 years ago, but noooooo, all those US oilmen, and their agents, like Bush Sr.....
mark "should have built the first real
space station by expanding Skylab, too"
Average sunlight is 1.36 if memory serves, but your rule of thumb is easier to work with. So with 8-12%, you are looking at closer to 16-24kw max. Multiply this by 6 (number of hours of usable sunlight on a roof -- I'm not going to calculate that unless all of your roof uniformly faces the sun, you will get substantial loss) and you get 96-144kw/hours. This is of course best case scenario. Better keep those panels clean. Dirt and dead leaves do not make good photovoltaics. And you need to account for degradation -- 2-5% every year for the life of the solar cells. So after ten years, you are only at 80% of what you were originally...in the best case scenario.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
They say they're bad, but if you built a space-elevator, hoisted the nuclears' poop up to space and used, oh, say, a banned aerosol can thruster to put it on a 500 year trajectory to Jupiter, then the nuclears can peacefully co-exist with us hunams.
The Toyota Echo does the same thing that the Ford Focus and a handful of other small cars do: raise the roof. I know when the Focus replaced the Escort as Ford's entry-level car, a lot was made of the fact that it was 3" taller than the escort. In fact, the Focus is noticeably taller than the Taurus. If you ever see two of them parked next to one another, you'll see what I mean.
I'm 6'3" and I drive a Ford Focus wagon. I can sit in the back seat without slouching. Even better, the car came with a manual seat hight adjust, plus a steering wheel that tilts AND telescopes. The wagon model has more headroom in the back seat than either the sedan or the hatchback models, on account of the fact that the roof doesn't start sloping down over the rear seat.
The other thing to avoid if you are concerned about headroom: Moonroofs. They take a good 2-3 inches away from your noggin. Often they extend back over the back seat, too (where the glass goes when you open it).
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
I'm 6'3" and 260 lbs (certainly not thin) and I comfortably fit into the front seat of a Mazda RX-8.
With the seats pushed forward a little I can squeeze into the back seats.
Instead of buying a bigger car, try buying less food. Maybe exercise a little.
As long as week keep up on the redundant safety of our reactors, I am not worried.
Your speech-to-text software may need a little more work...
Now you're assuming that the words "2 mile wide" is a circle, and that it's the radius and not the diameter of the circle (though that doesn't tie up with your 25km^2 either).
It said radius in the document. Did you read it? And a 2 mile radius is 12.56 square miles, which is 32,530,250 square meters (I said square meters, not square kilometers) - Google is your friend. 200 MW means 200,000,000/32,530,250 = 6 watts per square meter, or 0.6% efficiency.
And making assumptions about the generation time.
Yah. Generous assumptions. Considering the method of power generation, power is generated for more than the sun is up, which means it's *worse* than 4%. I'm assuming that the 200 MW number is average power generation, not peak. If it's peak, it's far worse. If it's average, then the solar efficiency goes up by the fraction of the generated power time. You mean to tell me that it's only generating power from solar flux for less than 5 hours?!?! Solar cells generate peak power without tracking for more time than that!
Yeah, that's solar flux to DC. Which is damned near useless on a large scale. Invert it and lose 10-20%.
10-20% of 15% is 12-13.5%. Still much higher than 4%. And there are inverters out there that are 95% efficient, not 80-90%. I can give you more quotes if you want.
You're making assumptions about the heat being lost as waste heat after it's used, the very fact you mention the Carnot efficiency assumes this (hint: it isn't lost)
What are you talking about? Carnot efficiency is conversion of heat to mechanical (and mechanical to electrical, which is near perfect). If you use a heat engine, this is the best you will ever get. If the heat isn't lost, then the conversion efficiency is lower, because it's the heat transfer to the baths that matter. The "hot bath" in this case is the hot water (not the sodium, as the sodium doesn't run through the engine to do work - it's simply heated and cooled) and the "cold bath" is the cooling of the steam to recondense to water. If the cold bath isn't cold, then the maximum conversion efficiency gets worse.
These aren't assumptions. It's thermodynamics, that's all. You're using a heat engine. You're going to be bound by thermodynamics.
Photoelectic cells which are 30%, 40%, 50% efficient are fairy stories, they don't exist.
Labs are fairy stories? Neat. They do exist, and they will make it to market. It will take time, but it will happen.
Whoops - that was supposed to be 25k m^2, not 25 km^2. Sorry about that. Anyway, the efficiency number doesn't change.
I hate to be a stickler here, but nuclear is pronounced just as it's spelled.
r
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=nuclea
Read the excerpt in the entry:
Usage Note: The pronunciation (nky-lr), which is generally considered incorrect, is an example of how a familiar phonological pattern can influence an unfamiliar one. The usual pronunciation of the final two syllables of this word is (-kl-r), but this sequence of sounds is rare in English. Much more common is the similar sequence (-ky-lr), which occurs in words like particular, circular, spectacular, and in many scientific words like molecular, ocular, and vascular.
I agree with everything you said though... and I think if it wasn't for the whole chernobyl mishap, we probably could have gotten over the 3-mile island fiasco.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Dangit! I'm a doof. It is 25 km^2, not 25k m^2. It's 25M m^2. Sigh. Square units. (It's actually 32 km^2)
Mock Bush for saying "nucular" all you like - but Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer, also says "nucular". It's no more indicative of his intelligence than the way Canadians say "oot".
I recently attended a talk on 'dirty bombs', and what I found incredibly interesting is that the people who get the highest on-the-job dosage of radiation is not any sort of nuclear plant workers, but flight crews.
Just being closer to space that often increases the dosage much more than being near a nuclear plant, but its still well within safe levels. We're getting dosed all the time, from both space and the earth.
So this is not all that much of a surprising suggestion.
More like: Introduce bill for taxing of oils. Watch pockets of various reps and senators get very fat. Watch bill die.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
I'm so sick of people being completely uninformed when it comes to diesel engines and emissions.
Today's diesel engines are more efficient, and no where near as dirty as a modern gasoline engine. Yes, even a gas-electric hybrid.
In fact, with direct-injection becoming more available (and popular), diesel engines are set to go up another step in power and efficiency, and run even cleaner.
Diesel is the future for American automobiles. Cars like the VW Lupo are a prime example of what can be accomplished when you apply diesel power in the right proportions (hint, over 80mpg!).
I just wish everyone in the US (yes, I live in the US) would get their heads out of their asses, and realize techonology has not left the diesel engine behind. It's better than ever before, and still improving.
"It said radius in the document. Did you read it?"
l .h tml
I did read it and it said "It is estimated that a "Power Tower" power plant would have to have a 2-mile wide field of mirrors". No mention of the word radius.
Do you want to read it again?
http://www.colby.edu/personal/t/thtieten/sol-ca
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The big thing that scares me about nuclear power is that publicly traded for-profit energy companies have a motivation to cut corners on safety and regulatory standards. I shudder when I think about the fact that Ontario's nuclear power facilities are no longer in the hands of a regulatory body that has no profit motive. There are nearly 6 million people living within 100kms of the pickering plant. Luckily, most of them are up-wind..
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
On the other hand, if fuel was taxed to provide an anti-polution incentive, as it is here, then perhaps people would have to travel less, and it would become economic to provide more local facilities. Or to put it another way, if things were built closer together then you might not use so much fuel. Alternatively the automotive industry would be forced to innovate and produce more efficient vehicles. Either way, if you as a nation want to survive once the oil runs out you're going to have to find a way to live without oil, and the sooner, the better for the rest of the world which just chokes on your smoke.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
You got it from being a kneejerk fuckwit.
The point is that our current extraction of resources is unsustainable. When something is unsustainable, you either stop doing it or get forced to. At some point our fossil fuel addiction will have to come to an end - hopefully not in a scenario of economic collapse.
The same can be said of other resources like iron ore, uranium, etc. One day these will be substantially depleted - what then? Face it - if you are using resources much faster than they are created, you are engaging in a form of environmental rape.
Yup, you're right. Sorry about that. I'll now revise it to 4 times the original. Now it's 2.5% efficient ((1 KW/sq.mt flux) / (200 MW/ 8M sq. mt.)
You're still fighting against 12-13.5%, from solar panels that are available *now*. That's five to six times the power at the same area. Yes, the cost is higher. I'm not arguing that at all. I'm just arguing efficiency, and that's all.
Humans are uniquely vulnerable to radioactivity. Most(all?) other species are not.
what about the teenage mutant ninja turtles?
Kelvin-what? Use the correct units. kW. Nothing else.
The big problem with that? You live on a small island nation, that is what, 550 miles north/south and 200 miles at it's widest? (total of 241590 sq km land area)
Compare this to the US - 9.1+ Million sq km of land area - we have to cover larger areas
BTW, one of the interesting things is that the US happens to be one of the most efficient users of energy in the world - yes, we use the most, but we also produce MORE with that energy than anyone else - the biggest gains are to be had in other countries!! Yes, we use gas guzzling cars, but we make up for it in other places
As I said - I don't burn a heck of a lot of gas, even considering I own a truck to carry my stuff - I use about 70 US gallons/year. How can I do that? Simple - I keep it parked.
Oh, and for smoke - go talk to China - they produce a shit load more smoke per unit output than we do -
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
As with anything, oversimplification causes problems. The standard examples for pills and oil are subject to those problems.
It is difficult to compare US and European transportation requirements, in part because of the other differences.
SUVs became popular in the United States when it became unlawful to sell passenger automobiles that do not meet the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. The customer requirement was for a mommy machine, capable of hauling the kids to soccer practice, the groceries home from the market, and the whole family to Aunt Suzie's place. You can't do that with a European-style economicrobox, and, at the time those rules went into effect, it was not technically feasible to build a full-size station wagon, at that time the standard mommy machine of choice, that could meet the standards. SUVs, being legally trucks, were and are not subject to the CAFE standards, and so, as the full-size station wagons died out, the SUVs took over their ecological niche. The problem with this is that the SUVs had to remain sufficiently truck-like that they do not fall under CAFE, which basically means BIG and HEAVY, and that's where your gas mileage problems come from.
Homework: Design a complete ambulance rig, including space for gurney, passenger, all necessary equipment, and oxygen, including communications, to fit inside a Nissan Altima.
(Trying to steer back toward the topic, here)
70% of the water on the planet is saltwater.
Think of the energy it takes for desalination.
Now consider the pilot projects going on in Eritrea--that war-ravaged drought-stricken country on the Red Sea, wedged between Sudan and Ethiopia.
Using saltwater irrigation, Gordon Sato is showing the locals how to grow mangrove trees in an effort to reclaim desert and produce fuel, building products, and feed for livestock.
He is also showing them how to grow algae and raise fish on the algae.
Carl Hodges is demonstrating farming shrimp (a cash crop) and fish.
The fecal matter from the shrimp and fish fertilizes an edible succulent called Salicornia.
Salicornia produces a high-protein meal and a premium-quality cooking oil.
The fibrous stalks are good for fodder and and as building materials.
The irrigation water drains into manmade wetlands with (indigenous) mangroves, which attracts aquatic birds.
Finally, the water seeps into the soil, cleanly filtering it before it returns to the sea.
"The only two vehicles we tried that had enough room in back were the Ford Windstar van and [applause!] the tiny Toyota Echo. I'll be buying the Echo, but if you don't like Toyota and have big kids then you're kinda out of luck unless you are willing to accept something huge."
Did you try a Camry perhaps?
I'm astonished that none of the hi-modded posters have mentioned the import of increasing power networking - increasing the amount and distance of power shared between generation facilities over the grid.
What frustrates pro-Nuke types (and yes, I'm one, but that's not my topic here) about renewable rants is that renewables are not useful for generating the "base load", the minimum level of power needed 7x24. Your wind and solar plants can't provide it when the sun isn't shining or the wind not blowing.
Buckminster Fuller pointed out nearly 50 years ago that the cost (in both $ and "lost energy" terms) of sharing power across great distances was rapidly dropping because it's a function of the voltage you can push the power up to. If you can transform it up to a million volts, you can share power across, say, 10,000km (all North America) with only a percent or so lost in transmission. This much is now becoming common today. BC and Alberta made out like bandits selling power to California during it's artificial "crisis" the other year.
Fuller proposed another order of magnitude: *global* sharing, and elaborated on it at a lecture at the U. of Calgary I was privileged to attend in 1980 (one of his last). He talked about running lines clear across the Bering Strait so that US power plants not needed when that side of the Earth was in sunlight could run the streetlights in China, Japan & Russia - and vice-versa. He told us that Russian engineers looked at the costs of the transformers and the big power lines in the 70's, ran the numbers on payback, and came back with "practicable and afforable - it's just a political problem". It still is.
Would a global grid cost trillions? Oh, yes; but big power towers and cables last a long time and the global banking system would be happy to hand you a 35-year mortgage on it.
It applies both to making renewables and nuclear more practicable.
For on thing, with long transmission distances, you can put the nuke plants where the uranium is and have NO transportation - just put the waste back in the mined-out drifts of the original uranium mine.
(Here's a wild thought: get a globe. Run a rough line from the major US power consumption area in the northeast, the Boston-Washington corridor, up to the Bering Straight, on the way to Asia. Notice it runs right through northern Saskatchewan? Where about 10% of the uranium on earth, most of the north American supply, just happens to sit. Good place for a cluster of plants, no? And if there's an accident, it's one of the emptiest places in the world.)
For another thing, the sun may not always shine, nor the wind always blow - in one place. But SOME solar/wind farms would always be generating.
With global thinking, you can put your solar where the reliability rate is high - across the great "world desert" that covers most of North Africa, through through Saudi, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan and parts of China. Then there's much of central Australia (60 degrees away); and another 90 degrees along, the western US and northern Mexico. If you can draw on all three of those places, you can get reliable solar 7x24.
Wind is chancier and more localized but the principle's the same - enough windfarms in enough places add up to a baseload.
If people really hated Nukes enough to pay triple the cost for renewable plants, then double AGAIN because they aren't always working and you have to build 2X as many all over the place to keep the global "grid" full - well, then we could get by with renewables ALONE.
With a big enough grid.
(Me, I'd just build about a quarter that costly a grid, do the base load with nukes and about 30% of the load with hydro and renewables for diversity. Then spend the ~~$300B/year difference on doing good works for both humans and the environment, but if you want to be a renewables fanatic, there's how you can make it work.)
the problem isn't that there isn't enough power coming from the sun, it's just we can't (yet) covert it into electricy efficently enough for it to be practical as an all-encompassing solution.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
If you are defensive driving, and minding your own business and a sports car comes out of nowhere and hits you at around 30 mph, you're a hell of a lot more likely to survive that crash than if an SUV hits you at 30 mph. That's why everyone hates SUV drivers. Because they're a danger to people who are NOT compensating for something.
So what if a nuclear plant was designed that addressed these issues? Would you still be against it?
By the way, it was. The prototype was called the EBR-II. The reactor type is called an IFR (Integral Fast Reactor). Let's discuss...
Passive safety: safety systems that rely on properties of nature (like gravity) to function correctly rather than computers or complex machinery. Aside from the fact that a Chernobyl-like accident cannot happen in Western countries (the design was fundamentally different -- optimized for weapons production rather than power), Three Mile Island, a far less serious accident, cannot happen either. How can anyone say this with any conviction? Because they tested the Three-Mile scenario. What happened? The reactor quietly shut down.
So let's summarize safety in an IFR. If something went wrong (the heat exchanger pumps stopped working for example), the reactor is "scrammed", the control rods completely isolate the fuel rods. The control rods are suspended by electromagnet above the fuel rods. Cut the power the control rod suspension mechanism and they drop (gravity), stopping the reaction. But let's say the control rods couldn't drop for some reason. The heat would rise, but the sodium pool would distribute the heat so it wasn't simply localized at the fuel, preventing a meltdown of the fuel (incidentally, for those who get this confused, a meltdown means the fuel melted, not that the plant exploded). The fuel rods would expand gradually from the heat (hot things expand...natural property and all that), the density would descrease, and the chain reaction would reach a terminal point where it cannot sustain further reactions. But let's say that somehow failed. The fuel would need to penetrate the sodium pool to expose its radioactivity to the rest of the core facility (not the outside world, the core building). So let's say that the fuel actually got clear of the pool. It would be contained by the main structure. Let's assume that the fuel were working its way through the main concrete shell. More concrete could be poured to supplement any weak spots. And finally note that all of this highly unlikely scenario would take some time to occur. This would be more than enough time to evacuate anyone in the area.
-----
Re: Weapons use. "The IFR pyroprocess was designed to be 'proliferation resistant'. Simply put, this means that fuel recycled with IFR technology can't be easily used as material for nuclear weapons. Attempts to extract material to produce a nuclear weapon would require a huge, easily detectable, investment in the same type of facilities and equipment that would be required to produce the material directly from spent fuel from any type of reactor."
Only the material coming out of the IFR would have a much lower concentration of transuranics than that of current light water reactors. Which brings me to...
-----
Radioactive waste. The spent fuel of light water reactors and the nuclear material in nuclear warheads can be used for power generation in an IFR. You'll hear the boneheads at Greenpeace say things like "...the nuclear industry has failed to come up with a solution for what to do with nuclear waste." Utter bullshit. Here is a solution that reuses the spent fuel instead of dumping it in Yucca Mountain, uses it more efficiently so that the remaining isotopes are of types with substantially shorter halflives, and it gives a solution to the existing, decaying stockpiles of nuclear warheads.
-----
Uranium caches, while not a renewable resource, w
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Oil won't necessarily run out. Firstly, we are not sure where oil comes from. One hypothesis is that the earth secretes it from its mantle as it cools down in spots. If that is true, then the supply of oil is practically limitless, except that the rate of production/secretion may be limited.
Secondly, we may perfect fission/fusion reactors, thus reducing the demand for oil dramatically, so we only need it to make plastics, in which case the present supplies will last a very long time -practically forever.
We could also produce oil from coal and we have fantastic amounts of coal all over the world - it practically won't ever run out.
So, the doomsday oil will run out scenario is only one of many.
The earth as a whole will adapt to global warming just fine, just as it's adapted to various asteroid strikes and supervolcano eruptions. Whether any given species adapt to such changes is another matter. Nobody thinks global warming will wipe out life on earth, but it may well have drastic consequences for our civilization.
If they had made class with that nucular (heh) waste as an ingredient, the waste wouldn't have the problem of leaking. I forget what that method is called, but it was a really fantastic idea. It didn't remove the radioactivity, but it at least contained the waste so that it wouldn't get into ground water. The problem is that a bunch of frightened greenie lawyers sued to make that method of storage illegal.
Now, we have to resort to barrels that could become leaky.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
"we use oil for energy. Problem, oil is a finite resource, it WILL run out. Alternatives are needed. Okay, we agree so far."
Well, wait a second.
How do we know oil is non-renewable?
Let me ask a simpler question.
Why are large deposits of Helium found with oil deposits?
They're "fossil fuels," right? They're what you get after dinosaurs die and decompose and get subject to intense pressure. Right, now what part of the body uses Helium? I mean, besides the part for sucking on balloons and getting a funny-sounding voice.
Oh, that's right... Helium isn't part of biochem. So where did it come from, and why is it always there?
Thomas Gold has an interesting hypothesis on this. But it alone isn't enough to explain everything; we still know very little about what really goes on beneath the crust of the Earth.
Given the significance of these questions about our understanding of where petroleum comes from, it seems to me that we cannot definitively say whether or not oil is renewable.
So to then predict a date at which point we'll be "out" of oil is at best a Wild-Assed Guess.
Remember how during the Internet Bubble, people were saying that the speculation and rampant spending was because of the New Economy, and that the rules had all changed, and this was different from every other time in the past when they'd said "oh, the rules have changed" because it really, really was different?
And then the bubble burst, and it turns out that the old rules still applied, and it was no different from any other time?
Remember how people were saying that we'd run out in the 70's, and then we didn't, and now they're saying we're going to run out but hey, things are different from the 70's -- THIS time we really will run out? Well, maybe we will, but:
1. We really DON'T know where it comes from.
2. We've heard this alarmist politically-motivated song-and-dance before.
Thanks.
The problem here is that you assume natural resources (like oil) are provided by markets, when in reality they are provided by the environment. It's a common mistake of an economist.
Higher prices for a commodity may increase supply at the margin, but you're certainly not increasing the overall resource base. It should also be mentioned that in the case of oil, higher prices meaning higher exploration and drilling costs as well.
anecdotal and 2nd hand but plausible
The MPG display does provide real feedback to the driver about the grosser habits, like leadfoot acceleration and sustained suboptimal speeds (65+ mph).
Someone with a Prius wrote that without the MPG feedback, the only info they had was from the speedometer. They thought that installing this on non-hybrid cars would save an Exxon Valdez every year.
So we're palatable now?
Geez, with the European emphasis on "slow" food, I'm in big trouble. Time to make sure my running shoes are tied on tight at all times.
(joking!)
The Toyota Echo does the same thing that the Ford Focus and a handful of other small cars do: raise the roof. I know when the Focus replaced the Escort as Ford's entry-level car, a lot was made of the fact that it was 3" taller than the escort. In fact, the Focus is noticeably taller than the Taurus. If you ever see two of them parked next to one another, you'll see what I mean.
Funny thing is... the Focus ZX3 has the same overall dimensions as the VW Golf. (I looked at both prior to buying the ZX3 back in 2001.) The interior of the Focus feels a lot larger then the VW Golf.
Solar Chimneys
No. You're an idiot. If only those who can afford to can drive SUVs, then far fewer SUVs will be driven and far less pollution will come from them. But you seem to be unhappy with the thought that anyone, anywhere, can drive what they want to.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
Look into the reasearch into Pebble Bed Nuclear reactors. They are a safer replacement to traditional nuclear. NOT perfect but much safer. Of note I believe there are two types. One which the pebbles have a special coating and others which are a mix of special material all the way through. The latter is safer I believe.
That combined with Fuel Cells, Solar, and Micro Turbines could move us a step forward to meeting energy needs.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
He was quoting Homer Simpson, though, who said those exact words. He knows how it was pronounced... I think he was just making fun.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
It is frustrating to see so many people go to such extremes of rationalization and rhetoric to avoid the obvious conclusion. Humanity is clearly and undeniably threatened by both fossil fuel shortage and global warming. Both are the result of reckless over-use of fossil fuels for the last 150 years. As always, the best solution to the problem is REMOVING OR MINIMIZING THE CAUSE. If the cause is energy over-use, the solution is eliminating and/or reducing energy use.
Humanity (and particularly the West) must learn to get by on FAR less fossil fuels than we currently consume. This will preserve what precious little we have left, and postpone and hopefully minimize the effects of global warming (if that is possible).
The most efficient energy sources by FAR are conservation and reduction. No megawatt is cheaper, cleaner, and easier than the one you don't use because you minimized your energy requirements. No gallon of automotive fuel is more environmentally responsible than the one you save when you ride your bike to work.
When you consider the severity of the very real threats posed to us today, why are these ideas frightening?
-- Aaron
not a bad post...too bad most of the people filter out Anonymous Coward posts.
Why didn't you post with your real name? You're not a loon, nor a troll or a flame war starter...you have valid points.
It is cost competitive in many situations right now, and it would be just about everywhere right now if the end user had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels ... with no theoretical reason PV panels should ultimately cost much more than glass, shingles, or sheet plastic.
People say this and yet the best estimates for the return from photovoltaics is that they take around 40-50 years to output an equivalent amount of energy to the (mainly) fossil fuel inputs required for their manufacture. This has improved from 50-60 years from two decades ago. This is slow progress and unless the nanotech fairies produce some miracle, PVs are a long way from being a solution given our increasing constraints on fresh water (required for manufacture) and dwindling cheap energy supplies.
Da Blog
Green groups out there in general, and Greenpeace in particular, have long being known as traditional pressure groups whose goal is to push their own agendas. Like other pressure groups, they don't shrink from manipulating the data an plain lying in order to do so.
In encourage everyone to visit http://www.lomborg.com and read The Skeptical Environmentalist, where the mendaciousness of green associations is starkly exposed.
The UK uses mpg also. The rest of Europe uses not kmpl but the inverse : Litres per 100km. My current car burns around 6,5 litres/100km. :-)
It allows easy calculation of how much gas is needed for a trip. On the other hand it's probably because it's familiar to me that I like it
Nazism was an outgrowth of socialism combined with nationalism.
Dude, fascism is an expression of corporatism, which emerged as a reaction to the leftist revolutionary tendencies unleashed in France in 1789, and which erupted like wildfire across Europe in 1848 and whose flames are still smouldering. Fascism always has and always will be seen as a purely reactionary emergent property of capitalist or oligarchical systems when "threatened" by social or political progress of the poorest members of society. The only thing "socialist" about Nazism was in its title - it was a classic example of bait and switch marketing. For other examples of nominative misdirection, see "Greenland".
Da Blog
... afford ...
What does afford mean to you?
The point of this slashdot article is that nobody can afford to drive SUV's, not even the rich who can right now, because it is destroying the earth.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Unfortunately, nuclear power won't help. Even if the U.S. were to magically build hundreds of nuke plants overnight and use them for all of our electricity generation, the world's oil would still go into gas tanks everywhere, and natural gas would be used in other countries to generate electricity. The pace of consumption might go down a bit, but the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in 200 years would be the same under either scenario.
I'm not saying we're doomed, just that nuclear power won't save us, or even help.
O.K - use the solar energy to pump water from lower to higher dams.
Officer: Next weekend, we're having our annual war games. Now Simpson, because of your many years as a nuclear technician, we're putting you on a nuclear sub.
Homer: "Nuc-u-lar". It's pronounced "nuc-u-lar".
As a proud SUV driver (Dodge Ram 1500, extended cab baby!) I must say I am totally unconvinced by the doom shouting of the Global Warming bunch. Mr. Lovelock is the classic case, he contends that humanity is a disease, a blight on the face of Gaia if you will.
How big an idiot would I have to be to place any credence in the words of a man who thinks I'm a disease? I'd be better off just swiming over to Iraq and offering myself up for an Islamofascist haircut. They just think I'm a tool of Satan, not a disease.
In the 1970's the big fear was another Ice Age, these days its global warming. Next year it will be some other crap. There is no "proof" of global warming at this time,there aren't even any measurements consistent with warming. There are only computer projections based on incomplete data. Garbage in, garbage out.
The USA alone uses roughly 21 million barrels a day of crude oil alone, without figuring in all the coal, nuclear and natural gas. Figure out the energy content of a barrel of oil, then figure out how many square feet of photovoltaic cells you need to generate that much electricity. Also, remember that solar does not work at night or in the rain or when its cloudy so you have to have someplace to store a couple of days worth of electricity in case of a big cloud front.
Do that up and you will discover that you need more square feet of solar collectors than there is land surface in the USA. Ain't gonna work.
As to giving up my SUV, no fucking way. Its a free country, I get to choose my own vehicle and I chose it. I'll not give it up just because some tree huggers don't like it.
This here is where you see what a political movement is made of, in how they deal with the people who don't agree. Lets count the number of people who call me a pig for driving a politically incorrect vehicle, shall we?
I think the poster meant:
catastrophic PERSONAL reason
as in, their income taxes would touble, or increase by 10000$/year whichever is more, unless they use efficient vehicles.
For that matter, why not just revise the law that makes SUVs legal to drive, being that inefficient?
Not sure why it makes any sense to have trucks, for that matter, who tend to do more mileage per year of life, than any other, be the most inefficient/polluting of the bunch, for that matter.
Over the course of a year, they may be paying hundreds of dollars more for gasoline, but they generally have already payed thousands more for the upfront cost of buying an SUV over an economy car.
I think for the majority of the car buying public in the US, this is NOT true. Why? Most buyers here in the US finance their car purchases - otherwise, it's kind of hard to justify spending upwards of $30,000 on a van or SUV, with the leather interior, CD changer, automatic doors, sunroof, etc. As a result, they're really looking at their monthly cost of owning the car - not the total cost, since it's distributed over several years (ie, 5 yrs.) If you consider a $575 a month car payment, then things like a higher insurance premium and higher gas per month start to become problems if you were already pushing the limit of your monthly income.
I think that's the reality of car buying here in the US. Most of the costs are spread out over the time of ownership, so unless there's a general perception that you're going to suffer by buying an SUV (ie, higher gas prices), you're probably going to listen to the salesman, with his rebates and incentives, and almost guaranteed long-term financing. Yes, they'll be paying thousands more in the long term (especially since the higher cost will translate into more interest paid on the auto loan), but most people are living beyond their means anyways...
[the Sun is] the ONLY source of new (not stored) energy
Coal is a fossil fuel. It comes from plants that died a long ago.
Oil is a fossil fuel. It comes from dinosaurs (ok, algae) that died a long time ago.
Uranium is a fossil fuel. It comes from stars that died a long time ago.
Hydrogen is a fossil fuel, too. The energy there was stored in the Big Bang, and they aren't making any more of it.
People use gas mileage as an excuse to pick on SUVs.
People hate SUVs because they block visibility on the road. The new SUVs often have televisions that distract the driver behind them. They are more likely to be full of kids and thus, often have distracted drivers.
Many people consider them to be the most obnoxious things to drive near.
Half of my country's (Denmark) power in 2012 is supposed to be coming from winds, and we are close to getting there
Wow, a big 5.5Million people in Denmark. (CIA fact book 2003) That's about 1/5th of the greater Los Angeles area!!!
I heard that covering all "wind area" in the US would bring less than 2% of the current energy needs.
In fact all 'alternate' tech. (non-Dino) used at it's current maximum geological and technological capacity could barely satisfy 10% of the energy needs (in the US).
What is the world going to do in a few years when China will need 10 times more energy than the US? And the regime will not care about CO2 emission.
I noticed a disturbing trend in alternative power sources. They're all developed/tested, in unpopulated area. With the growth of population being the way it is, that means alternative power will become more and more anti-green. Because it takes away habitat from other species, to preserve "human" habitat.(If you're curious, I was seeing a show about the controversy surrouding the marine wind turbines being discussed in Massachusetts.)
Then it struck me, why can't we reuse urban areas for power production? Say tear down some uninhabited buildings to make a solar farm, or some abandoned harbor for tide power. Or my favorite, why not put wind turbines on the tops of skyscrapers. We already know the wind higher up is more powerful, and can cause buffeting near the base of the building. With careful design, we can limit or eliminate buffeting, and transform the force of that buffeting into power.
*tongue in cheek humor mode*
Humans need to use better the land we have, not take more away from baby tigers, nuff said
*end tongue in cheek*
Mighty big thumb you have there.
Insolation is about 1300 W/M^2 at the top of the atmosphere. The atmosphere reflects and absorbs some of that. Simple trigonometry reduces the energy density at useful temperate latitudes where most of the energy is used. That doesn't even get into night, weather, local terrain, landscape and building effects.
More charts than you know what to do with, detailing averages over 30 years of data from 293 locations in the US, for various types of solar collectors (fixed, 1 or 2 axis tracking, flat, concentrating, etc.)
Have you not been paying attention? Horse farts are a greenhouse gas and contribute more to global warming than my SUV does. So does horse poo.
Now I want you to think about how many horses it would take to transport all the people and goods into Manhattan for a single day. That's a lot of horse poo, dude.
There's a reason why people at the turn of the Twentieth Century jumped on automobile technology and pushed it along as fast as they did. It sucks to be dependant on horses.
Horses are an idea that's been and long since gone.
I know about CAFE, the rise of SUVs, etc. I also know that with the average sized (2 kids) US family, an SUV is not a daily necessity. Even in the case of 3 kid families, a sedan is adequate for daily use. Four people + groceries, books, etc in the trunk. My wife does it all the time, in a Saturn SL2. Granted, my kids are young, but those car seats take up a lot of space. I'm fine in the back seat of that car (well, when the car seats are out that is), and I'm 6'2.
I don't think that SUVs are simply a logical consequence of CAFE. CAFE certainly contributed to the rise of the SUV, but as you noted, oversimplification can get you into trouble. There are other factors. There are significant psychological reasons for driving SUVs : feeling of being in control, safe, and protected, and the feeling of being able to see over traffic. My mother in law drives an SUV. Her youngest kid is 26, rarely takes the grandkids out, hardly ever transports anthing large (they have a pickup for that), but still drives an Expedition. She drives it because she "feels safe, and in control". This is not a necessity, it is a luxury.
I'm not saying that SUVs are evil and that it should be a criminal offense to drive one. If you can afford it, do it. If you think there is a need to do it, do it. I just think that, for most people, SUVs are not a necessity, and the supply/demand effects do apply to them (they are elastic). I live in a city (Houston) where nearly half of the private vehicles on the road are classified as trucks. A large porportion are pickups, but we have more than our fair share of SUVs. Most of the SUVs I see on the road have one, or possibly two occupants. Rarely do I see one with more than 4 people in it.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
There was this guy, awhile back, named R. Buckminster Fuller. He was somewhat of a crackpot. He pioneered geodesic domes, the Fuller projection for global cartography, the tetrahedral lattice, among other things. Not bad ideas, really. All of these are used today.
He also tried to get the world to start driving cars with single rear-wheel steering (the Dymaxion Car), or live in round all-aluminum houses that leaked air by design, or install one-piece stainless-steel bathrooms that could be automatically cleaned. None of these things caught on.
He did have a lesser-trumpeted idea, though, that related to the global electrical grid. The idea (and it requires a VERY high degree of cooperation between nations) was to interconnect every nation's power grid to that of its neighbors. In such a way, power would become more fault-tolerant and production would become cheaper.
The idea is that there are about six hours of every day that people are just not using much electricity. Humans tend to sleep every day. While we sleep, we're not watching TV or running the vacuum or opening/closing the fridge door a lot, so there's more electricity available. A hydroelectric plant doesn't shut down for the night -- it keeps generating power as we sleep. Same goes for a nuclear plant.
Electricty has no shelf-life. You put as much on the grid as you need from it, and when demand fades, you put less on the grid -- but you don't stop producing. Balancing the demand and the production on a global scale, while a tall order, would certainly help lesser-developed nations aquire cheap power and would ease the environmental impacts of individual plants in areas where they may not be needed.
clearly, there's a lot to work out in the global grid scenario, but it has certain advantages and elegant attributes.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
We've heard from Down Under, and the Misty Isle, along with us uniformed Americans. Is there anyone here from Japan? Isn't Japan almost 90% Nuclear?
0 /2 1/166237&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=134
Here on the West Coast of America, I have never heard about a major Nuclear accident in Japan. And there records go back to the 70s
And New Tech seems to have shrunk useful reactors down to relatively teeny proportions. Wasn't there an article on here a few months ago about a new small reactor --->
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/1
Has that project pushed foreward?
Steven D. Leary
They NEED to come out with Fuel Cell SUV's. Big ones too. A large SUV with over 80mpg would change how people view them, AND reduce our use of the fuel.
:D
First one to come out with such a vehicle will own the market.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
There is a very simple way to eliminate the demand in 99% of cases for fossil fuels: criminalize their possession.
If it works in the 'war on (some) drugs', it should work in any scenario, right?
"I know together we'll make the possible totally impossible" - Homme
To put this in the form of an example, suppose I have a car that gets one mile per gallon. Somehow I manage to change that to two miles per gallon. I have now reduced my costs per mile by half. If I add an additional mile per gallon, I reduce my costs by an additional third. In mathematical terms, the fractional savings is 1/n where n is the MPG achieved. If I had a car that got 15mpg and traded it for one that got 30mpg, I save 50 percent. To save half again, I have to go to 60mpg. Et cetera.
Meanwhile, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve thos high mpgs. This is why there is a certain sweet spot where the tradeoffs in achieving high mpg exceed the cost benefits. In my opinion (and the market bears this out) that sweet spot is about 30mpg.
Why dont we dump it in the ocean, then finally I can get some mutant sharks with friken "lasers" on theyre heads.
This sig intentionally left blank
If the Sun supplied enough energy per square meter then Minnesota would not be so darn cold in the winter. As a civilization, the US consumes more energy than what hits the ground the US sits upon!!!
So then, how does average fuel efficiency in the UK compare to in the US?
If someone could come up with a cheap paver that collected solar power and all parking lots used them we could be a long way toward getting rid of oil.
Uhm, why not just use roofs? They cover a huge amount of area.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Granted, a lot of families COULD get along with something smaller than an SUV. The mileage that they have to drive is generally very inelastic, and is pretty much determined by distance between affordable housing and place of employment.
There was a pretty good piece in "USA Today" today about that problem. There are a lot of places in the US today where it is IMPOSSIBLE to find anything even remotely resembling affordable, acceptable housing anywhere near the workplace. In order to afford the roof over their heads, in a safe neighborhood, they have to live a long commute away, which turns into lots of miles driven. Further, for most of them, mass transit is not an option. The workplaces are too scattered. (There may be cheap housing nearby, but the neighborhood may well not be someplace you want your family living.)
In the cases where mass transit is an option, commuters from the high cost areas can quickly crowd the locals out of the housing market and bid the prices up.
From your link: Therefore the massive investments in mining, silicon manufacturing plants, operation, and cleanup are obfuscated and hidden in these calculations. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
I am reminded of calculations in a similar vein that demonstrate for every Kg of beef produced we burn approximately 5.5 L of petrol (for USians that's around 3/4 of a gallon for every pound of beef). That makes around 5 barrels of oil per cow consumed as fertiliser, transport costs, materials. We are, literally, eating oil. However we rarely notice such obfuscated inputs because they are so deeply embedded within our industrial infrastructure as to become well-nigh invisible to a casual glance.
Da Blog
I don't think anyone should seriously equate, even in an analogous manner, the environmental issues to the threat faced by fascism. If anything, the fascists were strong and dominant where we still have a lot of control over environmental policies. Blaming the actions of the left during the rise in Nazism is kind of shortsighted given that the Nazis were killing off all the leftists in Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, etc. The fact that the soft "liberals" considered Communism to be a greater threat than Nazism kind of didn't help matters.
As far as nuclear energy is concerned, here is the main reason why leftists cannot really endorse it outright:
What are you going to do with the nuclear waste?
Already, you have countries like USA and Japan trying to unload their nuclear waste onto other, usually poorer, countries. This is particularly a problem for Japan since it has shortage of land (whereas USA can just dump it into some mine/bury it and hope the clueless citizens don't say anything eg. Nevada).
If you support nuclear plants, you are basically shifting a modern problem to the future. The amount of nuclear waste generated now is negligible but if nuclear plants replace other forms of energy, then the waste will actually be a serious problem.
Lastly, nuclear plants are too expensive and problematic. Many countries have had problems with them. As an Ontarian (Ontario, Canada), I can refer you to the nuclear plants in Pickering, Ontario, which are way overbudget by several billions with no hope of managing them.
I think leftists should endorse the following sources (in order): geothermal, solar, and wind. Hydro should be a last resort.
Having said all this, I'm just talking about nuclear fission. Fusion is another story (fusion may be ok)...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Here's a paper on payback time by Alsema, Frankl, & Kato.
Da Blog
Where do you live? Here in Minnesota 2x4 outside walls have not been legal for years. 2x6 is minimum. (2x4 is R13 BTW, 2x6 is R19) Attics get at least a foot of insulation.
We now have to meet "international" building codes, which are getting stricter all the time. (I have no idea how international they are)
"take their fat asses out of their SUV's"
/. where the average reader probably tops 300 lbs of twinkie eating l33t n3rd that is sitting in a air conditioned apartment with 5 computers - oen of which draws so much powere it needs a custom cooling system :)
/. bitches about the excesses of other peoples lifestyles it makes me crack up :)
This on
Anytime someone on
--> Fight tyranny and repression.... read
Take a close look at what happened in the early '90s. Emissions laws got stricter, to the point where manufactures had to trade lower emissions for milage. Valve overlap (when both exhaust and intake valves are open for a moment) is great for increasing total milage, but it costs in emissions so they don't do that anymore. Not to mention other changes.
I have long suspected that the only way out of the global warming conundrum is expanded use of nukes, combined with aggressive conservation programs. Quite frankly I find the possiblity of a meltdown in an American design light water reactor much less frightening than the prospect of continued use of fossil fuels to power the world economy. Since we have been slacking on research into alternative power solutions since the beginning of the Reagan administration we have wasted twenty years when we could have been developing photovoltaics for use in distributed generation schemes (my favorite mostly green solution). We have also squandered chances for higher efficiency technologies for heating, cooling, lighting, etc. We have also mostly given up on higher CAFE requierments for vehicles. It seems to me that we have backed ourselves into a corner where increased use of nukes, especially nukes to manufacture the electricity needed to crack hydrogen from more complex molecules. Long term storage of wastes remains a problem, but I think it is less of an engineering problem than a political problem. Whatever happens, we cannot continue of the course we have been following.
Isn't theory a great place? Everything works in theory.
In case anybody cares about the facts
http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/
Nuclear power is great for those who are willing do manage the nuclear waste until such time as it is safe to eat - which I believe is hundreds of millions of years into the future.
Americans should never be allowed to use nuclear power, however, because they simply export their waste ( current exports include nuclear, electronic and toxic chemical waste ) to other countries who have leaders stupid enough to accept the waste. In many cases, these leaders are of course supported by the US with under-the-table contributions as well as military gifts.
Put simply, nuclear energy has great potential to power a planet's industry, however human society is not mature enough to manage the waste yet. It only takes one accident to render large portions of a country hostile to life for millions of years. We don't have the right to do that.
"Tax oil (BEFORE refining). Try this thought experiment. Tax oil. Consumption goes down (supply/demand etc.). Competing suppliers respond with lower prices barrel prices in an attempt to keep market share. We (as a nation) effectively pay *less* for our oil AND our consumption rate decreases AND new markets are created for energy effiency AND alternative sources of energy become more attractive AND greenhouse gas emmisions decrease." Consumption would not go down by enough to make a difference. Most people will not give up or reduce their mobility by driving less. Especially americans, those without cars in the US are 5th rate citizens because everything is so spread out. Public transport can amerliorate this somewhat. What would happen is the prices of EVERYTHING would go up by the tax you are suggesting we put on oil. When pansies whine about "no blood for oil", they fail to realize that oil is the blood of the industrialized world. So we either have to give up our way of life and go tribal, or deal with reality. When the price oil goes up, or the supply goes down (same net effect), not only does it mean that your road trip to florida will cost more, but groceries will cost more. Every thing at Target will cost more because their trucks still run on the oil you've taxed. Total cost of living goes up for EVERYONE. Your dollar doesn't get you as much as before. Your rent goes up because your landlord is spending more on gas too. If you make 500$ a week and your rent, food, transport and everything else gets more expensive, you still aren't making any more than you were. Now some may argue that our material luxuries are not worth blood shed. But lets realize that what happens on the micro scale will also hit the macro. Your state government is paying more for its police patrol cars, so they have to reduce the number of cars. The state government is finding schools more expensive to operate, so no raises for the teachers. The fed level must also make sacrifices... so we scale back the nice and fun projects like medical research and foriegn aid. In france they tried to encourage ppl to use the trains and busses by racheting up the price of gas. It failed, ppl would rather pay more and keep their cars. For some it the commute was the only privacy they had. It is not about the price of oil, it is about finding new SOURCES of energy. Ideally cheaper and cleaner sources. Here we refer to the age old truth of FAST, CHEAP, GOOD... Pick TWO. In the case of energy it might be CLEAN, CHEAP, AVAILIBLE. In our case zero point energy is not availible. Cold Fusion will be clean and cheap when it becomes availible. As it is, oil is cheap and availible.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Are you serious? Do you not realize that if car exhausts are destroying the Earth, if, then it's a problem of excess - too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing the Earth to heat up, whereas a lesser amount would have little impact. If only the rich were to drive SUVs, then it wouldn't be excess, now would it?
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
I believe there is one major difference between Professor Lovelock and the leaders of so-called environmental groups -- he is an environmental scientist, while they are first, and foremost, activists. Scientists try to maintain objectivity. Ethical scientists are willing to change their minds at any time based on the facts. Activists, on the other hand, don't require facts or evidence. All they require is faith and belief that their vision of the world is right and proper, for them and for you. In this way, they are remarkably similar to right-wing, religious fundamentalists.
I don't care to delve too deeply into the similar psychologies of left-wing activists and right-wing fundamentalists. I've been exposed to too many examples of both in my life. Actually, I just wish that members of both groups would shut the hell up and get out of the way. Then the rest of us could get down to the really important work of making sure that our children inherit a world that's in better shape than the one we started out with.
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
Death toll in fossil fuels is much higher than in nuclear fuels.
Chernobyl was an example of extreme carelessness.
In the West the death toll for nucelar events for the last 40 years is minimal - much lower than YEARLY death toll for coal mine accidents in China alone.
Direct death toll in coal mines and similar is way over 100 - probably close to 1000 yearly worldwide.
Moreover there are effects caused by CO2 and SO2/3
Not counting the cost of involment in the oil-reach unstable regions like Middle East.
It is our oil money that allowed 9/11.
Or maybe he recognizes most of the rhetoric against nuclear to be utter nonsense. Ralph Nader declared plutonium to be the most toxic substance known to man. It isn't. Not even close. Others suggested that the use of nuclear power would boil our rivers and oceans away. It doesn't. Not even close. It's repeated over and over that there are no ways to dispose of transuranic spent fuel. There is.
Environmentalists (myself included) need to get over this and move on. More people have died from the coal cycle each year than have ever died from nuclear accidents -- including Chernobyl. Renewable alternatives may potentially solve energy problems someday. Nuclear solves them today. It's not politics. It's just running the numbers.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
all of the answers say:
:-)
We don't need no f*ckin' environment
We don't care about sustainability
I don't care about anything but my own, fat ass
I don't even care about my children's future
Anything that would require me to think about my position is leftish
These answers look exactly as insightful as the ones a five year old could give. On the other hand: this is slashdot
Wow, I didn't want to know it that precisely.
k2r
The answer to the station wagon is the minivan. They hold just as many people and groceries as an SUV, and in fact was the prototypical vehicle of the "soccer mom". Minivans are much safer, get better fuel economy, and are easier to drive than SUVs. The reason SUVs are popular is that people think they look good, think they are safer (the opposite is true), and they want that big V8!
While there are certainly people who need to haul or tow things and go off-road, this is by far the minority of SUV owners. That's why passenger car CAFE standards don't apply to them. However, that distinction is being abused by insecure people who want others to think they're cool.
BTW, ambulances used to be made out of station wagons before they started using vans.
aQazaQa
to an extent, you can mix it with borosilicate (pyrex) to create a kind of radioactive glass. In that form it should never leak into groundwater and it is a nice compact way of storing high level waste
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Don't forget, Nazi meant National Socialism.
And 'National Socialism' meant anti-socalism. Whadda yer gonna tell me next, the NAACP is a white supremecist organization?
After all, wasn't taking control of the means of production, nationalizing businesses, and launching major work programs all done in Nazi Germany?
Well one out of 3 ain't bad I suppose, but there was no taking control of the "means of production" (you crypto-Marxist you :)), there was no nationalising of business. This is not surprising, since the NSDAP, by the time they took office were neither 'socialist' not a 'workers party,' but firmly ensconced in with the right of German politics.
I think there is not one solution to the problem. We should be investigate various sources of energy. In future we will have a mix of wind, solar, nuclear etc. Every roofshould be covered in solar panels especially in high sunlight countries. Houses could power themselves.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
What you nuclear-haters always assume is that everything radioactive is "bad" and that all radioactive substances (in whatever quantities) are equally as bad.
This is naieve and simplistic.
As environmental standards increase, the Nuclear Industry, like every other industry, makes improvements to its business such that it complies with the law on these issues. Mere compliance isn't all they reoutinely achieve anyway. But you wouldn't believe that.
If you want some facts, go here.
Stick Men
I wonder what mass hysteria there would be if Joe Public suddenly realised that it worked because it contains a radioactive americium-241 source.
Could you imagine the mass panic and uproar there'd be when the ignorant suddenly start imagining that they're all going to die of cancer from their smoke detectors? I wonder how many more people each year would die in house fires?
All elements heavier than uranium do not occur in nature (on earth) and have to be produced artificially by nuclear reactions (in one of those horrible, evil, scary nuclear reactor thingies). That's where the dreaded plutonium comes from, as well as americium for your smoke detector.
You can also read about all the radioactive isotopes used in medicine for both diagnosis and treatment of things like cancer that we make using nuclear reactions.
Stick Men
Cost is a proxy for resources, right? So part of the cost of photovoltaics are relatively exotic materials (gallium?) and the manufacturing processes for same (power, water, precursors, reagents, amortised cost of capital equipment etc etc) plus of course replacement parts in the photovoltaic array.
There will be similar numbers for the mirrors on a heat pump of course. I imagine that the motorised assemblies for the tracking mirrors will be prone to failure and relatively expensive, but my gut feel is that mirrors are relatively simple devices compared to photovoltaics with fewer bottleneck materials in their supply-chain that could bugger up the cost-benefit numbers if you were to ramp up production to significant numbers.
Put simply I'm proposing (with no evidence to back me up mind) that it would be easier, in terms of total cost to a civilisation, to cover Arizona with mirrors than to do the same with photovoltaics. Has anyone done any work on trying to estimate those sorts of factors?
If my hunch is correct, then thermal towers might well be a way to go as a stop gap technology - which is where this discussion started from.
Regards
Luke
That was me in the parent.
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
You don't need a fast reactor unless you are breeding plutonium; you can burn Pu in anything that will accept MOX.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Or maybe: those of us that have brains have no problem with nuclear-power, it's nuclear-waste that we take issue with.
/. crowd appears to be falling in line.
And surprisingly, though no one can figure out why, the two are inextricably linked.
This new line of pro-nuclear ranting that's been coming on strong recently is bullshit, and for some reason the
Yes, nuclear-power is safe.
No, nuclear-waste is not safe.
No, you cannot have nuclear-power without nuclear-waste.
Whenever one argues that nuclear-power is safe, and slams those that don't agree as fear-mongering tree huggers or the like, take it with a HUGE grain of salt because you're missing 2/3 of the story, you're being lied to. Period.
I hate being lied to.
Now, personally I'd like to see this issue resolved once and for all. Why don't we fix the problem with the waste? Does it not strike you as odd that we have nuclear-waste? Why do you think it exists?
Answer is simple: because there is no incentive to do anything with it other than stuff it in a closet and forget about it, other than the "save the world" argument which sits well with individuals, but doesn't fly with corporations.
Now, here's the interesting part: It has been hypothesized, and many studies have been done that appear to support the hypothesis, that if the same amount of money that goes into creating nuclear-power were directed at dealing with the waste, 2 things would occur:
1) There would be no waste as we would find uses for it.
2) Chances are the uses we find for it would offset the cost needed to find the solution, and would likely end up paying for the creation of the nuclear-power in the first place!
Think I'm on crack? Prove it by showing that billions(Probably Trillions actually) have been put into projects intended to solve this problem.
Rhetoric doesn't cut it here, but that's what we take for granted, the assumption that there's nothing that can be done about the problem we have created.
No Comment.
Trees are solar collectors that are self replicating, produce their own power, and use solar panels so cheap they may throw them away annually and make new ones each spring. They may even produce fruit free for the lunch-time picking! So there is plenty of proof of concept here for cheap solar collectors.
Self-replicating photovoltaics. Ah the raw material of so many sci-fi replicator dystopias...
Da Blog
You're completely right, and I agree with you that solar thermal, if you only look at the short-term, might be viable - that is, as a stop-gap.
But my whole point throughout this was that photovoltaics, fundamentally, are a better technology. Half the reason I even replied was because the person recommended power towers as "better" at converting solar to electricity. Heat engines are just fundamentally impossible to make efficient, because of that darned Second Law of Thermodynamics. And so, eventually, any sane study of the two technologies would have to be in favor of solar panels in the long run, because they will (and currently do, from what I can calculate) generate more power per square meter than power tower designs. And fundamentally, in the end, land is the one thing that you can't hope for process technologies to improve upon - one square meter is one square meter. Solar panels might get cheaper, power towers might get cheaper, but since you're dealing with solar flux, ultimately, if you need to scale, land issues are going to come into play. And solar panels use land much more effectively than towers do.
It should also be noted, of course, that there's no reason you couldn't use mirrors with solar panels, either to increase their effective area, but there's an efficiency loss there as well.
Would seem to me to make sense to build an array of tracking solar panels with mirror extensions which can be replaced with solar panels when they drop down in price. That seems to me to be a perfect stopgap solution.
You can burn fissionables in a thermal reactor too; you just avoid including any fertile material in the core. You could do this just as easily with e.g. U-235 or U-233 and some burnable poison (which is depleted as the load of fissionables is replaced by fission product); you would eliminate the fissionables without making any more.
A thermal reactor can be a breeder too, making U-233 from Th-232; IIRC that test was run on the Shippingport reactor before it was decommissioned and found that it would essentially replace its burned fuel and make about 2% more, roughly breaking even.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
My last dump took "a lot" of energy, that dosn't make shitting a bad idea. Are you saying that it takes more energy to extract an ounce of Uranium then it does to extract a few tons of Oil?
I find that a little hard to belive.
All other sources of energy require some energy to setup, so are you suggesting we simply give up on using energy, or what?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sportscars are status symbols that get low milage, but you don't see a holier-than-thou attitude about those. Curious.
Most modern sports-cars get pretty good gas millage, A Camero, for example, gets 30+mpg.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actualy, the "mommybox" you're talking about is the Mini-van. SUV's only became so popular in the last few years, while Average Fuel Economy laws have been in effect for decades. The mini-van, not the SUV, replaced the station wagon. Today's minivans get plenty of gas-milage, and most have more cargo space then SUVs.
Homework: Design a complete ambulance rig, including space for gurney, passenger, all necessary equipment, and oxygen, including communications, to fit inside a Nissan Altima.
Or try doing it in any commercian SUV. Ambulances are made from heavy-duty trucks.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They hold onto older cars *longer* because the money they'd spend on new ones is being swallowed by the gas pump.
In some cases, (like daily commuters) a monthly car payment + gas on an efficent car may be less then a monthly gas bill for a gas-hog. Imagine driving a suburban 100 miles every day.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Even in the grain-rich United States, people can and will starve in huge numbers if the grain can't be moved economically from where it's grown into the cities.
You're out of your mind if you think that will ever happen. (at leat due to high gas prices, anyway).
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I've got a decent pile of links stored at work. You made me blow off about three hours of work today to gather info for a post here. ;-)
m l
Anyways, yes... Bio-diesel is the logical step, because you don't have to change the infrastructure to deliver the fuel, and you would have to make very little to no modification to existing engines.
There's a story on Slashdot tonight that's kinda interesting, and relevant to our posts:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.ht
Links to come tomorrow morning.
Yeah -- that story definitely fits right in. The whole thing has made me wonder about the motivation for the hydrogen economy. When we can do it all so much simpler with biodiesel, why is everybody clamouring for hydrogen? I'm starting to think it's either 1) because people like the high-tech sound of it or 2) it's being promoted because it's not something we can do ourselves and is thus a better commercial opportunity.
Anyways... I'll check back later.
The vehicles you mention are just the same Japanese light trucks they've been making for decades. Calling them "SUVs" is just a marketing gimmick. It doesn't change the fact that (real) SUV owners are mostly contemptuous of environmental issues. I only exclude the rural folks who actually need a big 4wd vehicle.
Tell me something, do you drink coffee? Do you eat bananas? Have you ever eaten Brazil nuts?
Stick Men
Some of the links I found yesteday:
t ic les/93338/article.html
e se l.html
l ut ion/e00090d.html
% 20 070202.PDF
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http://www.edmunds.com/advice/specialreports/ar
http://www.off-road.com/4x4web/faqs/tech/gas_di
http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/database/earth/pol
http://www.raqc.org/diesel/Diesel%20WG%20Report
http://www.denvergov.org/Mayor/1688press1248.as
http://www.osti.gov/fcvt/deer2001/lawson1.pdf
http://www.ntec.org/air/epafactsheet.html
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel.html
Thanks I will read through these and change my position if appropriate.
Cheers.
We see this a lot -- a sort of glib "If Minnesota turns into Kansas, we'll just be a little hotter, next subject..." You're just not thinking that through at all.
Sometime take out a map of the world and look at the scale of the Sahara desert. Consider that that region was once habitable savannah or grassland, in which millett was cultivated (first evidence being around 8000 years ago).
The Sahara's transition to desert happened rather quickly a few thousand years ago due to a rapid climate change. Depending on your sources that may have happened due to a shift in the gulf stream, or there are some other ideas. Whatever the causes of that one: consider what would happen to a civilization in that region. Something more severe than, say, the Mfecane in Southern Africa?
Global climate change would radically destabilize the human world in ways the writer of that paragraph would recognize. More to the point, a huge preponderance of scientists are telling us it's already resulting in the first notes of a new mass extinction. Previous mass extinctions have never -- never -- seen the dominant type of animals before the extinction remain dominant after them. Think hard now: who are the dominant animals on earth right now?
Try to imagine a world in which, say, a nuclear power like Russia suddenly undergoes massive drought for, oh, fifty years. The Mfecane resulted in Shaka Zulu's rise to power as an absolute ruler. Put those two together. Russia's not that stable a nation now. Picture it as an Iraq or Afghanistan "weak state" in the middle of a staggering drought. With nuclear weapons. How safe does that make you feel? Imagine a ruthless dictator emerging from that chaos. Make you feel better? How many historical examples of changes like this do you need in order to accept those possibilities?
Global warming is not going to be a "more sunscreen" sort of a problem. "Better in some ways, worse in others" is wishful thinking, and wilfull ignorance of what science and history are telling you.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
An interesting analysis, and while I agree w/ that nuclear power would be far preferable to coal, (and without discussing further viability issues), I would just like to point out that wind power in the US should not be ruled out offhand. From the abstract of the 1993 Wind Energy Potential in the United States study by D.L. Elliott and M.N. Schwartz (which supercedes the 1991 study cited):
So yes, in theory, wind power could meet our power needs (but not w/o being coupled with advanced battery technologies.
Even cost per kWh, Wind does ok. From a March 2004 briefing published by the World Nuclear Association on The Economics of Nuclear Power, shows a present day cost of about 3.7c/kWh. A recent AWEA analysis of the The Economics of Wind Energy [PDF] places the cost/kWh for a 51MW wind farm at between 2.6-4.8c/kWh depending on wind speed. Even if we account for backup power and double the cost, we're not doing too badly either way.
Coal is at about 3.3c/kWh, but when calculating in the external costs "to put plausible financial figures against damage resulting from different forms of electricity production for the entire EU" as done in the decade long EC ExternE studies. Total cost of both nuclear (avg'ing 0.4 euro cents/kWh) and wind (0.1-0.2 ec/kWh) end up beating the snot over coal (4.1-7.3 ec/kWh).
Regardless, I agree with Lovelock. We really need to dump fossil fuels now.
How many windmills is that? A million? With maximum outputs of about 3MW per wind turbine (standard amount if I'm not mistaken), it would take a million give or take. I was under the impression that a million wind turbines would take up 19% of the total land area. Can they be placed more densely packed than I was led to believe, are there turbines that substantially exceed 3MW, or was someone calculating potential wind energy instead of actual hardware and materials?
How much does each windmill cost? (I don't know.) How much would a million of them cost?
What would be the effect of taking that much energy out of wind patterns? Would rainfall in the region be affected? Regional temperatures? Flowering plant pollination rates?
I'm not attacking nor trolling. I'm honestly curious. All of the studies I have seen about wind either cover environmental concerns (usually related to birds and relatively small numbers of wind turbines) or potential power output. Never both. At this point, I don't care about the politics. I trust the math and verifiable numbers.
All that said, again I feel it necessary to point out that I am not against solar nor wind. Quite the contrary. I just don't see them economically replacing coal. However, from a purely civil standpoint, I would love to see more residences with solar if for no other reason than major blackouts like the one in northeast North America wouldn't have been as severe.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
">3.7 million megawatt/hours"
That should have been >3.7 billion megawatt-hours.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Great post. Good food for thought.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.