Saving Energy Without Derision

George Maschke writes "Saving Energy Without Derision (5 mb PDF) is a new (and free) e-book by former Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff. This book is intended to be a real-world, no-nonsense, thoroughly documented collection of easy-to-implement recommendations to help the average thoughtful person to pick the 'low-hanging fruit' of conservation and renewable energy. The author is after the easy 75% of actions we can all take (but almost uniformly ignore) that most certainly make a difference in energy costs (after all that's what most people care about) and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few folks actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation). The author welcomes comments and intends to continuously update the book (consistent with readership interest) and address many new topics. For example, next on his list is an analysis of the economics and scientific basis of fuel-cell vehicles powered by hydrogen. (Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)"

Comments

Re:No comments?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't comment because I can't download the fucking 5MB .pdf ...

Why do people use PDFs when HTML works perfectly fine? Do you REALLY need to control the layout that much?

So what?

[Pig Hogger]

This is a collection of stuff that we do anyways, just because in the last 20 year, the middle-class earning power WENT DOWN.

Turn off your displays

[ottergoose]

Do you turn off your displays when you leave the office? My coworkers always leave them on, and it drives me nuts.

OTOH, I have no problems leaving my CPU running - it takes long enough to boot up that I'm willing to contribute to global warming.

It's a nice thought..

[JohnnyKlunk]

I beleive in this stuff, I really do.
I can't rtfa as it's /.'d currently - but we all know the content - "Install insulation, drive a fuel-efficient car". Lovely, great thought - but how do you put it into practice. I don't own a car, I make a point of not owning one but how do you convince Mr Tinyknob in his suv-sports-environment killer to drive something fuel efficient? He's never going to impress people any other way.

OK, I'm being harsh, but it's fair. I take all sorts of precautions to leave a fair planet for my (currently) 5 week old daughter, but I frequently wonder what the "£$%ing point is if the guy at the next desk drives 500 miles weekly in his V8 5litre penis extension because he's got no self esteem what-so-ever?

Re:It's a nice thought..

[IAR80]

Don't vote the republicans and maybe US will sign the Kyoto threaty and when gasoline is going to cost 4.5$ per galon (like in europe) Mr Tinyknob will be bancrupt in no time if he still try to impress people with the suv.

Re:It's a nice thought..

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like a serious case of denial.

Driving doesnt have to be in a sports car to be fun. and acceloration in traffic.. how amusing..

Re:It's a nice thought..

[alan_dershowitz]

This is not about men and psychological issues about their penis.

Multiple polls in the USA have shown that women largely prefer SUVs over other vehicles. According to industry research, FORTY PERCENT of suv buyers are female:
source

It has also been found that, all other things being equal, the average female will find the male with the SUV more attractive than with any other vehicle. (source is Men's Health magazine).

So please, this is not about "male inferiority", women are a HUGE part of this problem, both because of their buying habits and how they affect the buying habits of men.

Re:It's a nice thought..

[Anonymous Coward]

I take all sorts of precautions to leave a fair planet for my (currently) 5 week old daughter, but I frequently wonder what the "£$%ing point is if the guy at the next desk drives 500 miles weekly in his V8 5litre penis extension because he's got no self esteem what-so-ever?

You are careful with the environment but your neighbor isn't, so why bother? It is an interesting problem, but I think it is very simple. You can't control your neighbor, but you can control yourself. Just Do what you think is right. There might have been a time when you were less concious of the environment. Maybe 5 or 10 years ago you had a vehicle too large, littered, whatever. Maybe you didn't. My point is, often times when people make a positive change in their life they expect everybody else to do the same right now, not realising that it took them many years to come to this conclusion, and it might take many more years for other people to. It is OK, that is how things work. It all takes time.

You forget about nuclear power

[argoff]

You are forgetting that in a hydrogen society - there is now room to bring nuclear power back into the picture. Now people have the potential to create hydrogen on a vast scale far away from any place that might have political fallout.

In spite of all the bad press, the fact is that nuclear is still the safest, cheapest, and most environemtally friendly energy source ever created. IMHO, it's bad wrap had far more to do with its threat to OPEC then it ever had to do with safety or radiation.

Re:You forget about nuclear power

[deragon]

Its a matter of quantity, and exposure to nature. The volume of nuclear waste is very very small compared to the size of the planet (very small). Carbon Dioxyde produced by burning oil on the other hand takes much, much more volume. CO2 is a gaz and thus becomes part of the atmosphere. Nuclear waste is solid and can be buried in the ground, like oil which in its natural form, is not environmental friendly either. But thats not a problem when it is buried deep down, is it? Oil has been naturaly been buried for millions of years. We can do the same with Nuclear waste. We will not run out of space to bury nuclear waste.

Re:You forget about nuclear power

[RsG]

Plus, never forget that nuclear waste is far worse for human health than it is for the environment. For a variety of biological reasons we are especially vulnerable to radiation, whereas most plant and animal species are not. A nuclear disaster would be devastating for human nations, but the ecosystem(s) involved would recover. And while the life expectancy of nuclear by-products is long when compared to human civilization, ten thousand years is an eyeblink from a global ecological perspective. What greens fail to realize is that humans fuck up the environment by introducing _fast_ change, not because the environment is inherently fragile.

That being said, I would much prefer a fusion economy to a fission one, since that would solve our energy production problems in short order.

Re:You forget about nuclear power

[Dagowolf]

Actually, nuclear power's bad wrap has come more from the scientific communities poor understanding of how the public views risk and hazard (yes, those are mutually exclusive items at least in the field of risk communication). It took years to move the public from a mushroom cloud image of nuclear power to a cooling tower image. Then along comes TMI and Chernobyl. In all reality TMI was handled well by the NRC risk communication teams, but Chernobyl had a devestating impact on the public's view of nuclear power. Nevermind that the USSR design and the US design are completely different. The fact remains that too often the scientific community fails to understand just how much outrage the public has for nuclear power and has not properly communicated with the public in a way that "Joe Six Pack" can understand.

Re:You forget about nuclear power

[Phanatic1a]

Burning coal produces waste that remains toxic forever. Half-lives come and go, but arsenic is forever.

Nuclear power is environmentally friendly because the amounts of waste you're talking about are incredibly low for all the energy you're getting out. You're looking at around 23 tons of high-level waste per megawatt of plant per year, at a 91% duty cycle. And this is dense stuff, by the way, so volumetrically it's a very small amount. It's also in a relatively convenient-to-handle form; it's not discharged into the air or the water.

Compare that to a coal plant, where you're generating 1.5 million tons of ash per megawatt of plant per year, which is vastly more polluting, and that's not even considering the CO2. For every single kilowatt-hour of energy you get fro burning coal, you produce a kilogram of CO2. So if you run your megawatt coal plant on a 70% duty cycle, generating 8800 megawatt-hours,you dump 4400 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

And that fly-ash you're making is toxic forever. It's caustic. It's filled with heavy metals. Both in terms of mass and volume you've got orders of magnitude more of it to deal with than you would if you went nuclear. And if you're concerned about radiation, well, burning coal releases uranium and thorium isotopes right into the atmosphere; coal has up to 10ppm of uranium in it. Since 1937, burning coal in the United States alone has dumped 145,000 tons of uranium and 357,000 tons of thorium into the air; that radiation's just as real as the stuff in nuclear waste, and the cancers it causes and the people it kills are just as real.

Let's pick a random small country, like the UK. From what I can find, they have a generation capacity of 361 terawatt-hours per year. 8765 hours in a year, 91% duty cycle, so 8000 hours. To produce 361 terawatt-hours in 8000 hours, you need 4500 megawatts of plant. So if the UK went all-nuclear, they'd generate just a bit over 100 tons of high-level waste per year.

They could take that, put it in thin-walled steel drums, and dump it right to the bottom of the North Sea, and they'd be doing vastly less environmental damage than they're doing now, by getting 74% of the electricy from burning fossil fuels and dumping 614 billion pounds of CO2 into the air every year.

That 145,000 tons of uranium the US has dumped into the air just by burning coal, since 1937? Well, that's 10440 tons of U235, which if you fission it (okay, with perfect effiency. This is just to illustrate a point) produces 17.6 kilotons of energy per kilogram. If you fission 10440 tons of it, you end up with 193 petawatt-hours. That right there's the electrical needs of the entire UK for 500 years, at present rates of consumption.

By all those metrics is nuclear power environmentally friendly. It's utterly ridiculous that we're not embracing the technology and making our electricity the right way.

Stop telling us what we want

[scotay]

Nobody really wants 50 miles per charge even if that covers 90% of eventualities. I like the idea of hydrogen and the gasoline hybrids because they seek to lower emissions and raise efficiencies while giving drivers what they want. The 50-60 miles on an electric charge car may get us a commute to work, but if we want to do some shopping, or take a day trip to the shore, we are stuck with a charge. People want to feel their vehicle purchase gives them choices (even when they don't use them 90% of the time), not forces a choice down our throats. I'll always bet on a solution that deals with the realities of consumer choices, rather than those than impose a morality that will never exist with most of the market.

Re:Lowest hanging fruit of all

[IAR80]

Stop watching FOX!

thinks that can be done

[IAR80]

Build more nuclear reactors. Develop a working plutonium breeder (invest money in research). Drive down the prices on solar and wind (a wind turbine that can be manufacured in 300-400$ cost 2-3K$). Move out of teh suburbia. Start buying from local shops instead of driving to Walmarkt. Move closer to your working place even if the rent is 20% higher. Use the bike more often (is healty, environmental friendly and cheaper). Recycle. Increase the thermal efeciency of your home (better insulation ....). Get a VIA C3 or Crusoe instead of the P4. Get a hybrid car or a diesel. And most important DON'T VOTE BUSH! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!

Re:thinks that can be done

[dsanfte]

The fact that Bush will likely win this election is more a failure of the Democratic party to be anything but "not-Bush", while still being as corrupt and crooked as the republicans.

The wise choice this election would in fact be to vote for a third party candidate, but nobody can seem to motivate themselves to do that.

Re:thinks that can be done

[moonbender]

If Bush win's this election it's mostly a catastrophic failure of the American people. No offense intended.

"Cruel Hoax"

[Rostin]

I'm no expert, but I've believed this to be the case ever since I wrote a paper on it for a chemistry course and (for an unrelated course) designed a methanol reformer for use on a fuel cell vehicle. I've never said much about it, because I thought, "Well, who are you? All these specialists and people who make energy policy seem to think it's feasible.."

It warms my heart to see a expert saying what I already thought.

Cool, but...

[Rew190]

I really doubt in a nation filled to the brim of SUVs that average America has a real concern for environmental and energy-related issues...

Re:Cool, but...

[evilviper]

I don't know about you, but when I'm driving down the road, I don't see a sea of SUVs. More like 5%.

Seems to me that it's only the rather well-off, getting SUVs despite high vehicle and gas prices, that don't care.

I'd say most people do care that their electric and natural gas bills are through the roof.

I think people miss the point of hydrogen

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of hydrogen is to create an abstraction layer between creation and consumption of energy.

Then everytime you come up with a better way to create energy you don't have redesign the engine and wait for it to be adopted. It will work in any fuel cell car. If everyone has a hydrogen car and you invent "the next big thing" in energy creation all you have to do is start making cheap fuel cells that way and selling them. You don't have to design a new car and try to get people to buy then and gas stations to support it.

You'd think programmers would be able to appreciate the value of this...

And of course fuel cells have many applications outside of cars...i.e. laptops that last a week, local power generation on your own block so no more "mega-blackouts" etc. the possibilities are endless....

Re:Diodes

[totoanihilation]

So you're telling me that a simple half-wave rectifier, as used in most wall-block power supplies, don't register on your meter? Somehow I have a hard time believing that one, although I will admit I haven't the faintest idea how the meters work internally. Have any links on that?

The other problem I see with that is finding a high enough power and capacity capacitor and diode to run at 120V, in the several amps range. That in itself might cost you more than than the savings you could ever hope to attain.

sorry, saving money IS the botton line

[Anonymous Coward]

If saving money isn't the botton line, then the goverment is doing it's job (which it isn't).
Money makes the world go round. We should not blame people for making decisions based on economics: rather, we must blame the government if they institute an economic and regulatory framework that fails to ensure that the good economic decision is the decision that's good for society (i.e. the environment) also. The current bad system actually subsidizes (encourages) poor decisions (dirty methods of energy conversion) and fails to appreciate the value of (encourage) good choices (clearner methods of energy conversion).

NOTE: It is the failure to *value* cleaner methods of energy conversion that prevents people from not only making the 'cleaner' choice, but also from making the more energy efficient choice. why? Simple. It's because the cleaner technologies that emit less pollution per useful unit of energy output (Pollution Efficiency) also happen to be the technologies that have higher useful energy output per unit of fuel (Fuel Efficiency)!
Therefore, consumers can't just buy a more fuel efficient car for a higher price but make it up on the fuel savings... no... because they are also paying more for the cleaner technology, but they get no reward for it!

SO, and I hope despite being AC, this idea is evaluated on it's own merits and modded up if it makes sense to you, economically recognizing the value of clearner technologies is *the* lynchpin not only of less pollution, but of greater efficiency as well!

there's some shenanigans going on...

[zogger]

...with the consumer "choice" model. Example, the GM EV-1 pure electric. The people who got to lease them loved them, wanted to purchase them outright. GM refused and is now crushing all of them. It worked too good or something. You can still google and find enthusiast boards about those cars. It was normal size, fast, carried people in quiet comfort and eliminated the cocnentration of pollution in the downtown area, something you still get with hybrids no matter how efficient they are.

Here's one I'd like to see as one sort of choice. A pure electric for the day to day commute. A dedicated solar array at home for recharging it when not in use (along with the normal plug in charger). An add-on cargo trailer for trips that also included a fuel generator and fuel tank to give you the option of automagically turning it into the extended range vehicle you need, plus some additional cargo capacity. As a plus, the genny is useful for those situations at home when the grid goes down, recent hurricane action shows the practicality of having that. You get the best of both alternative auto worlds then, plus the grid backup aspect.

Re:Good to see!

[blitziod]

You are making a critical error when you say that recycling at a higher cost is good for us. If it costs more in dollars, it costs more in energy to produce(earn) those dollars. Example if I have to work harder (more) to earn money to buy an electric car what about all the resources I use in the course of my job( electricity, raw materials etc)? Also what about the production of the car? What about the old car, will it still be driven?

Re:I've never understand electric cars

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anyone know how safe the batteries are in electric vehicles? What keeps them from going kaboom

Psst. Gasoline is incredibly explosive. Pass it on.

Re:I've never understand electric cars

[doorbot.com]

Everytime you drive it you have to plug in and get more electric charge from the above environment destroying power plant.

In theory, a power plant's pollution is "localized" and thus more easily controlled.

Perhaps you can think of it as a mainframe/supercomputer vs. workstations/beowulf clusters... car pollution is distributed (which might be good, because then one place doesn't get polluted "too much"), whereas powerplant pollution is highly localized (initially -- yes, it gets distributed by wind patterns, etc).

The point is that it's *far* easier to reduce pollution (eg, with newly invented tech) if your pollution sources are centralized. Good luck getting every car owner to bring their 1970's beater in to get the latest anti-pollution gadget. Installation of pollution controls on one power plant reduces pollution far more than installation of a similar gadget on one car.

But the problem with this discussion is it's really a no-win solution. Humanity needs energy, and there will be pollutants no matter what we use (let's ignore entropy for the time being). That's not to say we should use the most polluting processes, but it's is important to recognize what levels of pollution can be reduced in an economically-feasible manner.

There will be some optimal point where we accept a certain level of pollution because it's not worth my/your/everyone's limited time and money to do additional cleanup/prevention.

How much energy was "wasted" while you read this post? Maybe you should've turned your computer off instead...

Re: "Derision" felt for the "Anti-Consumer"

[Jameth]

"Notice that the new environmental buzzword is 'sustainable'. Wonder where that came from? The reason being is that environmentalists have been talking about the end of the world for the last 20-30 years, and have most always been wrong. Therefore, sustainable is the new world because there are no firm dates. Things could easily keep getting better and better... but they can always say 'its not sustainable'... and no one can prove them wrong."

The new buzzword is 'sustainable' because that actually is the goal for many people who are not environmentalists, and the environmentalists want to be in league with someone else to strengthen their base.

Despite how much it may seem like a vague idea which can be thrown at anything, sustainability isn't so ridiculous. That's why it is usually mentioned with important things that we know to be limited. For example, I am up in arms about the wasteful use of oil not so much because I am worried about the pollution but because I like plastic. It is a clear fact that we do not have an infinite oil supply. Yet, without that oil, we do not have plastics. We can easily get an alternative for vehicle fuels, but we can't easily replace plastics, so I want people to stop wasting oil on cars.

In cases like that, sustainable is not just a buzzword thrown in to make it working and unpredictable, it is a genuine problem which is clearly defineable. The word has been messed up by rabid environmentalists tagging it onto everything else, but is not on its own flawed, as you imply.

Re:I don't get it...

[Fnkmaster]

I stand corrected on the current wisdom on corn ethanol - I have heard the same before, it's just that I prefer not to deal with debating about corn ethanol since it gets so damned contentious and everybody has an opinion about it. Better to keep the conversation focused on the less politically baggage laden, more economically promising production methodologies.

As for your claims about biodiesel, based on my research about a year and a half ago, the production cost gap between B100 and fossil fuel diesel was still much greater than the gap between estimated cost of large scale fuel ethanol production and gasoline fuel, which likely reflects the underlying energy economics. I'm not saying biodiesel isn't great stuff, but I'd like to see some evidence to support this claim... I'm well aware of the biodiesel algae research, and I was involved in doing a study on that as well. Again, it's entirely possible, but still didn't look like it was as economically promising to harvest biodiesel from algae without substantial genetic engineering work to improve lipid yields and growth rates simultaneously (as I recall, these two factors tended to work at odds with each other). It's entirely possible that more progress has been made on the genetic engineering front though by now, and I definitely agree with you that biodiesel-from-algae has lots of long term promise.

The sad thing is that it looks like a lot of the NREL's work on bioethanol has been reorganized or deprioritized from their website, which doesn't really make any extensive mention of it anymore. Hopefully work is still ongoing behind the scenes.

I'm a proponent of...

[zogger]

...alternative energy conversion devices, but I'll be the first one to admit that more sane conservation will do more in the short and medium term than anything else. It's jhoe sixpacks best bet dollar for dollar right now. Making homes with double the insulation for example, and using triple pane nitrogen gas filled windows, or integral blinds, etc are all great. The water heater blankets. Much better quality home appliances, like sunfrost units instead of el cheapos, and etc.

Basically, I like both methods simultaneously. My theory is you work both ends towards the middle. Produce (or use) more of your own power using renewables, and conserve what you use, use less but get more. Eventually those two lines meet up and you are sitting pretty energy wise.

some more things I'd like to see:

LEDs becoming commonplace in replacement of incandescents and fluorescents

Solar hot water heating and some more PV action on all the millions of sunny roofs out there

More commercial sized wind gennys on farms, both to help out the farmers and to add to the grid redundancy without resorting to more fuel burning plants.

Electric vehicles are practical enough now, need the manufacturers to just come up with a few normal looking models and sell the dang things, recharging at night is a benefit to the big power producers as well,they have to keep their units running even when demand is low like at night

Building codes and mortgage lenders need to get into the act and stop lending or approving dismally low levels of insulation in new construction

Stop the destruction of community small scale hydro electric like they are doing now, hydro is the cleanest and most cost effective low tech solution for electrical production.

Legalise industrial hemp and partially use it for liquid fuel production, the "solar conversion" with plants is very good and the ethanol or methanol or biodiesel that can be produced burns fairly clean. Hemp is good because it grows so fast, requires little attention or fertilisers compared to alternative fuel crops like corn for example

Higher mandated average vehicle mileage. Detroit whined and sniveled, said it was impossible, but once it was passed, by golly they met the goals. They could do it again because the higher mileage vehicles are out there now in other areas of the world, and until there's an incentive like a law, it won't happen as much as it needs to happen. And include normal pickups and SUVs into the mix. They could add take a scosh better mileage.

R&D I'd like to see

I think there's some huge power to be harvested in the areas of atmospheric static electricity and in the "differential" areas like in the ocean thermocline difference and with deep earth to surface differences. Pilot programs have shown it's there, just needs a little more work to get it consistent and useable

More work on improving permanent magnet motors and generators, they also show some decent promise in efficiency gains in a variety of applications

More mandated recycling, stop the nutso throw away culture. Products should also have their recyclability taken into consideration during design phases. Most people don't mind recycling at all-if it's convenient and actually useful

A LOT more methane production from ag waste and community sewer treatment plants. It's barely got off the ground in some places and it's proving practical, just need more of it and better designed digesters, etc.

Re:Good to see!

[tverbeek]

You're making a critical error.... all over the place.

Spending more money on an electric car doesn't necessarily mean you have to "work harder" to earn more money. It could mean that you spend less money buying other goods (which is how most people would accomplish it). And your equation of work with energy usage is a huge non sequitur; perhaps you've confused the physics term "work" with the colloquial job-market term?

As for your old car, if you sell it to someone, odds are they'll use it to replace an even older (and probably less efficient) one, and so on. At the end of the line, an old oil-burning environmental disaster on wheels ends up in a landfill, where it will at least stop burning fuel. And if it's time for you to buy a new car anyway (which is when most people would actually purchase a hybrid or electric), then the status of your old car is irrelevant to the question of which kind of new car to buy.

Re: "Derision" felt for the "Anti-Consumer"

[travler]

Some who tries to conserving energy may be said to be an "anti-consumer", because if one conserves energy, then that person is not being the best possible consumer.

The reason such persons are objects of derision is because we Americans have been socialized to be the best possible consumers we can be: years of corporate media propaganda have been directed towards encouraging us to spend as much on food as possible, as much on transportation as possible, as much on healthcare as possible.

I don't care about anyone being an 'anit-consumer'.

Consume less all you want I really don't mind, in fact since less demand = lower prices I'm all for it.

The problem that I personally have (and I think that most anti-green/socialist types have) is that the only way they (enbormentalists/socialists) can force their utopian agenda on the rest of the world is by government action (people with guns forcing me to do stuff I don't want to do).

In other words it is a freedom issue. I think we all want clean air/water, good health care, nice work environments, etc. The argument is how to get there not on what the goals are.

The way I see it enviromentalists/socialists are objects of derision (at least in my mind) because they either truely don't understand how the world works (they want stuff for free as in free beer with no thought on who pays the bill) or they do know the cost and are more than happy for me to pay it for them even though I don't agree with their plan.

Socialism (and most environmentalist groups I've read about seem to fit here too) doesn't work because you have to have a strong central government forcing people to behave in ways they don't want to. It is inefficient and the people who live under it feel oppressed. You don't get good results for society as a whole or for individuals within that society. Everyone loses.

All of this is my opinion but perhaps you will find it usefull to understand how the 'oposition' thinks. It isn't that we don't want those things it is that the price of the system that you are advocating (my freedom) is too high.

Monty Burns got mod points

[orzetto]

You are forgetting that nuclear does not produce neither money nor energy.

The fact that nuclear power does not work should be hinted by the other fact that, doh, nobody wants to build them anymore. Even the French have stopped. The investments are simply not worth it, and the energy balance is heavily dependent on finding uranium with a high concentration of the good isotope, else the enrichment costs eat up money and energy. And no, there are not many of those.

Nuclear fission is a miscarriage of science, that got initial funding by military objectives and survived promising improvements that never came.

As for the "safest, cheapest, most environmentally friendly" crap, I don't know whether I should laugh or cry.

Re:Monty Burns got mod points

[David Rolfe]

Just for fairness' sake:

The fact that nuclear power does not work should be hinted by the other fact that, doh, nobody wants to build them anymore.

Except China, which plans to build quite a few brand new nuclear reactors to try and keep up with the energy requirements of their increasingly metropolitan way of life. I think they are or planning on damming the Yangtze for hydroelectric as well. I know it's easy to overlook China, as it contains the largest population of humans on Earth. :-p

Re:Monty Burns got mod points

[Phanatic1a]

and the energy balance is heavily dependent on finding uranium with a high concentration of the good isotope, else the enrichment costs eat up money and energy.

Nonsense. Breed the stuff, don't worry about digging it out of the ground.

Nobody wants to build them anymore because of the ridiculous liability concerns, which is hardly fair. Coal plants kill way more people than nuclear plants do, by crudding up the air. They cause respiratory problems, they shorten lifespans, and the radiation they spew into the air causes cancers. But people have this notion that if you distribute a problem widely enough, it suddenly becomes not a problem anymore, and so you can't sue coal plants when they thorium they emit as a waste product gives you cancer.

That's just silly, no matter how you look at it.

Re:tiny little cars

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no wish to die on the highway.

Then I hope you've got a roll bar, because when you hit my envirocar (and you will because the majority of people who own SUVs drive them like a sedan and not the truck that they are) we're both screwed (I get your fender in my head, and you roll and land on yours).

So soccer moms who drive around and cannot see the front of their hood are safer?

Buying into the fear-mongering salesman argument about SUV safety is like buying into the argument that if we don't give up our civil liberties then the terrorists have won. (By the way, if you didn't get that undercoating package with your truck, then the terrorists have won too).

Count the cost of free energy...

[mellon]

Hydro is not environmentally friendly. It dams up rivers and destroys ecosystems. Making solar panels takes energy, and produces pollution. Wind energy kills birds in large numbers.

The big unsolved problems of nuclear power include - how do you mine fuel without killing people? If you think coal dust is bad to breathe, try breathing uranium ore dust sometime.

Okay, now you have to enrich it. Now you have to use the fuel without meltdowns. Pebble beds solve that problem - it's really not the big problem with nuclear power plants.

Now you've got spent fuel that you have to get rid of. Where do you put it? And what about the plant itself? Once a nuclear plant is worn out, you have a giant heap of highly radioactive stuff, and you can't just haul it off and dump it in a salt mine because in order to haul it off, you have to cut it up, and cutting it up releases a giant plume of radioactive dust into the environment.

Pretty much any energy generation system has costs associated with it. I think the cost/benefit analysis for nuclear really sucks, and the story for some other forms of energy is much better, but let's take off our rose-colored glasses and look at all the costs, not just the costs of the energy generation systems we don't like.

Re:Count the cost of free energy...

[mellon]

BTW, in case anybody's following this, the link referred to above provides some good information on this problem, which for some reason Mr. Trophy didn't quote in his message. In fact, the number of bird strikes at most wind sites is really small - on the order of 1.5 birds per tower per year. As Mr. Trophy alludes, Altamont pass has an unusually high bird kill rate, partially because the turbines there are ancient, and partly because of where it is.

This doesn't contradict what I was saying. When building wind projects, this information indicates that bird kills are a factor that needs to be considered, precisely because the kind of wind generation technology used and the siting of the towers can make a dramatic difference in how many birds are killed.

The scandal is that in many energy generation projects, factors like these aren't considered at all. For example, every commercial nuclear power plant build in the U.S. has been a control-rod plant, which fails by melting down, and for which containment breaches are routine. This is true despite the fact that some very notable minds in the nuclear club (e.g., Edward Teller, who I don't normally think of as a voice of reason) knew about and argued in favor of pebble bed reactors long before the first commercial nuclear power plant was built. Pebble bed reactors fail safe. Pebble bed reactors aren't harmless, but they do mitigate that particular kind of harm - they do not go out of control and melt down. And yet for some reason we built all of these incredibly expensive control rod-oriented plants that do not fail safe.

This is my point. Whatever kind of power generation systems we build, we should not ignore the problems that that form of generation has because our favorite form of power generation is ideologically preferable to the bad kinds of power that those crazy other people are promoting.

By accepting and even encouraging this kind of thinking in ourselves, we create an environment where what is actually known to be true is unimportant, and getting the politically correct outcome is all that matters. This weakens us when we debate, and reduces the equation to a question of who has the most economic power, rather than which cost/benefit tradeoff is best, which I think is why we seem to get such counterintuitive results.

Re:I don't get it...

[moonbender]

Huh? A perpetuum mobile has nothing to do with it. Biological fuels are basically solar powered. In the same vein, a solar cell or a water turbine also "creates" more energy than used during its production.
Of course grandparent's original sentence is kind of wrong - of course there's not more energy "inside" corn-ethanol than it took to produce it, but most of the energy used to "produce" it comes from the sun, and wasn't "invested" when the corn is planted. (Sorry for all the quotes.)

Re:Start the invasions...

[egarland]

The electric car is a good thing because your power plant can burn oil and coal at around 80% efficiency. Your car burns gas at, IIRC, a meager 20%-40%.

This is a common misconception but it's simply not true. The theoretical limit of efficiency is for an internal combustion engine like the one we use in our power plants is 35%. Internal combustion fossil fuel power plants operate at very near that theoretical limit but you have to factor in transmission loss, about 9%, which basically makes them equal to best-case car engine use (about 30%). The problem with today's cars is they often operate far from best-case (idling, downhill slopes, breaking, etc) bringing their efficiency down to 18-23%. This is why hybrid vehicles do so much better. They operate the engines much more intelligently and bring the efficiency up to about 30%. That means that an electric car powered by an fossil fuel power plant uses just about as much fuel as a hybrid car running on gasoline. This says nothing about pollution emissions which will be better from the power plant, but fuel use and CO2 emissions will be roughly the same.

The only way electric/fuel cell based cars are actually a benefit to the environment is if they are powered by nuclear power plants or some other non-poluting technology. Fuel cells in cars won't solve anything by themselves.

Good stats on fuel efficiency

Second law of thermodynamics wrt. internal combustion

Half-life versus stable

[2901]

Some industrial waste is stable. Arsenic waste from tin mining, mercury waste from gold mining, cadmium from discarded rechargable batteries, beryllium from heat transfer uses.

None of this stuff decays at all. Waste that just goes away if you wait long enough looks good by comparison.

More significantly, there is an inverse relationship between half-life and activity. When you take out your spent fuel rods there is some U235 left, with a half-life of 700 million years, and also Strontium 90 with a half-life of 29 years. The Strontium 90 with its short half-life is releasing its energy quickly. This contributes to making the spent reactor very radio-active and very dangerous. But 290 years later 99.9% of the Strontium has decayed. Meanwhile the Uranium, which is releasing its energy too slowly to be dangerous, clouds the issue of how long reactor waste lasts. Long after the waste has ceased to be dangerous, it remains slighty radioactive.

One mind boggling point is that Uranium used as reator fuel supplies about a million times as much energy per unit weight as coal. Coal is a fairly pure product and contains only about 1.5 parts per million Uranium as a contaminant. So about 50% more Uranium goes up the chimney of a coal fired power station as goes into the reactor of a nuclear power station.

That is amusing in a way, but not very important, because the Uranium that goes into a reactor isn't dangerous anyway. The worry with nuclear power is the transmutation of Uranium into short lived, highly radioactive isotopes of other elements. However the point remains that the quantities of waste involved in nuclear power are very much smaller than the quantities involved in producing power from chemical sources.

Why do I care? I was six years old at the time of the Aberfan Disaster, the same age as many of the 116 children who died, suffocated under a slurry of waste from a coal mine after the collapse of a waste tip. The TV pictures of the time showed the gable end of the children's school. It was just like the one I attended and this upset me.

I have never forgotten that quantity is a quality of waste. The waste from the coal mine might as well have been composed of perfectly safe, inert materials. It would not have made any difference. The children were buried and suffocated because there was so much of it, not because it was "dangerous" in the sense that the word is used today.

by what metric is it considered environmentally friendly?

Quantity.

Re:Sadly, we've built a North American wasteland..

[ThousandStars]

Sadly, you're part of the problem. When you shop at big box stores, the dollars you spend there aren't spent on whatever kind of store your post indicates you might prefer (small box store?).

Until there's more demand for high-density urban housing, sprawl is the answer. People can choose to live in cities. Some -- like Seattle, Boston, New York and Portland -- are especially viable for a car-less lifestyle. But that requires people who want to live there. Most people, including you, probably don't.

This has been harped upon since Jane Jacob wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Numerous urban development courses focus on the problems created by suburbia. When someone buys a tract house and shops at big box stores, they vote for precisely the kind of lifestyle you claim to lament in your post.

This isn't to say that I'm perfect or somehow superior. Still, I don't say "developers seem stuck in a rut" when I know that I'm part of the rut driving the market.

Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen...

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have forgotten or discounted nanotech. The density problem can be solved there. It has already been done. Problem now is with mass producing it cheaply enough, then of course the infrastructure to support it.

Re:Start the invasions...

[Firethorn]

Actually, I think that nuclear is even with coal & oil, but it's overall fuel efficiency would be much higher if we were allowed to reprocess the fuel, or use breeder reactors.

But, yeah, I think that the "hydrogen" economy is a crock. By the time you add in all the inefficiencies, gasoline is actually more efficient.

Hydrogen is hard to produce, hard to store, hard to transfer, etc.

Now fuel cells, especially if they get it so that it can be used to burn ethanol or natural gas, will give you a fuel that is easy to manage and move. Combine this with batteries for short range vehicles (and nuclear plants to power them).

Re:Good to see!

[sjames]

You are making a critical error when you say that recycling at a higher cost is good for us.

That depends on how you figure the cost though. The real costs must include the cost of disposal, and the various negative effects of pollution that somebody, somewhere will eventually have to pay.

Unfortunatly, some of those costs (externalities) are more or less hidden, and end up being paid by others who may not even realize where the cost comes from.

A classic example is industrial pollution. The company 'saves' a few dollars by skipping expensive waste treatment before discharging into the river. The external cost is the extra medical bills the people downstream get stuck with. They may not even know why they get sick so often. The cost spreads further as their employers suffer from lost productivity when they're not feeling up to par. If the company actually had to pay for all that, they'd discover quickly that the 'expensive' waste treatment is actually quite a bargain.

My advice as to distribution: Bittorrent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, look into starting a 'torrent
of the PDF. That way all the people who
download it will be helping with the
bandwidth to distribute it.

Re:The Calculations or Flawed for Canada

[upsidedown_duck]

The original poster's word choice was poor, and it caused the predictable stream of responses.

What should have been said is that one watt of energy input can transfer four watts of heat from one place to another. This is what heat pumps, refrigerators, and air conditioners do. With eletric resistance heat, all you can do is move that one watt of energy into the room as a direct conversion of electric energy into heat energy.

There is a reason poorer people have electric resistence heat and everyone else on the planet has heat pumps or gas/oil furnaces. Anyone who can get past the initial purchase price and see the future savings will pass up electric heat like passing up an obviously drugged-out hitchhiker with a mysterious duffle bag at 3am on a rural highway.

Of course, electric heat is okay for very short-term use to take the chill out of a bathroom, for example, but it doesn't belong anywhere else.

Re:Start the invasions...

[ChairmanMeow]

The problem with that is that if you are going to use the hydrogen for fuel cells and get it from water, then you'll end up with less energy than you started out with: the amount of energy put into the electolyzing the water would be equal to the amount of energy outputted by the chemical reaction in the fuel cell, and since neither reaction will be 100% efficient, you will have less energy at the end than you started out with.

(please forgive any errors in what I wrote above: I shouldn't be posting this late at night)

Re:Start the invasions...

[egarland]

isn't a tad bit of a misstatement to call a nuclear power plant non-polluting?

I stick by non-polluting. Taking radioactive material out of the ground and returning less radioactive material to safer places in the ground, is something I can't consider pollution. I believe it makes the environment just ever so slightly safer and better. The radioactive radon gas that constantly seeps up into the room I'm in now is caused by uranium breaking down in the bedrock below me. Take it out and put it in Yucca Mountain and I get less cancer.

Everything anyone does has an impact on nature, right down to swatting mosquitoes. Just because it has an impact on the world, doesn't mean it is pollution. From what I understand, the mining of uranium ore is rough on the environment and could be considered pollution, but it's also my understanding that you could power the entire world for 20 years with what we already pulled out back in the post WW2/cold war era. Plus, mining coal is horrible for the environment, never mind the tons of mercury that comes out when you burn it that they are currently safely storing in the lungs of the general population not to mention fish and other wildlife everywhere. Overall, the switch to nuclear power would dramatically reduce the pollution created by generating power.

Heat is another byproduct of nuclear power generation but it's also a byproduct of every other heat-engine based power technology and is rapidly dissipated with little effect on anything so I don't consider it pollution.

for instance use a lot of chemicals in their manufaturing process more recent advances are allowing for organic solar panels but still a little pollution is generated

I agree that solar power technology currently can't be considered non-polluting. Lots of people consider solar to be the ultimate in low-impact living. This is naive. These are the same people who live on giant plots of land lamenting the high-impact living of people in cities. If you look carefully at it, someone living in downtown Manhattan shares a tiny footprint of land with everyone who lives above and below them whereas the big house in the country disturbs vast expanses of land. If everyone in the United States had a 5 acre plot of land they'd take up almost every bit of land in the continental US (all the mountains, forest, farm land, all of it.) The plain truth is that the Seinfeld lifestyle is much more environmentally friendly than the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle. These same people tend to praise the native American's for their low-impact lifestyle. Each native American required the resources of huge expanses of land to support them. They had a profound impact on the environment but, because their way of life, they couldn't sustain enough population to make a big impact. If you look on a per-person impact basis, native American's were awfully hard on their environment.

Just because it's quaint, simple, and peaceful doesn't mean it's low-impact or environmentally friendly. I'd reclassify most environmentalists as "my environment-ists" because what they really want is to have an environment that they can enjoy, play with and have fun in. They don't care that nuclear power is better for nature, their scared it's bad for them so they hate it.

Right now, oil and coal cost much more than nuclear and pollute horribly yet they are still generating a majority of the world's power. This is silly. It's time to build a lot of nuclear power plants. Lets build them and buy us some time to generate good efficient non-polluting or low pollution methods of generating power that are economically more attractive than nuclear so eventually they shut down on their own because they cost too much.

Re:The fundamental issue with Hydrogen...

[smithmc]

Umm, that is the whole *point* of using hydrogen: to provide an efficient storage mechanism for energy, which can then be extracted cleanly using fuel cells, combustion, etc.

Well, that's all fine and good... except that hydrogen is not an efficient energy sotrage mechanism. Certainly not nearly as efficient as diesel fuel, or methane/propane, which could be manufactured almost as easily as hydrogen, and are much easier to store/use.

Re:Blankets not always helpful. Go tankless!

[rcw-home]

Are tankless water heaters a scalable solution?

It pretty much only works with gas. Say your shower is 2.5 gallons per minute, or approximately 10 liters per minute. Say you need the water to be 110F (43C) (in the pipe) to feel hot by the time it hits your face. Say incoming water is 55F (13C). You need to raise the temperature of 10 kilograms of water 30C every minute, or 1 kilogram by 5C per second. That's 5 kilocalories per second, or 21 kilowatts. For a 240V heating system, that would require 87 amps, which is a significant (some would say scary) fraction of the average home's electrical service.

For reference, the natural gas furnace in my home is capable of 55000 BTUs per hour, or 16 kilowatts. A load 31% larger is certainly within the realm of practicality.

Re: "Derision" felt for the "Anti-Consumer"

[Tungbo]

Unfortunately, the 'price' you are being which you feel drives your decisions are not accurate price for the life cycle costs of the energy you are consuming. The cost of air pollution from an energy production process is usually not included in the price you pay because it is easy for the corporate or government entity to pass it onto another entity or into the future.

Without a social movement which drives public policies, such 'externalities' will never be incorporated into the market price. All this it well known to the main stream neo-classical economicst. Only starty-eyed libertarians and supply-siders seems blissfully unaware of this.

Following you arguments, every body loses when we have seat-belt laws ? Do you wear seat belt when you drive?

Re:Totally disagree

[ErikZ]

Well, how much did it cost for you to install? When do you expect to break even? 10 years?

How many people keep the same house for more than 10 years these days?

What if it breaks? How hard/expensive is it to fix?

Re:Start the invasions...

[OldManAndTheC]

The only way electric/fuel cell based cars are actually a benefit to the environment is if they are powered by nuclear power plants or some other non-poluting technology. Fuel cells in cars won't solve anything by themselves.

Well, shifting pollution from densely populated cities to more remote areas would at least improve air quality for many people. However, I do agree that combining fuel cells with a clean source of energy production is the way to go. And nuclear power does deserve another chance - in fact, it is probably the only viable answer to the coming energy crunch.

Re:Start the invasions...

[haruchai]

What's wrong with having an environment you can enjoy? And, your statement about the Seinfeld lifestyle versus the Little House on the Prairie ( or that of Native Americans ) only makes sense if you eliminate the personal automobiles from the equation.
If you look at what the resources that goes in to the manufacture of an automobile, both now and throughout the history of the industry, you'll see that the environmental costs have been huge.

The real problem that we're facing is that we are too slow to change. A hundred years of living in the Age of Petroleum has given us an unrealistic view of the true costs of survival.
Had all of North America embraced a lifestyle more geared to conservation back during the Oil Embargo of the '70s, we'd be sitting pretty right now.
But, we've become enamored of the SuperSized life and there is no longer an easy way to support that kind of living. I don't know enough about nuclear power to say whether or not mass construction is a good idea but again, even if it is as safe and as efficent as its proponents would have us believe, it's another Band-Aid over the true problem - the refusal to learn how to live within our environment in a sustainable fashion.