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?

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?

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

[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.

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: "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.

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

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.

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: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.