Slashdot Mirror
Will Wind Power Change Earth's Climate?
lommer writes "The Globe and Mail is currently running an article on a recent wind power study. A group of Canadian and American scientists has modelled the effects of introducing massive amounts of wind farms into North America and have come up with surprising results. While still having only 1/5th the impact of fossil fuels, wind power will still adjust the earth's climate with the equatorial regions warmed while the arctic grows colder. Could this be a boon for the nuclear lobby, or is this just further evidence for a diversified power-generating system?"
Why is it that people are so scared of nuclear plants, i would find global climate change to be a lot worse than the ever reducing risk of a nuclear accident. I'd rather have a few square miles potentially ruined than a certain change to the global system.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
How can this possibly be good news for nuclear energy? A nuclear reactor produces huge amounts of heat - hence the huge, highly visible cooling towers. This point generally gets ignored, since people are far more concerned with other side effects of nuclear power - but any unbiased study of the total global side effect of each kind of energy generation is going to show wind ranking far above nuclear.
Global warming is a global problem, so everyone needs to help fight the problem, espcially the country that contains approx 2% of the world's population but emits a quarter of the word's CO2 emissions...
The US is by far the highest emissions per capita, and its worse in that the US doesn't even do much of its own manufacturing....(imports far exceed exports)
Global warming will affect everyone, and the costs of not acting will be far greater than the cost of implimenting the protocol- that's why every other country is still going ahead with the plan, even without US participation. Yes, even Russia agreed to the plan, with the terrible shape its economy is in, because it knows the costs of not acting will be greater.
And the fact that the economy will be hurt is BS- the underlying assumption in economics is that our living standards are proportional to number of goods/services we produce- But what about air quality? pollution? clean water? moderate temperatures? None of those are accounted for in our economic models, so a naive economist would say destroying those for greater manufacturing output would improve our living standards, when in reality it would do the exact oposite.
And considering that cutting greenhouse gasses will require substantial investments in technology by companies all around the world, and the fact that the US is a global leader in research and development, it stands to gain much more from developing and marketing these technologies than it stands to lose from job cuts at the oil companies and SUV manufacturers.
I want to like blimps, but the Hindenburg shows just how bad an accident could get.
I want to like space travel, but the Columbia shuttle incident shows just how bad an accident could get.
I want to like sex, but AIDS shows just how bad an accident could get.
I mean, seriously, are you honestly trying to make this sort of argument? In the development of any technology or process, mistakes are made, and they are learned from. Are you under the impression that there's never been a fatal accident at a coal-based power plant, in the history of their development? Are you under the impression that there have never been accidents with dams? With the development of air travel? Space travel?
Here's a news flash for you: production of energy, at its most basic level, involves the harnessing of an exothermic -- or at least exergonic -- reaction, either chemical or nuclear, at some level or another. This essentially means that if you are dealing with large amounts of energy all concentrated in one place, there always remains the distinct possibility that it could all blow up in your face.
This is true of every single energy production method that actually generates large amounts of energy in a small space. Wind and solar aren't dangerous because the amount of energy generated per square foot is very small; and this is exactly what makes them (at this point in time) unworkable solutions for large scale energy production.
For everything else, you're dealing with potentially explosive, volatile (but hopefully controlled) chemical or nuclear reactions. That's how you get the energy out of them. (Fusion may be an exception).
However, despite the fact that your car runs by constantly harnessing the energy produced by an exploding gasoline/air mixture, it itself doesn't explode. Why is this? Engineering. See, despite the fact that gasoline is volatile (less so now than fuels used in the past, when combustion engines were first being developed) we have figured out how to stabilize engines running on them. They don't blow up in your face. But I'm willing to bet you that when people were first messing around with driving pistons by explosive force, someone got hurt. It was inevitable. It's part of the process.
Look, no one likes accidents, but the Chernobyl thing is silly to bring up. In terms of design, it's like comparing modern cars to Pintos, and concluding that every car will behave that way in an accident -- but Chernobyl, like the Pinto, was flawed from an engineering perspective, not from a technology perspective. When the Pinto was recalled, people didn't say, "Man, this automobile technology is bunk, let's never use it again, and use pogosticks for transportation from now on", they said, "Damn, Ford sure fucked up the design of that car. Let's never design cars like that again."
Throw in the word nuclear, and suddenly, everyone is saying, "Yeah, Chernobyl was poorly designed, and to boot, the operators were running it in a deliberately unsafe manner, and there was an accident; so let's stop the development of nuclear energy completely, and just use our radioactive reserves to build weapons of mass destruction instead." I mean, WHAT?
If someone had suggested that same idea wrt to automobile technology right after the Pinto incident, people would have rightly thought he was looney. But if it's nu-cu-lar, well, darn! I guess that logic makes perfect sense!
Nevermind that current reactor designs are completely different from Chernobyl's, and that the same accident would not be possible again, even if they tried.
Yeah, let's just kill the most promising means of producing renewable, clean energy because, during early development of the engineering principles needed to control such a powerful reaction, an accident occured. Let's wax lyrical about wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power solutions solving all our problems when a) they don't scale b) are prohibitively expensive and c) have problems
Nuclear energy is an interesting science experiment, but a bad commercial energy source.
1. Its too expensive, the last plant to come on line in the eighties in the US, generated electricity a cost higher than solar power of the same era (the luz plant). After around $3 trillion in R&D funding, subsidies, loan guarantees, insurance no fault legislation, etc nuclear power is STILL a commercial failure only to exist out of the "goodness" of governments around the world.
2. Smart engineers know Murphy always wins. Its not IF there's going to be a serious accident (there have been many already), its WHEN. Reliability and safety only comes in nines - no such thing a 100% perfect.
3. Nuclear proliferation. The nuclear power industry is the only other major user and generator of nuclear materials other than nuclear weapons. You eliminate nuclear power and nuclear proliferation is easily controlled. Remember it only takes 5lbs of plutonium or 25lbs uranium to make a bomb. Once you've got the material, the bomb itself is literally garage science.
4. Compared to alternative energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.), it's less commercially viable with far more risks. Nuclear power only wins on one account: energy density. And yet, outside of a nuclear submarine, this isn't an advantage! Transmitting power is twice the operation costs and ten times the capital cost compared to the generation of that power. Small decentralized power souces such a solar, photovoltaics, wind, etc is far cheaper overall.
5. Large monolithic power plants take years to build, the investment makes no sense without government subsidies if you have to wait 5 years just to begin to make some income, and 15 years to breakeven. Modular power technologies that are built on an assembly lines, such as photovoltaics generate returns within days.
I could go on here, but I think you get the point. Nuclear energy is a fun science experiment, but commercially we should cut our losses and run.
Solar power is after all fusion power already done for us, at a safe distance, and transmitted free nearly equally around the world with sufficient energy density to suit the worlds needs for millennia to come.
Interpretation for computer guys:
Nuclear power: old complex clunky mainframe, prone to bugs.
Solar power: wireless handheld with worldwide networking