Slashdot Mirror
'No Quick Fix' From Nuclear Power
humoly writes to tell us BBC News is reporting that while many are calling for nuclear power, new nuclear plants are not the answer to combating climate changes or the wavering energy concerns for the UK. From the article: "The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) report says doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035. The body, which advises the government on the environment, says this must be set against the potential risks. The government is currently undertaking a review of Britain's energy needs."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While I was shocked how little nuclear power would reduce emission and the fact apparently intelligent people thought this would be a silver bullet deal, it should not surprise anyone that
There is no quick fix. A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
What about trippling the nuclear capacity? What about quadrupling the capacity? That should have an impact surely.
Congratulations on stating the obvious! Considering the fact that energy requirements are almost always increasing, and not decreasing, simply having CO2 levels maintain where they are now in 2035 would be somewhat of an accomplishment.
If you don't build nuclear, and instead build that new coal plant, does that somehow cause CO2 levels to go down? Didn't think so.
It's time for the world to face the fact that nuclear energy (and hopefully fusion in the "next 20 years") is the only practical way to truly reduce CO2 emissions and solve pollution problems. If cheap nuclear energy exists, it is possible to reduce pollution and CO2 production in other areas, in addition to the initial electrical generation. Hydrogen fuel for vehicles, electrical heating instead of natural gas or oil, etc.
While other forms of alternative energy are "nice", they all have their downside - solar cells aren't exactly environmentally friendly to produce, wind plants take lots of land and are an eyesore, etc. Nuclear plants may have some miniscule risks, but when properly managed, they are by far the best solution. The problem with nuclear energy (dealing with the waste included) is entirely political, not technical.
6.5 billion people...
85 million barrels per day of oil alone...
One of these 2 numbers needs to come down drastically...
Nothing else will work. And it's probably too late to save either.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
After all its not like we could just brush that highly radioactive waste under the carpet (or nearest mountain) like some countries, we will only have 10,000 years until the waste we create today will be even approachable
CO2 waste compared to RadioActive waste isnt even in the same league
I see these 'reports' all the time, claiming that nuclear power would do little do reduce emissions. Now, wait a minute - those gigawatts per year produced would then instead come from what? A coal plant? Now, that ADDS to emissions AND it actually produces more radioactive waste isotopes than a regular nuclear plant (not many people seem to realize that). Why in the world is everyone so freaked out about building a frackin' nuclear plant, whilst tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are rotting away in the former Soviet states? And the U.S. has at least as many and they don't know who do drop them on either... It's all a big mindfuck if you ask me - NUCLEAR? BAD!! Poisoning the air with your car and other air polluting devices - GOOOD!
"By 2035" -- its sounds like a long way off, no? Lets suppose the modular plants the South Africans are building take of like wildfire. 2035 -- by that point you'd just be seeing real productive use of any significant number of them. That's a best possible outcome.
Are these the same people telling us we should just give up fossil fuels for WIND? That some combination of animal dung methane and solar power will make it happen?
Look, we rely on fossil fuels because they have a huge amount of easily available energy in a very dense package. Where else do you find that kind of energy density? Seems like the nuc plants work -- though they're expensive.
How about magic microwave beams from spacecraft with huge solar sails? Ummmmm......ok. Right after Scotty rides down in the space elevator to show us how to make transparent aluminium out of mile long flexible carbon nanotubes. Let me know when its working, I swing by in my flying car to come check it out.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
This (pay wall past intro) is an interesting article I read in Scientific American about a plan to recycle much of what is currently considered nuclear waste for use in advanced fast breeder reactors. It seems the most feasible alternative to oil I have seen.
Unfortunately, 500 million of those 6.5 billion live in nations that are armed to the teeth.
Interestingly enough, sans immigration, industrialized nations would have collapsing populations now.
..don't panic
And while you're up there, can you pick me up a few billion dollars worth of resources that have been unaffected by geological change and are therefore infinitely easier to mine? Oh wait, they said quick fix. I know, keep burning coal, but pump the carbon dioxide into the ocean. Yeah, that's a plan. As with all space based activities, what's lacking is not the technology, it's the mandate.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Seems to me some of their claimed disadvantages are in conflict. To wit:
1) The economics of nuclear new-build are highly uncertain, according to the report
2) Nuclear would lock the UK into a centralised energy distribution system for the next 50 years when more flexible distribution options are becoming available
3) The report claims that nuclear would undermine the drive for greater energy efficiency
4) If the UK brings forward a new nuclear programme, it becomes more difficult to deny other countries the same technology, the SDC claims
Points 1 and 2 seem to indicate economic and technological malfeasance, but points 3 and 4 seem to imply the technology is good enough to curtail better economic options which would be desirable to other countries? Hmm...
Point 4 also implies that the UK would seek to deny other countries nuclear plants in general, or that "other countries" might use said plants for other than above-board reasons. I can't figure out whether point 4 is insulting to other countries or insulting to the UK...or both.
The only reason that doubling the number of nuclear plants wouldn't have an impact on emissions is because there are so few nuclear plants. For the UK, doubling would mean 23 more plants that would cover 20% of the UK's electricity needs.
I couldn't find details, but the study likely also ignores the benefits of nuclear plants in relation to automobiles. Currently, if a person drives an electric car, he'll still be causing emissions at the electric plant. In conjunction with electric car technology, nuclear plants could be a way to significantly reduce emissions that result from vehicles.
No, nukes are not a quick fix. But they (barring a breakthrough in fusion, which I wouldn't bet on) may still be our only hope, because changing the lifestyles of billions of people isn't possible.
Nuclear power does reduce emissions by helping us eliminate coal and oil power plants. Something's better than nothing, and nuclear waste is infinitely easier to contain than a cloud coming out of a smokestack.
Moreover, nuclear power scales better for the future. Like it or not, our energy usage is only going to go up. Nuclear also makes possible other technologies that reduce emissions- where do you think the hydrogen for fuel cells comes from? The easiest way to generate it is in a reactor.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
I say we nuke the b*st*rds.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
You can say that again!
A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
So if the nuclear capacity was doubled, it would indeed cut CO2 emissions. What if it were quadrupled? Increased tenfold? (There are 12 operational reactor sites, each with multiple nuclear units)
With this added nuclear power, CO2 emissions may be reduced 8% by 2035. And there is a forecast that the UK will exceed by 8% its 2010 goal.
So is it better to reduce CO2 emissions or not? Does the study mention how much radioactive material must be released by coal plants in order to equal the power which could be created by nuclear plants?
A Pink Floyd song I really like. Sounds all arab and stuff. Don't know what make me think of it just now... :-P
Liquid fuels for transportation are the bottleneck. Nuclear power isn't going to directly move anything smaller than a ship. Not even considering personal automobiles, rail, truck, and aircraft all take oil, or liquified coal.
Interestingly, my doctor wants me to eat more fresh vegetables and more fish. All of which will have to be hauled from warmer climates or the coast, to me, using oil-powered vehicles. If, sorry, When transport gets much more expensive, there will be some unexpected public health issues.
There was a write up on this, from the UK, called The Busby Report a couple of years ago. Although I didn't agree with all of it's conclusions, it had some good points. I wonder if the Busby people will be in on this?
All of which are "Quick Fix, Instant-Oatmeal One-Hour photo answers." Because if we could do that overnight, we'd be right back where we are 5 years from now. If North America disappeared overnight, it would still probably only buy 15 years or so because China's and India's needs are growing so quickly.
And how would you propose to implement your proposals, anyway? It would take oppressive and violent acts of governments around the world. And it won't happen. Sorry.
* Switch light bulbs for fluorescent bulbs
* Replace bulky monitors for flat screens
* Incentivate low-power CPU's
* Invest in information campaigns about not using home electronics in stand-by mode
* Invest in solar power R&D for home applications
* Incentivate usage of bycicles instead of cars, change the infrastructure of cities to provide smaller stores in more places rather than huge walmarts 10 miles from home
Any other ideas?
...nuclear power plants are nowhere to be found since we're the world's largest producer of hydroelectric power but it wasn't always like this...
In 1968, after a nuclear meltdown in Charlemagne (Quebec's own Chernobyl accident), the government decided to ban nuclear power for fear of another disaster. Unfortunately, it was too late, since Celine Dion was unleashed to the world soon after that and the rest, as they say, is history...
Sounds like a badly written Uncyclopedia article or something.
One-Hour Photo? What is that, a place where it takes an hour to select a digital camera?
Check your assumptions.
While I am a fan of alternatives, the problems for alternatives is that stable power plants are built to handle the worst loads. That is, when you design your grid and your sources, you use the dependable sources as the figuring of the input energy. Well, we may add more alternatives, but we still need to increasethe plants that can be counted on. Why? Because almost all energy is at the whim of mother earth. Of course, there is tidal, geothermal, and hydro available, which can be counted on. But most of the alternatives showing a great deal of promise are in wind and solar. They can NOT be counted on. So until a good viable way to capture the excess energy is created (hydrogen is a LONG ways off), then we will have to use on the normal types (coal, oil, gas, and nukes).
And personally, I think that Nukes is about the only good choice left.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I can take, process and print digital photos myself in minutes. So, to extend your analogy, fundamentally there is no reason why technology can't provide a perfectly acceptable quick, cheap and easy fix to problems.
Nuclear isn't it, sure.
Carbon emissions are *rising*, with something like a 60% increase in the last 30 years.
Even a small impact in terms of *reducing* emissions over 30 years is a *huge* change form the level they would have *risen* to by '35 at the current rate.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
...nuclear power isn't going to quickly absorb our need for efficient power. However, with different innovations here and there collectively they can diminish the problem to a minimum. When I say this, I'm specifically thinking about the Norwegian salinity power plants. From the stated article, "The principle is that fresh water and salt water are channelled into a membrane module. The fresh water is transported through the membranes and over into the pressurised seawater. One of the properties of the membranes is that they transport water but not salt. The pressurised mixture of seawater and fresh water (brackish water) flows out of the module and into a hydropower turbine that generates electricity."
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
How about increase developement into solar energy? Start building our skyscrapers with glass laced with solar panel windows which conduct the heat energy while being clear, eccentually making all skyscrapers huge energy making machines... And start building suburban houses with roofs made of solar panels (this is already being done in some places).
http://chickencamels.poemofquotes.com/
Nuclear power isn't a fix because it just won't scale and causes pollution in other ways such as in radioactive waste. Energy researcher Dr. Nathan Lewis of Caltech and perhaps many others in the industry have already estimated that in order to even become close to the approx. 13 terawatt energy that the world is using every year, "producing 10 TW of power would require construction of 10,000 new nuclear power plants over the next 50 years, i.e., one every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 years." Considering the fact that getting even one nuclear power plant built takes years, nuclear power does not look optimal.
However, about "1.2x105 TW of solar energy" hits the Earth's surface, and from "50 TW to optimistic estimates of 1500 TW" can be harvested each year. Therefore, solar energy is our best chance at meeting our energy needs.
But two of the biggest factors in holding this technology back is the increase in efficiency of solar cells, and solar energy conversion/storage (into a fuel).
1) Long-term storage of nuclear waste.
...as opposed to the way things are now? There's an economy of scale benefit to most forms of power generation. This is nothing new or unique to nuclear. Furthermore, any alternative sources that could be decentralized could likely still be deployed and connected to the power grid as they become availible. History demonstrates that demand for energy generally only goes up.
First, keep in mind that the longer it stays radioactive, by definition the less radioactive (and thus less dangerous) it is. Depleted Uranium, for instance, despite being technically radioactive, is actually used as radiation shielding!
The obvious solution to dealing with waste is to seperate it into stuff that can processed back into viable fuel (and used as such), stuff that's so mildly radioactive that it could be ground into powder and scattered into the ocean and you'd never notice the difference in the background radiation level, and stuff that's not viable as fuel but still radioactive enough that it needs to be stored--which I imagine you'll find is not very much waste.
2) Economics of building nuke plants
Yeah, and how much of the economic uncertainty comes from artificial barriers created by scientific illiterates who oppose nuclear power? Other than fossil fuels, nuclear is the only type of generator that is proven to be long-term viable and scalable to any capacity. If the economics are "uncertain" for nukes, they can only be worse for anything else.
3) Centralized distribution system
4) Undermines the drive for efficiency
Uh, no. Efficiency is, within reason, its own driving force. Despite what some people would like, we're never going to use less energy. There's only so much efficiency gain possible, for one thing. Besides, efficiency gains don't reduce consumption any more than getting a bigger house reduces clutter. Efficiency just lets us get more value from the energy we do use.
5) Difficulty in denying other countries the technology
Oh yeah, because that's working really well as is.
Hey, there ya go! That looks better :-) From that page, my favorite quote happens to be...
And the global warmers are worried about the frickin' CO2. :-D They never cease to amaze me.
and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
... but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy recycled condoms.
Maybe
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So nuclear power is only good for a small improvement. but then, so were the Kyoto protocols.
It's from a simpsons quote.
There is no quick fix. A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
Automobiles can be handled by using electric vehicles, with power generated by nuke plants. I'm not sure what you mean by "suburban lifestyles" as a contributor to anything other than cultural pollution. And one-time-use items aren't inherently bad, the problem is one-time-use items that are discarded without recycling the resources used in them--a problem that, unlike the other things you mentioned, is relatively amenable to reasonable legislative solutions such as economic incentives.
Biodiesel works pretty well. The best method probably involves algae grown under glass plates.
I do admit that the UK is lacking in Sun, but surely you still have a few desert colonies. There are plenty of places with the land and climate for this.
Of course, given nuclear power, you don't really need an energy-positive process for fuel production. You could suck the carbon dioxide right out of the air to make fuel.
Nuclear power will most likely never surpass its existing use as a source of supplemental power for the world market. That said, I disagree with the article in its suggestion that it cannot make a significant dent in carbon emissions.
Nuclear power could very easily become the largest source of power for fixed location consumers. Existing coal and oil plants could simply be replaced with nuclear facilities. This eventual phase-out of legacy power supplies could easily cut carbon emissions by hundreds of tons per year.
However, nuclear power will never become the totally dominant source of all our power needs unless the near future reveals a revolutionary advance in battery or super-capacitor technology. Until then, transportation technology will never be able to efficiently harness power off the Grid. Transportation will continue to use energy sources that are easy to transport and distribute.
The major hold-up with nuclear power is two-fold. First, current generation nuclear reactors use uranium as a fuel source. This fuel creates huge amounts of radioactive waste. Although this waste was once highly desired for nuclear weapons projects in the past, today it is a worthless product that is expensive and dangerous to dispose of. Also, this fuel is quickly becoming scarce. Some scientists suggest that the world has less than 60 years worth of reactor grade uranium at current consumption. Secondly, current generation reactors have a high potential for danger. The horrific blunder of Soviet engineers when running a coolant test at the Chernobyl facility will haunt generations to come. America's own scare at Three-Mile Island brings that fear close to home.
Surprisingly, most of these issues have modern solutions. The French has developed an encapsulated uranium fuel source that places fuel within a heat resistant shell. This shell keeps the density of the fuel low enough that in the event of a coolant failure, the fuel rods never go critical.
Second, scientists have suggested that a switch from uranium to thorium could reduce radioactive waste by over half, and could reduce our plutonium stockpiles by using it as a seed for these new reactors. Furthermore, thorium is a more common element than uranium, with prices being only a fraction of uranium.
However, political pressure will most likely never allow it to happen since traditional power companies fund many anti-nuclear lobbies. Oil and coal hate nuclear. Popular media demonizes nuclear. Environmental laws make it nearly impossible to even whisper nuclear without the threat of civil lawsuits.
As such, we will continue to pump greenhouse gasses into the air. At our current rate, my home in Washington State might experience weather similar to that of Southern California today. Sunshine is good. . .
Thorium reactor acrticle: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68045, 00.html
Exactly right! Now, you go tell China to halt their ongoing industrial revolution, and I'll tell Americans to stop driving their cars, move to the city center, and take the bus everywhere.
Doesn't sound very practical, does it?
On the other hand, nuclear power works today, right now, with zero atmospheric emissions from the power generation process. Modern reactor designs are safe, and the waste disposal problem is easily solveable given the political will to agree on a safe, remote dump site (or go the breeder route).
There's only one reason that nuclear can't be an immediately useable alternative energy source, and that's political handwringing by the same morons who yelled "split wood, not atoms!" back in the 60's and 70's. They didn't understand physics back then, and they still don't today. It's just that the word "atom" sounds scary.
The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) report says doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035.
Okay... if doubling nuclear capacity won't help how about we triple it? Seriously, would 4x our current capacity help? How many nuclear power plants would we need to make a difference?
Yeah, I'm with you there.
Next time I run down to the store to pick up a new computer, I'll bring in back home on my bike. Of course, it won't be in a box, so I'll take a blanket with me to the store to wrap it in for safety.
And, when I go for additional RAM, NATs, graphics boards, etc., I'll bring my own anti-static bags.
And then there's the candy and cookies for the kids. Buy in bulk or make our own, and when we take it with us we'll re-use baggies. Or wrap it in leaves.
Of course, since we'll be changing our suburban lifestyle, we won't be taking the kids to piano lessons all the time, that's less auto usage and less need for candy or cookies or other junk the can get quick energy on the road from. (On the other hand, if they are riding bicycles, they need more energy.)
Actually, this is not so much sarcasm as it might appear. I actually picked up my last sempron box with LCD monitor in Mikage, carried the bundle back to the train on foot (about a mile and a half if I remember right), and carried it from the local train station to home on the back of my bike.
My back was a little sore for a couple of days -- should have borrowed one of those wire-frame luggage carriers or something.
And my wife already does a lot of making and/or packaging her own quick food for the kids. Got to give her more credit for that.
What about when those 30 year old reactors finally get decomistioned? Or the risks involved with 30 year old reactors?
Pebble Bed Reactors can be made now that are virtually meltdown proof, more efficient, and use a fuel source that is not produced in the same way as weapons grade nuclear material. Compare a brand new state of the art Pebble Bed reactor with any coal burning power plant and see which one poses a greator health risk to employees and the local population.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
From the article, these are the five major disadvantages identified by the CDC:
* No long-term solutions for the storage of nuclear waste are yet available, says the SDC, and storage presents clear safety issues
* The economics of nuclear new-build are highly uncertain, according to the report
* Nuclear would lock the UK into a centralised energy distribution system for the next 50 years when more flexible distribution options are becoming available
* The report claims that nuclear would undermine the drive for greater energy efficiency
* If the UK brings forward a new nuclear programme, it becomes more difficult to deny other countries the same technology, the SDC claims (emphasis mine)
While the first four are significant, the last one is an interesting angle I hadn't considered. If going nuclear becomes the model for leading first world countries, second and third one countries are going to demand the technology in order to follow the dominant pattern. If they're refused it, they'll probably feel very littlle remorse in cranking up their fossil fuel plants and polluting like elephants with dysentary in order to set up a little environmental blackmail. If every tinpot dictator is given nuclear tech, the chances of someone turning Manhatten or heaven forfend, downtown Vancouver into a radioactive cloud go up dramatically. Just on that point alone, it seems like going nuclear would only buy a respite of a few decades before the energy squeeze moves further down the chain and gifts us with a whole new set of problems.
It would take oppressive and violent acts of governments around the world. And it won't happen. Sorry.
Perhaps H5N1 will do the trick.
How about opressive acts of Mother Nature? :D
"may still be our only hope, because changing the lifestyles of billions of people isn't possible."
We done it many times before. Or do you believe that humans have always driven cars to work?
What the BBC article really doesn't talk about is that if the UK increased thier nuclear power they'd decrease thier use of fossil fuels which will extend the commerical life of the North Sea fossil fuel reserves and allow the UK to sell more fossil fuels longer.
They do say "It regards building nuclear capacity as an alternative to reliance on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.
As North Sea supplies dwindle, nuclear is seen by some as a more secure source of energy than hydrocarbon supplies from unstable regimes. Proponents say it could generate large quantities of electricity while helping to stabilise carbon dioxide CO2 emissions." Yea, but that doesn't mention extending commerical life. Which would be a boon economically for the UK, Denmark and Norway.
They also don't mention advances in reactor technology that'd eliminate some of thier listed reservations.
More radiation comes from coal plants than from all the nuclear waste, reactors and mining. Now as to your statement that Yucca Mountain is overflowing, that'd be hard since it isn't taking waste until 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_mountain
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/about/index.shtml
"The Yucca Mountain Project is currently focused on preparing an application to obtain a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a repository."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If there is a "shortage" of something, whoever has the power to ration that resource has enourmous power. No matter if it is food, water, energy, medical care, whatever... if you can decide who, where, and why one gets the resource, you have an giant stick and a giant carrot to enforce obedience.
No government panel wants a solution to global warming that produces a lot of energy. No one wants there to be plenty of energy for everyone who needs it. They want an excuse to strictly limit and control energy. If they can decide who gets energy, and who doesn't, they have total control in a modern industrialized world.
Wind power, solar power, and such, cannot produce enough energy to satisfy current consumption. Nuclear Energy is the only technology that we have off the shelf that can produce the energy in vast amounts to satisfy our energy hungry society. That is why so many people are so dead against it. How are you going to usher in a new age of central planning and government control if there is no crisis to justify such a thing. Nuclear power is just not acceptable.
the conservatives are against nu'clear and for solar???
Wot a flippin' crazy post-colonial world it tis....
Except that the waste you speak of isn't (mainly) generated by "nuclear power" it's generated by ineffiecient nuclear power because America is under the incorrect assumptions that:
a)They're the only ones with the right to the bomb
b)Nations reprocessing their own fuel == bomb goes to the bad guys
c)The bad guys can be stopped from getting the bomb in the long run.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Is this a reversed Precautionary Principle? Rather than "avoid an action because it might be dangerous", they're saying it would require becoming a leader in low-carbon technologies, or "avoid this action and take a different action despite not knowing how to do it".
Doh! Dude, stop revealing the secret plan.
Actually, what we will do is spread this virus via
fake vaccinations. To prove you are vaccinated, you
will have to get a rfid chip implanted. We will
tell you this is temporary but we told you that
the patriot act was temporary too! Ha! Silly
commoners! Line up for Haliburtons internment camps!
This might be the only use of nuclear power that would ensure that India and China would not over polute the rest of the world
And it won't happen. Sorry. Unless they do it to themselves. And the more third world countries get nuclear power, the more likely something like this becomes.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The waste is only a problem since nothing can be done with it thanks to Greenpeace's lobbing efforts. With out their short sighted but effective blind-siding the industry, there would be separation plants to convert that waste into more fuel and stuff thats only radioactive for a few weeks.
Nuclear plants may have some miniscule risks, but when properly managed, they are by far the best solution. The problem with nuclear energy (dealing with the waste included) is entirely political, not technical.
The problem is political, but not for the reasons you give.
Current nuclear technology is inherently so dirty that there is no safe solution to the waste problem, and none will ever be found; there simply is no place on earth where you can safely put indestructible waste that's going to be deadly for thousands of years. Currently deployed nuclear technology also only uses a tiny fraction of the energy contained in the nuclear fuel, which is highly irresponsible.
We have nuclear technology that is pretty clean, namely breeder reactors. Breeder reactors use nuclear fuel far more efficiently and they produce little highly radioactive waste. The resistance to breeder reactors is indeed purely political: they are viewed as a proliferation risk.
Nevertheless, in the end, we don't really need nuclear. Energy efficiency coupled with solar and bio power is more than enough to power the world, safely, easily, and forever.
In Australia, _right_now_ you can buy 'green power', which is power that comes only from renewable resources. It costs a little more (maybe AU$40/year more). Perhaps a 10% price increase.
;-).
There is no reason why what can't be scaled up to provide electricity to every one in Australia (and presumably other countries too). (Of course, if everybody signed up in one day, I doubt they'd have the infrastructure
This isn't an anti-nuclear rant - it just isn't the best option for domestic electricity.
combating climate changes
There is no combating climate changes. If you think you can manipulate this planets eco-system then you are really stupid. You are, as a biologic, insignificant as a life form on this planet. We have as much control over solar cycles as we do over volcanic activity which is Zilch, nada, nothing. Gasoline is killing our planet my ass. Save the magnetic North is first in my book. Can't do noting about that either.
These sentences brought to you by the words: God, Fate, and be Happy.
It seems that this very important government body only has one (yes, only one) PHD scientist on it's board (a metallurgist)... and zero (yes, no-one), with any knowledge of nuclear energy or physics at all!
Nearly all of the people on the board are lawyers, administrators, or prominent members of anti-nuclear organizations.
So a government body of people, with no knowledge whatsoever of nuclear power, and who were already ideologically dead set against nuclear power from the get-go, decided that nuclear power is bad. Wow, what a shock!
Yes, the advanced research determined that if you double the tiny amount of energy produced by nuclear power in England, you get double a tiny amount! Wow! I wonder what happens if you generated ALL OR THE VAST MAJORITY OF ENERGY VIA NUCLEAR ENERGY? I guess that would produce a lot more energy and reduce a lot of greenhouse gases, wouldn't it?
How come people take things like the "Sustainable Development Commission" seriously? I mean, this "commission" is a joke!
Nukular. I mean, c'mon guys - that's how the *President* says it, and he's got to be right.
-sorry, couldn't help myself
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Let's see, you listed two nuclear weapon production facilities and claim that a disposal site that isn't open yet is 'overflowing' as for the problems with nuclear power.
Apples and Oranges. Enriching Uranium or creating enough plutonium to make a bomb is a dirty business, and we weren't exactly too concerned about the enviroment during the cold war(at least for weapons production).
But it's only significantly cleaner than coal when you ignore the waste.
No, it's significantly cleaner when you acknowledge the fact that nuclear waste is actually easily contained because there's so little of it.
I don't read AC A human right
Nuclear power has by and large been mostly safe thanks to the fortuitous way water moderated reactors work.
When you start putting liquid metal cooled breeder reactors all over the place I don't expect a simular safety record. Hell I have my doubts about pebblebed reactors, lots of heat plus graphite equals safety?
humoly writes to tell us BBC News is reporting that while many are calling for wind power, new wind plants are not the answer to combating climate changes or the wavering energy concerns for the UK. From the article: "The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) report says doubling wind turbine capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035. The body, which advises the government on the environment, says this must be set against the potential costs. The government is currently undertaking a review of Britain's energy needs."
;)
Fixed it.
Honestly, doubling nuclear capacity would do more towards reducing CO2 emissions than doubling wind capacity. It's not like you couldn't go on a building program and build at a rate to commission, say, 5 plants a year using parallel building. 20 years of that and you'd have another hundred plants, enough to shut down most coal plants. That'd cut down on something like 700 million tons of CO2 a year.
I don't read AC A human right
...before you type something equally rediculous.
Are you suggesting that we turn off all non-essential electronics in the wealthy nations so that some of that energy can provide fuel to cook and preserve food in the developing world? Maybe you're just suggesting we tell the developing world to (in the words of Dick Cheney) Go F*** itself. We in the west, after all, are the only ones who count. Forget the fact that we are a small minority of the ACTUAL population of the planet.
No, you'd rather believe some bullshit about a few windmills providing enough power for your needs while in truth, a few perfectly safe pre-fab pebble bed reactors could provide both the power and clean (desalinated) water needed for a fair portion of the poorest nations -- turning arid wastelands full of disease and starvation into working cropland.
Let me tell you something...A man desperate to keep his family from starving to death will not give a fart in a hurricane worth of damn about his "carbon footprint" (more B.S.) while he burns any damn thing he needs to in order to make a living.
You want to know what protects the environment more than anything else? Wealth. Wealth protects the environment. Poverty destroys it through despairation. To save the planet (which will be here long after you and I, and doesn't give a rat's ass about being saved) you need the energy to provide water, food, and education to the poorest.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
How exactly does nuclear power create more nuclear material than is in the ground already? I mean, nuclear material is mined out of the ground, used, and then put back into the ground, presumably with the same amount or less of radioactivity that it had when it was mined..
Well, we could phase out the market distortions that favor sprawl and wasteful land use patterns over compact (ecoheads call them "sustainable") urban communities. Tax deductions for mortgages on single-family homes, zoning laws that prohibit mixed-use development, the massive government funding of the interstate highway system--these are all market distortions we'd be better without. Unfortunately, if we want a smooth transition to aforementioned sustainability, it'll take generations to fix.
...or talked on cell phones, or used computers, or done things at night with electric lighting...
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
Of course. Haven't ya ever seen The Flintsones? :P
Yet, there are plenty of economic tricks you can impose to change lifestyles. Make something not worthwhile for people anymore, and over time they will change their methods of living. I don't encourage, condone, or am proposing any of the following... just pointing out there are possibilities if we are thinking in the extreme :)
As gas prices rise, we will see people move closer to their jobs (ie, the city) from the suburbs. Suburban sprawl is obviously more likely if the act of commuting is not in the least bit taxing (See: United States). If we want people to stop driving so much, make it expensive as hell...and in turn, maybe start using Europe's incredible public transportation. We don't have that in the U.S. (realistically).
The biggest problem with environmental concerns (very similar to security concerns which any of us involved can relate) is obviously that a single person experiences very little payback for their contribution (and/or can see very little return instantaneously). To curb the public's tendencies, we may have instate some pretty intense restrictions.
How far do we need to go to really protect ourselves against Global Warming (yes, I said it), or environmental concerns?
I'm not sure what you mean by "suburban lifestyles" as a contributor to anything other than cultural pollution. I'm sure he means that all those people who live in the burbs are spread out and thus require oil burning autos to get anywhere, whereas in a dense city it is much easier to have a decent public transit system. Tokyo vs Aurora, IL for example
Sweet, Cool, Uh.... Whatever...
It amazes me to see so many informed comments, yet none practically based.
How many people here have worked in a nuke plant? How many know the logistics of it?
First off, redundancy factors make failure and meltdown a near impossibility. Unless an operator is asleep in the control room, and then deaf and blind to all of the alarms and lights that go off when a coolant failure might occur, the reactor will be shut down.
Second: Waste storage. Many people don't seem to know what a spent fuel pool is. Everyone's talking about disposing of waste, when all nuclear facilities in this country already have a means of storing the waste for the approximate life of the reactor. The spent fuel pools are huge buildings with a huge pool, where spent Uranium fuel bundles are stored. The walls of this building are solid concrete, approx. 10 ft thick. No radiation is getting out of there.
On top of that, most slashdotters would probably be surprised to know that they pick up more radiation in a year from their computer monitors, cell phones, simple radios, and other devices, than a nuclear employee does from the plant. Everything is carefully monitored with dosimeters (devices that measure your radioactive dose).
Another thing that annoys me: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A RADIATION SUIT. The suits that nuclear workers put on are are called "Anti-C's" or anti contamination suits. Inside the reactor building, and in other areas where boric acid is used to absorb radiation, loose radioactive particles are everywhere. Movement of those particles from where they're expected to where they're not desired is called contamination, so these suits are used to prevent the spread of contamination. There's even a special process you are to use in removing these suits which prevents contamination. After that, you enter a scanning device which does a once-over of your entire body to detect contaminants, and if you're contaminated, a number of things can happen. If it's an article of clothing, it's simply disposed of. A shoe or boot, generally on the bottom, the offending region is sliced off. On your skin, anti-contamination soap is used, and if that isn't successful, they bring out the SOS pad.
Also, people don't realize how common Radon is. Often, workers would enter the "hot side"(we call it that because that's the area where exposure to radiation is possible) and come out, having gone nowhere near contamination, and they set off the alarm, mostly on rainy days. That's because of Radon. The water causes the radon to essentially stick to your shoes, and while sticky pads on the floor can help removing this, often a de-ionizing fan is required to get rid of it totally.
This is the extent to which they go to prevent public exposure to radiation/radioactive material from their facility. Environmental concerns are nil.
Fear of meltdown is an irrational, uninformed position, and an easy fear to maintain through ignorance.
When I was (I'm in my twenties now so it's not too far off) I remember hearing about solar power. It was amazing...free energy from light. I went to the Radio Shack in town and bought myself a "solar kit". It was a cheap solar cell and a motor with a fan...probably cost them 80 cents and charged me $14.99 but it didn't phase me. When I first put it together it was such an amazing feeling. I brought it outside and the motor started to spin.
For several years after that I was very facinated by the idea. The concept and downright purity of free energy seemed god-like. But soon I realized that there was something wrong with this. Solar cells produced only a small amount of energy. People need lots of energy...Now I'm an engineering student and I can relate these ideas to mathematical equations and easily prove to myself what I thought ten years or so ago.
Humans need lots of energy. Solar, hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal are nice, but they don't solve the problem. Environmentalists have protested nuclear so much that our country is burning coal and petroleum products for energy. This is insane when you realise that burning coal puts more radiation in the air than all the nuclear accidents and oil comes from countries run by terrorists.
I think the US could position itself well if nuclear power was increased and we worked ourselves towards a hydrogen economy. It's not perfect, but I think it's better than what we're doing now. Part of this war on terror is the war to protect oil, and cost alone...it's very expensive.
Temperatures will grow, no matter what you do. Ice will melt. Everything will be flooded. Don't build anything in coast areas designed for more that 50 year - it will be under water by then. There will be more hurricanes. Sky will be constantly covered by clowds. Astronomy will be useless. We'll never see the sunshine. There will be no ozone in air. Then there will be no oxygen in any form other than CO2. Animals (except cockroaches) will die out. We'll run out of oil. Satellites will start falling down due to atmosphere expansion. The atmosphere will leak into space. We'll have no air to breathe and to protect us from UV radiation. Gulfstream will stop, and we'll freeze. And the polar bears will drown. And even if we stop driving and smoking tomorrow, the polar bears will die anyway.
All of the "zero carbon emissions" or "clean" people have forgotten that it is an industrial process that exists in the real world and not a washing powder commercial. One third of the carbon emmissions of gas turbines (assuming the best possible quality of ore) is still very good - but it isn't zero.
Big power plants of any description are never going to be quick anyway. It can take three years just to get a turbine rotor delivered out of a catalogue.
an idiot, I was referring to people doing things like say walking more often and not doing things like driving their car to their mailbox, rather than walk to it, like my old cul-de-sac neighbors.
It's not about the nuclear alone. We still use oil cars.
It's not about hydrogen cars. We get the electricity from coal.
But with Hydrogen cars getting power from nuclear plants, we can cut emissions drastically while saving a ton of money.
That's the thing about cadmium, arsenic and mercury; they're poisonous forever.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Big power plants of any description are never going to be quick anyway. It can take three years just to get a turbine rotor delivered out of a catalogue. What catalogue do I use to shop for turbine rotors? Grainger?
The main issue is the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, ie automobiles. Unless those nuclear reactors start powering the cars, it's pointless.
What oil crisis?
Oil today (NYMEX): $61.47/bbl.
Assume that nukes and alternatives come on strong. One form of storage for them is methane. In particular, there are a number of reactions that will allow Co2 + H2 -> Ch4 (+ O2). Nice thing about that is we can pull the CO2 from the air and the H2 from H2o. Basically, it is a zero sum game WRT CO2.
The really nice thing about that, is that it could be used not only for cars, but long term storage for a country and shipped around (think natural gas).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm pro-nuke, but nuclear's share looks likely to get smaller before it gets larger. Gas is going to fall off; the expansion in consumption looks to be driven by wind and coal.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You have to dispose of the waste from any hydrocarbon burning plant, too. There is less waste from a nuclear plant
IIRC, there's less nuclear waste from a nuclear plant, and none of it is released into the atmosphere.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We just start buying your CO2 credits and then give them as gifts to others. Now, we have reduced OUR net CO2 amount as well as decreased the demand on oil supplies. :) windbourne ducks.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
My understanding is that CO2 sequestration is a viable technology that has been in use for a few decades for different reasons. It is possible to clean power plant exhaust, but it may cost a couple more cents per kWh to do so.
There are other issues, environmental and economic concerns are complex, but I don't believe that they are necessarily contradictory. I do believe there are ways to encourage more sustainable energy use, it seems many countries do this by selective tax credits and taxes. The EU has a tax on automobiles based on their CO2 emissions and it has encouraged looking for more efficient cars and other fuels.
Okay, I'm posting anonymously in case it turns out I'm the world's biggest idiot.
It seems to me we have a HUGE nuclear power plant (the Sun) and that even as far away as here (the Earth) collecting a couple of square meters of its rays gives a decent amount of power.
Further, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that once you send something off in space, if its trajectory is correct[1] it will just keep going toward its destination without any further power -- ie the only difference in getting a probe to the moon or to our Sun[2] or to Alpha Centauri is how long it takes to get there. (Or maybe also whether you can still communicate with it, no matter how many years the ping time - I don't know how far we can still communicate with a probe).
>So, if the Sun isn't any harder to get to than the moon is (except higher latency), and it's a huge freaking fusion plant... why don't we use it?
Plus, it's so freaking huge that besides all the stuff a normal Earth-based fusion power plant would do to turn the heat into electricity, a power plant close to the sun can afford to waste ANY amount of free energy in keeping itself cool, in converting at a high loss rate, or taking huge hit on packaging the energy and sending it back off to Earth, then getting its storage body back.
And, unlike on Earth, it doesn't even matter how dense its energy cells are - it can use a giant flywheel for all we care - since shipping in space is free. (And don't tell me the calculations for shipping back and forth are too hard -- we got to the moon in the sixties, you know, we didn't miss it or anything.)
Also, clearly it's not a problem of DUDE it would so burn up!!!1111 because if you calculate the correct trajectory, you can send the plant into orbit at any distance you want -- just get it just shy of "too hot", even together with limitless energy you have to spend on cooling it.
It just doesn't make sense to me that we have a freaking huge fusion power plant, that we can get to with sixties technology, and don't even use it.
ps. BY READING THIS COMMENT YOU AGREE TO HONOR THE POSTER'S EXCLUSIVE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ASSOCIATED WITH "using the Sun as a huge freaking nuclear power plant", REGARDLESS OF THE LEGAL STATUS OF THIS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE EXISTENCE OF PRIOR ART, TO INCLUDE, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE ENTIRE SOLAR POWER INDUSTRY. IN THE CASE OF ANY PART OF THIS CONTRACT BEING FOUND VOID OR UNENFORCEABLE, YOU AGREE THAT THIS CONTRACT WILL BE SUPERSEDED BY A CONTRACT IN THE SPIRIT OF THIS CONTRACT AND HAVING THE EFFECT THAT YOU WILL ACT AS THOUGH THIS CONTRACT IS IN EFFECT. YOU AGREE TO WAIVE ALL RIGHTS ASSOCIATED WITH SOLAR POWER AND YOU AGREE TO FORFEIT ANY AND ALL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY YOU HAVE AQCUIRED OR MAY LATER ACQUIRE WITH THE AID OF THOUGHTS, METHODS, OR PROCESSES ASSOCIATED WITH OR DERIVED FROM SOLAR POWER.
FURTHER YOU AGREE TO WAIVE ALL OTHER RIGHTS YOU HAVE OR MAY LATER BE GRANTED, EVEN RIGHTS OF WHICH YOU ARE UNAWARE, OR OF WHICH YOU CANNOT REASONABLY BE AWARE, AND TO INCLUDE, WITHOUT LIMITATION, RIGHTS THAT YOU CANNOT WAIVE. IN THE CASE OF YOUR INABILITY TO WAIVE CERTAIN RIGHTS, AND IN THE CASE OF RIGHTS THAT CANNOT BE WAIVED, YOU AGREE TO ACT AS THOUGH THESE RIGHTS HAVE BEEN WAIVED. IF YOU ARE A CALIFORNIA RESIDENT, YOU WAIVE YOUR RIGHTS UNDER CALIFORNIA CIVIL CODE 1542, WHICH STATES, "A general waiver of all rights does not extend to rights which the waiver does not know or suspect to exist in his favor at the time of executing the waiver, which if known by him must have materially affected his agreement." RESIDENTS OF OTHER STATES AND NATIONS SIMILARLY WAIVE ALL RIGHTS PROTECTED UNDER APPLICABLE AND/OR ANALOGOUS LAWS, STATUES, OR REGULATIONS. IN ADDITION TO WAIVING RIGHTS THAT CAN LOGICALLY OR POSSIBLY BE WAIVED, FOR RIGHTS THAT CANNOT LOGICALLY OR POSSIBLY BE WAIVED, YOU AGREE TO ACT AS THOUGH YOU HAVE WAIVED THESE RIGHTS. YOU AGRE
A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
You can say that again!
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
Yes... but the "report" still doesn't give a really good reason why we shouldn't be building new nuclear power plants... One thing to keep in mind... The "Sustainable" crowd is all about low energy in the first place as turning down the juice turns down lifestyle and demand thus - according to their brand of science - overall reducing carbon emissions. This coming from a bunch of people wanting at first to take the beef off people's plates and who bitched and moaned about methane emissions by cow farts... It figures, doesn't it?
The article doesn't say what doubling is.
If Great Britain only has 1 plant, then I severely doubt that it would make a dent.
Increasing energy production is only going to accelerate the destruction of the earth because it will simply mean people can buy more, create more, destroy more and throw out more. Do you honestly believe there's any chance people will cut down on using the cheapest, most powerful resource on earth (oil) just because they now also have electricity as an option? Even if the US or part of the world made a concerted effort to switch over, developing nations would quickly buy up and use all the fossil fuels that were saved.
The ONLY way to slow climate change is to slow growth. Painful but unavoidable.
doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035.
......
And driving more hybrids would also make a small impact, and using solar power would make a small impact, and using energy efficient appliances would make a small impact, and using wind power would make a small impact, and using more hydroelectric power would make a small impact, and developing fuel cell technologies would make a small impact, and turning off lights at night would make a small impact,
The point is there's no magic bullet, there's no one thing that will make us stop using dirty, non-renewable energy sources. But, if we encourage all the things that will make us less dependant on oil, we'll be better off.
No Sigs!
The answer is simple to phrase but hard to acheive. We need to get off planet and set up solar collectors in space which transfer their energy to a power station in a geostable orbit around the earth, which transfers the energy to a power station on the equator, which feeds it into the global grid. Anything else is a stop-gap measure which cannot scale, whereas a setup like I've described can scale as long as there are materials to build more collectors. Practically limitless power.
As an aside, put this together with more advanced versions of rapid prototyping devices, the sort that started off printing 3D versions of X-Rays and are now advanced enought to print off cell phones and the like, and you can do to centralized manufacturing what the internet did to mass media.
Heady stuff, and nearing if not already within the realm of practical. This is the sort of environment where a communist economy would actually work, where the market is destroyed because there is PLENTY. But don't expect to see any capitalist robber barons pursuing such a dream... they'd rather destroy what PLENTY we already achieved with laws like those surrounding intellectual property. Am I the only one that finds it all reminiscent of the traditional "burning of wealth" parties that the Native Americans used to throw to keep their people working?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You're absolutely right.
People love those sorts of lifestyle changes that represent a reduction in lifestyle.
:-) I had one of those cars, gave it to the wreckers in the end.
These are one-time improvements. A growth rate of 2% will double in 35 years. If England is growing at 2% a year, then doubling the gas mileage simply puts the problem off 35 years. Oil will have peaked in 35 years (probably sooner..) The first doubling of gas mileage may be easy, but each succesive doubling gets exponentially harder. It can't keep up.
The same logic goes for better insulation and efficient lightbulbs. Conservation and better efficiency are not long term solutions, practically they just break even for a little while.
One possible exception to this: Germany and other parts of Europe no longer have replacement birthrates. This means without immigration they are not growing. If England can achieve this, and ban immigration, and go carbon neutral by conservation, then - for england - they are done. As a practical matter they would also be on their way to extinction.
If the global warming crowd is roughly correct, and we have just a decade or two to significantly reduce CO2 emmisions (or face global catastrophy), then, since we have a [1]global growth rate of more than 2%, we have about that much time to come up with carbon neutral energy sources, - in excess of what we already have - that equal roughly double our current fossil fuel sources. All of them. Coal, Oil, rain forests (that we do not replace) ...
I see no way to do this without a huge increase in nuclear, or possibly carbon sequestration on coal, and this on top of lots of wind solar and biomass. Greater efficiency? One quarter energy use on everything, at a minimum, and then we have to have some alternatives coming online in 20 years or we just put off the problem, and not even long enough to pass it on to our kids.
[1] If nobody grew at all except China, we would still have greater than 1% per year growth. 2% is low for most places outside of western europe.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
The trouble is we have never had these kinds of population before. Remove the power generation and we have to return to old world techniques.
This effectively means we can no longer feed everyone.
No machines to pick the crops. No trucks to get them to us. Etc Etc...
We have an interesting energy problem because populations have never been this high.
Current financial wisdom relies on "growth". Growth is unsustainable for these reasons. We keep growing. We won't survive for too long. At least not in a meaningful way as we know it.
Oil will run out, Icecaps will melt and TheSims addon packs will stop coming out.
Not a good outlook really.
O.k. So I didn't read the report only the article so take this for what it's worth. But based on the article it seems this 'SDC' group has a definite axe to grind with regards to Nuclear Power. Given that one of their objections is that "Reliance on Nuclear Power would reduce the push for conservation"(or some such). I have to say "Huh?". There is nothing magical about Nuclear Power that forces people to use it without regard to waste! It can be conserved just like anything else. It's obvious on it's face and a seemingly intelligent group of people would know this. I think they probably do and yet allow such drivel in their report specifically because they don't want Nuclear Power to succeed.
It becomes more obvious when I consider the research I've done locally. I live in Canada and know for a fact that replacing the Electricity generation plants in Alberta & Saskatchewan with Nuclear would provide approximately 41% of Canada's Kyoto requirements. Different measure I know(e.g. the article is referring to Britain & goals for 2035), but this 41% isn't "insignificant". Further it comes from only 2 provinces with approximately 4 Million of Canada's 30 million people.
Than if you get in to the possibilities of electricity generation growing drastically to support electric/fuel cell vehicles. The reductions in CO2 are potentially enormous. Yes renewables may provide support here too but Nuclear is a largely known and viable option right now provided public perceptions(and that's all they are) were changed.
The "cost effectiveness" of Nuclear Power is largely due to the over burdensome "environmental" regulations generally applied to them as opposed to almost all other forms of large energy production. Some of these regulations are required, but too often the case has been that one review after another delays the building of plants at enormous cost to investors.
In other words I find that by reading between the lines of the article that this SDC group is deliberately being obtuse and deliberately trying to sabotage the new push to use Nuclear Energy. This is counter productive if they are really trying to solve the world's Global Warming "problem".
People are choosing to downshift their liftstyle already, without significant economic, environmental or political pressure. And you haven't demonstrated that a reduction in energy use is equivalent to a 'reduction in lifestyle' (heck, you haven't even defined what you mean by a 'reduction in lifestyle').
Is riding to work on a bicycle rather than going to the gym a reduction in lifestyle? Is eating a shared meal with your neighbours rather than eating in some fast food joint halfway across town a reduction in lifestyle? Is picking fruit from your own tree rather than buying from a supermarket a reductionin lifestyle?
I know you only wrote that as a throwaway line, but perhaps you could spend some time thinking about why you said it in the first place.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
>This means without immigration they are not growing. If England can achieve this, and ban immigration, and go carbon neutral by conservation, then - for england - they are done. As a practical matter they would also be on their way to extinction.
If England's population continues to grow forever, at some point its biomass would exceed the mass of the universe, causing some difficult gravitational issues.
England, and every other subset of humanity, and humanity itself, will limit its growth eventually. The only question is whether it is done with intelligence and forethought, or through catastrophe. The natural universe admits no third way.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Do you have some stats to back up your argument that people are choosing these options in greater volumes than some earlier period?
I used to drive 45 minutes to work, as did practically everyone in the area that I was from. Dinner I cook, but then, I don't think that most people ever made McDonalds their primary source of dinner-food. I see plenty of TV dinners at work, and most people do not pick their fruit from their own tree.
We also never before had the advanced information infrastructure, nor the ability to make machines with COP measured in the billions. We know vastly more now than we did inthe 19th century. I'm full of hope as a result.
People have demonstrated being able to live self-sufficiently on say 1000m^2 of land. There is enough land like this for everyone to have some, yep, all 6.5billion of us. 1*10^14 m^2 of land means we have 23 times this amount world wide. As people become more affluent the breeding rate drops.
What are you doing about it?
Oh. That's pretty much redundant with the bit about automobile use, though, isn't it? Either way, electric vehicles would help a lot. Though I have to say, I'd be happier to eliminate suburbs entirely and see decent mass transit in place, with high-speed connections between metro areas, but that's a huge amount of expensive and disruptive infrastructure reworking, so the USA is most likely stuck with our current setup. Unfortunately.
Nope, but then you haven't given any real data either :-)
I can think of a nuclear solution that will completely eliminate our energy concerns, can you?
One thing I haven't heard to much about... What about TIDE??? the mass of the moon and the precentage of the earth covered by ocean.... Seems like there is a lot of potential power to be had with an infrastruture that can take advantage of existing natural geography and resources... Another thought... naturally occuring currents example: gulf stream.... food for thought at least. Mark W.
Follow the money.
Most objections to nuclear power are driven by the coal industry, who stands to be the biggest loser if the US and UK move towards more nuclear power.
Anybody else who objects is simply echoing the fears which were fed to them by coal lobbyists.
Nuclear power is both safer and cleaner than coal. Anybody who rejects nuclear in favor of coal plants out of "environmental" concerns is either badly informed or deliberately lying.
Also, anybody who says we can avoid the need of nuclear power by just riding bikes, using a more efficient furnace, and holding hands while singing "Kum Ba Ya" is simply not looking at the real numbers of what our future power needs are, even after you account for a radical scaling back of elective consumption.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'll be looking for them >=)
Amazing how disagreeing with the party line is an automatic troll. The Republicans are more liberal than the Slashdot community.
Depleated Uranium isn't health food it's still a toxic metal and has caused significant health problems where the rounds have been used. Saying that once it's cold it's harmless is just plain ignorant.
For some reason the geek community has gotten the idea nuclear is high tech so by definition good and anyone that isn't for it is the devil himself. The world would be a better place if nuclear power and bombs had never seen the light of day. The genie is out of the bottle so what the hell lets keep wishing until we get it right. It's a cautionary tale because you'll never get it right. Large tracks of land are already too contaminated to live on and we hardly scratched the surface of the nuclear potential. You can't just stick it in a hole and hope it goes away. It's like pumping carbon dioxide into old oil wells. Ever occured to anyone what happens if it makes it's way to the surface and is suddenly released? It happens naturally from time to time and kills anyone in the area. By doing this we are possibly creating hundreds or thousands of ticking timebombs. Now we want to start sticking spent fuel core in holes and hoping they go away. Some actually suggested grinding up low level wastes and dumping them into the oceans. Hey the oceans are the magic garbage pit that makes everythinggo away. He actually got an insightful mode. Apparently geeks don't read. This has been tried before. You know what happened? Microscopic animals ingested the material and got mildly radioactive. Small fish ate them and got slightly radioactive. Larger fish ate those and got somewhat radioactive. Bigger fish ate those and got very radioactive. People couldn't figure out why the larger fish were so much more radioactive than the smaller ones. They live longer and eat more and it accumulates in their tissues. Unfortunately people eat larger fish. Same thing happens in humans. Ever hear of the baby teeth study that has been going on since the 60s? Astronium 90 is measured in baby teeth. The assumption was that it would cycle out of the environment and gradually go down. The opposite has happened and every single year the levels have gone up. It didn't cycle out it concentrated in the environment is is already likely to be with us for the rest of human history. Now we what to crank up nuclear production and make it the answer to the worlds energy problems? We deserve to loose because as a species we are stupid. Dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years. Civilization isn't likely to pass the ten thousand year mark and in truth we've devastated the environment environment in a couple of hundred years of industrialization. How in the bloody hell do we expect to live like this for a thousand years let alone a million years. The "I'll be dead before it happens" attitude makes us Darwinian flops. Dodo birds we've a shining success story compared to humans. They didn't destroy their environment we ate them. Technology won't save us from the toxic sludge we are creating. We don't need a Biblical end of times we're doing an exceptional job without divine intervention.
How do you American suckers reconcile the Non-Proliferation Treaty with the USA committment to supply the necessary nuclear materials to India so that they can make dozens of nuclear warheads per year, rather than 5-6? Do you take your lead from the Big Man?
There certainly exist possibilities, but they are not politically viable. The American politician to try and push a substantial gas tax will be crucified. The American politician that tries to force Americans to live on top of each other using the force of law in expensive apartment buildings instead of 'sprawling' out into expansive and cheaper suburbs will be crucified.
Own a home with a lawn and having some space from the neighbors is probably the pinnacle of the American dream. Telling Americans they can't have that is a good way to get thrown out of office. The US doesn't have the political capacity to make any such proposed changes. In a totalitarian system like China they might very well be able to enact draconian policies like the "one child" policy, but they don't have to worry about the fickle masses getting pissed and voting for someone who will do what they want. In a place like Europe where significantly more people are dependent upon the government for jobs and money, they might be able to enact some social change to a limited extent. In the US, you are talking about a complete impossibility.
The solution to this environmental problem is not social. The solution lies in allowing people to live as they want without destroying the environment in the process. Instead of pouring money into social programs to change people and crippling the economy by burdening it with more expenses, the solution is to make reasonable changes when it is possible and work towards a technological solution. Dump money into R&D and really drive for technological solutions. We NEED technological solutions. Humanity is not and never has been "sustainable". We can't throw on the breaks and try and become sustainable now. The only thing we can do is do what we do best. Plow forward and try and solve problems as they come.
I am not advocating whole sale clear cutting of the rainforest and dumping as much CO2 as possible into the atmosphere. Environmental regulations are very important for buying time and trying to minimize negative effects on the environment. My point is that regulations can only slow down the process, not stop it. The solution lies in technology.
I'm happy to discuss this via email, slashdot is a poor way to have a discussion. email me at sustainability@njhurst.com
They'll change because they have to change. It's survival of the fittest, baby! Evolve or die!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
First of all, advancing technology has solved virtually every environmental problem that we've yet solved so far, energy and pollution are no different.
Fusion power, for instance, should it be perfected represents basically free energy for humanity for the rest of time.
On top of that, if you're familiar with GIGO then you should have an idea why the evidence of computer simulations is totally spurious. If you can't forecast weather accurately for the next five days, what makes you think 50 years or 500 years is possible? Secondly, we don't have enough information to know that the earth itself doesn't simply cycle hotter and colder itself. We're assuming a static temp would be natural, when everything about nature tells us change, especially cyclical change within boundaries, is natural. I could go on, but what's the point.
Nuclear power doesn't scale for future - it is a temporary fix that is estimated to last about a century before it runs out.
When you consider all the things that coal and oil are needed to *make* (this is often forgotten in every discussion), why do we continue merely burning it?
This whole area is a classic example of where our 'democratic' (actually 'capitalist' system) is non-viable and needs re-vamping: the changes needed are radical, needed yesterday, and almost guarantee that the 'majority' (idiots) will vote out the first government that tries to fix it because no-one is going to take their car away and make them catch a bus even if it means the world comes to an end.
It's not impossible to change the lifestyle of billions of people - it's just a question of what sort of change it will be. Painful adjustment or total catastrophe through inaction - take your pick, but it will change for sure and soon.
Our governments do not understand this - they are so wrapped up in thinking like politicians they think the scientists are just saying it all for attention (like they do) and making it up as they go to sound good (like they do). They simply do not understand how the world works. This is why when the oil starts to run out in England, USA, and Australia, we invade Iraq (note the time to have done it on 'moralistic grounds' was when genocide was happening) rather than pull our finger out and develop alternatives.
That's what my wife called me when I road my bike (bicycle for anyone who lives in a country where bikes have motors) seven hours round trip to pick up some hardware on another occasion. ;-)
The toughest part was getting across the walkovers over the highways without dropping the package on the cargo carrier behind me.
But, yeah, I'm with on the driving to the mailbox. I can see letting the motor idle 30 seconds at the curb while you check the box on the way to work, but anyone who bothers to put the key in the ignition for less than a hundred meters is addicted.
On the other hand, there are places in the world where a hundred meters is about what you walk to get to your car in the first place. (And you pay about a fifth of what you pay in apartment rent for the privilege of parking it on an unprotected slice of asphalt with marginal road access.)
Not sure what any of this means, other than standard of living is not standard.
Lies, damned lies... statistics.
...as if that's a real barrier.
This article is nothing more than mental masturbation. People that want to come to the conclusion that Nuclear Power is a non starter are merely looking for an excuse and framing the situation in those terms. We've been squeamish about nuclear power for over TWO DECADES. Of course it's going to take more than just doubling current capacity.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Unbelieveable that the article thinks this is a small amount. Compared to other possible actions, this has a big effect.
Now if doubling the capacity creates 8% reduction, building 5 times as much would create 40% reduction.. What is the point in limiting discussion to just doubling?
Peak Oil already has happened. Peak OIL USA happened i the 70's. Other major oil producers are hitting their peaks soon.
Now fossil fuels in the form of oil and naturagal gas, and some coal is what we use. It is the cheapest, energywise to produce, and it is in abundance(for now).
Renewable energy sources represent only a very snall fraction of what we consume.
There has been some talk of alternatives such as biodiesel, grass, corn, and who kows what. The problem with these sources is that they geneate CO2, but even worse, their energy efficiency is almost 0, and they deplete the top soil. The president's state of the union speach was a red herring at best, incompetent and naive at the worst.
The largest exporter of oil to USA is Canada.
The Oil tar its in Canada has been touted a solution. Problem is that it is extremely expensive to extract, adn it takes a lot of energy to extract.
We have renwable sources such as hydropower, but there aren[t a lot of rivers left, so hydro is only ging to provide minor help.
On the short term (30 years), we will need to dramaticaly increaae renewable energy, such as solar, wind, tide, wave, geothermal. We will also need to dramatically improve energy conervation. We need more eficient devices, better insulated houses, house designs that will lessen the need for winter heating and summer cooling. Energy conservation is by far the largest untapped source. But even this won't be enough. Emerging economies will eed energy as well.
We can not expect that the countries with emerging economies will forgo their rights to development. The total amount of energy consumption is going to increase, no sdoubt about it.
Research and building out new alternative renewable low-emision energy sources is ging to take a long time.
Apparently the consumers are NOT going to do the right thing, as evidenced by the SUV glut in USA at the edge of an energy crisis. Aggrwssive taxation on fossil fuels, and ineficnebt fossil fuel devices such as cars will be necessary to nudge the market in the right direction.
Nuclear power will not be enough to make a smooth transition from oil to renewables. But without many new nuclear plants, the tranisiton will be much worse. ALmost Mad Max.
My predictions are dire: Even if the governments start to do the right things now (which I have zero confidence that they will do), and do the needful:
Increase nuclar power capacity, increase renewables, agressively fund research into alternatives, pass legislation that encourages use of renewables and punishes fossil glut, provide financial incentives for consumers and businesses to use alternatives and to conserve, and tax the heck out of the hogs.
EVEN WHEN ALL THE ABOVE IS DONE, WE WILL LIKELY RUN INTO A MAJOR AND PAINFUL ENERGY CRISIS.
That takes care of the energy issue.
The other issue is CO2.
CO2 is what makes some of the red herring alternatives unfit. Coal, tar sands, biodiesel, freak grass, etc. are expensive (energywise) to produce, and they don't help with the emission issue at all. teh only reason the current administration is riding that horse, is to get some votes from the midwest for the next election.
And, Mr President, George Mongo Bush, excuse me for calling you a freaking retard, but that's what you are: HYDROGEN IS NOT AN SOURCE OF ENERGY. IF IT WAS, I WOULD PROPOSE THAT WE CANCEL THE ALARM AND JUST BUY ENOUGH BATTERIES TO GET US OVBER THE LOOMING ENERGY CRISIS!
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
None of that would help.
People would still flee the inner cities to keep away from the crips away from their kid's schools. People are out in the suburbs primarily to get away from rifraf of various kinds and larger city beaurocracies that are fundementally broken.
The 2x - 3x home/condo prices in the inner city don't help either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There are big advantages to having the same parts in different plants, so a lot of places do order the same type of turbine rotor that went into a different plant fifteen years ago.
I'm far more worried about my fellow man. Feel free to try to convince me otherwise, but the Little Optimum doesn't scare me as much as the countless examples of the blackness of the human heart and the universal desire to exert power over neighbors.
I live in the city/metro-area that is the king of suburban sprawl in the US (Los Angeles). To suggest that 60-90 minute commutes each way are not taxing because they don't cost enough per mile is pure foolishness. Given the population distribution, effective mass transit is virtually impossible as well. Even well meaning efforts like high occupancy lanes end up contributing more to pollution than ensuring adequate capacity on the freeways in a place like LA. As for real pollution, yes LA is bad, but often time the central valley (the large agricultural area north of LA and southish of San Francisco) has worse air quality... primarily growing food. Better nail them too. Actually, that really makes me wonder what the cost of producing nitrogen based fertilizers that make the current world population possible should -really- cost.
Make fuel prices rise and you are right: people will drive less. But in LA they won't move into the city, at least until the high fuel prices have dragged the economy down to the point where there aren't jobs enough to keep people in the city at living wages to begin with.
And so we beat up that old evil U.S. Then what? Do we slap down India and China since their consumption is growing to the point where it might not be so long until both countries catch up to Uncle Sam? Many of the people that want to stop the US from burning fuel argue that 'developing' countries should get a pass... but it's the same environment no mstter who's burning it. So how should we make it taxing on the third world? And one we decide how to stop the engines of civilization, how to you intend to get people to buy in.
Look, nuclear power is a part... and important part, of a larger picture. But just because it doesn't do all things for all people and solve all problems doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue it agressively. Greater fuel efficiency in cars is considered a prime way to reduce emissions, but that won't solve the larger issues alone either.
Sounds like somebody didn't get his nap today. :-)
See, I interpret that as "you want to force me to move into an urban shithole." Somehow, that rubs me the wrong way. As does the idea that government should (or even CAN) shape the economy successfully. This always seems to fail in practice.
Why are we listening to a load of dipshits with their fingers in their ears going la-la-la?
/. posters here. They are the enemies of human development, and now they cannot even get their own side to vote for such appalling tripe as an end to the energy economy and reversion to living in mud huts. The sooner they and their ilk are consigned to a landfill site, the better!
The news here is that an anti-nuclear loby group who lie and scrape the bottom of the barrel for biased attacks on nuclear power could still only manage to get 8 of their 16-strong committee to vote for a ban, with 7 accepting the technology, and an FOE wanker sitting on the fence.
Their arguments are facile lies and debating rhetoric; easily seen through by the other
Actually, I agree completely--which is why I think the government should end its subsidies for sprawl (see above).
So looking at things from a logical perspective, the goal is to minimally inconvenience peoples lives (whether it be by global warming, running out of oil, or disposing nuclear waste). Since this is another example of the Tragedy of the Commons, governments will need to intervene or the problem won't get solved. The problem seems to come from too many people using oil and not a renewable energy source. Thus people need more motivation to use less oil (whether in their cars or in power plants).
Solution: do what the government does best and tax; tax crude oil or tax machinery based on CO2 emissions. Let the market sort out for itself whether it wants to use nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, tidal, geothermal, solar, or some other form of electricity generation. Let the market determine how much people want to decrease their energy consumption. Maybe spend the increased revenue on renewable resources; it's not necessary, but that would help too.
The way things are going, we may not have to change the lifestyles of that many people if the destruction of the planet causes a step-change in climate leading to the wiping out of 80% of the population. We don't necessarily need a dinosaur-killer asteroid to come along, we seem capable of the same impact ourselves.
The tragedy will be that the people who are causing the damage - USA and Western Europe - are likely to be the survivors of such an extinction event, because we have the most resources to adapt to a massively changed environment.
I don't know. That may have been true from the late '60s through early '80s, but to take the long view, these two decades were but an anomaly in urban vs. suburban settlement patterns over the past few hundred years, if not the entire course of human civilization. Since those dark years, the pendulum's swung vigorously back. Most of the company I keep prefer to live in cities in order to have access to the widest possible range of goods, services, and information. Then again, I admit we probably don't approach life with a suburban mindset, and I admit I wouldn't much care to live in e.g. Detroit.
The American politician to try and push a substantial gas tax will be crucified
In most states, the gas tax is about 50 cents/gallon. Even at $2.00/gal, that's a 25% tax. Isn't that already substantial?
That's a red herring. additional nuclear plants can easily be built to conform to existing infrastructure using current technology. PVs on every roof aren't enough to power the houses under them without massive batteries, not only for operation at night, but also for operation on cloudy days, and during the winter. How much energy is required to create those pvs and batteries? what is the environmental impact of their producition and periodic replacement?
It is not immediately clear to me that decentralized power generation is all that superior to centralized power generation, and any form of generation that relies on a heat engine to work is going to benefit from efficiencies of scale for at least the following reasons: tolerances: fittings have much tighter tolerances percentwise the bigger they get due to machining capabilities
carnot efficiency: a large plant can achieve a Thot much higher than a small plant can practicaly achieve, and can often be located conveniently close to a Tcold significantly lower than can be found within a reasonable distance of any given local or household plant. for instance a deep lake or a river perhaps.
In fact, even solar power benefits from efficiencies of scale like this. a solar dynamic power plant of sufficient size is going to be far more efficient than the equivalent area covered in PV cells, in a region which has little cloud cover. At a cost of efficiency (but perhaps an increase in safety), the daily flux can be averaged out using wax or thermal salts to store energy in their phase change for later use in the generating plant. I'd like to see PV try that...
If it is demonstrably more efficient to decentralize the power plants, I'm certainly in favor of the redundancy that can be potentially had, but it certainly wasn't the case when the power companies were established (or they wouldn't have been. ).
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Mod -1 The Implications Make Me Shudder
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
a single person experiences very little payback for their contribution
That is the biggest evil in our culture... How many people bother recycling now that a bag of aluminum cans isn't worth much? [If anything].
I was away from my apartment for a couple of months. I turned everything off. My electric bill was insanely low, less than 100KHh -- 1/10 of my usual usage. Guess what? My electric bill went down only a third... Still paid $25/month for not using anything. In other words, using 10x the electricity only costs 3x as much -- a bargain! Where's the incentive?
Water here is shared.... I pay $40/month (USD) whether I bathe three times a day or once a week. And I live by myself...
Judging by the number of souped up 4x4 trucks with sparkling-new looking cargo beds, cars are still too cheap... Even a recent (Lexus) commercial seemed to make fun all-solar car attempts in an effort to promote their new SUV.
Forget environmental concerns... When oil becomes scarce [Or when people think it has], what will happen? How will goods be transported? How will plastics be manufactured? How will coal be mined without the use of gas-powered vehicles? How will people get to work? What will propel ocean liners carrying goods? How will farmers harvest food? How will they deliver it? Keep it refrigerated? Commercial planes aren't going solar anytime soon...
Yes, there are alternatives to some of these... No, I don't think people will plan the switch in time.
Society should not be promoting this sub-culture of waste and greed. Unfortunately, "society" has too many idiots and greedy businessmen for this to change anytime soon.
We seem to try to live as far apart as possible, as far from work, school, etc as possible... Just imagine how much time we could save doing more useful stuff, how much less driving done, and how things could be better...
Or do people in southern california and in large cities enjoy a 1-hr commute to work? Do people really dream of sitting in stopped traffic? Do they fantasize about gridlock? I for one, do not.
Buncefield, not to mention the dozens of tankers that have grounded, gone down or otherwise shed their oil all over a large patch of ocean over the years.
Shit happens in all industries; we just need to work to make sure it happens as rarely as possible.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
8% of overall CO2 emission is not a "small impact". Nuclear power is used only to produce electricity, and that is less than 50% of CO2 emission. If you talk only about CO2 emmission in energy generation, doubling nuclear power would reduce CO2 emission at 25%. Also take into account, that UK already importing considerable amount of energy from France, where it's produced by nuclear power. Also, if nuclear power used not only to replace existing fossil fuel power plants, but to increase overall electricity production it can be used to reduce fossil fuel burning in the consumer sector (heating) and transportation - like new cars which are not dependunt on fossil fuel, community transport. That can reduce CO2 emission far beyonds of ten percent.
How do you think fossil fuel is extracted? Using Fossil fuel of course. Ever been in the gulf at night? you can see as huge flame from 10s of miles away (horizon is kinda close even on a aircraft carrier). That flame is just them burning off parts of the fuel they didn't want at the oil rig. Yes Uranium production uses fuel but when you compare the amount of CO2 produced for every watt of electricity produced its is still much higher then a coal/oil/gas plant. I would even guess that the amount of fossil fuel used to run the power plant is greater then the amount of fossil fuel used to mine and refine the uranium. My assumption is based on the fact that the fuel cost is very minor compared to the other costs of running a nuclear power plant. I say the cost is great since in out industrial economy ever dollar you spent generally turns into oil dollars at almost a fixed rate no matter what you spend it on. Since so many people and services use oil and your spending almost invariably triggers the sale of more oil within days. So since it cost more to run the plant than to mine and refine the fuel I think it is very fair to say that mining fuel is not holding back nuclear's ability to produce electrical energy at low CO2 levels. And now onto the storage facilities. At least its possible to make storage facilities for nuclear. Also with proper design of new reactors if production where to be increased by 50x times in the US we would only double the amount of waste the US has in about maybe 15 years. We already have so much waste from poor design that the extra space is really not a big deal. Also newer designs make much cleaner fuel. The pebble bed reactor which china is big on might have other issues but waste is not one of them the design is very very clean due to using gas for a coolant and burning up fuel rather well. Sending the leftover fuel to breeder reactors for a final burn would cut down on the waste even more. Anyhow please excuse my poor spelling and grammar I do not have much education but I am always impressed by the things people will say about nuclear.
Here is the end all of energy production. The only way that is going to work to reduce CO2 or any other problem is to find a way to make the cleaner production methods better and by better I mean CHEAPER. Price is what makes things happen except maybe in some ways in China. Really the closest thing to a dictatorship left on large scale. Everywhere else the cheapest tech wins.
Onto you other comments (I love these btw they are classics)
1. New products almost always increase efficiency, New homes do, Remodeled homes do, Newer cars.
But hey guess what most people do think long term even in there own budgets or the interests just don't work out. More efficient house cost 20k extra but only saves 1k a year does that pay for itself? no that 20k is on the top so for 30 years you pay 1k extra a year. (assume 5%) And the price tag is higher. People hate sticker shock. The extra heating bills come out later.
Basically I think a lot is being done about this item. It could be better but no here comes number 2.
2. I agree about the shipping and transport. But its just not practical people like working 70 miles from home. People like moving about the country/world. People like fresh production from Mexico. People like buying things cheap online individually packaged and shipped overnight even! Yes public transport would be great. In the US there are very few place where talking public transport is not associated with being either poor or crazy. I know its sad but mostly I think other then being not as convenient this is the problem. Really a improved public transport system is needed. How could this be done? Really I think just designing automated electric buses that have really good collision avoidance that is better then a human driver is the key. Smaller buses ones designed to stop and start quickly. Automated routes that people can sign up for to pick many people up in one area then go directly to another area without having to
Hardly.
Sig
Learn some fucking English, cunt. "Incentivate"?
Are you a fucking American?
Nuclear power is both safer and cleaner than coal. Anybody who rejects nuclear in favor of coal plants out of "environmental" concerns is either badly informed or deliberately lying.
Uh huh...
Nuclear power is still a fossil fuel in that it relies on underground energy sources which are unrefined, then releases this energy via concentrated local energy plants. When the fuel is "spent" it is every bit as toxic as millions of pounds of coal, it's just easier for us to handle (sort of) and transport to storage facilities. Meanwhile the spent fuel presents a HUGE security risk and even after it has been squirreled away it is still a huge security risk that we will have to defend for at least hundreds of years.
What happens when the US becomes unstable? Who is going to defend those plants when the military has become disorganized, undisciplined, and possibly split into competing sides? What's to prevent one side or the other from making use of their stores, especially if one of those new regimes is led by a fundamentalist zealot?
Nothing lasts forever - including governments. We are being irresponsible to future generations. The real kick in the head is that it still contributes to an overall heating of our atmosphere because creation of all that energy requires cooling via water which is then dumped back into the rivers and lakes. Around Oak Ridge it's not uncommon to see steam rising from certain streams and rivers as well as warning signs not to fish or swim in the area. The energy produced AGAIN contributes to heating of our atmosphere as it is "consumed" one appliance at a time - every toaster, tv and computer emits more heat into the atmosphere. This is energy that has been stored in the ground and built up over millenia, and it is being released into our atmosphere over decades - you think that's not heating our environment?
By making use of solar power we are releasing back into the atmosphere heat which has already been provided by the sun on a daily basis - it's a net dead heat. Even those imaginary gadgets that would beam infinite amounts of energy down to us from space would likewise contribute to an overall warming of the planet because it would be new heat energy released into our atmosphere not naturally present. Unless we figure out how to sink that heat energy back into space as quickly as it comes in we're still slowly cooking ourselves to death like so many frogs in a pot.
There's also potential in geysers and volcanos and other such "natural" underground stores of heat energy, but those aren't present everywhere and the seismic instabilities that accompany their presence might make actually tapping into that energy impractical for most parts of our planet. But the only sustainable long term energy source we can employ without introducing some sort of "global warming" is the sun. Wind, solar heat and electric conversion, oceanic tidal movements - doesn't matter, that's where we need to focus our efforts.
doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035
Doubling Hybrid and electric car use would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035.
There you go, some perspective.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Water is too relentless, and machines break down. So I doubt it will ever be realized to any great potential.
Sig
How many billions of people were there with jobs when cars were invented? Or do you believe we've always had this many people with jobs far enough away they had to get there somehow other than walking and were dragged kicking and screaming into the world of travelling THIRTY miles in half an hour or less, let alone under a DAY?
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
It was always the long term intention of government to price people out of cars and on to public transport. Some of the motivation being the environmental issue. This started in the early 1990s with the so called "fuel escalator". It works to some extent. The main problem is what public transport. It is still in a poor state (but getting better) and over priced.
Of course world events have tipped the balance sending the price of oil very high. There are cries to reduce the tax on fuel, however this is a short term solution. It is a common view that oil prices will keep rising, the problem is the dependence on oil. Without breaking that we will just defer the problem.
Other posters are right I fear. Introducing a higher tax on fuel over there would be political suicide. Unlike starting wars it seems [*]. I imagine the only way is the stealth techniques of your own fuel escalator. Who's going to notice 2% above inflation?
Boil the frog slowly!
---------
[*] Sorry, a cheap shot, but I can't help myself.
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
Clearly, the taxes are not substantial enough if the goal is to make people not want to commute using their cars.
Personally, I don't think you could ever do anything more then punish the poor with a large gas tax. Rich people will be more then happy to pay a few extra bucks a month to remain in their suburban homes and not be stacked up in expensive and claustrophobic apartment complexes. The poor on the other hand will simply be taxed so severely that they will not be able to afford to use cars.
If you want to get the average American to not strive for getting a nice suburban home with a green lawn and some elbow room from the neighbors, you are going to have to do it a gun point. If you try and use the force of law to get an American to do it, they will throw your ass out of office so fast that your head will spin. The entire argument that the solution to environmental problems is social is an academic argument with no basis in reality.
Most of the billions people on earth still don't have a car. A quick google indicates that there are about 750 million cars on the road at the moment. There are 6.5 billion people on the planet, and many car owners have more than 1 car.
Nuclear is not a quick fix. Solar is not a quick fix. Biodiesel is not a quick fix. Drilling in ANWR is not a quick fix. Carbon sequestration is not a quick fix. Ethanol is not a quick fix. Methanol is not a quick fix. Hydrogen is not a quick fix. Hydro is not a quick fix. Tidal is not a quick fix. Wind is not a quick fix. Conservation is not a quick fix. Energy efficiency is not a quick fix.
However, if you add them all together, and you might just have a really slow, big pain in the butt fix.
If I hear "such-and-such is not the answer" one more time, I am seriously gonna smack the idiot who says it upside the noggin. There is no single answer!
Yet, there are plenty of economic tricks you can impose to change lifestyles.
There are also a lot of things we can do to cut down transportation energy costs w/o making sacrifices or massive changes. For example, you could more double the effective MPG of 18 wheelers by changing the regulations that limit them so heavily (pun intended) to rather light loads.
For example, Michigan raised it's limits and the largest food quality tanker truck fleet went from 5MPG to an effective 12.5 by carrying more cargo in a single trip. Kind of like making ONE trip to the store in the (E85 powered) Suburban per week than 3 or 4 in the metro, or taking two family sedans@22 MPG each to take the family somewhere instead of taking the 15MPG SUV and no additional vehicles.
For those worried about safety: require an additional acle for GVWR over 110,000 or so pounds. An additional axle will keep the road surface PSI from the truck at or lower than today (meaning no increase in road wear/damage) and the increased braking power from the additional axle will in most cases MORE than compensate for the additional weight - often making the vehicle *safer*.
But people don't like to think or talk about the "easy" changes we can make. Considering that the change I mentioned above would represent about a 40% savings in fuel costs ( one of the two most costly aspects of heavy transport), the no loss and likely increase in safety of the trucks, and the resulting lower costs and lower magnitude shockwaves to the economy you'd think it would be an easy, almost no-brainer. You'd think that the Environmentalism preachers would be railing away at it.
But that would require that "Environmentalism" be actually about making the world a *better* place.
Sure there are non-whackos who "care about the environment". It's one of the reasons I have a Suburban. It runs on E85. Here, the cost diffrence is usually a wash (lower MPGf, lower $$PGf) or tilted in favor of the E85. for example last fall when gasoline was pushing three bucks/gallon, I paid under two bucks for E85. When I get 10MPG on E85, I am getting 67MPG of gasoline. Now who requires more oil to drive around, my Suburban or the Prius?
Curiously enough, vehicles that get significantly higher MPGf will lead directly to a higher per-gallon tax. Why? Do you think the government will want to "lose" that revenue? Already some states are looking to increase their gas tax simply to keep up with a) better fuel economy and b) people driving less due to high prices.
There is always the conspiracy theory that the Fed doesn't raise CAFE because of the oil companies and car makers. I suspect a more realistic consideration is the loss in revenue they'd have to experience (or significantly raise the gas tax).
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
It seems to me, who have no background in physics, that nuclear is the future, unless some new alternative pops up, yeilding a far better energy/danger ratio. If we truly can reuse the fuel through a breather reactor, and have basically unlimited energy for a hundred thousand years, who can serious say no?? I even think it would be a good psycological factor for humanity, to use a truly advanced form of energy supply. Anyone can burn coal, we've done it centuries... but getting our electricity from something we could not discover by accident, but only through understanding...maybe it would put our future in perspective. The future is science.
However, my question is how this report can conclude so differently from the previous slashdot discussion? Coal lobby, or scientific facts?
P.s.: But I'm not sure it will save the planet. Unless the world gets more stable and strong geopolitical climate, in which an authority (UN) can impose a nation to stop burning fossil fuel, I belive coal and oil will sell as long as there are supplies we can get with relative ease. Hopefully new rising nations will not pollute so much that the effort of other's will be in vain...
Here in Cape Town, South Africa we've been experiencing some rather terrible power outages - due to the complete shutdown of one of our Generators and partial shutdown of the other generator at the one and only Nuclear plant at Koeberg Power Station. The cause of the shutdown was due to a variety of reasons, and honestly, everyone seems to have their own spin on what the reasons may be. If anything goes just slightly wrong at a Nuclear power plant, then it needs to be shut down - for obvious safety reasons.
Now the repairs to the main generator cannot be completed until we get some very big spare parts from France - something that may take the better part of a year. So, another disdavantage of Nuclear power is: as it is such a highly specialised arena, if something goes wrong, power will be interrupted.
how flawed is your society? flawedsociety.myfreelancejobs.com
Doesn't it sort of imply that something is horribly wrong with the system when you propose a "stealth escalator" as a way to dupe people into accepting that they normally wouldn't?
More to the point though, I think it is still political suicide. I don't think the "stick" approach is going to win anyone. You will just severely punish the poor while the middle class family that desperately wants to own a home outside of a city with green laws and elbow room will simply shrug off the expense.
There is no social solution.
Even if you could convince all the people of the first world to reduce consumption substantially enough to make a difference, what about the other 5 billion+ people in the world? What do you think a guy making a dollar a day is going to do when you suggest that they should hold off on that industrial revolution of theirs? He is going to tell you to go to a hell, and rightfully so. The simple fact of the matter is that we do not and never have had a sustainable system. Since we first develop agriculture and started mining we have continually been operating in an unsustainable mode.
The only real solution is to develop technology to meet our needs and make it cheap. The 5 billion+ people of the third world and rising, and rising fast. We can either work feverishly to have technology in hand that will power their rise out of extreme poverty in a less destructive manner, or we can foolishly chip away at the exponentially growing problem and utterly ignore the gathering storm. The first world needs to be the ones to find a way to make cheap and reliable solar cells or whatever. We need to either get our shit together and start working on it NOW, or we can see what it is like when 5 billion people enter into an industrial revolution over the course of a decade or two. We know how ugly a few tens of millions of people entering the industrial revolution over the course of a centaury or two was, do you really want to see 5 billion+ do it over night?
Several post have mentioned that simply becoming more reliant on nuclear power for our electrical needs wont really reduce our carbon emissions that much, this is only partly true.
Coal/Oil/Gas stations would by definition produce more CO2 than a Nuclear station, however the big Carbon saving comes from nuclear vehicles(okay stay with me). By nuclear cars I actually refer to a hydrogen (or similar) vehicle that has its fuel create by nuclear power (i.e. Electrolysis). If 25% of the US and Europe's cars all switched to this virtually carbon free energy source then we would see some serious carbon reduction.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Maybe in America, but hardly in Europe. Even 50% could be considered low around here.
If only I hadn't used all my points yesterday, I'd mod you up so fast you wouldn't know what had hit you.
That didn't really make sense. But I'm going to post it anyway.
What a ridiculous supposition. If there's nowhere suitable to dump the waste, have you ever thought about the possibility that we shouldn't be producing it?
That didn't really make sense. But I'm going to post it anyway.
Show me a wind farm that produces emissions
That didn't really make sense. But I'm going to post it anyway.
"Who is going to defend those plants when the military has become disorganized, undisciplined, and possibly split into competing sides?"
... sure, but I think if that day ever happen in the US, that will be the least of your concern compared to the threat of actual nuclear weapons like the massive arsenal the US already has. ( and the one of Russia, Pakistan, India, China, Israel, ... and probably at the time Iran, North Korea, ... )
Current reactor design make it hard to explode, and the reactor will stop working well before there is some real risk.
Off course some government could tinker the reactor of those plants
No.
Maybe you're just suggesting we tell the developing world to (in the words of Dick Cheney) Go F*** itself.
Definitely not. The developing world would be much better off without the political and economic problems of using non-renewable sources.
a few perfectly safe pre-fab pebble bed reactors could provide both the power and clean (desalinated) water needed for a fair portion of the poorest nations -- turning arid wastelands full of disease and starvation into working cropland.
Talk about nonsense. A "few reactors" will not save the starving world. That is a much deeper problem, much better solved by simple, low-tech, local solutions. not Western fantasies and pipe-dreams of nuclear technology.
You want to know what protects the environment more than anything else? Wealth. Wealth protects the environment.
What evidence do you have to support this? The wealthier nations generally waste a lot more energy than the poorer nations.
... and then they built the supercollider.
All of them. That much steel and aluminium needs a hell of a lot of fossil fuels to be burnt.
That's because nuclear fuel is not made of magic beans as people expect but a rock that needs to be dug up, processed, enriched and manufactured into fuel rods/pellets.
The process of mining produces a large quantity of rather nasty waste. The cleaner alternative would be to recycle nuclear weapons into fuel, but countries with nuclear weapons are not too keen to give them up.
The only way to really solve this problem is to stop wasting energy. The way to think about this is: if you have to live with using only 5% of the energy that you use now, what will you choose to use it on? Take it as a thought experiment - you're not allowed to invent ways to produce your own energy; assume that this has already been done. So what will you keep? A car? Your fridge? Your computer? How about not buying stuff that comes in unnecessary packaging? Avoiding ready made meals, drinks, snacks etc?
Perhaps 5% is not what we will have to live with in the future, it could be more or less, but I suspect it won't be far off at least for our children.
Not annoying ;-), but I think you are wrong in parts ;-)
;-)
;-)
I'm not advocating oil/petrol instead of nuclear. I'm saying if we're going to change all our infrastructure, we should take advantage of better technologies. For some funny reason, people like uniformity. I'm not against having any nuclear reactors, but if we can get away with having 85% of our electricity from renewable sources, why not do it? (then have the last 15% as nuclear)
(I agree - fossil fuels are crap
1. I work for a consulting firm (tho I don't claim to be an expert). We assist organisations to improve their energy efficiency. We don't suggest they invest unless we anticipate they'll break even in 5 years. That's a 20% saving.
2. I don't live in the US, bhat you say about public transport is not the case in Europe, or (to a lesser extent) Australia (where I live). I think both the US and Aust will *have* to embrace public transport as petrol becomes more expensive.
3. Sure. So have a *few* uber-reliable power sources for peak demand, and use renewables elsewhere.
Anyway, I can't be buggered typing more - no one will read it
The reality is that any grouping put together by this man is unlikely ever to come out and say nuclear power (of any type, including Pebble Bed) is acceptable. The only acceptable solution in their book is for everyone to 'power down' and accept an energy budget akin to the Victorian era.
Although Nuclear Power isn't the full answer, we need lots of renewable investment as well, its almost certainly the best shot we have at the existing time for continuing our civilisation in roughly the same shape as it is at the moment as the oil supply declines. Renewables are just too low in energy density to be able to build fast enough to match the problem.
File under ignore - the government will.
If its a poor way to have a discussion, then why did you bother? The benefit of a public forum is that others might have something relevant to say.
Besides you two werent having a discussion, but a pissing match. You're both right to a degree.
Yes it does. That's how politics works. Cynical? - Moi?
More to the point though, I think it is still political suicide.
Shhh..... Don't give GWB any tip-offs.
No, I think what's needed is for a strong president, who thinks "people are addicted to oil", to introduce just such an idea. You are strong aren't you George? (nudge, nudge, wink wink).
It all depends on how things work. The US is a massive country of course so there are wide opinions based on geographical and historical differences. That said, it's not impossible. Just as long as it's done slowly, a little hint here, a little hint their, a bit of "viral marketing". Before you know it the people want it! Then you just give them what they want. Ah, democracy! Of course this only works if you have a decent civil service and the politicians stay out of the way...
I think you are slightly missing what I said before. Clearly the developing world wants SUVs, 24/7 shopping channels and iPods. After all, that's progress right?
My point is what we decide to do at home, in our own back yard. Surely that's the place to start? If we don't want to change there's no hope that anyone else will.
Did you mean "green lawns?"
we do not and never have had a sustainable system
Clearly that is true and must change. Much of our wealth has come from what can be dug out of the ground or stolen, sorry "liberated", from others.
The 5 billion+ people of the third world and rising, and rising fast.
I'm going to change tack slightly here. Perhaps you are right, if the rest of the world follows our history we are all "doomed, doomed I tell you" [*].
As Mark Twain once said however, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme". In other words they may go through a similar process of improvements in health, life expectancy etc, but not in the same manner.
Look for example at the first world. The population of this country (UK), and other European countries is in decline. This decline is particularly amusing in Italy since it is regarded as a traditional Catholic country and obviously abhors contraception, but that's another story. If it wasn't for immigration to these countries our populations would be actively shrinking, or shrinking much faster than they currently are.
This will, I suspect force countries to become more sustainable. Rather than living off the wealth to be created by our children in some mad pyramid scheme we will have to be more prudent. Pyramid schemes can after all only work if their is unchecked exponential expansion!
Why has this happened? Well we can speculate. Bringing children into the world in these countries is now extremely expensive. Also, the (relative) emancipation of women now means they are more likely to want to build careers. Consequently birth rates are lower, much lower than they were in the past. Many people can now choose to have children or not. In this manner our growth has become self checking. Big famillies are now rare. This is not just an economical perspective, it is now a social one.
In some respects one could argue that a world populated by smaller numbers of people (say 500 million), who have a low birth rate and long life expectancy would be preferable to the current situation.
Following this hypothesis, the question of course is how can this happen without the potentially unplesent "middle step"?
Time will tell. In many ways I feel it is futile to engineer these things. Nevertheless it's fun to conjecture.
holding off the industrial revolution of theirs.
I assume you do not mean this literally.
Yes, this is a difficult problem. The main problem is greed of course. Everyone wants stuff for themselves and to hell with everyone else.
Of course, "hell", may just be around the corner....
As is often the case economics dictates what hap
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
Oh no, it's already been done
That didn't really make sense. But I'm going to post it anyway.
Actually, being "relentless" is considered the prime advantage of tidal power. It isn't fickle like the wind. The biggest disadvantage is that biofouling is higher (shit grows on the machinery). The was an article on it in Newsweek the other day mentioning that tidal turbines are being placed in the East River in NYC and that the Navy is interested in them as well.
If its a poor way to have a discussion, then why did you bother? The benefit of a public forum is that others might have something relevant to say.
:) But that's the main point of slashdot eh?
Because you are more likely to meet interesting people on slashdot than by sitting waiting for email to arrive?
Besides you two werent having a discussion, but a pissing match. You're both right to a degree.
very true
We need to get off planet and set up solar collectors in space which transfer their energy to a power station in a geostable orbit around the earth, which transfers the energy to a power station on the equator, which feeds it into the global grid. [...] Practically limitless power.
You're mostly right, but there's a limit to how much power you really want to get this way, though. That's because our little warming problem won't be exactly solved (only delayed) since our planet can only radiate the industrial process waste heat away so much/so fast before becoming too hot to live on.
The final solution would be to move the entire industry in space too, not just the power generating facilities.
(quick computation shows that with approx. 500 billion square kilometers of solar panels running at 50% efficiency you could (theoretically) generate enough power to make the whole earth glow brighter than the sun)
Do you really think that LA is less densely populated that the whole of the UK? We have a train network that goes pretty much everywhere. I hear this from the US all the time "We're so sparsely populated it could never work". Well maybe that's true for way out in the country nowhere towns, but it sure as hell isn't for somewhere like LA.
It would be expensive to put in, sure, but the "it's not viable" line is just plain denial.
From memory.
About 80% of home and buisness heating in the UK has converted to gas.
Essentially all of the UK use of gas, apart from a tiny fraction that is used as chemical feedstocks could be converted over to electricity.
The remaining long pole in the tent is transport use.
Some of this - trains - can be electrified without impossible hastle.
There are options to make cars nuclear powered - you use the heat from a nuclear power station to make hydrogen. But this does mean replacing the entire fleet of cars/...
The other point is that 'nuclear is more expensive'.
While this may be true (and I have doubts, if a significant production line was instituted), it's not the whole argument
A significant factor is that with gas/oil/..., you are paying well over half the money you spend on energy to the Sultan of Bling, meaning you need to export more stuff to pay for it.
With nuclear, you are paying the money to local people, who shop at local buisnesses, contribute taxes, ...
Even 'just' substituting gas, would however mean an unprecedented (well, perhaps apart from china) level of construction, ~50 plants, and massive upgrades of the national grid, to cope with an order of magnitude increase in demand.
Ahh the joys of all them taxes and regulatory fees simply for being hooked up. And being hooked up is mandatory in most places. Go figure.
Forget environmental concerns... When oil becomes scarce [Or when people think it has], what will happen?
Nothing. It'll be a page 45 blurb in the NYT. Why? By the time that happens pretty much nobody will be using it. i twill be a footnote in history.
There is more oil in North America than most ever people dream of.
That is a damned lot of oil. And yes, it can be economically "produced" at today's rates, enough for several hundred years of oil use. It's politics that prevent it.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
There's a 40MW storage plant down in England somewhere. Unfortunalty, I can't did out any links to a page about the plant. It was Regenesys energy storge was bought out by VRB recently, a bromine / sodium bromide plant.
n t2.shtml
It's basically a giant battery, with liquid electrolytes. This means that the maximum power is determined by the size of the electrode (a conductive plastic in this case, IIRC), and the maximum storage is determined by the size of the liquid storage tanks (about 200 hours at 40 MW IIRC, or maybe 200MWh).
The cute thing about it is that it scale well - want more power, add another section of electrodes; want more energy storage, add more tanks - modulo the usual engineering problems.
It looks like the only major problem is that no one wants it. http://www.mensetmanus.net/windpower/no-green-gia
And a fair degree of NIMBY to boot.
Oil doesn't have to run out. The supply simply has to be disrupted due to war or some other economic or natural cause (as in last summer's hurricanes). Let the disruption last long enough, and I suspect that people will wish they HAD some other option.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Don't burn the coal traditionally, gasify it and burn the gas in a combined cycle turbine. Then sell the "waste" heat to customers for space/water heating and the spoil to the construction industry. The thermal efficiency goes to about 65% and the overall efficiency to nearly 90%.
Actually the solution to human induced global warming is very simple, but it's a social one, not a technical one, all of the technical solutions already exist, and frankly it's a waste of time debating which one we should use. The market will work that out for us.
That solution is... Make energy expensive. In particular carbon produced energy. Most easily achieved by migrating taxes from goods and labour to energy production.
Deleted
I'm reminded of an article I saw on slashdot about using ethanol as fuel for cars, and someone's response to it. They said that we had arrived at our current problem with oil by being nearly solely reliant on oil, and that the solution lays in finding many different sources of fuel for cars. I think the same can be applied here - the solution to our energy problems will be nuclear and solar and wind and bussing, walking, riding your bike etc rather than taking the car (which will run on solar and petrol and ethanol and hydrogen), as well as being more effecient with our electricity at home (turning off lights, monitors, air conditioners & heaters, clever design of new houses so air conditioners aren't needed, etc etc)... you get the point. The environmental and economic benefits that can come from being energy efficient alone are quite exciting. Have a read of "Natural Capitalism", a book that touches on this and other subjects, downloadable from http://www.natcap.org/sitepages/pid20.php. There are many many things we can be doing, and we should try to do as many of them as possible, in my humble opinion :-)
nt
People don't commute for fun, they commute to afford a home. Every off-ramp closer to LA you go the price of homes climbs around $5000. When you are up here in the Antelope Valley they start at $200,000 for a prefab.
This all has little to do with the commute. If you want to reduce emmisions then you have to reduce the number of poluters, in other words, people.
Lot's of money needs to be spend on R&D for better ways to collect energy, but some needs to be spent on getting the global population back down below 4 billion, if we ever want to see things get back under control.
This issue has been well-analyzed for decades, as in "Least Cost Energy: Solving the CO2 Problem" by Amory Lovins (out of print, but the Rocky Mountain Institute has other documentation online). Reducing demand is the same as increasing capacity, and if it is cheaper, then do it first. Better insulation, for example, reduces energy demand 24/7 just as a nuclear plant (supposedly) provides energy 24/7 and costs much less per unit of demand reduced than the nuke does per unit of energy produced. It's also much quicker to reduce demand through efficiency improvements than to increase capacity by building more power plants.
And I think you need to check your numbers. How much of all of that "available" land is arable? Has water and irrigation? Isn't sand and desert? Isn't mountainous or tundra? Isn't a sheet of ice? Has a growing season longer than a few months? Isn't covered by rainforests and trees otherwise needed for, you know, oxygen? Isn't already covered by houses and roads and cities and towns?
Do the math, and I think you've find that most of the available land suitable for farming and food production is... surprise! Being farmed.
And just out of curiosity, what happens to technology and medicine and so forth when everyone is busy planting carrots?
Finally, you may not have noticed, but people involved in sustenance living do not have low birthrates. They breed little workers to help plow the fields, milk the cows, and help with the chores.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Look , I personally use about 2.2 KWH, which means, that 3 x 1kw solar panels would give me 100% free power. .8kw i dont use.
and the power company would get ZERO, except excess
So spend $3000 per HOUSE, which is what , 30000000000 dollars, 30billion.
Big deal, thats cheaper than all power plants and coal and oil put together in one year and then
every one has zero power bills FOR LIFE.
Simple as that.
Who said solar power doesnt pay.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Do the math, and I think you've find that most of the available land suitable for farming and food production is... surprise! Being farmed.
You've hit the nail on the head with this one: We produce more than enough food for everyone, and we haven't even come close to using all available land. When people grow their own food, particularly using sustainable practices, production increases. So it should be a slam dunk.
If we got rid of pointless wastes like war and subsidies to not grow crops; food would not be an issue.
...is that the French are doing it
:)
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Bicycle Trailers. Or be like me and rig up a large folding box so it can be attached to your bike. On the rare occasions when you need something too big for one of these, such as furniture, pay the shop to deliver - the cost of this is insignificant compared to the savings from not running a car.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Siemens and Hitachi are both electronics companies, not makers of heavy machinery. Try MAN or Mitsubishi.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
As for the risks, they are far smaller than those cheerfully encountered in the fossil-fuel industry. And getting smaller all the time: the technology exists now to make nuclear waste less active than the uranium that's dug out of the ground in the first place.
More radiation comes from coal plants than from all the nuclear waste, reactors and mining.
Coal contains on average 3ppm uranium.
By comparision ordinary soil contains 1.8-5ppm uranium.
Coal fueled power plants have aerosol filters. Fields, roads, deserts, and lawns do not.
Could people please stop perpetuating this idea that coal is radioactive please. Coal is a kinematic and chemical pollutant, not a radioactive one. Unless you consider your breakfast cereal to be radioactive.
May the Maths Be with you!
> Moreover, nuclear power scales better for the future. Like it or not, our energy usage is only going to go up.
r ) that could possibly extend the timespan those ressources last, but as far as I hear it is not coming along well.
Not true. Uranium is a very limited ressource. Just like oil and coal, someday it will all be "burned" away. If I remember correctly, with the current amount of nuclear reactors the uranium in the world will be depleted in, like, 65 years (according to greenpeace). So how does that scale? And even if greenpeace is off, if there is more uranium that can be mined if the price is higher... Lets say ressources for 200 years. Now, say, quadruple the amount of energy generated by nuclear reactors to use less oil and coal... Thats 50 years.
There is the breeder technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reacto
Actually, during the fifties "atomic power" sound cool and nobody was afraid of it. We even had the old AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission. Then it became the "Nuclear Regulatory Commissions", right off the bat a more negative-sounding term, and people began to fear the word "nuclear", and the companion trigger word "radiation". You know ... kinda like Dr. Pavlov and his dogs. *ding* "NO NUKES! NO NUKES!" Granted most of those people didn't have the slightest idea exactly what it was that they were afraid of, still don't in fact, but they were afraid nevertheless. Thank the media and public ignorance for that. You can thank them for getting saccharin pulled off the market (another bit of mass hysteria) and dozens of other anti-science, anti-technology crusades over the past thirty years that have done nothing but hurt us.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
siemens makes almost everything.
to be more precise, siemens had a child company named kraftwerk union (kwu) which used to build lots and lots of nuclear powerplants. a couple of years ago though siemens sold kwu to a french nuclear reactor maker but afair kept the turbine making business.
ah, yes, here it is
p.s. i used to live in a town where kwu had one of their main sites.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
Actually, that energy was stored for the entire history of the Earth, but it was built up in a matter of seconds by the enormous neutron flux in a supernova. We're releasing the energy over a much larger timescale than it was built up over... in reactors, at least.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
...and I'm not going to go off and try to compile them for the sake of this discussion. You may then write my comments here off as unsubstantiated or subjective if you like -- they are not, however.
The shortest answer is that wealth (distributed wealth, not a single ruling party's wealth) buys flexibility, health, and realistic population growth.
1. When you talk about wealthy nations producing more waste, that's sort of true on a per person basis but its not true overall. With wealth comes declining birth rates (because your retirement plan isn't to have enough children so one or two survive to take care of you). Less people put less strain on the available resources than more people, and thus there are more resources to be spread around.
2. Waste produced by a wealthy population tends to be drastically more controlled. I'm talking about biological waste, consumer waste, and energy waste. Wealth buys flexibility. It means you don't have to burn all the wood and eat all the available vegetation nearby to survive this week leaving you nothing by a soil poor dustbowl left for next.
3. "Simple, Low-Tech, Local solutions are not available to handle the vast needs of the largest and poorest populations in the world. Sure, solar powered radio-telephone rigs in remote villages make great press and provide great help as spot solutions. They won't help major population centers. Further, wind technology and the like is anything but low-tech and simple to maintain. A modern wind farm requires a good bit of upkeep and in fact can become radically less efficient if not kept properly lubricated, cleaned, and maintained on a regular basis.
4. There is, contrary to commonly held belief, a great deal more undevoloped land in North America than in Africa (as an example). We see pictures of the great savanas and deserts but most of the continent isn't actually well represented by that. The populations of the poorest nations are vast and their suffering is equally vast because they don't benefit from the simple efficiencies we take for granted.
5. Why do you suppose people take live chickens on trains in many countries? One reason is that you don't have to refrigerate your lunch if its still walking around. Refrigeration is nearly as important as food, water, and medicine in terms of the health of a population.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
If you increase gas prices/energy costs that will make a lot of people think about trading in their SUVs for bicycles and adjusting their thermostats and adding more insulation to their houses, etc..
He's not the one making absurd claims that no one else seems to be able to back up either.
(I live in Belgium)
Regarding the public transport in here, (I don't think it's much different elsewhere in EU)... It still needs development to beat car commuting. It hurts me inside to drive alone in the car to work (I do ~70 km per day of commute), but public transport is still worse - not much cheaper, slower, and, obvoiusly, less comfortable. Yes, had I lived AND worked in the same big city, public transport would have been a viable alternative, but even then, only because streets are clogged with cars, not because busses/metro/trams are sooo great.
When I get 10MPG on E85, I am getting 67MPG of gasoline.
E85 is only 15% Ethanol, not 85%. Your 10MPG for E85 is only about 11.5 MPG gasoline.
Sheesh.
Complete and utter bullshit.
The original claim was that a correctly functioning coal fire power station releases more radioactivity than a correctly functioning nuclear power station - since nuclear power stations aren't *supposed* to leak at all this is trivially true. This takes no account of waste products, accidents, etc.
Nice post. Just one nitpick: "Or do people in southern california and in large cities enjoy a 1-hr commute to work?". I take public transportation to work, as I have all of my life, and it takes me 45 minutes to go about 5 miles. I sometimes think about giving up on it since it is grossly inefficient for me. I am sure on the whole it is more efficient, but the decision that is usually being made is 45 minutes vs. 15 minutes, not short-term gain vs. long-term gain. Admittedly, there are some secondary benefits (e.g. you can read, do work, etc), but most people after working ten or twelve hours just want to go home.
I don't know what you googled as you didn't provide a URL but your 750 million cars figure sounds a bit fishy. While your overall argument that most people don't own a car, the population in America is ~325 million, and Europe is ~750 million. Both have a saturated car market with multiple ownership per household. That would be around 1billion cars alone. China, India and other places to a decreasing degree are buying cars like crazy. Their ownership may be much lower but there is ahug base of old Soviet vehicles and obsolete western models across the world. I'd guess (hand-waving) that there are 1.5 - 2 billion cars in circulation...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
And then there's Alberta's oil sands, which may contain another 2 trillion or even more.
T. Boone Pickens once rejected working those fields because to make it profitable, oil would have to skyrocket to the unbelievably high price of $5 a barrel. Oil was $61.58 yesterday. Developing this field is now Pickens' largest single investment.
They've taken hydrogen as the energy carrier out of the equation. No wonder they end up with such a flawed conclusion!
The beauty of hydrogen as the energy carrier is that you can use wind power, solar power, all kinds of power to produce the energy that automobiles use. You can even install fuel cells in each house, removing the entire electriciy grid.
Nuclear power does not produce emissions that contribute to global warming. So, by replacing coal and oil as energy sources with nuclear power combined with hydrogen as energy carrier, we'll be able to shake the oil habit. That means less reliance upon the inherently unstable mid-east, and also reduced emissions. Plus a localised benefit: Cleaner air.
Stop the brainwash
Perhaps you can use a bike, i'm pretty sure it would take a whole lot less than 45 min to do the 5 miles, and as an added bonus, would give you your daily exercise dosage.
The amount of energy arriving in the form of sunlight and stored in the oceans is so vast, all forms of manmade energy consumption look like a 10th decimal place rounding error in comparison. Waste heat simply won't make any difference to the equation.
The main thing that is warming the planet is excessive 'greenhouse' gas production, notably CO2 from coal and petroleum burning. This stops the re-radiation of IR radiation back into space, thereby warming the planet.
As for your comments on the stability of governments, I would imagine a government that can provide energy, heat and light for its citizens is far more likely to be stable than one which can't. In fact, I would imagine a government that lets its people freeze in the dark would be very likely to fall apart or be overthrown.
Whenever there's a suburban vs. urban lifestyle debate, I need to ask the question: Do you have kids? As the GP said, the reason many people don't want to live in the city is because of the environment they want for their kids. So, I question whether you and the company you keep have kids, and possibly whether this skews your perception of whether the pendulum's swung back.
City's aren't as bad as the use to be, but they still only offer an attractive lifestyle for the rich (who can afford private schools and very expensive property), the childless (who don't need as much property or care about schools), and a select few who have non-mainstream priorities.
There's a reason almost every sitcom that doesn't involve kids takes place in the city, and almost every sitcom that has kids takes place in the suburbs.
Really? You might want to let the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition know that; they seem to be a bit confused about it.
There are some people who choose to change for the good of the environment, but they're such a small percentage it won't really make an impact. People CAN change, but most won't.
Nuclear is dirty, but the waste can be controlled, whereas the coal is air dirty, which cannot be controlled. Big difference.
At least biofouling shouldn't be an issue in the East River. I'm not sure anything can live in there.
As they say in medicine, the dose makes the poison, and burning coal, oil or whatever isn't really such a problem unless you've got 6-8-10 billion people participating in it.
There's no way that we can sustain the growth of our current global population and I'm not entirely sure we can sustain our existing population. I can't help but think that the global strife we're experiencing now isn't just a side effect of too many people sharing the same space.
Think about what you just said...
"Is riding to work on a bicycle rather than going to the gym a reduction in lifestyle?"
Even if 100% of gym users switched to riding a bike, what percent of the world goes to the gym? What percent of these users work close enough to home to ride a bike? Not to mention that the cardio/leg workout of riding a bike does not equal the other stuff available at a gym.
Is eating a shared meal with your neighbours rather than eating in some fast food joint halfway across town a reduction in lifestyle?" :)
Then, how may people drive "across" town to eat fast food. No, people drive "across" town to eat good food. Fast food is gotten around the corner for convenience. Both of which are often done with neighbors/friends
"Is picking fruit from your own tree rather than buying from a supermarket a reductionin lifestyle? "
How many people have the property/climate to grown their own fruit? Yeah, those city dwellers are screwed.
It sounds like you've got some throw-away lines too.
Yeah, sorry. I haven't even been to Europe -- I should have stated that I'm not saying this on experience. All I know is what I've studied from France/Britain...so, thanks for the clarification.
Oil is shortly going to become unprofitable, so now the western military industrial complex need another rarity based power source to perpetuate the economy.
I've made a similar post before, but in short capitalism in a post industrial society inherently relies on and compulsively promotes massive amounts of needless waste.
Every time we waste something, someone makes a profit. We have to waste as much as we can to perpetuate this dangerously anachronistic resource allocation system that we haven't seen fit to revise in 500 years of drastic cultural and technological revolution.
There's little profit in commoditised energy that everyone has free access to, and unless someone finds a way to make it more profitable in comparison to wasteful energy it can't be promoted by our government/corporate system. That having been said it sounds a little like Windows vs Linux. If we could undermine the the artificial value of nuclear power by "giving away" wind turbines and solar panels to everyone, hardly anyone would buy grid electricity anymore and nuclear power would soon become a lot less prevalent, in the same way Windows is inevitably going to be massacred by a cost free equivalent.
Perhaps some kind of grass roots non profit movement to introduce solar power to as many homes as possible at the smallest cost possible.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
In reality it's far, far worse than that. The best farmland is also, generally, the best living land. Two areas I'm familar with -- rural Maryland and the Willamette Valley in Oregon -- were once among the most fertile areas ever seen. Unfortunately, they are also great places to live so every year thousands of acres of prime farmland becomes yards and parking lots and roads. From an economics standpoint this is a perfectly rational allocation of resources -- houses and businesses are more valuable than farmland -- but it doesn't bode well for the long term sustainability of our economy.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
I didn't see any disruption of suppiles last summer. I did see a price bump, allegedly because of the hurricanes, but perhaps also because of greed. Likewise, I keep hearing about bombings in certain oil-rich areas, and the prices rise and fall, but the gas is always at the pumps.
I'm not saying we CAN'T have disruptions, but the fact is, we haven't really had any (at least outside a disaster zone like NOLA) since the 70's, and they were manufactured.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You dumbass
Enough with the anti-nuclear, environmentalist BS. Seriously, I am sick of this garbage.
Nuclear power has been the convenient club with which to bash tree-huggers over the head, as long as one ignores all the drawbacks of nuclear power (not the least of which deal with waste disposal, leaks and accidents, and the peculiar tendency of US Govt regulators to look the other way when safety rules are violated - damn pansies! we don't need no stinkin' safety rules! We're tough Americans. Not a bunch of goggle-boxed do-gooders going around telling everyone that radiation's bad for them. Pernicious nonsense! A guy could take 400 chest x-rays a year. Oughta have em too.)
It's good that some of the other drawbacks are gaining attention too. But I suspect that this is going to be framed as "radical leftist nonsense" by the media, and dismissed, and soon we'll return to building tons of nuclear plants. Oh what a joyous future we'll have. Can we please build them in Republican neighborhoods?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
While I was shocked how little nuclear power would reduce emission and the fact apparently intelligent people thought this would be a silver bullet deal, it should not surprise anyone that
There is no quick fix. A lot of things have to change, like our automobile usage, suburban lifestyle, and the excessive packaging of one time use products.
In and of itself, nuclear power won't make a huge impact. But combined with other advances, it can. Automobile usage is a major greenhouse gas contributer. Plug in hybrid vehicles will help a little, but not that much as long as you have to burn fossil fuels to make the electricity. but plug in hybrids plus nuclear power has a synergistic effect that can make a difference.
It's a complex problem, so simplistic single solutions won't solve it. That doesn't mean a solution isn't possible, just that it will have to be multifaceted.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Several times, you've mentioned "a nice suburban home with a green lawn and some elbow room from the neighbors" vs "stacked up in expensive and claustrophobic apartment complexes". What about a 3rd option?
I live in a decent house in the city. It has a green lawn and elbow room. Maybe not as much as the rich suburbanites, but I don't spend 2 hours mowing my lawn either. And it's certainly not claustophobic.
In ancient times, people actually did live in cities. Suburbs are relatively recent.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
That may or may not be feasable for the OP. But it's not feasable for everyone. I live 15 miles from work. The direct route is down the highway. If I took a bike-friendly route it would be much longer than 15 miles, and a whole lot longer than the 30 minutes my commute takes by car.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
People may be "downshifting" their lifestyles, but it's a drop in the bucket. Energy consumption continues to rise and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Conservation is hard, especially for those who are not dedicated to the cause. Real change won't be noticeable for decades and by then, it may already be too late (take your pick: global warming, oil sources depleted, oil sources inaccessible due to wars, etc. One of those is bound to happen). Going nuclear at least buys us some time.
Nuclear power does reduce emissions by helping us eliminate coal and oil power plants. Something's better than nothing, and nuclear waste is infinitely easier to contain than a cloud coming out of a smokestack.
Right. You can also eliminate emissions from heating houses by burning oil and natural gas. heating can simply by electricity from nuclear power plant. yes, you may need to upgrade to a beefier hookup to the power grid for that but many people already do that anyhow when installing central AC units.
Industry is also burning quite a lot of oil and gas as heat and power source while it can be supplied by electricity from nuclear power plants.
I don't have numbers for any of this handy but we're talking about significant portion of fossil fuel use here.
You've got it right. Live small, or at least recognize how much "living large" costs, and be ready to pay for it (psst: you aren't really paying yet).
Us? We don't make much. We're happy with the sustainability of how we live.
Family-type: Nuclear, wife, child, husband (no, we're not a power plant)
Car: none
Clothes-dryer: none
Dishwasher: none
Computers: 4 (on 24/7)
Central heat/a.c.: none (rooms in use are climate-controlled)
Hot water: demand, propane-fired
Excess packaging: unwrapped/declined at market-place
TV: none
Mon, this is luxury. We walk to the deli (10 mins), the supermarket (2 mins), the truck-farm market (2 mins). We bus to work (20 mins) and walk the kid to school (15 mins).
Spouse and I (we're both 'mericans) work together, staggered shifts, 30 hours/week, low stress, 38 weeks a year (10 weeks off in summers, 4 in winters); 100% health-care (great care! $US3 deductible), for appx $10/month each. Low pay, but pffft, who gives a RA about making more money to spend more?
Oh, yeah; eat-your-heart-out weather, too: it was 26C today (79F) today.
You can live like this, too, MOL, if you are an educated American willing to chuck the rat-race to live in other parts of the world. There's work for you (this is NOT an ad) out there in the world, if you're smart and flexible. If you want a 3br split in the 'burbs and an SUV, though, you're already dead.
I never heard of that! Of course, where I live, the mailbox is on my porch. I walk farther to my car than I do to the mailbox.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Before pulling figures out of your arse, perhaps you should take into account the following:
- The population of the USA is less than 300m (if you were refering to the whole continent you should be more clear.)
- A household in most cases comprises of more than 1 person, so 1 car per household does not equal one car per person.
- Children and some adults can't drive, yet they are still included in the population figure.
- A saturated market only means that everyone who would buy a product owns it, not that everyone actually does, as not everyone will want said product.
- Parts of Eastern Europe are quite poor so it is doubtful that the market is saturated there, yet you included the popluation for the whole of Europe in your figures.
There are probably other points that should be taken into consideration, but I'll leave you with this, I did actually try to verify that 750 million figure myself and although I couldn't find a link for it, I find find a source from 2001 that states there are 600 million cars in use, so 750 million today seems plausible, but your figure certainly is not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Burning calories == burning calories, no matter how you do it.
Building obscene muscle-mass is an entirely different beast, and only a few people truly want to do this.
I'd agree with the impact, but I'd quibble about the terminology. I expect that might more accurately be called changing "lifestyles" to "deathstyles".
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Also, anybody who says we can avoid the need of nuclear power by just riding bikes, using a more efficient furnace, and holding hands while singing "Kum Ba Ya" is simply not looking at the real numbers of what our future power needs are, even after you account for a radical scaling back of elective consumption.
For some reason, I heard that in my head as read by John C. McGinley from Scrubs.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
How is riding a bicycle or having an apple tree related to electricity generation? These are transportation issues which belong in another thread.
The simple fact is that electricity makes modern civilization possible, and that drastic cuts in electricity use through shortages or high prices will quickly return society back to the level of the 18th century.
However noble you think the idea of a 'downshift' is, electricity use is not an area that can be cut without serious societal ramifications. Most people do not wish to freeze in the dark.
As my truck-driving roommate would say, "Relying on your wheel brakes to stop your rig is a surefire way of killing the kids in the back of that SUV. Use your engine brake."
Every time one of these discussions comes up, I wonder why. Years ago there was an excellent article in New Scientist that very simply laid the argument to rest. It went something like this:
Question: if you build 5 new nuclear powerplants per year, for how many years do you get a new positive net return from all the plants... ergo, how soon does the energy cost of maintaining mothballed facilities (safely) exceed the total output of the currently functioning plants? Each year, iff n is the number of currently producing plants and m is the number of mothballed ones, then total net output = n(Z-Y) - mT. Add it up year by year and don't forget to subtract from the sumtotal the total of (m+n)X. Do the math. Depending on whose numbers you use, it ends up somewhere between 55-125 years of positive net energy output.
Rememebr, too, that if you are looking at making nuclear power plants for 20 years (100 plants) you have 3000 plant years of power generation, more or less, as compared with 800,000 - 1,200,000 plant years of energy consumption (for safe maintenance) to look forward to.
Lastly, they made the point that France, which generates most of its electric power by nuclear reactors is today about 10% smaller than it was in 1945, because they have given over approximately 10% of the land surface of their country to a single use that precludes any other human occupation or use for at least the next 10,000 years - if you can't use it anymore for anything else, it effectively does not exist anymore.
The only counter to this argument is that our technology will advance to such an extent that we'll be able to make things unradioactive and reclaim these facilities for productive, non-energy consumptive uses in the near future. Predicating your energy policy on this kind of scientific speculation is like depedning on the development of antigravity as a means of disposing of landfill toxins.
Sustainable nuclear technology using fusion power is a fantasy.
What's wrong with a slow fix? Or even part of a slow fix? Or just a bit of stopgap while a long term fix is developed?
Let's posit fossil fuels production starts to drop, as world economic output continues to rise. Many economists I've met will blythely say that the market will create technology to replace it. Not all, just the stupid ones who still somehow managed to get a Phd. Technologists know that technologies aren't created overnight. The only thing that's certain is that the market will reallocate resources; there's no guarantee we'll like the way it does it.
So, in our scenario, fossil fuel emissions are bound to drop, although not every component will do so monotonically as we may shift to dirtier fuels. We don't want nuclear technology then to cut emissions; we want it to cushion the blow on our business structures while a longer term solution is developed. Which it won't be until the pinch is felt.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm well aware of that, my post was in reference to LA, a sprawling mass of suburbs which the original posterseemed to think ruled LA out of having a public transport system. Unless you seriously think LA is less densely populated than the rural parts of the UK where we have bus and train services then you are in denial.
Sure there's a whole lot of nothing in the US, just not in LA. Ferchrissakes.....
I think the GP's point was that if you took all the people currently living in the suburbs and moved them into the city, you would have to move to a denser system. In other words, say goodbye to your nice house in the city, unless you are willing to pay an order of magnitude more for it.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
For some reason, I heard that in my head as read by John C. McGinley from Scrubs.
I'm actually going to take that as a compliment, Brittany.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Also, anybody who says we can avoid the need of nuclear power by just riding bikes, using a more efficient furnace, and holding hands while singing "Kum Ba Ya" is simply not looking at the real numbers of what our future power needs are, even after you account for a radical scaling back of elective consumption.
OK, but why sneer at methods of conservation? Some argue that nuclear power isn't enough. You argue that conservation isn't enough. Maybe we should be doing as many things as possible. What other choice is there?
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
Who said that nuclear power would be a quick-fix? It may not solve the climate change problem right away but there are other immediate benefits that make it very worth while.
For instance, it would reduce dependence on foreign oil, which always makes sense.
if the number of nuclear power plants goes up, the demand for oil burning power plants will go down. Thus, the demand for oil goes down. As you know, oil causes more deaths from resultant military and economic conflicts over its supply and its profits than nuclear power ever could, even after a meltdown or contamination. It therefore makes sense for *human rights* and for economic reasons for every country to aggressively pursue a non-oil-consuming energy policy. One way to streamline such a transition would be to invest in nuclear power technology.
Moreover, risks as they are now are not necessarily risks as they are in the future. Funding nuclear research could potentially make safer nuclear containment and waste-storage technologies. Eventually the technology could become so advanced that the net risk to human lives inside Britain would be close to zero, or still less risk than oil poses to the average Brit. While a complete conversion to nuclear power right now might not be a risk worth taking, at least some conversion with some funding of future technology to make nuclear power acceptably safe could work(to the point where the benefits outweigh the risks).
If there was say, an international coalition for nuclear power technology that maybe organized an effort to store nuclear waste in one location on earth or to shoot it out of orbit every year, or say, into the moon or sun, - instead of under a mountain in Nevada - most likely the international cooperation would result in a very cost effective nuclear solution.
In any case, nuclear power(fission) is definitely something that should be pursued more actively than it currently is.
And when nuclear fusion comes? Can we say party?
One third of the carbon emmissions of gas turbines (assuming the best possible quality of ore)
These processes actually require electricity. Electricity comes from the nearest power plant, if that happens to be coal fired, uranium mining emits CO2. Blaming nuclear plants for the emissions of coal plants is a stupid concept.
Well, while you're considering the horrific solutions, the most "practical" way to do it would be to include in your extinction event the 10% that's already massively industrialized. However, since we're all reading slashdot at computers, I doubt many of us will be enthusiastic for that plan.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The solution to this environmental problem is not social. The solution lies in allowing people to live as they want without destroying the environment in the process.
Both of these statements can't be absolutely true because "allowing people to live as they want" IS a social solution!
I agree that we need to push forward in technology, but we also need to address the social problems: 1) There simply aren't enough jobs that fund a suburban lifestyle that are physically close to the suburbs already. 2) There aren't enough jobs to fund a suburban lifestyle for the millions of people who already live in the cities and would love to live in the suburbs someday. #1 is changing already as "ex-urbs" develop outside the large cities, but it's not enough to make a serious dent in gasoline consumption. I've heard zero constructive suggestions from any economists (right and left) regarding #2 -- apparently we neither know how to create jobs nor care about the people who don't have them.
Regardless of technology, our global economy is not sustainable. At some point we need to make a real decision regarding the question: when is enough enough? Why can't we get by on a 30-hour work week, or even a 20-hour week? Is leisure more or less expensive in terms of raw resources than work? How can we make a transition from a scarcity-based economy (classical economy) to technological semi-utopia (Star Trek)? I think answers can be found, but they will come out of sociology and psychology, not engineering.
Well, there is a cost-benefit that skews things to suburban sprall. The extra 10 hours a week (1 hr. commute, twice a day, 5 times a week) is worth it for the standard of living increase you get vs renting an apartment across the street from where you work. One choice is to work 10 hours a week less. The other choice is to have three times the house, live in a good school district, and have neighbors of a similar socio-economic background with similar values (as in I like not having to lock my car at night).
The simple fact of the matter is that people like to have some elbow room. Its unreasonable to say "all you people, just cram together here because it makes things easier". A better solution is to have better mass transit, and a lot more telecommuting.
In Washington, DC, as in everywhere else I've lived in this country, the electric rates are scaled:
..and it continues to level off at that point, but they _do_ make it much more painful as you approach 1000kwh, which is effectively running 1388 watts 24/7 -- basically, an airconditioner, a lamp, a television and a computer or something. I had two roommates who did this, running up electric bills in the $250 range. After they left, my next month's bill was $6.97. After that, the only thing I leave running now is my server. I got the message from that pricing model...loud and clear.
Minimum of $2.96 for 30kwh.
60kwh=$5.74 (1.93x of 30)
120kwh=$11.28 (1.96x of 60)
240kwh=$22.39 (1.98x of 120)
480kwh=$53.52 (2.39x of 240)
960kwh=$151.48 (2.83x of 480)
1920kwh=$347.40 (2.29x of 960)
Anybody else who objects is simply echoing the fears which were fed to them by coal lobbyists.
Ooh, ohh, let me try too:
"Anybody who disagrees with me is merely posessed by Satan and needs to be burned at the stake, as demonstrated by the fact that they disagree with me!".
Wow, cool!
sudo ergo sum
It was always the long term intention of government to price people out of cars and on to public transport.
My guess is that the US does not do this because we have a fairly substantial automobile manufacturing industry. They probably have a powerful enough lobby, with plenty of bribes/campaign contributions to keep those kinds of policies from being enacted here.
Of course, it's not like they actually produce much here any more, and they have a bad history with public transportation (eg buying up subway lines in LA and scrapping them before the could even be put into use).
Ah! Another cynic. Welcome!
Of course, if you were a real cynic you would add the suffix "...for the time being". ;-)
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
The parent post is quite ignorant - on par with those who modded it up. Fossil means "form old organic material". None of the nuclear fuels is fossil in any whay. Nuclear energy is not a chemical at all. The "governments don't last forever" argument is no less ignorant - governments and social order form everywhere there are people. Until there are people - there will be social order. Nuclear power plans can make that order only better, cleaner and more proserous.
Sorry, but your viewpoint seems Pollyannish to me. Just because we "haven't" had any major disruptions in a while doesn't mean that we won't.
And BTW, the "manufactured" disruption in the 70s was a disruption none-the-less, the root cause economic in nature (as I mentioned).
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
It's easy to change everyone's lifestyle. "Run out" of oil, price of gas goes to $20/liter. Everyone's lifestyle changes.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE CLOSE TO WORK. Hear me scream this. I FUCKING HATE THE COMMUTE. I make really good money, but I live in a suburban ghetto because it's what I can afford while living within my means. Real estate in D.C. is insane, and what I *can* afford is the time it takes to commute, not a $500k one-bedroom condo within walking distance of the office. Sure it's soul-sucking and frustrating and stupid, but the money just isn't there to change it.
For example, you could more double the effective MPG of 18 wheelers by changing the regulations that limit them so heavily (pun intended) to rather light loads.
Your analysis of just increasing the load size of semis is simplistic. First, some current statistics. Every state in the US has a maximum gross vehicle weight of 80,000 lbs without a permit. A tractor weighs in around 17,000 lbs. Leaving 63,000 for fuel, trailer, and load.
Ok, adding an axle to carry more weight; axles are generally rated at 20,000 (including the weight of the axle), so for 110,000 you would need to add 2 axles. Most likely one to the tractor and one to the trailer. A third axle reduces maneuverability and increases tire scuff (wear). You could use tag axles, but that would increase the weight of the axle assembly and would only help when you are under 80,000 lbs. On top of that, the tractors are designed to pull 80,000. To pull 110,000 they would need a heavier frame and stronger drive train. You could get by with the heavier weight for a short time, but you'd pay for it in maintenance later on.
Then of course there are the road issues. Unless you extend the length of the trucks, adding extra axles doesn't efficiently distribute the weight. Think about bridge spans that are designed for 34,000 lb tandems that are 35' apart. And the fact that our national infrastructure is already severely neglected.
Then of course there is the issue that a lot of cargo is not weight constrained, it is limited by size. Do we want it to be the norm that semis are pulling double 53s or triple pups? Already highway safety advocates are looking to federally freeze semis at current state limits. It could be a big fight to get them increased.
http://www.saferoads.org/issues/fs-trucks.htm
BTW, if those trucks you mention are only getting 5 mpg, they should probably consider newer rigs or check their driver's habits. 7 mpg should be possible without changing their loads.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
Whenever there's a suburban vs. urban lifestyle debate, I need to ask the question: Do you have kids?
Maybe we should get rid of the tax incentives for reproducing too...
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
That is what our deserts are for. Nevada would be a great dumping ground.
Greenpeace's hysterical antics have given all environmentalists a bad name, and their "report" on an issue as emotionally charged as nuclear power is say, about as reliable as a Bush administration "report" on global warming.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In Oregon they charge $.05 per can when you buy drinks. When you recycle them, you get the money back. No net loss or gain for anyone, just a motivation to recycle! Stores that sell drinks are required to take back the aluminum for the deposit, so they have a slight burden--but I think most states already require such a system be available.
People apparently need this kind of feedback more often--why would any state not execute such a program?
Couldn't we also extend this to other wasteful products? For one thing, studded tires absolutely destroy roads--they appear to triple the number of times a heavily traveled highway must be redone. Why isn't that extra maintenance put into a studded-tire tax?
Companies that wish to deal with oil products should be paying to make the environment EXACTLY as clean as it would be without them--the price would obviously be reflected in the price of gas--fine.
And why aren't we building residential areas with embedded services? The areas I've seen that tried to do this have been fantastically popular! The ability to live within walking distance of a downtown area raises the price of a house significantly--including the little down-towns that include residence/storefront combo buildings.
The point my parent made about electricity is also fantastic. Companies are so interested in squeezing every last penny out of their pricing curves that they cannot see the advantage in pricing in a way that actually encourages conservation.
All these things are just one step away--what do they need? LAWS!
STOP saying that the government should not interfere in business--it's the ONLY thing they should interfere with! Stop saying that capitalism will make everything perfect if just left alone--that is a stupid, immature and uninformed fantasy created to justify greed. Wake up and watch how people really act (in the real world) instead of living in your little dream world of how people "Would be" if just left alone to their greed.
Try 'business casual' dress while riding 30 miles on a bike.
I'm just one of those guys that sweats when the temp goes above 80, let alone when wearing dress pants, and a long sleeved collared shirt.
It's not because I'm fat either. At 12% bodyfat and in the gym 6 days a week (I bodybuild), I'm actually a decent picture of health.
Here's an interesting link about the pollution issues coming to AZ this year because of our now 140-days-without-any-rain drought - Cleaner air on the way? Don't hold your breath
I'd love the extra cardio from riding a bike, but when the temperature is about to hit 115+ degrees here in Arizona within a matter of months, it's so HOT (you can actually feel your body being directly affected by the direct heat) that doing anything short of dumping ice in your pants won't help.
We have the light rail as well as some other transit options coming, and Tempe is pretty bike-friendly, but unless the companies we work for that demand us to dress a certain way, get there by a certain time, etc. modify things, we're stuck doing the best we can to get out of our house in time to get to work on time.
Less Talk. More Stab.
You've hit the nail on the head with this one: We produce more than enough food for everyone, and we haven't even come close to using all available land.
Wait until the oil runs out - our amount of arable land will almost certainly drop.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Anywhere near where I work this is all you see. When the normal monthly rate in halfway decent areas is about 800/month for an apartment - there's no reason a person who has educated themselves as much as you should have to shelter next to the 10 illegals living next door for 40/month each because it's all they can afford.
I have nothing against living next to folks who are poorer than dirt, except for the fact that all of a sudden, my 8 year old 19" tv starts looking like a Lexus to them. I bust my arse as is, my kids deserve a better life.
Less Talk. More Stab.
Coal is as greenhouse neutral as any other method of digging and burning/reacting if you sequester the carbon. And I don't mean by growing trees around the plant, I mean deep injection. The CO2 can pretty readily be fixed into carbonates that aren';t going anywhere. The yield of energy is less becaause some of the energy you release in burning has to be used in the injection. But, its not that much more expensive than solar.
If power is "cheap" anymore, its because its bad for the environment. Consumers are sucking up a doubling in gasoline and natural gas prices just fine. We're living proof. We can pay more for power that sequesters carbon, and gets us over the hump to truely renewable.
I reject nuclear out of sanity concerns, not environmental.
Hello? Anybody there? Have you BEEN to Tokyo? The sky is PURPLE at night - Purple! They have great mass transit-no doubt. People use stuff and create waste. Guess what we do to make insulation? Use energy. How about ride a bike to work? Eat more food because we burn more calories. There is always a trade off.
Am I trying to say that know the answer? No, but I AM saying that in a high energy society there will be a cost for using that energy which is in the creation of heat and by-products both of which would not have otherwise been created in a low-energy society. If you don't like it, move out to the woods, live in a earthen home, hunt and gather to supplement farming your own land (which you bought with your own money - which was made likely from the use of ENERGY.)
The solution to this environmental problem is not social.
It clearly is social. If it weren't social, it wouldn't matter to us all that much -- since when have we cared about the physical being of the earth (where it doesn't affect us)? Frankly, technological change is a huge social movement. This means that the people in charge of R+D and the people going to college for degrees in the sciences have to be concerned with THIS problem. My point here is, instead of being a society geared towards war (which, realistically, we are right now... you can see the effects in our economics. See: 1940's), we may end up having to be an energy/efficiency-geared society. This type of strong obediance for a cause can only be done by actually having the greater population putting it on their priority list.
While gradual changes, such as people using 10% less here and there may not seem like the change we need, it is definitely a substantial part. Solutions are rarely and infrequently based on 1 particular aspect. Coupled with technological advances (which _will_ require massive social recognition of the problem) and basic conservation (let's try to be a little less of the "consume, consume, consume" variety, I swear we can do it), I think these problems are solvable. Only time will really tell.
Oh, and a good analogy: A company that invests 100% in R+D and comes out with a great product is rarely profitable or successful. A company that cuts costs and becomes efficient in an industry they have no vested interest in is rarely successful. A company that combines efficiency and order with a strong product will become very successful. See where I'm going with this?
Ethanol does not come straight from the field; it requires considerable inputs to grow the crop, and more to turn it into liquid fuel. The average EROEI that I've seen for ethanol from today's sources is 1.34:1; the most optimistic is 1.67:1. Further, about 20% of the energy in a gallon of E85 is from petroleum. Summing that up, you've got:
- 0.15 gallon of gasoline per gallon E-85
- Of the 0.6 gallons-gasoline-equivalent of ethanol in the
.85 gallons of ethanol, between .36 and .48 gallons-equivalent is from fossil fuels (petroleum, coal and natural gas).
Your total fossil energy per gallon of E85:Sustainability and energy independence essay
And that oil is declining. Cantarell (Mexico's biggest field) has peaked. Kuwait's biggest field has peaked. Even Ghawar has peaked (and if you don't know what that that means, you don't know enough to expound on this subject). A million barrels a day from Alberta tar sands will offset a whole 5% decline in other US sources. Big whoop. Even if it pays off, you still have to replace most of that oil with something else.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
You're so right. And as we all know, there are no socio-economic or physical limitations imposed by reality that will force people to do something they'd rather not do. That's why everyone on earth has the lifestyle they want.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
If only I hadn't used all my points yesterday, I'd mod you up so fast you wouldn't know what had hit you.
Why?
Because he thinks nuclear energy comes from fossil fuels!?
Because he thinks a few nuclear waste sites represent a greater threat to future generations than unspent uranium lying around in unused ICBMs!?
Because he's worried that solar energy will cook us to death!?
Oh... I get it. You mean you would mod him up "+1, Funny."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
We do need to do something about climate change. There are even things we can do in the short term; if a single volcanic eruption can lower global temperatures by 0.6 C and bring sea levels down by half a centimeter (Pinatubo), humanity's far greater output of things like sulfur can probably reproduce this if we only use them to best effect. Once we've slowed the Greenland glaciers back to their normal speed and prevented the Siberian peat bogs from thawing and belching gigatonnes of methane, we'll have time to work on the rest of the problem.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
OK, but why sneer at methods of conservation?
I'm doing no such thing.
I'm sneering at the laughable idea that conservation efforts can prevent us from needing to expand power-generation by leaps and bounds over the next 50 years.
If you are in the camp which believes that burning fossil fuels is hurting our environment right now, then you need to wake up to the fact that, unless we turn to renewable power in a big way (and nuclear power in an even bigger way), we're going to end up burning exponentially more dead dinosaurs in the near future.
Remembering to turn the hallway light off when you go to bed is a good idea, but it's not going to change the reality of the situation.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Scrubbers and CO2 injectors make coal burning less dirty (I stop short of ever calling it "clean"), but you still gotta rape the environment to get it out of the ground in any useful quantity.
Also, the reason why coal is so popular as an electrical fuel is because it's so cheap.
Make it "not that much more expensive than solar" (when solar is one of the most expensive methods per watt), and it suddenly has zero advantages over other systems (apart from lining the pockets of coal mine investors and coal mining labor union bosses, that is.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Then there's solar. The US has about 113,000 km^2 of impervious surface (pavement, roofs, etc.). If you can cover 30% of this with PV, the PV has 15% efficiency and the average insolation is 1300 kWh/m^2/year (somewhat less than mid-Kansas gets), that would be 44.1 trillion kWH of sunlight from which you'd get 6.61 trillion kWh of electricity (755 GW average). That's another 2.5 kW/capita just from 30% of area we've already got covered with stuff, and you're getting it net after conversion losses.
Reducing per-capita energy to 500 watts might be an interesting thought experiment, but as a prediction of the future... ridiculous.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Is riding to work on a bicycle rather than going to the gym a reduction in lifestyle?
If you don't want to ride your bike to work then yes.
Is eating a shared meal with your neighbours rather than eating in some fast food joint halfway across town a reduction in lifestyle?
If you don't want to eat a shared meal with neaighbors then yes.
Is picking fruit from your own tree rather than buying from a supermarket a reductionin lifestyle?
If you don't like eating the same kind of fruit every day then yes.
See where I am going with this yet?
"Personally, I don't think you could ever do anything more then punish the poor with a large gas tax. Rich people will be more then happy to pay a few extra bucks a month to remain in their suburban homes and not be stacked up in expensive and claustrophobic apartment complexes. The poor on the other hand will simply be taxed so severely that they will not be able to afford to use cars."
It may be true that a gas tax is regressive just like any sales tax, but there is a huge amount of slack and inefficiency in the way passenger cars are used. Gas is cheap enough that even lower middle class workers can afford to buy big trucks as fashion statements. You can halve fuel costs by driving a small car instead of a truck. You can save a lot of trips by combining shopping trips in one area instead of driving all over town checking out the different sales or driving 70 miles to an outlet mall.
Also, the cost of fuel is a small fraction of the costs of owning a car. 10,000 mi a year at 20 mpg and $2.50/gal is $1,250 per year. How does that compare to the cost of financing/depreciation on a new car, repairs/maintenance on an old car, insurance, registration, and the risk of fender-benders and traffic tickets? If gas is more expensive (either through taxes or market forces), poor people on the low end might be priced out of driving, but everyone else could still buy a cheaper car and keep on driving.
There are plenty of quick fixes to CO2 and energy, if we want to take them. As usual, it's government that is preventing a lot of the solutions Here's one approach:
Revise zoning laws: Stop forcing the building of commercial buildings all in one area - spread them out. Eliminate the foolish prohibitions on commercial or high-rise buildings - let them mix freely. For a few decades, reverse the current zoning approach, by only allowing new commercial construction in an area that is less than 20% commercial (after the new construction is complete). Include floor area, not just ground surface area - so if someone wants to build a high rise corporate tower, they have to pair it with an even larger high rise residential complex, or split the highrise into commercial and residential floors.
Show me a wind farm that produces emissions
Show me a state other than South Dakota which has enough wind to meet the power needs of its population.
(Note: South Dakota is very windy, has few people, and is only using wind for part of their power needs... and even there, people are bitching about all the windmills which are now scattered all over their landscape.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
STOP saying that the government should not interfere in business--it's the ONLY thing they should interfere with!
You must not own a business.
There is more to a good workout than just burning calories. Building huge muscle mass is not it either. A balance of the two is the best way to get into shape along with a good diet. But this is an entirely different discussion.
http://www.serendipity.li/fe/ch_car_bomb.htm says Today's 6.3 billion human beings have around 775 million motor vehicles to fuel, repair, park and run, almost exclusively using petroleum and natural gas.
The recent loss off 12 coal miners in West Virginia was tragic, but what the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existance of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.72 persons.)
Regardless of what TFA says, nuclear power could solve global warming; if all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Even if 100% of gym users switched to riding a bike, what percent of the world goes to the gym? What percent of these users work close enough to home to ride a bike? Not to mention that the cardio/leg workout of riding a bike does not equal the other stuff available at a gym.
:)
It's not how many people go to the gym, but how many need to get exercise that counts.
Then, how may people drive "across" town to eat fast food. No, people drive "across" town to eat good food. Fast food is gotten around the corner for convenience. Both of which are often done with neighbors/friends
Even driving 5km is a long way energetically. Try riding 5km some time. Then think how often you drive that distance without thinking.
How many people have the property/climate to grown their own fruit? Yeah, those city dwellers are screwed.
Everyone of my neighbours has at least a lemon tree or apple tree. I live in the middle of the burbs. Perhaps by city dweller you mean people in high rise apartments? You're probably right, those are a bad idea.
It sounds like you've got some throw-away lines too.
No, my lines are 100% recyclable.
As an aside, one of the first things I noticed on my first trip into Canada (I took Greyhound) was the axle count on trucks once across the border. Dump trucks everywhere sported four axles (two steering, two drive), and semis regularly appeared with trailers equipped with 3 and four axles. Makes one wonder how you turn a corner with all those axles. And not just van trailers, I saw bulk commodity trailers, tankers and dump trailers with 3 and 4 axles (as well as triple-axle 20-foot container trailers). I always chalked it up to lower axle load ratings on Canadian highways, but I never got a real answer as to why centipede-like trailers are so commonplace there.
Not that it means much, but I've noticed a growing number of 4-axle dump trucks/ cement mixers here in the US (mostly a retractable 4th axle which I'm told is for additional traction in mud or snow). And Shell seems to have adopted triple axles on its newest "V-Power" tanker trailers as well.
---PCJ
Going nuclear at least buys us some time.
Or allows us to become complacent again?
One would think so, but...
From http://www.nycroads.com/roads/fdr/
"A TERMITE PROBLEM:
With the improvement of ecological conditions along the East River, a new menace has emerged. Millions of tiny marine borers, or "sea termites," are feeding on the wooden pilings that support parts of the FDR Drive, threatening its stability. The engineering firm Parsons Brinckeroff has been commissioned to determine the extent of the damage caused by the marine borers. According to state and city transportation officials, most pilings will likely require installation of a plastic shrink wrap to suffocate the pests. More seriously damaged pilings will require the construction of concrete sleeves to cover them. Nevertheless, officials believe that the FDR Drive is safe and not in imminent danger of collapse."
Who'da thunk it?
(Only reason I knew about marine borers is that I'm a member of a trolley museum located next to a salt marsh, that had to lay out a pile of $$$ to wrap the pilings on a couple of their trestles to stave off borer-induced deterioration)
---PCJ
That is the general experience, yes. You need to make sure that the people doing the production are knowledgable, but knowledge transfer is something we can do efficiently and cheaply. The nice thing is that it isn't necessary - it's easy for a farmer to produce a large excess without additional external energy or labour with areas as big as an acre of two. This could feed 100 people. So only 1% of the population needs to be farmers.
Our planet's soils are being eroded at a phenominal rate with intensive fossil fuel driven farming practices. The average soil loss over kansas is 3m in the last 100 years. When the soils and cheap fertilizers and the diesel tractors disappear, what are we going to do?
That's probably my biggest concern about peak oil. We can produce some fertilizers using coal, and I read a report last night that suggested that it would be more efficient to just use brown coal as a soil builder than than to burn it.
I've lived in several countries now, in various places within those countries.
.... Still waiting to find out how the mango's taste.
Wanna know how many times I ran into someone with a fruit tree in there yard?
Once....
Wanna know how many times he picked the fruit to eat?
oogly boogly!
The whole of the south of England, rural and otherwise, has train stations dotted all over and decnet bus services too. Sure there may be places where the village has only one bus, but if there are then they're WAAAAAY out in the remote areas of cornwall, wales or scotland. The south of England has a viable urban/suburban/rural transport network and is in no way uniformly dense like London.
I think there's a few things keeping the US from doing the same in metropolitn areas like LA - Cost, disturbance and love of cars. This "It could never work" crap is just that last one there, love of cars and refusal to contemplate a change, manifesting itself as denial.
Fascinating, yet all my neighbours have fruit trees. All my neighbours in my previous house also had fruit trees. MY collegues says he has a peach tree overhanging his yard. You must have had a strange selection of places to live (perhaps you always lived in an apartment or something - heck even my friends who live in downtown bristol have fruit trees in their apartment garden). My parents and their neighbours had fruit trees.
I think it might be fair to say that there is a lemon tree within 100m of every house in Melbourne.
First, I was talking about Britain's electricity supply, but I'll bite and use the USA.
Wiki States that 2004 US wind capacity was 9,149 MW.
Nuclear Power's been stable for a while.
Nuclear power capacity is 99,210 MW
However, this doesn't show the whole figure. In the case of the wind turbines, this is the amount of power produced under ideal conditions. For nuclear power, this is it's maximum safe/standard power generation.
The term for what percentage of maximum the plant actually produces is called "Capacity Factor". For nuclear plants, this is 91%
Wind seems to be around 30%-35%
(Note: One of the sites quotes nuclear at 71%, that's for the UK, not USA)
This means that Nuclear power has an effective capacity of 90,281 MW, while Wind only has 2,745-3,202MW. That means that Nuclear is producing 28 times as much power as wind. That means that it'd take wind a decade of doubling every 2.3 years to even catch up with nuclear. It also assumes that construction ramps up evenly for the next decade. It also means, that at least for 2004, a mere 4% increase in nuclear capacity would equal the increase in wind.
A nuclear power plant, from time of groundbreaking, only takes 5-7 years to build. There's actually a few new generators, built on existing sites, as well as refurbished plants that had either been shut down or had construction stopped before they came online that should come up by 2010.
I don't read AC A human right
Your post is a good counterpoint, I've had to think about it a bit. But I think you are only right due to cultural assumptions.
The same argument might be used with: Is stopping throwing litter out the window rather than enjoying oneself a reduction in lifestyle? How about the choice to drive a large SUV, which increases danger to others in smaller cars?
My original statement was definitely too strong[1], but society creates implicit rules about what is and isn't a reasonable way to go about life. I am suggesting that we could change these rules without losing the good bit about civilisation. Refusing to change ones habits is as much a choice as changing.
p.s. fruit trees rarely fruit all year round, I like the fact that as the seasons move my choice of fruit and veggies changes. New season's apples are so much nicer than apples stored for 6 months.
[1] On slashdot, if you want people to listen to an alternative viewpoint you often need to be bold in your claims.
I question how YOU got modded "insightful." You didn't refute a thing I said, you just drew question to it without making any argument at all. Then you added a punchline - wow! If that's what it takes to get modded "insightful" no wonder my post got 40% overrated!
Well shucks, I still don't have a punchline.
Wait.. how's this? I never said solar energy would cook us - I said exogenous solar energy - that "beamed in from space" via those imaginary "free energy" powerplants that get bandied about form time to time - would only help cook us. You think it's funny? I suggest you take a minute to engage in logical thought: our planet gets a certain amount of energy from the sun based upon the atmosphere, the size of the planet, and the orbit of the planet relative to the sun. If you beam in more power from space, even if it's just a giant mirror concentrating sunlight on a solar collector in the australian outback, you are introducing new solar energy that we would not otherwise have in this atmosphere - it's no different at all than if we just put giant rocket motors on one side of the planet and nudged it a little closer to the sun.
Nuclear materials have been stored in the ground and naturally decay over millenia. We are taking these reserves from under the ground and releasing that stored energy into out atmosphere over decades. That heat constributes to a spike in global atmospheric temperature. How much? I'm not going to make any claims because I don't care to engage in such sophisticated mathematical studies and I'm not going to make assertions without having done so. Note that I may be alone in this, however, since some of our residents seem well prepared to pull virtually any "fact" out of their butts and peddle it on our neighborhood e-corner.
Cattle farts and decaying plant matter contribute enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses. In fact, if you will study your natural history you will see this mentioned as a contributing factor to the global tropical climate that fostered the enormous plant life we now find in fossils. The plants might balance out in the end, but the cattle populations are unnaturally inflated by all that cattle farming. Again, if you will look around you will find some numbers based on scientific evaluation that make clear the contribution by cattle farming to our global heatwave is not trivial.
ICBMs are also a tremendous problem. But making nuclear energy a socially acceptable energy source only makes it that much harder to deny such socially acceptable development opportunities to underfed countries around the world... this is exactly the argument Iran is making now. So what do we do? Tell them to burn all that oil themselves instead of using nuclear energy? How does that help lower greenhouse gas emissions?
Yeah, I remember taking Data Structures sophomore year...
Nobody is telling people to give up their automobiles except for a handful of people who want to save the planet. How popular do you think congressmen who vote to eliminate SUVs would be?
Unless someone can get this whole Zero Point thing working reliably.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Let's see... a power source "too relentless" ... Sounds like dependable to me. Most of today's energy is derived in one form or another of fire. Geo-thermal energy Hydro generation Wind, Solar all appear to be environmentally safer than fossil fuel or coal. We need to be aggressively exploring all opportunities to get us off the fossil fuel teat-
Mark W
(quick computation shows that with approx. 500 billion square kilometers of solar panels running at 50% efficiency you could (theoretically) generate enough power to make the whole earth glow brighter than the sun)
;)). Radius of the sun is ~695,000km. Radius of the each is ~6,300km. So the sun's radius is 110 times that of the Earth. The Sun's area is therefore ~12,000 times the Earth's, so you would need to capture 1/12000th of the Sun's energy to make the Earth "glow like the sun". The surface area of the sun is 6 * 10^12 km^2, so if you placed the panels right on the surface of the sun, you'd need 500 million km^2 to do the job (less than your calc, but the temperatures are pretty hard to work with in there). If you (ever so slightly more realistically) placed it on the same orbit around the sun as earth, then it would have a radius of 1AU (150 million km). A shell around the sun at that distance (picking up 100% of its energy), would be 282 * 10^15 km^2. To get only the energy we need at that distance, you would need 23.5 * 10^12 km^2 of 100% efficient solar panels. That's a lot.
That's a hell of a lot of solar panels though. By my calculations, the "surface area" of a shell at 30,000km radius is only 15 billion square kilometers. To put such a panel in orbit around the earth, it needs to be 200,000km altitude, and it would put the entire earth in shadow (not to mention the fact that it would cast a shadow on itself). That's not a very effective way of building it though.
I wouldn't mind seeing how you got your numbers, too (I suspect you may have made it up
A good friend of mine who was an officer in the US Navy on a sub told me that sailors on the deck of an aircraft carrier get more radiation over the course of a year than a reactor officer on a sub.
He also told me that people who fly on commercial airliners get an even greater dose than either groups because because of their altitude.
Libertas in infinitum
Find someplace where the magma layer is relatively shallow that's relatively near a coastline, and drill a tunnel in the shape of a U, with one end under the water and the other exiting into a steam turbine. Make the depth of the tunnel (bottom of the "U") deep enough to heat the water to boiling. Inlet water pressure and/or a one way flow mechanism would ensure the steam is forced to exit through the turbine.
Voila, electricity with a bonus of desalinated water!
Obviously there would be issues to deal with such as drilling in such a hot environment and the salt/impurities of the water, but these seem managable. For such a simple concept, IMO it bears at least some idle ./ speculation.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
As James Lovelock will tell you, its not to combat pollution, it is already too late, it is necessary to build a lot of powerplants to generate the necessary energy when the poles melt and water rises 8 meters, flooding many areas around the world. Which he says will happen within the next 100 years.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, North Dakota, Montana, probably Minnesota.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The direct route is down the highway. If I took a bike-friendly route it would be much longer than 15 miles
Which leads to the next rhetorical question:
Why are there so few bike routes?
In smaller communities, 30,40,50-something adults in the rest of the world still walk/ride bicycles to work [several miles too!]...
Local roads are often cut/sealed for highways and interstates... They easily could add a bike path (far enough away) that would enjoy a direct route without car intersections, etc...
Yes, this may not be realistic for old parts of cities and downtown areas... But look at the new construction... In the suburbs... Are things being done differently? Are they planning ahead and putting walking trails and bike paths that could be useful for more than just a Sunday stroll?
No.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
You're wrong!
Canada's first nuculeer accident happened in Chalk River Ontario, somewhat upstream from Ottawa, and produced there an even more deadly mutant than the lovely Celine!
Had Jimmy Carter done his cleanup job properly on that one, the aforementioned deadly mutant would not have terrorized Las Vegas for decades to come!
I wouldn't mind seeing how you got your numbers, too (I suspect you may have made it up ;)
It's not made up - it was actually quite similar to what you did. The error was apparently caused by my inability to correctly count digits when there's more than 10 of them (only so many fingers...)
The exact number was 23629256830885km^2 - that's 23.6e12 (if I counted correctly this time), almost the same with what you got. The "approx. 500" figure is because I multiplied the result by two (50% efficiency) and rounded to get a nice looking number.
And yes, that's a lot of solar panels.
> Unfortunately, "society" has too many idiots and greedy businessmen for this to change anytime soon.
:)
You left out politicians and their political parties who are only focused on the short term (staying in power).
> We seem to try to live as far apart as possible, as far from work, school, etc as possible... Just imagine how much time we could save doing more useful stuff
Hmmm...I live 12K's (around 7.4miles) from work and am happy to ride my bike (aside from avoiding idiots driving around SMS'ing each other), but doesn't leave me any more time to do useful stuff, and anyway, here I am with some time on my hand...reading slashdot
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion
Congratulations. A sane voice on slashdot. You must be new here... ;)
This comment does not exist.
North Dakota has fewer people than South Dakota, but it is also a lot less windy.
Every other state you mentioned has a much bigger population... AND is less windy.
Add to that the fact land in several of those states is much more expensive. You gotta put those windmills somewhere.
If they can't cover 100% of their power needs with wind in South Dakota, then they can't in any of those states either.
Where do you get the bizarre idea that objective reality cares who gets elected?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Where do you get the idea that you're going to find a congressman who wants to do what you're saying?
Your current job is not the only thing you could get paid to do. Nobody's forcing you to live or work in D.C., which is a rather expensive place to live. There are plenty of places where the cost of living is *much* lower.
You said "I can't afford to live close to work", but what you really meant was "I can't afford to live close to my current job, and I refuse to work anywhere else". Guess what, wise guy: if enough people do that, you end up with high property values for the people who want to live nearby, and long commutes for the people who want cheaper property. You're getting exactly what you would expect, given your behavior, multiplied by a bunch of people.
It's not money you need; it's the ability to consider that you have more control over your life than just the one axis.
Thanks for the link. There's no authorative reference in there, but it does the match the figures that I found from a google. The main point in the article is quite interesting - that while we have fairly good population figures for humans there is no definite figure for the number of cars. I guess that your 750mil figure was fairly accurate after all... ;^)
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
1 in 10 sounds reasonable, I think.
1. Solar energy (direct: sunlight to electricity) seems to be most elegant but without deep analysis of environmental costs of mass production of solar cells (still rather toxis Selenium technology is used?) to "cover whole Montana to power whole world". 2. Most realistic is the present (until controlled fusion is developped) "Uranium" power plant. Fears are just magic taboo thinking by ignorant masses. They stopped fearing devils, ghosts, the plague, flying saucers, etc. so they have to fear something else, be it the atom, bird-flu, cancer-tomato... How many people died as result of nuclear power accidents, apart from - e.g. - falling down the stairs inside a power plant? Apart from the monkeys-and-hand-grenade Chernobyl disaster - probably zero. Scientist Slocum died when his scredriver slipped while screwing together semi-spheres of Uranium in a lab the early days, still earlier Madam Curie, and???? I worked at a reactor, so I know a little... Three-Mile-Island plant? Apparently not a gram of radioactive stuff got out from the containment. And coal miners are dying by tens or even hundreds each week. This year already some 30 in Poland and in China? how many thousands?? And how about pollution that we all breathe? Oil/gas? How many decades will it last, even with ever newly-found but ever more expensive to pump-out deposits? And inevitable conflicts with Arabs, Russians getting filthy rich but getting deeper and deeper into the trap of being a raw-resorces-country, numbers reducing so there'll be just 70 mil. of them in 60 yrs - OK, but Islamists will get them first and we, the Weestern civilisation will have Iraq/Afganistan from Poland to Bering Straits...
You can feed electricity from places like Iowa to Illinois and the Dakotas to Minnesota and Wisconsin relatively easily.
Even in "urban" states, there's often plenty of farmland. Farmers love wind-turbine operators; they can get $2000 a year rent for a 1/4 acre pad, which is ten times as much as they might gross on the whole acre next to it. South Dakota can cover 26% of the electricity demand of the whole freaking country. Texas can cover 30%. Montana has aboutTime is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT LONDON. I'M TALKING ABOUT THE WHOLE OF THE SOUTHERN UK.
We have a good train network over the whole of the UK, especially the south. Yeah, sure, we have a subway system and more buses as you get into London, but THE WHOLE OF THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND HAS A MORE THAN ADEQUATE PUBLIC TRANSPORT SYSTEM. IF YOU THINK THE WHOLE OF THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND IS MORE DENSE THAN LA THEN YOU ARE RETARDED.
I agree that political will to actually do anything about CO2 emissions is weak in the US and that the momentum of change is probably up to the levels where Bad Stuff is gonna happen regardless. (Dare I raise the ghost of NOLA at this point? Probably not wise, as I don't mean to be taken to be asserting that the hurricanes were 'caused by anthropogenic global warming', which I don't.)
My point is not that congresscritters will or won't do various things. My point is that it's not going to not happen because the Beltway droids are mostly in this or that camp. If US emissions were to fall at some wild rate like 10% in the next 10 years this might have some marginal effect, but that's not what I'd call serious action anyway. I just strongly suspect that at some point in the next few years an American president is going to do an unexpected address to the nation along the lines of Bill Gates' famous "I was completely wrong" memos in 1997(?) and 2003 (the former being the "hey this internet thing is pretty big news, huh?", the latter being "Crap, we're losing customers because our security's so shit." )
I just checked back the original comment I replied to. I agree with you that the droids don't want to lose their jobs, and therefore they won't start taking those unpopular decisions until some grotesque level of *visible*, and "intuitively obvious" AGW effects are seen in Texas and Iowa and Kansas. Waiting to see what level of catastrophe it will take to get through to those people makes for a rather horrible spectator sport. FWIW, I personally predict it won't be the price of gas or auto taxes that does it - it'll be the first 'event' that stops TV for a day or two. (Whether it be power failures or electricity costs or some huge production number "911 for climate" type event with thousands of people dead...) What scares me is the thought that all it would take to flip much of the US into a Mad Max / Escape from New York style collapse of civil society, really, is a few horrible catastrophes within a short space of time. Imagine a big CA earthquake with significant loss of life but (importantly) massive infrastructure damage. Bang goes the world economy. China calls in the national debt, snuffing the remaining US economy. Stir in tons of weapons, apparently widespread belief in a millenarian, supernaturalist interventionist god, very weak social structures, the widespread mass poverty that's already out there, survivalists, fundamentalists, embittered ex-military,... it could get really shitty :(
I don't think this scenario is very likely to happen. Say, a 5% chance over the next five decades. But would you get on a plane that had a 5% chance of crashing?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Nukes are the quick fix.
;) ...
/. editors. Then again, maybe in general /. nerds aren't interested in real solutions as opposed to "quick fix" hyped toys. I honestly don't know. I know some are at least, and that's a better ratio than in the mainstream press.
The more you use the quicker the problem of energy consumption goes away. We could solve the world's energy problems in about 30 minutes. That's about the time it would take to launch a full-scale first strike and trigger a full-scale retaliation strike and have them both hit their targets. Eliminate 90% of the population and infrastructure and *boom*, no more massive demand for energy and oil.
And most of us wouldn't feel a thing.
Obviously that's a whole lotta sarcasm up there. Obviously there is no quick fix that doesn't involve an event of such magnitude. But there are a lot of *solutions*, as those of us who work on these things know. In a way it's sad that most of the real science and good stuff in this field generally doesn't or wouldn't get approved by by the
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
You're way behind the times; they already do. The US burns about 9 million barrels/day of motor gasoline out of a hair over 20 million total.
Setting aside the question of why you drive a Suburban while touting light SUV-class stuff (hypocrisy?), the SUV form factor is inherently draggier than a car. The same powerplant technologies that can make a 40 MPG SUV can make an 80 MPG car. You know, like the Daimler-Chrysler ESX3, the GM ParadiGM and the Ford whateveritwas.
Done long before you ever thought to ask. (More here).
Take it from the horse's mouth: 2005 ethanol production was only ~4 billion gallons. Production this year isn't even projected to reach 6 billion gallons.
I've read The Billion-Ton Vision. It projects a whole 10% of transportation fuels will come from biomass in 2020 (see the sidebar in the first page of the introduction, page 18).
How many people can actually use E85 when ethanol is only 10% of transportation fuel? That's the proof that the whole flex-fuel vehicle thing is a scam. The auto companies are getting CAFE credits for guzzling monsters that can run on E85, without there being enough ethanol to run more than a small fraction of them.
Production of ethanol loses about 50% of the energy right off the top; it disappears into the process either as metabolic losses of the yeast or process heat in hydrolization or distillation. That's energy that can be used productively if you aren't wedded to the idea of using liquid fuels. There are other ways to use biomass, such as carbonization. Direct-carbon fuel cells (a variant of molten-carbonate fuel cells) can convert charcoal to electricity at up to 80% efficiency, and the off-gas from carbonization is combustible and can run engines. With a scheme like that, you can do a lot more than just offset some fraction of oil consumption; you can:
Ethanol is a very lossy way of making biomass suitable for even lossier internal combustion engines. It's a dead end.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Nuclear energy... can go head to head with oil and natural gas for cost effective power plants.
This is only true if you use accounting systems rooted in early 20th century manufacturing models, that don't look at the costs of handling long term waste.
The costs of Yucca Mountain are known and could be factored in-- except that YM will only store a fraction of the LTW that is already in temporary storage. Considering the difficulty in finding the YM site, all that can be said right now is that burying LTW is going to be so expensive that it probably will never be used for all the currently existing LTW, let alone future needs.
Other LTW solutions are blue sky at this point. Nobody knows the engineering for vitrification with deep ocean storage and no sane person would even consider using our current state of rocket science to move this stuff off earth.
To use an apt pseudo-accounting phrase that Microsoft introduced a while back, the Total Cost of Ownership of fission power technology is astronomical, with post production costs many times greater than production and distribution costs.
While fission power appears to be the only viable short term answer, it is not going to be a good solution and it will generate long term waste storage problems that are in many ways much worse than global warming.
I'm going on vacation and this thread will be closed by the time I get back. Feel free to have the last word.
Sustainability and energy independence essay