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Giant Snake-Shaped Generators Could Capture Wave Power
Roland Piquepaille writes "UK researchers have developed a prototype of a future giant rubber tube which could catch energy from sea waves. The device, dubbed Anaconda, uses 'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.' So far, the experiments have been done with tubes with diameters of 0.25 and 0.5 meters. But if the experiments are successful, future full-scale Anaconda devices would be 200 meters long and 7 meters in diameter, and deployed in water depths of between 40 and 100 meters. An Anaconda would deliver an output power of 1MW (enough to power 2,000 houses). These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."
'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.'
and called the anaconda?
i don't know if this scheme will work, but hands down, that is the most sexual innuendo i've heard in an energy generation scheme in a long time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And has a fairly small footprint for a 20 Megawatt solution - might be a good fit for small to moderate coastal towns.
I just want to see the boat captain who wanders unknowingly into a field of these things at night. Snakes on a boat!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I didn't see anything in TFA, but one wonders if they've considered sediment buildup around the device. Do they have some way to keep sand/sediment from burying the machine?
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
I saw this yesterday, and using nature to generate energy is absolutely right. Think outside the paradigm, generate energy everywhere, use less of it everywhere... this is the solution, no single answer will work, it takes all efforts and answers. Anywhere the universe creates energy, we should be able to harness and use it. This is the grail, holy or not, energy for nothing.... or close to that.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
and called the anaconda?
My anaconda don't want none
Unless you've got buns, hon
motherfucking snake generators on the motherfucking grid!
here
Sounds like it's not snake oil on the surface, but I have no real knowledge of the field.
These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."
I think this underestimates the ability of someone, somewhere being able to find a problem with anything. Hydropower dams wild rivers. Windmills smack birds out of the air. Photovoltaics pave over entire deserts. Probably Anacondas will interfere with the lifecycle of some species or other. One day we'll realize that any energy system is going to have some ill effects and say, "Intercourse the penguins, I need to microwave my popcorn."
There are about 30+ companies that exist, which capture 'wave' power. Two to come to mind are Ocean Power Technologies & Blue Energy, though to me, Blue Energy's method seems more efficient since it uses predictable current, rather than waves, to generate power.
Right now, the sky-high price for oil is useful in reminding us that there are limits to our resources. If we do not make a conscientious effort to control population growth, then nature will impose a solution on us. That solution will be poverty and likely starvation. If you doubt what I say, consider the huge amounts of energy that is needed to grow and to transport food.
Right now, I suspect that our population is unsustainably large due to the fact that we still have plentiful supplies of non-renewable sources (e.g., oil and uranium). So, our energy consumption = (1) usuable energy from non-renewable sources + (2) usuable energy from renewable sources. After #1 is depleted by roughly 2100 (?), a global world war for resources will dwarf the calamity of World War II. (By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
Will humankind wake up to the problem of overpopulation? In the USA, political correctness prevents us from dealing with the problem. The American mantra is that (1) expanding the population is always wonderful and (2) expanding the population by immigration is the best route.
Sure, CO2 from generating electricty might be a problem. But no matter how you slice it, using energy contributes to climate change in various ways.
If you believe that humans are causing the climate to change, the answer is fewer humans. Lots fewer. You can argue that before 1850 humans (all 50 million or so of them) had negligible effects on the climate. After that, well there has been an effect.
Continued growth of human population is going to be having a greater and greater effect. There is no getting away from it.
The Pelamis is based on the relative motion of fixed segments, this is based on the flow of water through a tube.
just go nuclear and conserve
going nuclear should give us enough time to figure out fusion. and if we don't, it's curtains
but renewables: geothermal, wind, tidal, etc... it's all tiny fractions of demand
except for solar. but that's a huge infrastructure outlay
nuclear is the best option before us to kick our hydrocarbon habit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If the captain was elsewhere working and the trawler was on autopilot, snagging a field of those things in your nets would rip the rigging off completely and probably capsize the boat from the stern before he had time to react and reverse engines. Modern fishing boats are like big tractors, huge engines and big props designed to pull hard, and they will. As soon as they reach whatever big anchor point is there for the turbines, the bow will lift severely, then either the whole rigging will go or they sink, just pulled over backwards more or less. A lot of fishing boats have had similar misfortune when they snagged submarines in unexpected places. Of course, I would expect them to have lit buoys and so on above the turbines, and have it marked on charts, but weird stuff still happens in the oceans. I remember a close one one day when we hit some unmarked coral heads on what was supposed to be pretty flat mud bottom, Yikes! Reality changed fast, luckily the chunks of coral broke off before stuff tore up bad or we flipped. Still tore the nets up bad. You just never know, there's sea laws and theory, then practice. One night I was catnapping in between drags, first mate yells out "get up, get ready to jump!" An unlit freighter had crossed our path, she didn't see us, we didn't see her, we scraped down her side, pressure wave kept us from being really damaged. Like two feet more our way we would have been smashed. Not a huge distance in the ocean.
Stuff just happens in the oceans and mass quantities of submerged and hidden anchored up things would be a menace without a lot of warnings of various kinds posted. Nowadays I guess you'd have GPS doing a lot of it, back then we had about zilch besides some ancient loran and mark 1 eyeballs.
Ocean Power Catches a Wave
"The first commercial ocean energy project is scheduled to launch this summer off the coast of Portugal. Three snakelike wave-power generators built by Edinburgh's Pelamis Wave Power will deliver 2.25 megawatts through an undersea cable to the Portuguese coastal town of Aguçadoura. Within a year, another 28 generators should come online there, boosting the capacity to 22.5 MW. That may be a trickle of power, but the project represents a new push into wave and tidal power as governments eye the oceans as a way to meet their renewable energy targets."
One simple rule for its versus it's
Where "long run" means a thousand years, yes. Why are we looking that far forward anyway? Whaats the point about saying we have too many people while new methods of energy generation are constantly being built?
While solar power in all forms is the only thing we know has a high probability of being around in a billion years, nuclear power will last us, at the least, 300 years. Even the pessimists can agree that we'll have nuclear fusion within 200 years. So thats it! nuclear fusion until nuclear fission is sorted out. All of man's energy needs in a simple two step plan!
poverty! global war! starvation! calamity! our population is unsustainable!
will you please stop mongering fear and get realistic!? And don't event start with the "nuclear waste" blather because nuclear power can safely generate enough energy to make chemicals to launch all waste into the sun and have all the energy we'll need left over!
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Many shorelines require natural wave action and currents to remain healthy. It seems like this is yet another technological "solution" that might in the long run cause more problems. The potential issues with shoreline erosion (or whatever might happen when wave energy is dispersed prior to getting to the shore) won't happen as quickly and obviously as we have seen with wind farm bird kills (apparently those big slow moving windmills are pretty good at whacking birds), the effects could be as disastrous as some of the things we've done with the Florida Everglades and much of the gulf coast.
The point that completely escapes many environmentalists, is that you can't just discard one technology and replace it with another, and expect everything to come out all right. There are damn good reasons behind the scientific method, and they do not include stomping feet, claiming anyone with a different opinion is trying to kill the world, or jumping headlong into untested technologies that, because they aren't bad in the same way as other technologies, must be 100% good. That's an insane way to pursue large-scale technology change, but that's what Gore and his army of environmental extremists consistently propose. Anything that replaces oil must be ok, even if it results in us burning food or in this case, disrupting wave energy and water currents along a stretch of shoreline. What could possibly go wrong? Idiots.
Let's see some long-term studies in limited regional experiments before we dump too much money into this boondoggle. We already wasted far too much cutting down and burning rainforests to grow corn which we then turned around and burned... How about using tried and true scientific methods before we rush into something really harmful.
In the meantime, we already have plenty of reasonably safe and clean technologies that have been in use for decades. Every nuclear power mishap that has ever occurred caused a mere fraction of the casualties we've had in just the last decade of conventional power plant and oil refinery mishaps... How about we start using the technology that doesn't actually kill anyone on an annual basis?
The American mantra is that (1) expanding the population is always wonderful and (2) expanding the population by immigration is the best route.
Hmmm, is that why the population density in the US is so much lower than in most of the rest of the world? Wait, I'm confused.
I'd say that most likely, we're best off pursuing fusion power with all the resources we have at our disposal. In the end, solar power is the same thing, hydrogen fusion. But the difference is, we can (in principle) get much more power out of fusing terrestrial hydrogen ourselves than the total incoming flux from the sun. We won't run out of terrestrial hydrogen for plenty long enough that we'll be able to build something approaching a Dyson sphere in time to keep our available power on a steady rise.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
"I'm interested in having the smallest foot print that we can reasonably do on the planet. Right now nuclear is that way but fear mongering has made it all but near impossible. Of the other viable methods out there fossil fuels is still has the over all least impact for major energy production....Many, if nor most, scientists do it for the funding."
This contradictory pile of anti-science gibberish is insightfull, how?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Will you please stop with this "nuclear waste" blather? "Nuclear waste" is just "nuclear fuel that we're too lame to recycle yet".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
It always strikes me as optimistic when I see estimated power outputs and supposedly how many homes that would power.
It strikes me as completely fraudulent when I see a non-constant used as an example of a constant metric. I can think of a few things that I'd rather see used.
IIRC, one "horsepower" is something like 735 watts, so a megawatt is...let's see...carry the two...about 1360 horsepower.
So...one of these tubes is the rough equivalent of three C5 Corvettes running wide open or in audio terms, 1/3 of a Rolling Stones concert.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
Now take the remaining farmland in the US, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Don't convert an acre of forest, park, or city. No mountains, or prairies. Only the existing farmland. You can grow enough food for everyone (via a vegetarian diet).
Now take the fresh water outflow of the Columbia river - the river separating Washington from Oregon. You've got 27 gallons of fresh water per person per day.
Now put 700 nuclear plants in the deserts of Nevada. You have enough power for everyone to live at the energy consumption level of the US.
Go do the research, you'll see this all to be true. We could support every single person on the face of the earth within 40% of the North American continent. No one on any other continent, island, or waterway.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
And note that it is almost always the country that would benefit that restricts the offer of aid. Think Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Turkmenistan, North Korea. Those countries are stricken with poverty because of the G8 or the first world; they are stricken because twisted, maniacal leaders are power-drunk.
Overpopulated? Not by a long shot. Poor distribution? Sure. The solution is to encourage free and expanded trade - and in some cases like Zimbabwe and Myanmar - a few well placed bullets. Economic growth is required to free more people.
And when there's more people with freedom and no longer having to worry about their next meal, or their next drink of water, you'll find a lot more participation in solving other big problems facing the world.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Am I the only one who thinks arrays of these could be used to power trans-oceanic relay stations leading to a more robust internet backbone. The internet could be not only made of tubes, but powered by them too.
over-rated and incomplete..I'd mod you down. Fusion is limitless energy and it's renewable as long as we have water (i.e. clouds, rain, oceans, rivers, lakes). Biofuels are renewable but not 100% as you lose some to seed. Just use all your cropland on biofuels and people starve so you have less population! Population problem solved! PC and population growth in the USA? Abortion is legal, birth control is practiced and family size is smaller. A lot of people will disagree with expanding by immigration being the best route, and it's certainly NOT an official policy. We have more illegal immigrants than legal immigrants! Go play the old computer game where you are the Pharoh and have limited resources to keep your nation happy and growing. That will give you some insights into how hard it is to balance everything.
In the long run, the only readily available sources of energy are renewable sources: solar energy and terrestrial energy (e.g., wind and waves).
Almost all of the energy we use comes from the sun, with nuclear and geothermal being (the) exceptions. The main difference is whether we're using the energy as the sun is producing it (wind, wave, solar) or we're using energy that's been stored from previous eons of sunlight (coal, oil). So I agree with what you're saying insofar as we shouldn't be using more energy than the sun is giving us right now, and we should strive to make that come from the current energy output rather than stored output.
Right now, the sky-high price for oil is useful in reminding us that there are limits to our resources.
(By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
But I'm going to have to disagree with you here. We will never actually run out of copper or iron or oil. As the amount of these resources that is naturally occurring decreases, the price will rise to the point that: (A) It becomes cost-efficent to dig through landfills and recycle previously used resources, and (B) other materials that were previously too expensive for the application will now be cost-effective.
Each person consumes a minimum amount of energy to live
You cannot "consume" energy, you can only apply it to work, store it, or change its form. (following E=MC^2 all the while) If you're cold, it's much more convenient to light up a log than run in circles awhile. That's just withdrawing some of the stored energy. It moved to your body, and will eventually be radiated/conducted out to somewhere else, but it will never be consumed. Even if we set off an atomic bomb in the middle of the ocean, that energy was not "lost", it merely changed. It changed atomic bonds to form new structures, it released heat and radiation, it moved a lot of air and water. None of that energy was lost, it just changed form and became a lot harder for us to get our hands on and put to work.
People do use energy though, so I see where the renewable energy comment is going. The problem is people want to use readily-available energy to do their work, while investing the least amount of their own personal stored energy. That's why oil is so popular, because it's power-dense and convenient. (good margin of return) Same for burning wood.
Renewable energy doesn't necessarily fill the void. When you can expend say, 1 unit of energy to make available 10, (by say, refining oil) the return is a lot greater. If you can spent 1 unit of your energy (and resources etc) and get back 2, it still looks good on paper but nobody wants it because that means expending more of their energy to eventually get things done, and people are lazy by nature. Unfortunately, there is no renewable energy that is going to catch up with the rate of that being withdrawn from the "easy to get at" energy stored in the earth.
All that energy is being used very inefficiently. Only around 10% of the energy in many of our stored resources is actually applied to the work we want done. The rest is wasted doing things we don't need (or don't want) done. Take a brick of coal. Burn it to produce electricity. Use that electricity to run your air conditioner. All you've done is moved (heat) energy from one place to another, so you haven't done any work. What you have done is heated up the area outside your house a little from the compressor getting hot. So again the energy was not lost nor consumed, it just went somewhere you didn't need it to go, and can't make use of anymore. When you drive to the store and don't find what you want and return home, you and your car are back where they started, no net work was done, and all you've done is distribute some energy from your gas tank to other places.
So one way or another that energy the sun sends us stays here on earth. Some is radiated out into space of course, but a lot less than what lands here via sunlight. So we will never "run out of energy", in fact we will always have more than we did yesterday. The problem is we WILL run out of readily available stored energy. The farther we go down that road the harder our lives will become.
In awhile, we'll reach a point where renewable energy has a better yield than use of stored energy. We're like the bum kid living in our parents' basement. At some point we will have to move out and get a job and make a living on our own instead of relying on a free lunch. It won't be as cushy but it has to be done.
But then at some point after that we'll have what Back To The Future called a "Mr Fusion", that can extract energy from mater. (or more likely and practical, extract energy from very low margin sources, like your garbage can) Once we can do that, renewable energy will be an afterthought because it won't be useful - we will be able to make use of all the energy that we've simply stored in a different form and been thus far unable to utilize because of its relatively low margin. It'll be a different world then. Oil fields will be replaced with old landfills. I don't know if I'll live to see it, but it WILL HAPPEN. So even renewable energy isn't "the answer", it's just a good before-dinner snack that we aren't hungry enough to eat just yet.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Discovery channel have been showing those stuff in live usage out the coast of scotland for 2-2.5 years now.
Read radical news here
Not to mention that in my post I noted we could supply ALL our energy needs with nuclear. No need for crude oil for basically none of our energy requirements.
Oil was a cheap and high density power source; in the 1800s we used it because nuclear wasn't an option. Now we can use nuclear for most power needs, and use petroleum for whatever else (like plastics, high-density requirements like airplanes, etc).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Almost all of the energy we use comes from the sun, with nuclear and geothermal being (the) exceptions
:-)
In fairness, nuclear comes from *a* sun, just not ours.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
It would take a huge investment in infrastructure to be able to "use up" nuclear material to the state where it is reasonably harmless to life. By comparison, increasing renewable energy generation can be done in a fairly incremental fashion (and can be moved & removed in a fairly incremental fashion as well).
Also, "nuclear waste" doesn't just include the nuclear fuel. It also includes everything which comes in contact with that nuclear fuel & all of ways that it is processed (like the containers used to store/transport the fuel, the reactor walls, the control rod mechanisms, etc). Almost all that material can't be safely used once it has become contaminated, the stuff that it is contaminated with can't be easily extracted for use as fuel, and it is all still hazardous to life.
I'm not saying that nuclear isn't theoretically a great source of energy, but you're seriously downplaying some of its disadvantages.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. . . Poor distribution? Sure. The solution is to encourage free and expanded trade . . . Economic growth is required to free more people.
My understanding is that free trade leads to a less egalitarian distribution of resources, despite an ideological assumption to the contrary. See, for example, work by Andre Gunder Frank or Immanuel Wallerstein.
Cheers, -m
Oh I dont know, I seem to find the US population extremely dense, I mean they voted for Bush.....
Agreed, perfectly. It's all a question of impact. (OTOH, there's still an uphill battle of the decades of propaganda concerning nuclear waste).
To be honest, carpeting a desert with solar panels makes zero problems for me... life there is pretty scarce at best in the best-producing areas (e.g. Death Valley), and its not like there's a mad scramble of developers who would complain.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Zimbabwe's a particularly good example; they once had a fairly decent country. Grew enough food for themselves and enough to export to other starving African countries.
Let's solve that, seize all the farms, hand them to people who don't know a damned thing about farming or owning a business, let them rip up the irrigation and sell it as scrap metal and boom! you've got a few people making a lot of money, one time, rather than a good bit year by year, and instead of a fed populous exporting food you've got a starving populous begging to import food.
I'd wager that Zimbabwe ALONE is more responsible for increased demand on global food supplies than biofuels.. so stop cryin about *that*.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
I see. Political Science... isn't?
And if you think that moving everybody to Texas and getting the water from Oregon down to Texas and building 700 nukular power plants is a POLITICAL problem, you have a gross misestimation of reality.
Yes, politics plays a key role in wealth inequity, but this is also a severe issue of engineering and resource management.
Yes, in a purely mathematical world, you could move everybody to Texas, and water then with just the water from XYZ river. But how do you distribute those 26 gallons of water per day? Can you imagine how much plumbing and energy it would take to distribute that kind of water? How many millions of miles of piping to lay?
How many trees it would take to build those kinds of houses, roads to transport the trees, mills to process the trees...
That's the problem with overly simplistic models that simply divide the number of people by XYZ (usually Texas) and figure that's the problem.
The truth is that if you were born in the United States, you inherited almost a MILLION DOLLARS of wealth at current market value in public infrastructure: roads, power lines, schools, libraries, police buildings, fire equipment, telecommunications capabilities, rail lines, and so on, all of which give you the ability to do some small piece and earn (on average) about 7% on your public "net worth" as personal income.
That's how come it's so much harder to become wealthy in the 3rd world - the infrastructure needed to support the widespread creation of wealth simply doesn't exist.
I digress.
So you have a city with a population density that at least compares to most cities, the size of Texas. Can you imagine what the quality of life would be like near Killeen? (the middle)
People live where the resources are available, where distribution is cheap to free, where the quality of life is something to enjoy. I like being able to walk through a park that isn't packed every 10 feet with another person. The feeling of isolation, the curiosity at watching a water snake swim.
I agree with your general conclusion, that the problem is largely political, and that the 3rd world could become much happier with effective leadership. But I don't like that you use such overly simplistic models to support your conclusion!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'd say that most likely, we're best off pursuing fusion power...
Hear hear. I doubt if we'll get the power density we need in the long run with anything less. Nothing like good ol' Mother Nature at her best.
In the mean time, there will be a large and diverse effort to lessen the dependency on imported sweet crude, most likely depending on what you have available -- wave power for the North Sea, perhaps, broad acreage solar here in Australia, manufactured fuels from coal, nuclear-manufactured ammonia chemistry and similar sources elsewhere. Stopgap solutions until then will need to match the local geography, physical and political climate. They'll probably all be represented.
In addition we'll need to exploit any energy differential we can tap as well, such as wave motion, any sort of temperature differential such as geothermal, oceanic wells, etc. Any place that's much colder or warmer than another place nearby is a candidate for a Stirling engine to tap into it.
On top of that, we'll simply need to throw less energy away, and we're all working on that.
By the time we run out of all the energy available to us, we'll all be somewhere else and the sun will be a brown dwarf surrounded by a photo opportunity.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The population growth has already curbed itself in most industrialized nations. However there is another problem that arises from this. All of the current economic models are really ponzi schemes which depend on always expending populations. That is because as far as recorded history goes, human populations have always expanded. We are unprepared to deal with a shrinking population as witnessed by the alarm bells of every government with a birth rate below the magical number of 2.1%. However, merely maintaining the current population won't really do us any favors int he long run.
There will be effects, you can't do only one thing. "These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment." Not quite. I remember reading an article on a study that was performed in the 1980s and reported in Scientific American. The purpose of the study was to discover the effects of putting tidal power units at the entrance of the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia. This bay has enormous tides, over 40 feet difference between low and high tide levels, making it a candidate for a tidal plant power. The overall environment was definitely affected, one of the big effects was that there was a "reflection" of the tide at the Bay of Fundy that affected tides in Boston, over 400 km away. Specifically tides in Boston were stronger and somewhat later in the day. The total amount of energy on the coastline was the same, of course, but distributed somewhat differently. Also see http://www.ems.psu.edu/~elsworth/courses/cause2003/finalprojects/canutepaper.pdf Add in a rising sea level and things could get interesting in Beantown.
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Consider that the US is the most open economy in the world. And that the poor in the US are much better off than the middle class or rich in most of the world. And yes, I have been to most of the world (well, 94 countries so far).
While some people will gain hugely in a free market, even the bottom end gain when the economy grows - it's not a zero-sum game. And the free market inherently rewards those who grow it the most - the gain the most. But they also provide more income.
Capitalism - the US, the EU - won. Communism - the USSR and China - lost. The USSR shattered. China is moving towards a free-market economy. Communism as practiced by men simply doesn't work.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I think you completely missed the point: the GP stated we were overpopulated, when demonstrably that is false. If you can support every single person in such a small area as Texas, and with the resources of just 40% of one continent, then how are we overpopulated? I guess that sailed right over your head...
I wasn't advocating moving everyone to Texas, merely pointing out that there isn't a population problem. Provably so. Unless you want to show otherwise? Clearly we have the resources to support everyone.
And if that is the case, then the fact that millions die each month from starvation must be because of some reason other than there are too many of them.
Take a look at Zimbabwe. 25 years ago, they were a net exporter of food, and starvation within Zimbabwe was unheard of. Jobs were plentiful. Education was free and open to all, and the country was quite peaceful.
Now? Zimbabwe can't even grow 20% of its own food. It's economy has been so wrecked that inflation is running at 10 MILLION percent annually. Prices double daily. Unless your wages increase at a higher rate - which they don't - you simply cannot survive.
How to solve problems like that? Well, you can try trade. It works for most places that give it a try. Grow the pie, everyone wins. But many places don't want or care for free trade and you get Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, and Haiti, and North Korea.
You want to solve those problems? You're not going to do it by talking. The rulers of those countries don't give a shit about the people. They are simply cattle to be used; in fact, in Haiti and Zimbabwe, cattle are worth more than people. I know, I've been to both.
So how to you negotiate with those bastards? They have everything they want. They have absolute control, they have air conditioned palaces, plenty to eat, and people to shoot and flay for sport. What can we offer them other than a restriction in what they do now?
You want to be humanitarian to the suffering people in those countries? You won't do it by providing food and money - that will just go to the thug running the place, guaranteed. You can support an insurgency, but that will take time, cost thousands - if not millions - of lives, and may not work.
Or you simply send in a few teams and in the course of a day or two eliminate the thugs. Eliminate the threat. Set up a government, and work to rebuild the country. It's worked every time we've tried it: Philippines, Japan, Germany, Iraq. Yes, Iraq.
You say I should grow up? I have, and I've been to those places. Ever run the pharmacy of a medical clinic in the hills around Dessalines, Haiti? Build water pumps in Kadoma, Zimbabwe? Distribute US Constitutions while teaching English in Hamheung, North Korea? Give out copies of the Declaration of Independence while teaching English in Dawei, Myanmar?
What's your solution? Sitting down and talking? How did the talking go with Myanmar's rulers - refused to allow all US, and most foreign, aid after the typhoon which killed 500,000.
How about talking with Saddam? Twelve years and still hadn't gotten anywhere - even talked for 5 years AFTER the US made regime change the official US policy. Of course, it didn't help that "pacifists" arguing for more dialogue - the UN, the French, the Germans, and the Russians - were skimming billions of dollars off their suggested "humanitarian" actions.
Speak softly and carry a big stick only works if you actually are willing to use the stick. If you're too squeamish for that, then I suggest you move over and let the grown ups actually do what needs to happen.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Sure, it does. I think Sir Winston Churchill explained it best:
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Yes, because if a British conservative politician said it in the middle of the last century, it must be true today. Just because the first half of the quote is undeniably true, doesn't make the second part true as well.
To Churchill looking at Stalinism, which was about all there was to go on then, it must have seemed that socialism inevitably led to misery, but with hindsight the "socialisms" of the 20th Century were no such thing. In fact, the "equal sharing of miseries" part is demonstrably false even as applied to the USSR, because it still had its rich elite.
Capitalism - the US, the EU - won. Communism - the USSR and China - lost. The USSR shattered. China is moving towards a free-market economy. Communism as practiced by men simply doesn't work.
I would agree with you if you'd said "Communism as so far practiced under that name simply doesn't work." Western economies in the early 21st century are more socialist than the USSR ever was in terms of wealth redistribution and state support of industry.
Who knows whether Leninism could work today - probably not without some radical rethinking - but green issues are making this kind of discussion more urgent, as capitalism is inherently wasteful of resources.
Off topic, but you missed an important part in the Iraq story. The US aren't hated do much for what they are doing now. Its what they did in the past that led to now. They put Saddam in power for their own selfish reasons. He brutally killed his own people and the US turned a blind eye. Then he stopped towing the US party line and decided he'd trade oil with those pesky Europeans instead of the USA. Next thing you know, Iraqs been invaded. Most of your point is good, but on Iraq you're missing some important details IMO.
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As far as oil goes, the majority of Iraqi oil was controlled by BP and Shell until 1972 when Iraq nationalized oil. And then cut deals with France and Russia.
Note that BP is British Petroleum, a UK company. And Shell is Royal Dutch Shell, a Dutch company. The US had precious little stake in Iraq before 1972 or afterwards. And even the recent grants of oil rights saw US companies getting about 30% of the production leases.
The US has never been a major consumer of oil from Iraq. Nor has the US been a major consumer of oil from the Middle East; rather, most of the oil goes to Europe or Asia. The US still produces 45% of its own oil, and buys more from Canada than it does from the Middle East. We buy more from Venezuela and Mexico than we do from the Middle East.
If you want to say the war was about oil, then it was about the US ensuring a stable supply of oil for the EU, not for itself.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree that the advent of the pill and better living standards in the west has brought a 1/3 of the world's growth to a screaching halt over the last 50-60yrs. China's has also curbed another 1/3 of the growth with the blunt instrument of government oppression. So yes, it could have been much worse (as predicted in the 70's). Dispite the collapse of fisheries in the N. Hemisphere and current downward trend in the global food/person ratio we are still far, far, better off in global food/person than we were in the early 70's (mainly due to China's rise from a famine infested hell-hole to a global super-power since the gang of four were booted out).
I think the root of the problem is that as individuals we instictively think that a constant steady rise in the population of the tribe(s) we belong to is a GoodThing(TM). A tribe of 6+ billion is just too big for our oversized ape-brains to handle in anything but an abstract way. We are at an evolutionary cross-road where our tecnology can both create and identify global problems that our social institutions can not handle. We do have an advantage over the apes and other mammals because we can see the problems, any other mammal (or pre-industrial humans) in such a situation would suffer a rapid population crash or even extinction.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Are you so dense as to miss the already-posted about point that DISTRIBUTION [capacity / infrastructure / technology / etc] is a resource? And that in many parts of the world, it is not this way.
You stubbornly cling to your imagined notions that the disadvantaged of the world are being ignored under the banner of "there just aren't enough resources for everyone." Do you really think anyone believes this idea that you're decrying? And do you think that we all nod our heads, mutter about how unfortunate it is, and proceed with our lives?
What can you expect from someone replying to an AC who played the "parapsychology" card (no need to mention the ad hominem) to discredit political science? Apparently you can expect that they know nothing about political science.
Frankly, you're the one who doesn't care about Earth's disadvantaged humans. Because you trap yourself in these bullshit nihilistic impressions of why the world is as it is - what if we could "handle" the entire world's population on 100% of the landmass? In your style of argumentation, this is still feasible, and distribution of resources is the problem. But even if it were true, the world would most likely be very identical to today - some people drive Mercedes, some people live in Burma.
-- arstchnca
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"Do we create massive amount of sulfur in the air rapidly killing everything with large scale geothermal?"
Geo-thermal does not create massive amounts of sulphur.
"Do we sterilize the oceans with tidal generators?"
Your kidding right? - Any ideas on just how much energy is in the tides compared to say all the coal on the planet?
"Do we cause massive upheaval that likes of which the most radical Global Warming people do not even think of with massive wind farms?"
How is converting a large part of our generation to wind over 50yrs any more radical than the build up of coal plants over the last 50yrs?
"Solar isn't able to meet our energy needs so it's not an option"
Why is it "not an option", what other single method of generation "meets our needs"? Also I'm not sure what the German's would do since they are pumping a gigawatt back into the grid from the excess generated by roof-top panels.
"You can list all the problems with CO2 and I agree, but outside of nuclear it is the smallest footprint out there that can meet our energy needs."
Only for politically inspired definitions of "footprint".
"Thus simply reducing CO2 does nothing and, in fact, tends to make things worse because we move to greater polluting methods."
Please tell me you are astro-turfing and it's just your friends who think your insightfull.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Not quite
From Wikipedia US electricity consuption per capita (2005 figures) works out to 12.8 MWh/year.
Multiply that by 6.5 billion people gives 83.2 billion MWh/year.
The US's 103 nuclear reactors' highest ever output (2004) was 788.5 million MWh.
Put the numbers together and you find you need around 10,900 nuclear reactors working at the average output for a US nuclear power stations.
Were every one of those stations to be the same design as the world's largest nuclear power station (which actually consists of 7 operating units) you'd still need 1150 of the things to match US power consumption rates.
I'm sorry, but did you just say that Haiti "doesn't care for" free trade? If I was a Haitian, I wouldn't care for free trade either.
Haiti used to grow most of the food needed by its people. This is not at all the case today, and what free trade has done to local growers is a prominent cause.
This is not to mention Haiti's problems from the Duvaliers' greed and the likes of the VSN. How functional would the society you grew up in be if you had to fear death squads?
Even post-Duvaliers, Haitian politics had been in constant turmoil as the US constantly rallied support for the least-populist Haitian leaders, the one's for the free trade. I wonder why that was.
You seem to think that the impoverished are at fault for attempting some communist scheme to avoid buying American products, a scheme that ultimately fails and leaves them the unfortunate "losers" to capitalism. You need to look at the big picture.
-- arstchnca
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Your post is definitely an interesting way of saying:
deposing Saddam and his party is like the United States' "apology" to world politics. More like a guilty ass-covering. Do you know why we were so tight with Mr. Hussein (by we, I mean older George Bush and his political)?
It's because he ran Iraq as a secular republic. That's really the only reason. Iran was more "threatening" to certain persons and so the US became Saddam Hussein's PR machine.
I really don't think you can consider the federal government's actions over the past several years as "fixing" the problem. Inasmuch as Iraq had a problem, the United States' heavyhanded politics of containment and fear of all things Islamic led to the way things are today.
Where di the above poster say that the war was about oil? It was certainly for tenuous "political" purposes and shady economic ones. Look at those getting handed contracts for things like energy infrastructure in Iraq. When the people who cause the wars give massive business to the people payed to come and build things up, and these people were all friends to begin with, I call conflict of interest. But then, since when has that sort of thing had any bearing on US politicing?
-- arstchnca
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Perhaps the population density in the US is low because, for one, its borders include in part huge tracts of land that anyone has yet to put a real use to? The fact is, it is functional population density that is important. Do you think that everyone lives around cities because they just love other people?
In the game of capitalism, money is your score. This is unfortunate. As such, it's necessary for one to come by money, a metaphor for one's own worth, by some means in order to survive. As hard as you might try, there's only one way to get this money - from other people.
Living far from other people in this country is a prerogative mostly reserved for the elite.
Anyhow, the parent's comments about population that you quoted hold true, or at least moreso than your counterclaims. Look at American communities like, say, Los Altos Hills. Is that a community that is sustainable without the constunt influx of persons that serves to fill the ranks of the "working class?" No.
-- arstchnca
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If this device floats and interrupts shipping, then I'm supporting CETO's idea instead. The CETO concept also uses compressed high pressure water, but uses submerged Buoy's that just bob up and down and around, dragging the pump and forcing water onto land. The high pressure hoses combine from all the Buoy's and drive a turbine on the land. At night the system can be switched over to provide freshwater instead!
700 Hectares would supply Sydney Australia with all its freshwater and a good chunk of its energy requirements, 2000 hectares with all its water AND energy!
There's no interruption to shipping, no interruption visually, it improves sea-life adding an slightly 'reef' like structure below the surface, and when one considers that visual pollution is a real political problem with renewable energy, I'd be backing CETO.
Simple Flash animations of how the system works here.
http://www.ceto.com.au/ceto-technology/what-is-ceto.php
Lastly, a page I love to quote.
The best wave energy sites in the world receive consistent swell. CETO operates across a variety of wave heights making CETO a base load renewable energy option.
* Some other advantages of wave energy and CETO include:
* Wave energy is a renewable, zero-emission source of power.
* 60% of the world live within 60km (40 miles) of a coast, removing transmission issues.
* As water is approximately 800 times denser than air, the energy density of waves vastly exceeds that of wind dramatically increasing the amount of energy available for harvesting.
* Waves are predictable days in advance making it easy to match supply and demand. (Wind is predictable hours in advance at best.)
* CETO sits underwater, moored to the sea floor, resulting in no aesthetic impact.
* CETO units are designed to operate in harmony with the waves rather than attempting to resist them. This means there is no need for massive steel and concrete structures to be built.
* CETO wave farms will have no impact on popular surfing sites as breaking waves equate to areas of energy loss. CETO wave farms will operate in water deeper than 15 metres in areas where there are no breaking waves.
* CETO units attract marine life.
* CETO is the only wave energy technology that produces fresh water directly from seawater by magnifying the pressure variations in ocean waves.
* CETO contains no oils, lubricants, or offshore electrical components. CETO is built from components with a known subsea life of over 30 years.
* Wave energy can be harnessed for permanent base load power and for fresh water desalination. The ratio of electrical generation to fresh water production can be quickly varied from 100% to 0% allowing for rapid variations in power demand.
* CETO uses a great multiplicity of identical units each of which can be mass produced and containerised for shipping to anywhere in the world.
http://www.ceto.com.au/ceto-technology/advantages.php
You seriously put the population density of the SF Bay Area forward as demonstration the world is overpopulated? People CHOOSE to live there. It doesn't mean there's not plenty of space left in the world where you could have a pleasant life and plenty of land for a low cost. I choose to live in London, and as a result live in a tiny house compared to what I could afford somewhere rural, but I don't go around and delude myself into thinking that London is an accurate representation of whether or not the world is overcrowded. But then again I'm from Norway, where the population density is about 14 people per square kilometer and the total population is about half that of London.
Hey, I have any idea; instead of being a troll who attacks people who have a differing view point, how about you engage in a real discussion. "You stubbornly cling to your imaged notions...", that is what is known as an appeal to ridicule, there is no real argument here. As is, "Frankly, you're the who doesn't care about Earth's disadvantages humans"; you have no evidence for this statement from the discussion above and it only adds to discredit you more. I'm not taking a side in the debate as I am not educated in the particulars but you seem ready to completely dismiss the GP without addressing his/her position in any sort of substantive form.
While fusion is great, it shouldn't be our only goal. This is still a non-renewable fuel. Hydrogen is an important ingredient to life, use up all the hydrogen and everything will die.
Also, fission produces some terrible byproducts with effectively infinite lifetimes. One really bad accident could destroy the entire planet. One failed rocket exploding in the atmosphere and we all die. So blasting the waste into the Sun isn't the miraculous cure-all supporters claim. Reprocessing has proven to be not "cost-effective". Hence we have these processing plants that haver been turned into storage facilities. Except, the waste has to be constantly stirred or it will explode. Unfortunately the stirring blades need to be replaced every 6 months or so due to the extremely caustic nature of the waste and the facilities have a projected lifetime of 300 years. What are we going to do with tons of waste in 250 years that have half-lifes in the millions of years?
So in conclusion nuclear isn't as great as it appears, in either form. Truly renewable energy is the only correct and really long-term solution. Leaving fission and fusion as good for limited uses such as interstellar travel, or in combination with realistic plans to obtain alternate sources of fuel and properly de-activate the waste. Neither of which is likely to ever be commercially viable.
The movie plot remark reminded me of a comment by a scientists on TV the other day, he said something like: This report reads like a horror story. For the non-Aussies, the Murry Darling Basin is Australia's bread basket, it covers a large portion of the SE quarter of the continent and according to the most respected scientific body in Australia, it is dying. We are the world's fourth largest exporter of grain but since 1998 there has been only one bumper crop, most years have been down by 40-60%.
The main problem is that the water has been over-used and mismanaged but the region is also becoming drier and they have found that a 10% drop in rainfall converts to a 30% drop in run-off (ie: 30% less water in the system). We have had some periods of good rain but mainly it has been either in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or all at once (as in record breaking floods), many places have now been in severe drought for over a decade. Looking at the news about California it seems to be having similar problems with "fire and water" but that's just the impression I get from news reports. Water rationing is the norm now in Australia's major cities.
Not that I agree with the GP's musings but all wars are resource wars.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Now take the fresh water outflow of the Columbia river - the river separating Washington from Oregon. You've got 27 gallons of fresh water per person per day.
27 gallons? that is way, way off.
An estimate for water usage in the U.S. is 408 billion gallons per day. http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/index.html. That's over 1000 gallons per person. Yes, we use too much, and waste a lot of it. But, there is a limit to how much less we can use; in particular, look at the usage for generating energy, which you propose to generate using nuclear power, which requires a lot of water.
Further, water is unevenly distributed, and does not travel in the direction you want it to easily. Already, much of the world does not have access to save drinking water, and it's going to get worse. We're depleting the ground water, and sucking the rivers dry as it is.
Yes, relative to water supplies, we have overpopulation. Spouting crap about poor distribution of people isn't going to solve it; people don't move easily and the water isn't there and doesn't move easily. Free and expanded trade won't work either.
The solution is to level off the population and then slowly reduce it. It has happened in other countries (including poor ones) and, with a little bit of effort, education (esp. of women), and contraceptive rights, can happen pretty much everywhere. And, no, it doesn't requires a China-like draconian imposition of one child policy.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Nuclear waste blather? Launch it all at the sun??
Yes, let's take all these tons and tons of radioactive material, pack it on top of some of the most efficient chemical explosives known to mankind, and elevate it into the atmosphere's global air currents. Paging the what-could-possibly-go-wrong department....
Okay, even disregarding this point, you and most people in this thread seem to be operating under a very common misconception about what "nuclear waste" is and the nuclear power industry as a whole. Most people will think of spent nuclear fuel as nuclear waste, when in fact there are many more kinds. The most often overlooked, and by far the largest source of volume in nuclear waste, is so-called "low-level waste," and is a very important window of insight into what actually goes on in a nuclear plant in reality.
From wikipedia: "Low-level waste (LLW) is a term used to describe nuclear waste that does not fit into the categorical definitions for high-level waste (HLW), spent nuclear fuel (SNF), transuranic waste (TRU), or certain byproduct materials known as 11e(2) wastes, such as uranium mill tailings."
To put this into plain English, this usually consists of everything that has been exposed to radiation in the course of a nuclear plant's facilities. "Nuclear waste" isn't just spent fuel rods. It's hammers, it's protective suit coverings, it's old pipes that have had to be replaced. There is a --huge-- volume of things that get contaminated by radiation in a plant. More information than you could ever use on this subject is found here Just to launch the low level nuclear waste alone in the state of Ohio alone (generated by only two nuclear reactors mind you) in the year of 1987 alone would require launching a satellite holding 50,000 cubic feet of material into space.
The simple fact is that in a nuclear power plant, radiation is --everywhere-- and it, to some degree or another, infects --everything--.
On an anecdotal note, of my family's grandfathers worked in the Pilgrim Power plant in Massachusetts for decades. He doesn't talk about his time at the nuclear plant much, even though it comprises pretty much all if his adult life. As more and more of his friends started dying of cancer, he just stopped mentioning it at all. While this is melodramatic, it's true: it reminds me in an uncanny fashion of how several other family members do not talk about their time in Vietnam.
The few things he did say gave me an insight into the nuclear industry that is very different from anything that shows up in G.W.'s nuclear power proposals.
He told me about how whenever he was working, he had to wear what he called a "dosometer." It was shaped like a security badge, and it changed color as it was continuously exposed to radiation, which was always present in some level at the plant. After a certain threshhold of accumulated radiation deemed "dangerous" was reached, the employee was supposed to stop working. Sometimes due to fiscal and work pressures, they just got a new tag. I'm sure safety procedures might be somewhat better nowadays, but humans are humans, and corners will always be cut on some level, by both management and by the employees, especially as economic times get harder.
While he has lived to a ripe old age, literally every one of his friends from the plant died a horrible death due to every type of cancer imaginable. "Incidents" like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl grab the headlines, but the nuclear industry kills each and every day in a way that is incredibly hard to quantify.
So, please. This "magic uranium" stuff is wishful thinking at best. If nuclear power truly is the only solution until humanity hypothetically masters fusion, that is a truly depressing option.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
On top of all the other problems with nukes (like dirty extraction that's dependent on an even tinier resource that's in even more unstable countries than oil is), we are now likely facing the rapid exhaustion of elements like indium and hafnium that are necessary for reactor control rods.
Nukes are a hugely top-heavy tech. That produce a huge problem in their waste, as well as extremely difficult security problems.
Geothermal is vastly more energy than even all the nukes we could produce. Other renewables can also vastly oversupply demand. If we'd subsidized any of them the way we've subsidized nukes for the past half-century and more, we'd already be well out of danger.
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make install -not war
And don't event start with the "nuclear waste" blather because nuclear power can safely generate enough energy to make chemicals to launch all waste into the sun and have all the energy we'll need left over!
Or we could do something smart and bury it in an area where it'll sink into the mantle. There's spots where anything more than 10 miles down slowly sinks and in about 5 years falls below the crust of the earth; melted nuclear waste is heavy, it sinks. It's no longer a problem at that point.
Expelling high energy matter into space is a bad idea, we lose the thermal energy from this planet that way, and thus local sustainability goes down.
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I'm sharing anecdotal knowledge regarding the one plant that I know, and clearing up an incredibly pervasive misconception about the waste stream of nuclear plants. I sourced the factual stuff, and labelled the rest as anecdotal.
My impression is that it's a much dirtier industry than its starry-eyed newfound fans want people to believe. There are very good reasons why people abruptly stopped building these things in the first place after the initial boom.
If you have countervailing evidence/experience, please feel free to share that; I'd love to hear it!
Anyone have any valid criticism that can't be boiled down to "I disagree, therefore Nazis?"
P.S.--Adding Imperial Japan to your logical fallacy doesn't make it any less fallacious. ^.^
Ceci n'est pas une signature.