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Wind and Sun Beat Other Energy Alternatives
iandoh passes along the news that researchers at Stanford University have completed the first quantitative, scientific comparison of alternative energy solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability, and sustainability. Based on their model, they found that the best sources of alternative energy are wind, concentrated solar, and geothermal energy. The worst are nuclear, clean coal, and ethanol-based fuels. In other words, "the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options."
Of course the ones getting the most attention can be much more easily controlled by those who provide it. I would love to see a rise in energy costs because a "shortage" of wind or sun light.
I love it. He only doesn't like nuclear power because of them there terr'ists. And that it's completely reasonably possible to get weapons-grade uranium from any nuclear reactor.
And he completely ignores the effects of wind power on things like bats and birds.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The rankings are based on a model, not empirical, real-world science. You can stuff whatever you want into a model, and make it say whatever you want. All we know from this is if you make some wild assumptions on XYZ, options ABC line up in the order of 123.
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I love how it's dismissed out of hand because of the bogeyman argument.
TERRORISM!!!!!! Oh crap.
We better rule out anything that is efficient and can be used RIGHT NOW.
No let's pick the ones based on Unobtanium.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The problem is it is NOT comparing everything in one area. It uses multiple different measures, including pollution, cost, etc.
But when you that kind of study it requires you to make judgments about which is more important. These are value judgments, NOT scientific ones. Basically all this study does is tell you what a few scientists at Stanford want, not what is true or factual.
P.S. While ethanol as done in US is stupid, Ethanol as done in South America makes sense. They take all the production waste from agricultural and make ethanol from it. That would be the leaves, etc. the things we don't eat. In the US on the other hand they put the stuff we actually EAT into the pot. South American plan makes sense, but the US version does not..
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You can find plenty of old abandoned buildings so clearly the single family home is never going to catch on without creating huge wastelands of old abandoned homes.
AKA: If the site is valuable maintaining or upgrading the wind farms is a net gain.
This "study" is not really a study, but a model. As such, it's only as good as its assumptions. Unfortunately, many of its assumptions are completely wrong or totally implausible.
For example, the model predicts that nuclear power emits 25x as much carbon as wind power. You may wonder how that could be possible. It's possible because that conclusion follows from the model's assumptions which are all wrong, as follows.
First, the model compares the carbon output of new windmills, versus the carbon output of obsolete ways of refining uranium as an average over the last 40 years. Since refining uranium is far less carbon-intensive than it was, we should use the new figures only. It does not matter how much carbon was emitted by uranium enrichment for plants in the 1960s. Nobody is suggesting building those. We are debating whether we should build new nuclear power plants, or new windmills. As such, we should compare the carbon output of new uranium enrichment against new windmills. In this case the author clearly commits the "sunk cost fallacy", and the assumption is totally wrong.
Another mistaken assumption behind carbon emissions of nuclear plants, is carbon emissions from delays in plant constructions. The author assumes that nuclear power plants will take 10+ years to construct, and in the mean time, we will continue to generate electricity by burning coal. On the other hand, he assumes that the delay associated with windmills is "zero". However, that assumption is totally wrong. Windmills will lead to "zero delay" only if the United States throws away every coal-burning plant we have and replaces them with windmills this year. Since that will never happen, the assumption is wrong. In actuality, those coal plants will be decomissioned at the end of their useful lives and will be replaced by either wind, nuclear, or something else. So, the delay associated with nuclear or wind would probably be quite similar. Since this factor alone accounts for most of the "25x as much carbon" which nuclear is said to produce, that figure is refuted.
And there are other assumptions which are wrong. For example, the model assumes that nuclear power will lead to nuclear weapons which will cause a nuclear war with a resulting environmental catastrophe. Since nuclear power cannot be used to construct nuclear weapons, this assumption is mistaken. Unfortunately, the author makes many errors when he discusses the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In actuality, nuclear power has almost no probability of starting a nuclear war.
The paper states that "Worldwide, nine countries have known nuclear weapons stockpiles (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea)" and shortly thereafter concludes that "Thus, the ability of states to produce nuclear weapons today follows directly from their ability to produce nuclear power". But that is entirely wrong. It's a spurious correlation. The reason some countries have nuclear power plants, and the same countries have nuclear weapons, is because those countries are technologically advanced, which causes both nuclear weapons and nuclear power; not because nuclear power causes nuclear weapons.
And there are other assumptions about nuclear (not related to carbon emissions) which are equally unrealistic. For example, the model claims that nuclear "produces fuel rods that are usually stored on site for several years in cooling ponds pending transport to a permanent site" and somehow concludes that nuclear has as much of a detrimental effect on wildlife as coal power. I honestly have no idea how he derived that conclusion (he doesn't say). It seems to me that mass strip-mining of the countryside (including mass-strip mining for serpentine rock if we intend to use that for mineral sequestration) every year, would greatly outweigh nuclear power's single kilometer of radioactivity buried deep beneath a single mountain in an isolated arid desert in Nevada, once. In fa