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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."
The corn farmers are going to be upset by this but once again research shows that Ethanol made from corn is not an energy efficient way to create fuel. It's time to stop the ethanol subsidies and start spending money on energy sources with real potential. That way corn will now go back into the food stream, and farmers will also start growing hops again rather than switching to corn to make more money.
Sincerely,
Home Brewer who misses his hops
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
I am happy to hear this: Wind (and solar) does seem to be a very elegant energy solution.
I do note, however, that the report seems to assume wind-based power generation as taking place with traditional turbines.
The question arises in my mind if the use of the windbelt technology might offer additional gains in this respect?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windbelt
My searches for use or deployment of the windbelt seem to garner sparse results...any info out there?
is the windbelt indeed a more effecient method of wind-power generation? Or are turbines still the way to go?
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Yes, it sounds like the author had an axe to grind. Being in the Bay Area, he's got to be aware of activists trying to shut down the wind farms near Stockton because they're killing birds. And I remember reading that the manufacture of photovoltaic cells uses some of the same processes that are already poisoning the groundwater in Silicon Valley.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I agree, nuclear is the only sustainable, easily scalable and safe energy policy. Not only is it safe, economical, and reduces carbon emissions, it is also proven.
France has an established and proven domestic energy policy based on nuclear. They export energy to the rest of europe, and essentially create money out of thin air(atoms). This abundant availability of cheap and reliable nuclear energy has enabled France to stay highly competitive on the global manufacturing front, even though the french are not known for manufacturing anything half as good as the germans.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html
When I was young and savvy, I always knew that nuclear power was bad. Polluting. Toxic. Dangerous. Wrong. But now that I'm older, I'm not so sure. In fact I think it's pretty safe. But, I can't objectively confirm this. My current opinion is still just as uniformed as my previous one.
Trouble is, it's difficult to separate the facts from the rhetoric, and it is danm near impossible to find an unbiased introduction to radioactivity, its uses dangers and safety limits. I would like to learn more, but there is precious little information available. I mean real information, with numbers. Without them, I'm just getting gas. And no, I am not going to rely on wiki-trips.
It's easy to find information on astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, radio, electricity, etc, etc, etc. But radioactivity? Not a chance. How close to I have to be to an exposed nuclear rod before I am "at risk"? 10 meters? 100 meters? A kilometer? In orbit? Give me graphs. Give me numbers. Help me understand. I'm not stupid, nor are most people. But without hard numbers, I can't confirm or deny my suspicions?
Or you could just keep making Radioactive super-mutant movies and promoting candle wick alternate energy sources. Whichever.
May the Maths Be with you!
Wave power?
there is ALWAYS wind. if there's no wind here, there certainly will be wind 500 miles from here. No wind is only possible when the the sun has gone out, AND the globe has stopped turning.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
From TFA:
I wonder if the transportation necessary to reach 0.5 of all U.S. land was considered. You must transport 1) the windmills themselves to the site, 2) all maintenance materials, 3) all maintenance workers over the lifetime of the windmills, 4) the windmills themselves offsite once they're retired.
Transport costs for windmills is undoubtedly large. I live in Texas and I've seen a few of these being hauled up I-45 from the port of Houston on the way to their destination in Midland. The blades are hauled individually by semi trailer and are about 2x as long as an 18 wheeler. And they're shipped to Houston from the Netherlands!
So I suspect that the analysis has neglected to take these factors into account when rating the carbon footprint of wind power...
The study claims to be quantitative and scientific. But when he goes into his anti-nuclear rant, it's all just opinion.
We currently have no perfect energy sources. I for one think nuclear sucks less than most of the others.
From my limited understanding, if we repealed those laws...we could really stretch the nuclear fuel in a massive way, and have much, much less radioactive waste to have to manage, that has a much lower half life, etc.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Solar and wind are bad solutions because:
- They require thousands of miles of new power lines to be built. Getting power lines approved and built is monumentally expensive (which is why Mr. Pickens wants the tax payers to pay for them instead of building them himself).
- The wind doesn't blow all the time, nor does the sun shine all the time. You can store it (which is equivalent to running a hydroelectric dam) or build gas powered plants to run during the evenings.
- Solar and wind are not as inexpensive as proponents claim.
Nuclear is the only power source with a virtually unlimited source of fuel and that can be brought online without a massive new power grid and is nearly as cheap as gas powered generation.
You can do this for the Country you live in, but you cannot enforce it on a developing country.
From a moral or a practical perspective?
From a practical perspective, you can certainly tell a country to whom you provide $X million per year in aid that you won't provide that money if they don't subscribe to your energy policy.
And from a moral perspective, wouldn't developing nations be better off if they were generating power from resources that aren't scarce? Sub-Saharan Africa doesn't have oil, but have plenty of wind and sun.
I also heard a "rumor" that the ore used in the production of electric car/hybrid batteries is another big energy/carbon sink (fueld used for mining it, sending it somewhere for processing, sending it somewhere to produce the batteries, sending the batteries to the car manufacturers). Does anyone know if this is true or have any facts or references that would be apropos?
No, because it is spent. You can sometimes toss it into another reactor and react the left over bits. But you need a special reactor for that.
The real promise in using nuclear energy in the future is doing this. You can theoretically increase the yield of energy by a factor of 60 if you reprocess fuel. Also, if you do everything you can to reprocess, all that is left is less radioactive than natural uranium ore in ~300 years. Check out page 5 of: http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Meetings/PDFplus/2004/gcsfSess2-Bernard.pdf . This all but eliminates the need to have yucca mountain for anything more than short term storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
Some proper funding could start this up. Increasing the energy yield of nuclear power by a factor of 61 would all but solve the world energy crisis. There is also still plenty of nuclear fuel available on the earth.
Yes, solar thermal plants can be made using the same steam turbines and generators used by coal, gas power plants to produce energy from high pressure steam.
If one adds an additional component of a heat reservoir such as molten salt, a solar plant is even capable of providing electricity through night and cloudy days (depending on the duration of reduced insolation and the capacity of the thermal reservoir of course) without requiring any advancement in battery technology.
However, I really do not appreciate him lumping nuclear power in with inferior bio fuels and carbon sequestering. Proper use of feeder-breeder reactors can effectively eliminate nuclear waste from uranium reactors and provide power for the entire world for many hundreds of years (all on its own). Add to that the potential of thorium reactors using a more plentiful fuel and nuclear power makes a perfect compliment to solar for regions not blessed with great weather.
Meanwhile the drilling and pressure issues of carbon sequestering mean that the excess energy extracted is marginalized while the risk of a geologic release of billions of tons of CO2 due to fissures or shifting could kill thousands or even millions if close enough to a major city.
Biofuel is not a renewable resource. To meet our gasoline needs alone we would need a corn field larger than the continental US. Even with switchgrass we would need ~25% of the surface of the US to meet our gasoline needs. Consider for a moment that modern farming is already devastating the aquifers that will take 10s to 100s of thousands of years to replenish naturally.
Wind has some potential but can never be used for base load due to the fact that weather on earth is inherently unpredictable, producing squalls that can overload a power grid with to much wind or starve it with periods of calm over nearly continental spans.
Whoops, just re-read that part and I realize I got it wrong, they weighted average is of the RANK of each solution in each category, so for example the ridiculously high difference in mortality between nuclear and the truly dangerous technologies is lost. Because of the global nuclear warfare scenario, it even moves down a place against a technology which is actually LIKELY to kill many more people (CCS) than nuclear realistically would.
Only a fucking idiot would use a blind ranking system like that. If one technology solves all energy problems for 0 dollars with 0 pollution, but ranked in a close 5th place for the other options like land footprint (most of the rankings are decided by very small margins, with a few huge leaps separating truly bad technologies from others which are essentially the same), guess what... that option loses to fucking solar because solar squeaked out a few rank positions better on other categories.
This research stinks.
The US may never have good nuclear reactors. The process of developing new reactor technology is so mired in political bullshit that in the future we'll have to look at nations like France for how to apply nuclear power in an effective and safe way. I am convinced that it will never be developed here at home.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Carter decided to avoid breeder reactors in part because they can blow up and new fuel is cheep enough that reprocessing is not that big a deal. Also by letting the fuel cool off it becomes cheaper to reprocess in the future. It's not like we are dumping the stuff into a volcano so it's gone forever so when we get really well tested and safe breeder design we will have plenty of high grade fuel waiting around ready to be used on the cheep.
PS: Carter understood a lot more about the industry than most lay people. "He was assigned to Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine." So it's not like this was some idiot deciding something based on an uninformed whim.
Tell me again how nuclear is (at minimum) 25X more polluting than wind or solar please. I think I missed that part.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
> A scientist saying creationism is real will get him shunned, as it should.
Yes it should. As should saying creationism is false should. Neither can be proved by the ways of science and anyone trying to push a political or religious agenda under the cover of science should be written out of the profession. Current science is only even believed to be valid back to the big bang and can say zero about anything before that... even if the phrase 'before the big bang' has a meaning or not. It might be able to say more in the future as our understanding improves but as things currently stand science cannot answer the big questions of Life, the Universe and Everything.
> A scientist saying "we need nukes, there is no possible way anything else can work" is not a scientific statement.
Corrent. However one can say all of the following and be 100% correct from a scientific Pov.
1. We currently possess the knowledge to build safe reliable nuke plants on a scale to provide all of our energy needs. The only obstacles are political. Since we know of at least one route to generating all of the energy we could want any talk of an 'energy crisis' is this pure political theater.
2. Sufficient proven reserves of Uranium exist to supply our needs for over a hundred years without recycling spent fuel rods. With recycling we have enough to either last much longer or increase our energy usage during the next hundred year.
3. No other currently proposed 'alternative energy' source, alone or in total can demonstrate a plan to provide our current energy supply at anywhere close to the current costs. Solar and wind are currently so innefficient that without government subsidies they would only be practical in locations so far off the grid that wiring them would be impractical. Continued research and development may or may not improve the deployment cost and output so as to make one or more alternatives practical in the future. Thus adopting as official policy that we MUST adopt these technologies means betting our future lifestyle and prosperiety on an ASSUMPTION that the price/kwh can be brought down.
4. While it is true that a practical fusion reactor has been thirty years away for the last forty years, unity gain is getting closer and closer now. It is thus rational to argue that it is at least as likely that we can build a fusion reactor in the next hundred years as it is that we can perfect wind or solar in the next twenty.
Democrat delenda est
There are production solar-thermal facilities in California. They are base-load generation, too, because they burn natural gas when output falls (in practice they're 85%-90% solar).
Most of these "alternative energy" ideas are pipedreams that just can't scale to the 1 TW electical baseload (which will get far higher whe people start plugging in hybrids - the idea that "people wil only plug in at night" is another pipe dream). Solar thermal is great, however. It's not limited by the scarce elements needed by photoelectric cells. It's proven technology using well-understood components.
If you want *no* depenency on fossil fuels, nuclear is the only real choice with technology that doesn't depend on some future scientific breakthrough, but I think a minimal natural gas solution is a great plan for Southern states.
Replacing heating oil for heating in Northern states is going to be a huge infrastructure change, however. Even if you're OK with the inefficiency of electrical heating (and we could be OK with that, given the right source of power), you *must* have a reliable way to deliver that power. Too many places lose power in blizzards, when the lines come down. Burying all the power lines in a rural area is a gigantic proposition.
Still, I'd rather spend 2 trillion on that than on bailing out executive bonuses and stockholder dividends!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why bother charging at all? I'd rather pull up to service station and have a car wash-like robotic system swap my batteries out for new ones.
It would take some level of standardization across the auto industry to make happen of course.
Why are you pretending as though a lack of nuclear fuel will mean insufficient energy?
Do you know exactly how much energy can be harvested with even inefficient solar cells?
Is this just because I lived in the desert? Is that the only reason I know these things? You can power the entire United States on solar power alone if you're willing to build enough troughs, and it will require but a small percentage of unwanted shit land in the middle of nowhere.
It seems reasonable that the user could 'plug them in' anytime, but they could be hooked up to something as conceptually simple as a "vacation light timer". If the car's clock wasn't blinking 12:00, it seems like a tiny bit of electronics in the car could even be set so it didn't start charging until after a certain time.
This is the worst reactionary reply that I have ever seen, and it provides NO facts to back up the ridiculous claims.
We give more corn subsidies than anything else, and you're going to bother attacking solar subsidies? WTF is wrong with you?
Solar power is not 5-10x more expensive than nuclear. You're wrong and have nothing to back up your absurd claims. The average cost per kWh for solar is very similar to nuclear, perhaps slightly more expensive meaning you'll pay MAYBE 5% more on your electricity bill at first, but since solar production is an economy of scale you'll actually end up saving money down the line as manufacturing processes improve and costs go down.
Except for your anti-environmentalist rants, I agree with some of what you say. (I'm very much for nuclear power, as an environmentalist.)
Except that "a couple hundred miles before another fill-up" is not needed for most people. From some results from google, ridetowork.org says 29 miles per day is the average, and another result from abcnews.com says that the average is 16 miles. As long as you can get to and from work, and do a little driving around town, that would be enough for most people,
and that would even only be plugging in at home, not even at work or other places, which obviously would need new infrastructure.
A pure electric car, and definitely a hybrid, would fit most people's needs. (I think GM should definitely be allowed to go out of business since they had a viable electric car in 1996.
Nice conspiracy theory you have there
It's a conspiracy theory in that it claims that the hard-core greens (which by no means includes all liberals, or all environmentalists) are lying about their stated reasons for opposing nuclear power. But unlike most other conspiracy theories it makes a specific prediction, which is that as solar, wind, and geothermal power becomes increasingly viable as replacements for fossil fuels, greens will suddenly discover reasons why they're unacceptable. I believe that is likely to be the case; we'll get to find out in the next decade or so.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I don't think electricity is a good idea for cars as they exist today.
Right now, cars are massive, they're heavy, they're expensive.
Why the hell would I want to pay for a car that only goes 75km for 5 years?! Why the hell would I want that car to take up a huge amount of space in my driveway?!
A more ideal electric vehicle would be inexpensive; less than $2000. A more ideal electric vehicle would be small; I should be able to fold it up and hang it on the wall in my garage when I'm not using it. A more ideal electric vehicle would be light; I should be able to fold it up and hang it on the wall in my garage when I'm not using it without a forklift.
Regular people would still likely own cars. They'd need one for trips, for towing the boat, for days when the electric just won't do the job, or it's too cold to use the electric (Batteries hate cold). An ideal electric vehicle would be more like a 4-wheel electric bicycle, with enough room for 2 people, a top speed of 50 km/h, room for a couple bags of groceries, an EXTREMELY light, watertight skin (It should be able to handle a foot of snow on the roof, but not someone standing on it), and a range that's short, but a hell of a lot longer than any of the "cars pretending to be environmentally friendly" we're seeing today. It'll take a change in our conception of a vehicle, but it'd be very useful.
If I were in the government, my goal would be to legalize a new class of vehicle for public roadways that would be designed specifically for 50km/h use and no more, with greatly reduced safety regulations, and for internal combusion engine vehicles, greatly reduced particulate emissions standards if the economy is beyond a certain level (for example, 80MPG city).
It's been a long time.
Yeah a grid is needed for high power transmission much like
we have now, though I say it is far less expensive to maintain
if they buried it in service tunnels.
In the tunnels the temp remains constant and thus less losses due
to heat such as in the southwest.
Sag of the lines in high heat has its own set of issues.
Too many times massive thunderstorms, ice storms, downed trees
damage the lines or lightning surges damage the substations and
end users personal electronics.
Often after massive storms, downed lines kill ppl and pets.
Less repair of the lines means smaller repair crews which
equals lower insurance losses, and lower operating costs.
The initial tunneling cost is high but could done in the
highest repair rate areas first, and the savings rolled
on to the other areas over time, ie. "pay it forward".
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
24 x 7 x 365 the sun is up in various places of the world.
At this time a lot of countries sell electricity to each other.
A world wide grid with losses comparable to the US of 7% is
very workable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses
This is with an old adhoc unmodern failing grid too.
The large deserts of the world could power the earth many times over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Energy_from_the_Sun
Solar is not the only option, but it is in the top 5.
Nuclear is set to run out eventually so it is at best
a predestined to end solution, same for natural gas.
If you burn a fuel at some point you will run out of that
fuel at high burn rates.
I know about thorium, and know that the THTR was shutdown for
more than one reason.
I know ppl have a lot invested in their scientific careers,
but ppl are going to have to step back and stop thinking
selfishly and stop pushing their agendas due to self interest
in their investment of their degrees.
Hydro, Wind, solar, algae bio fuel, jet stream tap,
ocean current tap, and geo thermal are our best and
longest term solutions.
Nuclear is a good option for some remote regions with poor
access to any of the above.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
By that project's measure, current solar technology needs 3 "average" states of southern U.S. soil to provide electricity (raising at 2% per year (leading to 100% useage of ALL U.S. soil in no more than 80 years). At 10% average efficiency per square meter you still need over 2 average u.s. states. We are nowhere near producing solar panels with that efficiency at acceptable (read : actually possible to implement) cost. "Oops".
And btw, Alaska will obviously not do. You need florida, texas soil. Or the US could maybe, you know, not invade pakistan but invade Mexico.
And about "those who control it". Who will control the land and produce the devices for solar power generation ? Oh, right ... the oil companies have the best chance of acquiring that position (since they have the most resources for designing the required chemicals. And if it's not them it will be a company like IBM or Sony).
"change", only in the Obamatron sense of the word.
The worst of it is just how stupid all these solar advocates think the rest of us are. Solar is currently like fusion power : in 20 years, perhaps (assuming "nothing goes wrong"). Now ? Not a snowball's chance in hell ...