Slashdot Mirror
How the Economy Is Changing Clean Energy
Al writes "The economy has hit green energy technologies hard, but technologies focused on energy efficiency and clean coal are still attracting money. Over the next few years, venture capitalists say that the biggest winners in clean tech will most likely be companies with technologies that improve efficiency. Such ventures often take advantage of cheap sensors, communications hardware, and software packages to monitor and control energy use both in buildings and on the electricity grid. High-capital businesses are now more likely to succeed if they can attract foreign funding. For instance, Great Point Energy, based in Cambridge, which has developed a process for converting coal into natural gas, has attracted $100m in funding from China."
... the companies that will do the best will be the ones that can maximize their profit with a minimum amount of debt. How cool their toys are doesn't factor into it.
Pfft! Yeah right. Pull the other one.
What?
There have been a number of ads by IBM lately pushing the idea that their new line of computers is needed to redesign the nation's electrical grid, claiming that half the power never makes it to any light bulb.
In other areas power companies will actually buy you the new CCFL bulbs if you pay the tax on the bulb.
The push for efficiency is long over-due.
But realistically, will the replacement of a an entire power grid really save more than it costs? Is it really necessary?
Wouldn't more energy be saved by taxing long haul trucking out of existence and putting the money into a resurgence of rail freight?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I read about how coal could be converted to methane via bacteria.
here's a quick example.
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr091103b.htm
This is one way to convert coal to a cleaner form of energy. However there are implications since there is a question as to who owns the energy: coal companies or gas companies?
So to create cleaner coal we just may need to pump some bugs and other chemicals into the ground but we also need to sort out some legal and policy issues.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Clean coal doesn't exist. Saying it is a clean energy form is like saying fusion is a clean energy form: regardless of whatever merits you can come up with for the system, carbon capture and sequestration (clean coal), like fusion, has no working plants (and probably won't for at least a decade) and is more a gimmick for public support and research funding than anything else. Money would be better spent on the efficiency efforts mentioned and commercially viable forms of clean energy that can be bought in the market today.
Great Point Energy has been unsuccessfully trying to drum up investors since 2005. Andrew Perlman is not a scientist, but is better described as an adventure capitalist. In venture capital, you don't actually have to have a technically sound idea. You just need to convince investors that you have some magic formula for creating a profitable business and they give you money. They still do not have a working prototype that shows a positive return on energy. They are only drawing up a proposal for a $100m plant for China. China has not committed to any funding.
The economy has hit green energy technologies hard, but technologies focused on energy efficiency and clean coal are still attracting money
Green energy technologies are generally expensive niche products. Ignoring nuclear power because of controversy, green electricity generally isn't generated on a comparable scale to old fossil fuel power. It likely could be. Pouring money and research into it would make it more feasible.
Clean coal isn't green energy. "Clean" coal attracts money because rationalising it as clean coal helps maintain the entrenched coal generated electricity industry at the expense of the promotion and development of potential competitors. Entrenched industries lobby more effectively than emerging competition.
And improving energy efficiency isn't about green energy at all, it's about reducing energy usage whether its green or not. It doesn't threaten any industry and all it requires of existing production is research and maybe some slight retooling.
I work for a company that is retrofitting 30-40 year old steam turbines at coal power plants. Its such a difficult and expensive process to get a new power station built (of any fuel) that the power companies want to keep these coal plants running for another 40 years. You can blame the NIMBY folks, or the environmentalists that require environmental study after study before ground is broken.
I'm in the business, and the cost of electricity is going to continue to rise pretty spectacularly. Most of the plants built in the past 15 years or so are natural gas, which is now expensive and continuing to rise in cost. Many of plants built in the 60's running on cheap fuel are getting near their end of life. Some are being retrofitted but many aren't worth it. Nobody can build a nuke plant these days and coal is equally taboo. Few people are studying engineering so the manpower is also getting scarce. Its not a crisis yet but most of the power industry is aged in thier 50s and 60s.
We aren't in a crisis yet, but in another 10 years its going to start getting ugly.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
In many areas of the country clean coal won't work since the geology isn't right for storing the captured CO2. Additionally, there currently are not even any working demonstration plants, only talk of plants that could be converted. The sheer amount of CO2 produced from coal is also a huge problem. It would require massive pipelines to dispose of the CO2 from areas that don't have the geology for storing it, and then there's the danger of a fissure opening up somewhere and the CO2 escaping, which would be deadly. As I see it, the only long term methods of reducing CO2 are renewable and nuclear. The only reason clean coal is happening is because the government is throwing money at it and all those coal producing states and the votes they represent. There has not been a single demonstration that clean coal actually works.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Coal burns all the way through. You get so much CO2 in the air and so much ash for every bit you burn. There's no changing that. It's conservation of matter. You could catch the CO2, but then it just screws up the ground water table and doesn't really help, because nobody would do it and it just adds another storage problem (we see how well they store the ash).
Out of curiosity are you a cleverly constructed parody of a dumb ass or a real one. Real ones typically aren't that dumb.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
There is also a vast amount of utter bullshit surrounding nuclear. The lobby is not happy with saying they have low CO2 emissions, they lie and say "zero emissions" and also pretend that waste at every step does not exist. If you ignore everything outside of the reactor, ignore all waste products and assume you never need to refuel nuclear is "clean" - but then under those conditions so is the sort of coal use with no pollution controls that gave London it's famous green fogs a bit over a century ago. Nuclear has to be considered over the entire process - and if it's going to be used as more than the nice side of the bomb we need to put in a hell of a lot of work to improve designs before building a lot of the things. It's possible, but private enterprise has only been interested in trying to sell old designs to fleece the taxpayer. We should be building prototypes first instead of some mad rush to force large quantities of money into the pockets of those pushing the hard line.
Remember that Carter and Thatcher both were in favour of nuclear power and both knew what they were talking about - and they both had to cut back on the lame duck nuclear projects their countries had been conned into.
... the companies that will do the best will be the ones that can maximize their profit with a minimum amount of debt.
. . . that would normally be a very economically sound business plan. However, governments are now in the process of bailing out businesses that have minimized profit, with maximum debt, and are "too big to fail."
So who gets to pay for that?
"Ah, Mr. Bond, I was expecting you. I see that you have again made a tidy profit. I will forgo any unfeasible sharks-with-lasers-aimed-at-your-crotch death machines. Instead, I will simply tax you to death."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
You know Sid's Civilization: "You found... FISHER TROPSCH in scrolls of ancient wisdom."
Because that's what Fisher Tropsch is, ancient. I don't deny the novelty of Great Point Energy's process, but why did it take 70 years between Fisher-Tropsch and this technology? Lack of lobbying^Wmotivation, I guess.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Let's see... We can't have nukes, because nuclear waste is dangerous for thousands of years and is produced in tonnes by reactors.
But "clean coal" is ok, because CO2 can be stored by deep well injection. And unlike nuclear waste, it's dangerous forever, and produced in millions of tonnes by power plants.
I guess sequestered CO2 is better than nuclear waste because giant clouds of killer gas are more "natural" than that awful "atom" stuff. After all, look at the area around Chernobyl, and compare it to the scenes around Lake Nyos.
Oh, and while we're at it, lets consider the number of coal miners killed each year. Too bad we can't ask them about "clean coal" technology.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
I thought the idea of "clean coal" was finding a way to store the CO2 to prevent it from screwing with the climate. This "coal-to-gas" does nothing towards this goal, so I don't see how one would call it "clean coal" other than the obvious lack of sulfur or mercury.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:
Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:
Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.
ObCredit: I found this article via Memestreams.
I heard of a Gym that would save X% on energy bills due to the floors having peizos, and maybe the resistance on the bikes having dynamos. Could that be trialed on a greater scale?
I think one of the reasons people are more afraid of nuclear waste than CO2 is that after you're irradiated, you know you'll die, but are still alive for some time and aware of the fact you will die. (Regardless of the actual chance of that happening, which is extremely low.) People really fear being confronted with their mortality. That's why they are afraid of cancer and flying, but not so much of road accidents where you die instantly.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Germans used a coal to oil process to satisfy 70% of their liquid fuel needs during the World War II. The process was initially invented at the beginning of the 20th century. See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergius_process
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process
Converting coal to methane is very similar in principle. However, you need an abundant source of hydrogen. The cheapest source of hydrogen right now is natural gas, mainly composed of methane, so the circle is closed. The only feasible carbon-neutral source of hydrogen is the electrolysis of water, which is currently much more expensive than getting it from natural gas. This could change with cheaper energy e.g. from nuclear power plants, but that would make clean coal pointless.
They are trying to market something that is well known and currently uneconomical but recently got trendy among the chemically illiterate. "Hey, what if we could make natural gas from coal? Natural gas is better for the environment, right?" - yes, but you have to get that extra cheap hydrogen from *somewhere*. Industrial chemistry is not about possibilities, it is about profits.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
"clean coal" is like saying that we can bury nuclear waste to make "clean nuclear" - Except it is probably safer and more feasible to bury the nuclear waste, than to try to bury CO2.
Well, it is a clean bomb vs. dirty bomb.
I just got done reading the Great Point stuff and frankly am shocked that W and team did not push this (hopefully Obama will fund this). It would still leave us CO2, which really sux. BUT, the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere from a power plant would be less AND all the other pollutants(mercury, sulfur, nitroxs,etc) would be gone. Basically, this would allow a power plant to convert from Coal to Natural Gas. Now, take that a step further. In an ideal powerplant, they would use Solar Thermal to be the main drive and then use the natural gas to provide backup. That approach would allow for cheap power with a much lower output of CO2. But again what is missing in this picture is that right now, coal is transfered all over via trains (inefficient). Using natural gas, we have pipelines running all over, which is more efficient. But again, where would this take us? Why it would move us rapidly off oil based cars over to either natural gas cars or better electric cars.
The problem that you are having is that you think that something like this would be the end goal. This is a goal of getting us there. We will continue to burn fossil fuel for sometime. Even now, it is expensive to build a nuke. Likewise, we need our AE boosted, but it will happen SLOWLY (sadly). Great Point could get us off importing oil, clean up our coal emissions (which is not just dirty, but heavy CO2 emissions), and move us towards electric cars. This is a win-win-win. Sadly, China sees it and we do not. Whats more, I bet that china will insist on the IP behind it and will run away with the idea.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Less. Ch4 burns quite cleanly vs. coal or even oil. There are few if any byproducts.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I sense a disturbance in the Force.
Actually...
You can take the 'waste' from the reactor and re-enrich it (a process that is also used for creation of nuclear weapons unfortunately) and turn it into fuel-grade material again although you do lose some mass in the process.
The idea of capturing CO2 is basically a result of chemical compounds/processes that turn CO2 into Sodium Bicarbonate or Baking Soda. If you put it underground in places with high Sodium content you'll end up with it converting to Baking Soda as it tries to escape.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
The 'economy' didn't hit all these green energy projects, the plummeting price of oil did. Few, if any, of these projectcs are remotely competitive with oil/nat gas under $75 and in many cases still higher - and even with substantial subsidies and tax breaks.
As we saw with ethanol, energy 'policy' is just another boondoggle of lobbyists and special interest groups seeking government funds so they can make some bucks. Wind, solar, clean coal and so on all live off the government teat to one degree or another. Would they even exist without those tax breaks and direct funding?
That is the new governmental hybrid business model. Private profits, but public debt socialism for the same guys.
IMO, "too big to fail" should translate into "too big to be allowed to exist in the first place".
So what happens to the chlorine?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Wind and solar are both doing reasonably well (especially when you consider that they have a lower return on capital than a coal plant). It makes sense to spread the investment into new technology at least a little bit, as the later investment will inevitably benefit from operation experience. Small scale tidal and wave power systems are getting deployed (and it isn't clear that throwing 10x the money at them would speed anything up, sometimes you have to actually try something to find out the scaling issues and whatnot).
In the meantime, I still want electricity, so trying to make is in a cleaner fashion is a reasonable goal. Most of the alternative power systems work just fine and are getting cheaper. At some point, they will be cheaper than fossil fuels (either by technology advancement or the inevitable carbon tax), so the question is, how much does clean coal slow that down? The answer isn't obvious, but it isn't going to be a century.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Mix it with sodium to create salt?
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
We have energy demand, and energy production, two different things. We can still do a *lot* more to reduce demand and not just fixate on the production part (this is also the main article point). If you had ever been inside a superinsulated home you would know what I am talking about (I have helped build and retrofit a few). It is quite conceivable and has been proven that-for instance- you can take a normal stick frame residential home and drop its energy demands for heating and cooling down to like 10-20% of what they are now, using off the shelf already proven technology, that in the medium and long run has a spiffy return on investment from reduced utility bills. This reduction in demand (along with better built and designed appliances) would greatly help to eliminate the need for all those coal to electricity plants in the first place, we can just shut them down and not have to deal with storing any co2 then, which then also makes the addition of home solar thermal and PV much cheaper, as you don't need as much production to get to what you still need to run the home. This same concept applies to both small houses all the way to large buildings.
An interesting venue to see some of this tech is in the solar decathlon contests that are held. They even design homes that are not only capable of being self powered, but also produce enough extra power to keep an electric vehicle charged up for the daily commute.
The main point is fixating on the production side is what wall street wants because it is big ticket profit central, whereas if we shifted emphasis to energy efficiency it would be a lot cheaper for society as a whole and give much larger and more immediate returns to just about everyone, and there really isn't a whole lot of "new" stuff that needs to be invented or developed to accomplish this. It won't make wall street and those casino banks and the entrenched energy cartels as much money though, so they tend to just "forget" about energy efficiency and push just more energy production. *Most* buildings today are still in the energy hog SUV type of mileage area for their energy demands if you want a car analogy, so a practical solution becomes easier to see once you grok this.
The easiest quickest way to accomplish this would be by the use of credible and large tax credits for energy efficiency retrofits (this would also put a ton of builders back to work), and then additional credits for decentralized energy production like home solar.
Isn't most sodium currently nacl or bicarbonate?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Just to chime in on the coal argument. Or to be more specific, fossil fuels.
The only reason mankind as a whole has experienced explosive population growth and massive rises in standards of living, is that we discovered and exploited fossil fuels. We have taken out a massive "loan" from the earth and whether it runs out or not is irrelevant. We are basing our future survival on energy that was previously stored over billions of years. Patently, there is no point expecting coal or oil to renew themselves naturally in a useful timescale, and our population is still expanding.
We must find sources of energy that do not rely on previously stored resources. Once those resources are gone, we are pretty much bankrupt, energy-wise. So get with the program, and finally accept that coal or oil in any guise, are only stop-gap solutions to keep us going until we can totally replace them. Spending time and effort on "clean" coal is wasting time and energy on something we will have to do without, more likely sooner than later. And I'm not even going to mention the specific environmental issues, or the myriad chemical/biological uses that fossil fuels could be put to instead of being burnt.
Of course, nuclear fuels are a naturally stored resource too, but they are more efficient, cleaner, and hold possibilities that mere fire can never approach. Solar is the only energy source that is truly long term viable, simply because it is not produced or stored on earth. It comes from outside the system. Is it ready now ? Of course not, but it is the only answer in the universe. (Unless we can somehow harness dark energy/matter).
I found the article about the magnetic spin battery concept interesting. Currently, all nuclear plants use nuclear material in place of fire, to produce heat and then steam to drive turbines. What if a nuclear reaction could be relied upon to directly induce a specific magnetic spin in a "wire" and thus supply the grid ? That has to be more efficient than converting heat > steam > kinetic energy > electricity. Imagine a small cylinder (0.5 " diameter) that you clamp to the power cable of a device and directly induces current to feed that device. Dreaming I know, but this is why that discovery has greater potential than many posters realise.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IMO, "too big to fail" should translate into "too big to be allowed to exist in the first place".
Agreed!!!
Companies that are too big to fail should be broken up into smaller companies.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The sheer amount of CO2 produced from coal is also a huge problem. It would require massive pipelines to dispose of the CO2 from areas that don't have the geology for storing it, and then there's the danger of a fissure opening up somewhere and the CO2 escaping, which would be deadly.
Natural gas reservoirs have contained the gas for millions of years, so it is fair to say that the technology exists to sequester CO2 on a geologic time scale. The reservoirs are far enough below the surface that any leaks would be a slow process.
There's also some talk about needing the CO2 to combat a future Ice Age due to changes in the earth's orbit and where the earth's axis is pointing at perihelion and apohelion.
Frustratingly, I still do not understand clean coal. To me, its like a clean bomb, vs. a dirty bomb. Its still does damage, maybe not as much, but it is still harmful.
Clean coal is smoke and mirrors. There is no such thing as clean coal. Even if what comes out of the smoke stack is cleaned up coal mining is dirty. Mining itself isn't clean but some of what's mined can be recycled, such as silicon and metals.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
(inefficient)
Actually rail, trains, are one of the most fuel efficient modes of transportation.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Have a look around at the current state of biodiesel in the USA, for example. Right now, despite a $1 a gallon subsidy, promising players such as Nova Biosource Fuels are shuttering their doors. The country has nearly 2 billion gallons of plant capacity for biodiesel, and a fraction of that is produced. The situation is the same for ethanol. And, just when things are gloomy for the USA, of course, along come our so-called European friends to jack up tariffs on American biodiesel and put the screws to even more American jobs.
Those high gas prices that Bush ushered in did more to boost alternative fuels and alternative energy than any stimulus package Obama will ever sign, and now that gas prices are lower again, alternative fuels in the USA is being destroyed, just as it was in the 1980s.
I'm bitter about this. In my lifetime I've seen two political parties make great use of spike in gasoline prices. Republicans did it in the late 1970s when attacking Jimmy Carter, and now, Democrats did it when attacking George Bush.
The worst is, Obama KNOWS that this was the wrong thing. He complains that the USA made the wrong choices in energy for 20 years, but had he actually been more positive about the increase in fuel prices during the campaign, instead of bitching about Bush's runup, we might actually have a credible renewable fuels industry in the USA. But, we don't.
Instead, we have a supposedly green President doing the same damn thing Reagan did - slinking off to the middle east to give more concessions to the Muslims in order to keep the oil pumps working, with the added stupidity of placing the USA back on the imported oil problem while at the same time pulling American troops off the top of the 250 billion barrels of Iraqi oil that they are sitting on.
When coupled with the recent killing off of nuclear energy, we are basically left with nothing. We have no biofuels left, ethanol is dead, nuclear power is being killed, and we're walking away from even getting access to the largely untapped sources of oil domestically and abroad.
WE HAVE NOTHING LEFT FOR ANY ENERGY, THANKS TO THIS JACKASS OF A PRESIDENT.
This is my sig.
Natural gas reservoirs have contained the gas for millions of years, so it is fair to say that the technology exists to sequester CO2 on a geologic time scale.
CO2 also burbs as it did in Lake Nyos, Africa killing almost 2000 people. Other burbs have killed more people as well as animals.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
mortality. That's why they are afraid of cancer and flying, but not so much of road accidents where you die instantly.
Some are and some aren't. I smoke and I love flying, eventually I'd like to get my pilot's license. And while thousands die in accidents on the road death frequently is not instantaneous.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Great- so with CFLs instead of putting carbon in th air we put mercury in the earth
Yes, CFLs contain mercury howewver coal fired power plants emit more mercury. Switching from incandescent lights to CFLs reduces the mercury released more than the bulbs contain. According to the Energystar [pdf] "Coal- fired power generation accounts for roughly 40 percent of the mercury emissions in the U.S." "As shown in the table below, a 13-watt, 8,000-rated-hour-life CFL (60-watt equivalent; a common light bulb type) will save 376 kWh over its lifetime, thus avoiding 4.5 mg of mercury."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The key to clean coal is not sequestration, but making coal power stations 90% efficient, rather than just 37%.
And this is only achievable through District Heating and District Cooling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
Deleted
Never mind the CO2 that coal plants produce.
Indeed, never mind the things like arsenic (that remain toxic forever) that are in coal ash.
The fact is, if coal plants had to meet the same standards for radioactive release that nuclear plants do, they'd all have to be shut down. There's all kinds of radioactive stuff in coal (radon, thorium, etc) -- not very much per ton, but coal plants burn millions of tons of the stuff. Indeed, if you could extract the thorium from coal you'd get more energy burning it in a reactor than you would from burning the carbon in a furnace. (Don't take my word, look it up.)
"Clean coal" is an oxymoron.
-- Alastair
When there is more CO2, plants do better.
Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures.
Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".
So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about how the world works.
I suggest you do the same.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
... in the commercial building sector is the triple-net lease. This is the most common lease for commercial space. The lease put all the costs, including energy, onto the tenant. The owner has no incentive to make energy efficiency improvements, and possibly a lot of disincentive. Even if the tenant is willing to pay for the improvements (as a trade off against their energy costs) the owner has incentives to disapprove them (such as avoidance of legal liability or any other kind of hassle).
Only owner-occupied buildings tend to get energy efficiency infrastructure technology. I've heard that is about 10% of the sector. The only way around this will be to adopt laws that cause pain to building owners that is best relieved by making or agreeing to energy efficiency improvements.
When I come to power, I will have the government build 500 nuclear power plants, and just wave aside any environmental lawsuit with a stiff hand of nothing, and any protest with a hail of bullets.
At some point, you just have to treat environmentalists as the diseased enemies of mankind that they are. They are today's Nazis that are so hyped about purity they don't even bother to notice what they destroy to get it. Like the Nazis before, purity is not some real goal, it is emblematic of their utter hatred for people that live. Dirty jews, dirty subhumans, dirty humans... all have to be "dealt with". At the end of the day, the head of Greenpeace and Heinrich Himmler are cut from the same cloth, a bunch of freaks that look in the mirror and see humanity as a corpse infesting the earth. Death matters not to them.
Environmentalists are the enemy of all of humanity.
This is my sig.
You go on a rant like that and then purport to somehow be different from those you hate? Every interest group has its extremes, but judging the whole group based upon those individuals is a disservice to everyone and a mistake. One who claims to be such a righteous observer of the flaws of mankind should know that.
CO2 also burbs as it did in Lake Nyos, Africa killing almost 2000 people. Other burbs have killed more people as well as animals.
Irrelavant. The blurbs came from an area that was already leaking CO2, where a natural gas reservoir would not be a source of natural gas if it was leaking. Many of these reservoirs also contained a significant amount of helium, which is much harder to contain than either methane or CO2.
If we had civilian nuclear plants that were good at producing electricity I would agree with you. Unfortunately in nearly every case we have a compromise dual use plant that produces very expensive electricity along with the weapon materials.
The only "dual-use" nuclear power plant in the US was the Hanford 'N' reactor which was shut down shortly after the Chernobyl accident. Light water reactors are poor sources of materials for weapons due to the high 240Pu, and will be even poorer with the high burnup fuels.
You go on a rant like that and then purport to somehow be different from those you hate?
Yes, because I want people to more energy at their disposal. Energy is wealth. If you are in favor of more energy, you want humanity to get richer. If you are against it, you want humanity to get poorer. It's pretty cut and dry, actually.
This is my sig.
Oh please. I bet you're the sort of person who believes that we can replace all our coal plants with Wind and Hydro by 2015 if we spent enough money.
In "A Solar Grand Plan" Sciam lays out how Solar power could provide 69% of the USA's electricity by 2050, about 35 years after your 2015. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States by the Renewable Resource Data Center (RReDC) of the government's National Renewable Energy Lab details the potential wind power of various areas of the US. As T Boone Picken's Picken's Plan lays out the Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind energy to also provide electricity to the 48 continuous states.
First you have to get the liscensing for all these power plants. For Hydro, this is mostly impossible since someone will stand up and say that the turbines chew up fish at a ridiculous rate and destroy the river. For wind, people will complain about the birds. These drawbacks were true in 1960 but they aren't anymore. You'll be tied down for at least 3 years trying to get the permits and approval to build. And that's being optomistic.
Dams do mess up rivers. However some years ago there was a story on /. about how hydro can be used to generate electricity without dams. Instead water mills like egg beaters are lowered from a boom into the river then the moving water spins the mills. I wonder what's happened with that, I haven't heard anything about it since. What's stopping wind, especially offshore wind farms in places like Cape Cod in so called "liberals", who are not liberal, backyard are NIMBYs. And I bet many of them say they're environmentalists.
Coal is mostly clean now
Coal is no where near being clean, and never will be. Sure emissions from coal-fired power plants may be cleaner than before but coal mining is not clean what so ever.
As for natural Gas, its completely clean.
Gas is not clean either. Sure, like coal, CO2 may be captured and stored. Nitrogen oxides also have to be captured. Gas, at least Liquefied Natural Gas or LNG, also needs the same sort of infrastructure as oil.
I *want* one of these plants in my backyard.
I'd rather have PVs on my roof and a wind genie in my backyard.
If you want to turn this country into Vermont, maybe you should just move to Vermont.
No, the state for the Free State Project is New Hampshire, next door.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Environmentalists won't stop till we live in caves...
Yes and industrialists won't stop until we're all covered in sludge. The death they bring to serve their elite is just as bad, if not worse. See it isn't just Nazis and environmentalists. It's anybody that acquires too much power that becomes the problem. Doesn't matter what angle they're working.
What?
Where've I heard such simpleton logic before? You're either WITH US or AGAINST US, you dirty traitor. Pretty cut and dry!
Yeah, it is, actually.
Any energy or environmental economist would be laughing their ass off at your sophomoric view of what "wealth" is
Actually, a lot of energy economists would agree with me. The more energy people have, and the less expensively they have it, the more their lives improve. It's cheaper for them to travel, to get to work, to power electronic devices and get new features in them. In so many ways, the more energy you have, the richer you are. It's just the way it is.
Even if you argued that increasing energy prices resulted in some efficiency, the fact of the matter, if you are investing a fixed set of dollars into a device to make it more energy efficient, you are losing out on other features as well.
For example, let's say cars didn't have to worry about fuel efficiency, for example, what would a designer not have to worry about? First off, weight could right out the wind. You could afford to make a car much heavier and use different materials. Indeed, the need to save weight might itself force the use of different, more expensive materials but with a compromise on other properties such as strength.
Similarly, what if power costs were not a consideration for data centers? Well, they could add other features, add more servers. Instead, they have to invest in efficiency, which doesn't really help their feature set too much. It's less brand differentiation and more commoditization, and makes them more likely to be outsourced.
Those are just two examples. There are countless others.
This is my sig.
Wikipedia will help. Failing that read something by a nuclear physicist.
It's anybody that acquires too much power that becomes the problem. Doesn't matter what angle they're working.
Ah, you are right, of course!
This is my sig.
Radioactive waste reprocessing necessarily implies shipping waste around the country to reprocessing plants. As it is, the problem of waste shipment has not been solved even for disposal, much less there-and-back-again for reprocessing. The big political hurdle to building breeder reactors actually is not where to site them (though that's troublesome too), but how to connect them.
IIRC President Carter proposed a nationwide rail network exclusively for radioactives. That's how ridiculous the problem is.
What is closer to dual use is the CANDU reactor, using natural uranium and a relatively low burnup (much lower 240Pu concentration). It also has provisions for on-line refueling, so it would be possible to have low burnup fuel elements to further reduce 240Pu concentration. The CANDU reactor cannot be licensed in the US due to it having a positive moderator temperature coefficient of reactivity. BTW, if you do not know the signifigance of 240Pu, you have no business making comments about "dual use".
"Clean coal" is an oxymoron.
It's much worse than that. It's an ongoing fraud. Just like the stock market.
What?
so please don't make up words to put in my mouth that are the opposite of what I wrote. I'm also talking about the majority of existing plants and not new light water reactor designs that might be built some day in a booming economy where there is a civilian reason and not a military reason to build the things.
The only nuclear engineers I have worked with have either been from a civilian research facility, an Indonesian military facility and Russian dual use plants. The Russians paticularly had a lot to say about the problems in their plants and used Westinghouse as a swear word to describe US plants with problems. I'm influenced by their attitudes. I must say I've lost touch with the electricity industry since the mid 1990s, but as far as US nuclear is concerned nothing at all changed except for a coat on green paint.
Anyway, the largest problems I have with the rabid advocates is the "we must spend billions now on a huge numbers of plants with poor designs" instead of what the Chinese did recently and built a pebble bed prototype and will use what they learn from that to make better designs.
GRC's Microwave turns solid hydrocarbons into diesel, propane and butane. The prototype works on tires, and the website gives a bunch of other uses - oil sands, coal, tar sands, soil cleanup, etc. A 20lb tire turns into 1 gallon of diesel, 50cuF of propane/butane, some carbon black, and some steel.
It also solves the problem with getting the coal out of the ground. Instead of taking off the top of a mountain (or sending miners into tunnels in the earth), you can drill a hole, drop the microwave down, cap your drill hole and apply a vacuum.
There is much better technology coming down the pipe, but GRC's microwave is a nice tool to get us through the next couple years.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
And working with finite resources like coal is a dead end. You will end up with the dirty parts regardless.
Coal is indeed finite, but we in the US have so much of it, it would take centuries to use it all. The US alone has one quarter of the Earth's coal reserves... no one else is even a close second. And even with the heavy use of coal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we've barely touched the supply.
With our huge coal reserves, untapped oil reserves, and untapped uranium, the US could be completely energy self-sufficient. The powers that be just don't want to be for political and environmental reasons.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I guess I'd have to disagree. I can't think of a single company, or to put it better, some manufactured item or offered service, that is so necessary that it is the only one that needs to be doing it, and I would include real big ticket items like ships and subs and power plants etc. Monopolies suck, fullstop.
There's room enough for several companies at least even at the most complex levels, heck, I'll include space exploration there as well. If companies aren't allowed to fail from incompetence or a changed business environment in society, what's the point of their capitalism stance then? That's why I would have MUCH preferred if they let those ludicrous casino derivative spewing monster banks go bust, because 99% of their so called "financial products" are complete fantasy BS contracts based on bets on bets on bets and shouldn't be tied to the real economy in any manner whatsoever, they should be firewalled off and allowed to go bust. Let them have fun ripping each other off, but not the general poulation they are now. I think they are thieves and bunco artist fraudsters at extremely scary levels. Jail not bail in other words for those gents. Madoff is a piker compared to most of them, IMO. Frankly, I think the US government now is so corrupt and so much in bed with supporting those wall street criminals and parasites I would support a second secessionary effort by some state or states, just to get away from those lying thieves and blood profits murderers.
As to the pet thing, that sucks! Someone has an injury or loses their job, their economics go down the crapper, they are already bummed out and psychologically damaged, and their loving pet which means a lot to them and that loves them back needs some care so that charity place will only help if they take the pet away? That's nuts! That's not charity it is elitism cruelty!
Doubly so with children. Human children are remarkably resilient, taking them away from the parents that love them is cruel beyond belief. Removal of children from a home should only be done under extreme abusive conditions by the parents, and for no other reason, and just being poor doesn't count as abuse in my book, especially as the official government and wall street economic policy lately has been to utterly ripoff and destroy the middle class in the US for short term globalist race to the bottom labor arbitrage profits.
The pet thing, glad I know that now, I am going to check into that spca thing and if true rank them soundly around the internet. We take care of a boatload of rescue animals (right now have 7 dogs and around a dozen cats) and my income is pretty low, I make well under ten grand a year, and I will never approach spca then if this is the case. I just suck it up and pay for what vet care I need and do without for myself if I have to. For instance the bulk of my fed return this year, I get most back from my income level, is going to spaying/neutering and vaccinations for my newest arrivals here, a coupla puppies someone dumped off and a few cats. Ya, I'd like a new computer, but my responsibility to my pets come before that. Out in the country, pets just show up. I like what I do, all my pets like me back (just got back from a good run in the mud with the pack, we got all slimed, been raining like ..cats and dogs lately here, pretty funny really) and also consider this to be my tithing for the most part.
You didn't notice above
Pebble bed is an exception
As a matter of fact I did notice that statement and I think it is absolutely wrong. A pebble bed reactor would be even easier to use for making weapons Plutonium than a light water reactor - you can pull pebbles out of the reactor without having to shut it down, whereas refueling in an LWR is done only once every 12 to 18 months. Probably the only reactor design that would be less useful for generating weapons grade Plutonium is the Integral Fast Reactor.
FWIW, the pebble bed reactor is based in part on the High Temperature Gas cooled Reactor (HTGR), sharing the helium coolant and graphite encapsulated fuel.
The Russians paticularly had a lot to say about the problems in their plants and used Westinghouse as a swear word to describe US plants with problems.
Considering the relative safety record of US naval and power reactors versus Soviet naval and power reactors, I wouldn't put much faith in what the Russians think of the Westinghouse designs (which are the basis for the majority of world's nuclear generation capacity). The US nuclear generation is now runnng at ~90% capacity factor, which speaks well for the future of the light water reactors.
Too big to fail should mean National security threat.
I think the larger a business is(the more people it has the potential to impact negatively), the more oversight it should have.
Irrelavant.
It's very relevant. This is about storing CO2 but it leaks. And kills.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
A lot of these huge corporations, being international in scope, have no loyalty to the US per se, just a place to hang their corporate hat and suck all they can out of the situation. As such, not only being too large is a general security threat, them having little to no loyalty is as well. If their corporate mindset boils down to "anything to make profit" and that's it, yep, a security threat because they will sell out if the price is right and they think they can get away with it, whatever unethical or criminal act "it" is.