Slashdot Mirror
The World Falls Back In Love With Coal
Hugh Pickens writes "Richard Anderson reports on BBC that despite stringent carbon emissions targets in Europe designed to slow global warming and massive investment in renewable energy in China, coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels, is making a comeback with production up 6% over 2010, twice the rate of increase of gas and more than four times that of oil. 'What is going on is a shift from nuclear power to coal and from gas to coal; this is the worst thing you could do, from a climate change perspective,' says Dieter Helm. Why the shift back to coal? Because coal is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. Due to the economic downturn, there has been a 'collapse in industrial demand for energy,' leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down. Meanwhile China leads the world in coal production and consumption. It mines over 3 billion tons of coal a year, three times more than the next-biggest producer (America), and last year overtook Japan to become the world's biggest coal importer. Although China is spending massive amounts of money on a renewable energy but even this will not be able to keep up with demand, meaning fossil fuels will continue to make up the majority of the overall energy mix for the foreseeable future and when it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the easy winner — it is generally easier and cheaper to mine, and easier to transport using existing infrastructure such as roads and rail, than oil or gas. While China is currently running half a dozen carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — which aim to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants and bury it underground — the technology is nowhere near commercial viability. 'Renewed urgency in developing CCS globally, alongside greater strides in increasing renewable energy capacity, is desperately needed,' writes Anderson, 'but Europe's increasing reliance on coal without capturing emissions is undermining its status as a leader in clean energy, and therefore global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.'"
Due to the economic downturn, there has been a 'collapse in industrial demand for energy,' leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down.
This does not make sense. A collapse in demand leading to an oversupply can plausibly cause other people, i.e. non industrial customers, to pick up the excess but that does doesn't result in more people using it than before, just different people.
The fact is that today's children are terrible. The increase in coal production is purely for Santa to leave lumps of it in stockings for these children.
Granted the CO2 is not good if we want the climate to stay as is but if coal is too cheap then we MUST figure a way to use it without the drawbacks.
There has been talk about talking CO2 from the air and making diesel out of it. Why not get straight from a coal burning plant? (BTW: sequestration of CO2 in the ground was proven to cause Earth quakes.)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Sources suggest that apart from a brief blip during the economic downturn in 2009, worldwide coal consumption has been steadily increasing for the past 10 years or so, after plateauing in 1988-2000.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's what you get for knee-jerking and planning to shut down all of your nuclear reactors. The promise of replacing that power with clean renewable energy is proving a tad hard to follow up, right? I'm not exactly surprised.
I expect Europe will eventually start driving coal down once more, but it'll take a while to do such a shift, during which time coal will be the stopgap measure. That, or they finally wake up and do nuclear right instead of writing it off entirely.
America is the only country it would seem, still building clean nuclear plants (much less shutting them down as Germany has done!). We are also the only country going full speed ahead on fracking, giving us lots of natural gas to use which burns without emitting CO2. Also where are realistic electric cars like the Telsa being designed? America.
Frankly I did not ever see Europe being a leader in CO2 reduction, they were all talk. It's one thing to sign a paper or give statements of support, it's quite another to carry through with real actions that will actually cause the reduction you seek. If Europe had been at all serious about CO2 reduction they would have leaned on Germany not to close down nuclear plants.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for joining in the HUGE PR EFFORT of the major energy corporations... FOR FREE!
My dear god. Could it hurt you, not to include loaded, "spin words" in the story title?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Coal reserves are much higher than oil and gas reserves, and it's dirt cheap to extract when strip mined. The only real question is whether we'll make coal plants cleaner by using all sorts of filters.
We have figured out that burning fossil fuel is bad for climate change. What do we do? Fracking and burn more oil. Sigh.
I misspoke in saying it burnt without emitting CO2, but as you say it burns cleaner than coal which is what as the article says, they are turning to in Europe.
So switching to a much heavier use of natural gas can significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or Obama's policies make it too expensive to compete against cheap Chinese coal, even with demand up.
Our leaders have mostly lost faith in the doctrine of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by our emissions of CO2 as we burn fossil fuels.
If our fearless leaders actually believed that we are in danger of runaway catastrophic global warming, they would never allow new coal power. Instead, they pay lip service to CO2 reduction while implementing policies that fly in the face of CO2 reduction.
It's much like the boy who cried wolf. People like Al Gore and James Hanson have been crying their alarmist warming for so long that influential people have stopped believing them. The downside is that those people have also stopped listening to the real scientists.
What are you, teh Socialist???/?
Why do you hate Americans' God-given right to prosperity and entitlement to profit?/???
Don't put France in the same bag as the Germans. The situation is totally different.
That way each one individually get to spend their current share without overloading the planet.
I don't see another solution. It seems countries have better _actual_ results in convincing people to have less children than using green energy.
none
So we are already sliding back, and we haven't even had an Empire and a Foundation.
Or maybe Murray is just making a political statement becase coal can't compete against cheap natural gas from fracking.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/after-obama-re-election-ceo-reads-prayer-to-staff-announces-layoffs/2012/11/09/e9bca204-2a63-11e2-bab2-eda299503684_story.html
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal, there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market. I didn't even have to RTFA to get that from the summary. The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it (free market at work, but Murray Energy blames it on Obama). Natural gas outside of the North American market is not (yet) so cheap so it is not pressuring coal outside N. America.
My guess is that the situation in the US is different from the rest of the world in that with the now widespread access to natural gas reserves and all the gas fired power plants built in the 90s it makes more economic sense to burn gas rather than use coal rather. Nothing to do with the alleged Obama policies.
I wouldn't say "Falls back in love with" so much as "Is fearmongering over everything else moreso than coal".
That's like saying a woman staying with a guy out of fear who beats her less than the previous boyfriend is falling in love with him.
Just because you go with an option because you're avoiding the others out of fear doesn't mean you love that option. It means you hate it the least. Just like Obama winning the last election.
This chart shows why so many americans deny global warming:
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/64302000/gif/_64302444_demand_coal_imports_464.gif
Fukushima killed 20,000 people! Think what a tsunami like that would do in central Europe!
Besides, Europe is going to be 100% solar and wind powered in five years. I think hand-cranked generators are the way to go, though. Think of all the jobs that would be created.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It seems to me the Greenpeace's successful campaign against nuclear power and failure to campaign against coal power has been a major cause of global warming. No doubt Greenpeace knew or should have known since the 1980s how much worse coal is for the environment.
China and the US have similar reserves of coal (about a quarter of the world's supply each.) Coal is a PITA to transport compared to natural gas (weight vs. energy). There's lot's of natural gas in the Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_exploration_in_the_Arctic, which is probably why China is building icebreakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Xue_Long. When their second one is built, they will have as many active as the U.S., which *is* an Arctic nation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Council with corresponding mineral rights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Elections have consequences.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
None of this applies to the United States. Operators of coal plants are routinely shutting them down these days as the cost of known regulation (and the threat of future regulations) makes them uneconomic to retrofit, especially in the current low power price environment.
Where load growth necessitates additional capacity, high-efficiency combined cycle gas turbines are being built given the strong economics of running natural gas plants in the current low natural gas price environment.
The idea that there is a net move from gas to coal in the United States, is patently false.
It astounds me that people who call themselves, "green," because they have a car that runs on a battery. I'm not talking about hybrid cars, but rather the ones that plug into a charging station, a majority of which have a power plant powered by coal supplying it energy.
Here's a visualization of energy flows (including coal) for the World, USA, UK and China for 2007
wow if there's climate change it all originates from the sun. ...
sure we can blanket the earth in a layer of "bad" gases, like on venus,
and heat up the atmosphere.
next: " coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels."
sure if you think short term. but fortunately there's life on this planet
and some of it depends very much on the gaseous form of carbon
in the atmosphere in the form of carbon-dioxide.
it is very much a carbon-cycle.
nothing on the other hand depends on radioactive waste to survive.
sure, short term, nuclear waste production might be clean, compared to
coal, but nothing but time will scrub this sh1t from the biosphere.
so carbon-dioxide is BAD because it traps SUNRAYS in the atmosphere,
BUT why don't we TRAP the SUNRAYS with solar cells in the first place?
or with plants?
plant more forests, which coincidentally also produce more
precipitation, which is like a anti-gravity mechanism to transport water
to the top of the hydro-dam.
-
yes, i wouldn't want to live near a coal plant.
if you can't fight them, join 'em. go out with a bang, like the guys on wall street.
who cares what comes after
"But coal doesn't cause tsunamis like nuclear does!"
I'd like to know a reference to the causal link between nuclear plants and eartquakes.
Heck, France must be very wary from now on. Maybe the Mediterrean Sea may go nuts anytime now
There's lot's of natural gas in the Arctic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_exploration_in_the_Arctic [wikipedia.org], which is probably why China is building icebreakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Xue_Long [wikipedia.org].
Next thing you know the PRC will draw a dotted line on a map that stretches through the Bering Strait.
Still cleaner unless it's 100% coal or very close to it. A dirtier electric car is only possible in a few places in the US and China. In most places they would be FAR cleaner.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
He's just a dick throwing a hissy fit to make a statement. Every right-wing employer either does this or fantasizes about it, depending on how much they can afford to lose on said hissy fit.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This should be great for the zeta cartels - it seems they've expanded from drugs and mass-murder to the coal industry.
Now when we do such things as turn on a light, we can relish more than our collective carbon boot-print on the Earth's bemired face -- we can smile as we bask in the sanguineous luminosity of torture and intoxication too!
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Because if they were they'd be pouring money into and dedicating their time to researching alternative forms of energy that are more advanced than burning fossil fuels, namely fusion and its various forms, including cold fusion and the polywell. Which based on the evidence are two of the simplest ways to achieve it.
Now for those too young to remember it, it took an act of god and seeing a direct one to one relationship between CFC production and Ozone Layer depletion to get the major nations of the world to stop producing CFC's. So while the evidence of AGW is there, the timescale doesn't work nearly as quickly and the consequences of inaction aren't nearly as serious to most people ergo it's nearly impossible to get anyone including governments to take it seriously.
Therefore instead of trying to change human behavior by legislation and forcing people to use less efficient and less dense sources (e.g., solar and wind) of power understand that human progress has consisted of going from less energy dense sources of power to sources of energy that are more energy dense (e.g., wood to coal to oil). Therefore it is more efficient to simply introduce technology that harnesses more powerful energy sources, in this case fusion by way of cold fusion or the polywell than trying to change human behavior by law, particularly when such cheap sources of energy like coal are still utilized for obvious reasons.
As for those who are skeptical about cold fusion understand that one doesn't stop research in an area because replication is difficult, one persists because that's what research entails, persistence in the face of difficulty with the full knowledge that success is possible. Also, since for human civilization our only choices are continued use of fossil fuels and more environmental damage or fusion.
Or the people who deride others for flying, as they prefer to go by high speed train. Tip: traversing a country like France by plane is actually greener, unless that high speed train is powered by those nice French nuclear power stations.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As always, an AGW-spiced article triggers a heated discussion among a bunch of computer programmers having a limited understanding of the subject.
The nuclear accident of Fukushima has yet to kill *a single person* due to radiation. I don't know where you get your data, but surely it's not factual.
In upstate NY several coal-fired electric power stations have shutdown due to the INCREASING price of coal caused by increased demand in China and elsewhere.
Fukushima killed 0. The earthquake and tsunami killed 20,000. Is that what you meant?
The global picture is very different from the American picture. Worldwide, gas is expensive, and coal is cheap. In the US, fracking has caused the price of gas to plunge. (European gas prices have doubled since the 2009 crash; in the US they've *dropped* by 20% since then.)
I teach a college class on energy: we visited a New England coal power plant a couple of months ago. They only operate the plant one day out of four now, because they can't compete against natural gas plants.
So TFA is right, from a European perspective (the article is from a UK site). And in the US, Murray Energy *is* feeling the squeeze. But not because of Obama's "war against coal": coal companies are losing out to gas due to cold hard free-market capitalism, and Murray's taking the opportunity to kick his workers to the curb just before the holidays (as he's done before), and blame his political enemy for it.
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal
Net, not gross. There's plenty of coal in China, they just consume more than they produce.
there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market
"Not enough coal to be self-sufficient" isn't the same as "not enough coal to drive down prices."
The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it
Apples and oranges in the power industry. Coal is base load, gas is peak.
The medical community isn't serious about cancer research, because if they were they'd be pouring money into researching alternative forms of medicine that are more advanced than traditional biology, including crystal therapy and homeopathy. Which based on the evidence are two of the simplest ways to cure cancer.
No, no, no. The tsunami Fukushima caused is what killed all those people. Get your facts straight, dude.
Ya, but what other source of power provides enough output to cause a tsunami!
Sorry, answered to some posts and can't mod anymore or I had modded you up again. Complain to support, perhaps the modder is a "known rogue mod".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Outside of wikipedia the distinction between base and peak is not so clearcut.
Forbes Magazine (outspoken defender of free markets) had these two articles in May of 2012:
"Shale Gas Takes On Coal To Power America's Electrical Plants", May 30, 2012
and "Why Shale Gas Is Closing Coal Plants, So Why Do The Hippies Hate Shale?", May 5, 2012
http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/05/30/shale-gas-takes-on-coal-to-power-americas-electrical-plants/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/05/why-shale-gas-is-closing-coal-plants-so-why-do-the-hippies-hate-shale/
So the electric utilities in the US are substituting natural gas for coal due to price differences. I read it first in The Economist.
Very bad example.
First the high speed traines ARE powered mainly by nuclear or german wind ;D
Secondly even if it was coal, the train would be more ecologic than going by plane.
The plane uses roughly five liter diesel/kerosine per 100km per passenger, the train *one*.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Have you been playing Fallout recently?
...is it does nobody any good just lying there in the ground. it's there, why not use it up?
Cheap labour is the way of the future and has been for the past 3000 years. It's also referred to as trade, growth, and prosperity.
This is not to say that America hasn't made some blunders. American manufacturing was in the catbird seat until Detroit happened. Want a small, fuel-efficient car that doesn't fall to pieces the minute your service contract expires? The Japanese will make one (eventually). Detroit could have matched the Honda Civic while the Civic still sucked, but they had their heads up their ass-hats. It would have cut into selling overpriced and oversized cars you really didn't need. Why sell utility when you can sell dreams.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Jap-Crap. Jap-Crap with a plan. Jap-Crap planning to kick your ass.
Oh, yeah? You and who else?
It takes a real genius to spin the globe and miss China. Well done, Detroit, well done.
If it weren't for Asia, America would still be making oversized shit that breaks like clock-work. Outside of high tech, that's mainly what America was good at. We don't bring out our A game until we have a trillion dollar sustainment program on the boondoggle warpath.
The golden era of high domestic wages and low productivity was paved by the global petroleum monopoly. Did the Arabs really want to sell us all those barrels for half the net proceeds accruing to what we could manufacture by its consumption? Hint: they didn't have many great choices.
Knock, knock.
Who's there.
F18.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
OK, let's talk business. Name your price.
But go ahead and spin your weird little protectionist narratives.
With the F35 we're now balanced on the knife edge at the post-knock knock end of history.
Ultimately coal may be the most expensive source in human history but the trick is proving it without denial wiping out the evidence. Just look at Sandy. And yes I do realize it wasn't caused by global warming that was never the issue. The point is was it a stronger storm because of the energy provided by warming? I can't remember the last time New York was threatened with being swamped. It was threatened a year or two ago then nailed this year. There's some belief it may happen every four years now. Sandy did around 60 billion in damage. Look at the tornadoes we had a couple of years ago in the mid west. I think that's a much stronger case for global warming caused storms. The tornadoes wiped out whole towns and hit multiple states. That's two incidents in one country. The worldwide total is likely in the hundreds of billions a year and it could be much more. Eventually it could be in the trillions a year. Ridiculous? Given the latest projections by mid century we could be easily talking those numbers. The coast will likely retreat anywhere between a few hundred feet to a few miles on average. That's a lot of expensive property lost just on the coast. The point is we're being short sighted and just reacting to the symptoms of climate change. We're already locked in for a few degrees of increase but what happens when we get several times that? Don't worry about changing your lifestyle, it will change! We may be able to control the degree of change but that option is going away very fast.
Parent was sacastic (ie: Fukushima CAUSED the tsunami).
The accident at Fukushima has caused deaths or rather it would have eventually. One post-mortem report cites ~600 died due to stresses from the rapid evacuation of the area (ie: hospitals) to save ~6 lives from radiation effects (cancer) over the next 70 years.
As mentioned in my previous rant here debunking greenie bullshit (which I suggest you read in full): "ecotards and incompetent government oversight monopolies fucked up nuclear power, which would have been very safe relative to all alternatives".
Governments failed to adequately protect the Property Rights of those affected by pollution. They've failed even to tax pollution, taxing productivity instead. They've spent trillions of dollars fighting (in part) for a more stable and cheaper oil supply, thus sabotaging investment in alternative sources of energy. They turned nuclear energy into a military threat - it takes a government to build a nuclear weapon! Corporations without "divine right of government" would face severe liability restrictions when dealing with something as dangerous as nuclear fuel, and they would thus develop much better safety technologies much sooner. This includes improvements in power transmission, which will mean power plants can be built very far away from population centers: polar regions, and eventually even space!
Governments have a tendency to break your legs, give you lousy crutches, and then pose are your hero - which is exactly what they're doing with "clean energy" today. Technological trends give us every reason to be hopeful for a clean carbon-free future; it's government intervention that keeps screwing everything up!
--libman
The wind turbines say "Whoosh!"
True, in France the TGV will run on nuclear power. But in any other case, the plane does win on long distance journeys. The thing is that a plane uses *assloads* of fuel on take-offs, but once airborne it uses little. If your journey is long enough, it'll beat the train.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
In face, the entire article is misleading.
The World is IN LOVE WITH MONEY.
Anything you can do to increase profits is acceptable, irrespective of how badly it damages the environment.
And I say THE Environment because THERE IS ONLY ONE, we all share it, and once it is so badly damaged that it no longer works well for ANY part of humanity, we're ALL screwed.
Seriously folks, either clean up your act here on PLANET EARTH or fund NASA (and friends) sufficiently so that we have "a backup plan" on some other planet.
Yours Faithfully,
The Selfish Gene.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
People like to believe that Coal and other fossil fuels continue to be long-term viable energy sources because they honestly believe that "carbon capture works".
Surely there's NOBODY out there who doesn't know that bandaid solutions eventually fail, and when they do they fail MUCH WORSE than just getting off your fat arse and fixing the problem.
My prediction for the future is that at some point a large number of previously "successful" carbon-capture schemes will fail.
Fail in the sense of "containment failure" , suddenly releasing all that previously 'captured' cee-oh-too back into the atmosphere.
In the space of a year-or-three The Balance will shift and Venus will not be much of a mystery anymore.
Don't believe me? Well think on this - millions of years ago they had a warming planet due to excess CO2 emissions, someone thought up the great plan of capturing all that excess carbon into great 'deposits' and fossilising them. (Coal, Oil, etc) "nobody will ever bother these deposits, they'll be safe FOREVER".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Does a dead human produce when burned? Soylent Green isn't people, the fuel used to create the power to your house is.
Germany produced 2011 20.1% of it's electricity with renewable sources.2010 it was only 17.1%. By 2020 50% seems realistic.
Sarcasm, but crystal therapy and homeopathy don't cure cancer. Although a case has been made that cancer researchers don't "really" want to cure the disease as that would mean the end of the gravy train of job security and indefinite funding.
As for the Polywell and Cold Fusion, they work. All that's required is sufficient research and time. Of course if physicists don't wish to work in those areas, we can waste billions of dollars more and wait another 40 years for the tokamak method of fusion to possibly show some results whilst AGW continues unabated.
I think what he is getting at is the Fukushima reactors created the tsunami, which killed 20,000 people. ;)
Right. Don't worry there intellectual coward, you can believe whatever you believe but he's not the only case. There's several dozen other companies that deal in coal who've done the same thing in the US who don't follow Romney's philosophy. Though unlike us in Canada, who are booming at selling Coal all over the world, you guys are still shutting down mines.
Well, I guess that follows with what Obama was preaching huh? Enjoy your new level of poverty.
The anti-nuclear scare which they brought to perfection in Germany was all about securing the exclusivity of nuclear power in the western world. They were simply scared that Germany would one day have nukes. And they were scared of the economic might of Germany - the product of hard-working, hard-learning, austere people. The whole Green Party Thing traces it's roots to that.
From the horses' mouth: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/alt-linke-jutta-ditfurth-gruenen-waehler-wollen-getaeuscht-werden-a-745943.html
"Ditfurth: Ich habe die Einflussnahme der US-Regierung auf hiesige Politiker ja selbst erlebt: Als ich Bundesvorsitzende der Grünen war, wollte das US State Department Kontakt zu mir aufnehmen. Ich sagte: kein Interesse. Bei meiner Vortragsreise 1987 durch die USA haben sie es trotzdem versucht. In der Georgetown University in Washington stand ich plötzlich vor einem geladenen Publikum - darunter jede Menge Uniformträger und CIA-Mitarbeiter. Wir haben uns lautstark gestritten - ein ehemaliger Stadtkommandant von Berlin brüllte los: "Wenn wir gewollt hätten, hätte es die Grünen nie gegeben!" Mein Gastgeber von der Universität versuchte nach der Veranstaltung, mich dazu zu überreden, an einer Studie über die Grünen mitzuschreiben. Da hätten auch schon andere Grüne zugesagt - "gute Freunde" wie Otto Schily und Lukas Beckmann. "
Googe Translate will help you.
And of course it is not a coincidence that the 66th MI Group have their HQ in Wiesbaden, next to Frankfurt/Main, where Mr Fischer stems from. Mr Fischer was a nice tool in the Anglo power structure. First facilitating American wars fought by German soldiers, now a nice professorship paid by Mrs Albright - his former master-ess.
Now eat the CO2, we closed down the only functioning, large-scale Thorium reactor a long time ago. We were leaders in nuclear technology and UKUSA government decided it had to be destroyed. Eat the coal, die of coal and SHUT THE FUCK UP. Dankeschön.
I assume you mean civilian population because I know a few people went into right into the nuclear leaking part to manually fix things and they came out with radiation burns covering large portions of their bodies. I'm sure those people didn't live.
What part of:
a plane needs 5 litres per 100km per person
a train uses 1 liter per 100km per person
did you not get?
That is irrelevant of distance!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is flatly dishonest, to say "Fukushima has yet to kill *a single person* due to radiation".
It is essentially impossible to prove that any cancer-related death is due to radiation emitted from a given accident site. At best one can use statistical tools to prove that cancer deaths have risen from background levels. And this is difficult due to large scale evacuations from the affected areas. Not impossible but difficult.
By all means continue with the trolling comments! Ignore the economic devastation that simple population displacement caused. Ignore that country-wide, the accident caused Japan to review nuclear power as national policy. Ignore that a series of devastating explosions occurred, and suggest that they were somehow OK because they were not "nuclear" explosions.
By your standards coal cannot be proven to have caused any specific deaths either.
I happen to believe that nuclear power can be acceptably safe. However with friends like you, nuclear doesn't need it's enemies.
That's actually a persistent myth. Yes, a plane uses much more fuel per minute during take-off than during high-altitude cruise. But take-off doesn't take that many minutes. On any but the shortest flights, the bulk of the fuel carried by a plane is burned during cruise. And it's certainly not more energy-efficient than an electric train. And most countries that have high-speed trains happen to produce a large percentage (much larger than the US, that is) of their electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources.
If you don't start building another nuclear reactor fairly soon after you've finished the last one you don't have much of a nuclear industry any more and it costs a fortune to set up a new one almost from scratch.
What we see now is a bit of spin to make retiring old plants look "green" when instead it's being done on economic grounds as the old stuff gets more expensive to maintain or is already at the end of it's design life. Restarting a civilian nuclear program is just not going to happen in Europe until the state of the economy changes, and the same applies in the USA even though the startup costs will be a bit less.
Ah, the Alex Gabbard article in the Oak Ridge labs newsletter has got another follower. Note I said newsletter, since that bullshit never ended up in a peer reviewed paper and the guy that wrote it was a manager and not a researcher. It did end up in a bit of lazy journalism in Scientific American, but if you look at the comments on the online version you'll see a few pointing out precisely why it's fictional crap.
We've had the equipment to detect all this radioactive material that is supposed to be going up the stack for well over a century but nobody has seen it yet. I wonder why? Maybe Mr (not Dr) Alex Gabbard can write his first peer reviewed paper in his life about it. He won't be able to put a fantasy about terrorists being able to build nuclear bombs from ash in it if he wants to get past peer review unless he can back it up with more than just hand waving bullshit.
As someone active in biomedical research (inflammation, not directly cancer) I can say that any claims that cancer researchers do not want to find a cure and that there would be some sort of "conspiracy" holding progress back is pure bullshit. The sad truth is that cancer is not a single disease and lately it has become evident that even within a single patient, the population of cancer cells can be highly divergent (including the still controversial idea about "cancer stem cells", which are non-dividing and thus resistant to most chemotherapy). There are lots of very interesting data still in basic research which will take years before they get out into clinic and sadly there are also very promising drug candidates that due to economic reasons will have a difficult time getting promoted by drug companies. One of those examples is salicylic acid - which has shown very promising results against colon cancer and a number of other types. The problem is that it is an old drug of natural origin which is basically impossible to patent. This means that no companies are interested in funding phase I to III trials (which is actually the most expensive part of drug development). Other highly interesting developments at the moment are the cancer-specific T-cell treatments (or vaccinations), which I do believe will become a future treatment strategy - unfortunately most of this research is publicly funded at the universities and the industry only steps in after they are nearly sure that they will be able to reap the benefits.
It astounds me that people who call themselves, "green," because they have a car that runs on a battery. I'm not talking about hybrid cars, but rather the ones that plug into a charging station, a majority of which have a power plant powered by coal supplying it energy.
It all depends on where they live. There are places in the world, and in US in particular, where hydro is the source of most electricity (e.g. PNW).
Actually, no. I was referring to real-life actions of the PRC in the South China Sea. There may be petroleum resources in that area. See the red line in the map in the linked article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Sea#Territorial_claims
Latest aggression is that the PRC now publish the map in the passport. The thinking is that since it gets stamped by foreign countries, it is tacit approval of their claim.
http://news.yahoo.com/china-angers-neighbors-sea-claims-passports-095849066.html
I assume you mean civilian population because I know a few people went into right into the nuclear leaking part to manually fix things and they came out with radiation burns covering large portions of their bodies. I'm sure those people didn't live.
Well, in the sense that they don't exist they don't live.
Because nobody "came out with radiation burns covering large portions of their bodies".
A couple of people got burns to their feet by standing in radioactive water, but they (AFAIK) haven't died.
There are videos on Youtube claiming things are much worse, but I don't consider that a reliable source.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I'm not an American. If I was, it wouldn't affect me, if anything I'd be happy about the decreased fossil fuel extraction.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This brings up the question, when the labor market is saturated and there are no jobs for the masses to do, what are the masses supposed to do to eat?
When we have a society where it takes only a few to produce everything people need, and maybe even everything people want, how do we keep everyone employed? Or should we even try? Or do we just degenerate to a state where the "haves" have everything they want, and don't need anything, and the "have nots" have nothing, and don't have any way of earning money to buy anything?
--PM
Not on any scale worth mentioning. It's possible to do, but no one is doing it, so why even MENTION it?
It's just a way for people to rationalize that "oh, we can clean up coal" when in fact no one does clean up coal's CO2.
--PM
Hello,
It's not clear to me that fusion can EVER be made practical. It's quite possible that a SMALL fusion plant just can't be made, which leaves you with investing in mega-plants. Then, if you pay more in capital to build a fusion plant than you can recover from selling the power than, say, wind power, no one will ever build a fusion plant.
As an example of the stringent constraints on fusion, did you know that a thermal plasma of reasonable size with elements heavier than hydrogen + helium cools off faster via Bremsstrahlung than it generates heat via fusion? That pretty much leaves us with D-D (harder) and D-T (easier) fusion as possible reactions, both of which produce lots of neutron flux. These neutrons activate many materials and require big thermal conversion units that'll get really, really radioactive. Furthermore, it seems apparent that a thermal plasma fusion plant will have to be "big enough" or it won't be able to sustain burning, pointing at a large capital investment to make it go.
Thus, I have strong doubts that fusion plants can ever be justified as a capital investment vs. an investment in, say, geothermal or wind or fission.
Best,
--PM
Up until a few years ago, the main ingredient in solar cells, silicon, piggy-backed on the electronics industry, because the supply chain already existed. Then the volume of silicon for solar cells became larger than that for electronics. Since it does not have to be as high purity, and often can be polycrystalline rather than single crystal, custom plants to make "solar grade silicon" were built. The market price for PV silicon dropped from $400/kg to a current $16, and the price of the cells dropped right along with it.
Today the average price of the completed panels is $0.70/watt, and is expected to fall to $0.55/watt by the end of next year. So the argument that solar is too expensive is just no longer true. Please note that the panels are not the only cost for a utility scale plant, you have inverters and transformers, site prep, installation, and project overhead (design, permits, etc.), but the total cost of a solar plant is now competitive with other sources of power, especially in the US southwest. Rooftop panels are still about twice the cost of utility scale plants, because it is just less efficient to send out a crew to install a half dozen panels on a roof than to install literally hundreds of thousands in open desert.
Anyone who says solar is "too expensive" today has to explain why big utilities are signing power purchase agreements with the PV plant owners, and the banks and Wall Street are financing the plants at attractive interest rates.
While most current coal power stations have 33% efficiency it is possible to make them 50%+ ( up to 57% efficient ) with the use of supercritical co2 turbines ( or 40-50% improvement of ratio energy/co2 ) see about this technology http://www.echogen.com/documents/TMISept_Oct12_000.pdf with few percents of efficiency going into 70% capture of co2 ( which are noticeable with 33% efficiency but much less with 50% efficiency ) co2 capture turns to be quite feasible even for china
A world (not planet) destroying trap. It's bait (cheap energy) is far, far too sweet to be resisted. Our doom is named: Coal.
Thank you.
Coal seems to be a great way to do that, poisoned air be damned.
"the technology is nowhere near commercial viability." They should buy from a different company. There are many with solutions that actually work.
You call that showing your calculations? WTF do you get that concentration for U - you are just throwing around numbers without saying where they came from PLUS you are totally ignoring isotopes and assuming all U is the most radioactive isotope which is definitely not the case. I'll assume total ignorance and not a petty little bait and switch, so your choice, pathetic sucker or evil bastard trying to mislead this generation. Whjich is it? A bit of both?
You also want me to show a "source" for my own observations when I'm not pretending that it's anything other than my own observations when you've based your stuff on non-peer reviewed lab magazine Alex Gabbard bullshit? Look if you are going to keep on following me around trying to find fault you should at least spend the ten minutes on the net it would take you to look up the technique I used and understand it, it's not that far removed from emission spectroscopy which you would have heard about in high school. You are just making yourself look more and more like a high school dropout with each post. It's utterly pathetic that failed PR is influencing you far more than fairly obvious reality (considering that the less than 10% impurity in coal is really different types of sand).
What next? When do you start your crusade against radioactive concrete? It's got to be at least ten times more radioactive than coal on average.