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Energy Production Is As 'Dirty' As Ever
kkleiner writes "A recent report (PDF) from International Energy Agency delivers some dire news: despite 20 years of efforts toward clean energy and a decade of growth in renewable energy, energy production remains as 'dirty' as ever due to worldwide reliance on fossil fuels. With the global demand for energy expected to rise by 25 percent in the next 10 years, a renewed effort toward cleaner energy is desperately needed to avoid detrimental effects to the environment and public health. The report says, 'Coal technologies continue to dominate growth in power generation. This is a major reason why the amount of CO2 emitted for each unit of energy supplied has fallen by less than 1% since 1990. Thus the net impact on CO2 intensity of all changes in supply has been minimal. Coal-fired generation, which rose by an estimated 6% from 2010 to 2012, continues to grow faster than non-fossil energy sources on an absolute basis.'"
We are producing more pollution because we are using more energy. The fact that it hasn't risen and is in fact falling in many places is due to us cleaning up and using more renewables.
I suspect this is just a lame excuse anti-environmentalists will use to justify inaction.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The article had one fact of which I was unaware, but should be entertaining:
"The boom in natural gas availability [mainly from fracking] pushed natural gas prices down last year to a 10-year low in the US. But the drop in US demand for coal sparked a drop in the price of coal, which in turn sparked a shift in Europe where coal replaced much of the more expensive gas to supply power stations."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
CO2 is food for plants.
You know what, you're right! And I don't know why those folks in Fukushima got all upset about their nuclear reactor getting water washed all over it! I mean, the darn thing needs water to work anyway, right? Plus plants and people drink water, why were they upset that they got extra from the ocean? It's just water!
Big whoop. Warming up this damn freezer I live in is NOT being "dirty".
Right because the possibilities of water wars, refugees, failing economies, destruction of the food chain, droughts and general destabilization of the planet will have no effect on you whatsoever.
My work here is dung.
CO2 is a colorless gas. It doesn't look, smell, taste, feel, or sound like "dirt".
I hear you, friend. CO2 isn't even the end of dirty's improper use. There are thousands of girls all over the internet that are also called "dirty", even "very dirty". But upon close inspection, most of them don't have any dirt on them at all! And you can seriously inspect everything. Whats wrong with our society?!
Well you can do whatever you want in a few decades because words won't mean anything any more.
But right now words mean something. And if you want to use words without us berating you, you need to use them accurately instead of blasting sensationalism everywhere.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...when your country completely discounts nuclear as the best option for an environmentally friendly energy source. Solar and wind can never be primary energy sources - they are not constant power sources. They can only supplement a steady power source. And they waste so much real estate compared to the alternative that even environmentalists don't like them, especially wind farms. I live in the shadow of one of the biggest wind farms in the United States, and it's an obnoxiously terrible use of land with comparatively little energy in return. At least now they're required to cover the cost of their eventual removal and land restoration.
Frankly I'd rather live next to a modern, safe nuclear power plant. China is appropriately proceeding with caution on the development of their next plants based on lessons learned with Fukishima (see recent slashdot posting) but they did not have a knee jerk "OMG nuclear is bad!" reaction. You fix it, you evolve the design, you move on. That's engineering. You don't go hide in a cave. Even Japan is coming round to the fact that ditching their nuclear reactors wholesale would result in an unacceptable level of energy dependence, plus they'd be burning dirty.
Nuclear is the only future in which we can have the energy abundance we have now, and do it clean. We CAN have both, unlike what some people may like to tell you.
In small concentrations it is necessary for plants - but it isn't what is typically considered a "nutrient". But CO2 has a strong effect on global heating and the low concentrations confuse people who don't understand just how powerful an infrared absorber it is, or what happens when you disturb an equilibrium.
eldavojohn is totally correct when he mentions "water wars, refugees, failing economies, destruction of the food chain, droughts and general destabilization of the planet". These are all consequences of a warming planet.
Some areas will have far too much water at times - like the midwestern US that is flooding now. But then it can go into drought and crops wither like they did last year. Other areas simply suffer prolonged drought. Right now the Rio Grand has slowed to nothing but stagnant water in the southern part of New Mexico and the pecan and chile farmers are looking at big crop failures. People are already fighting over water rights in a number of areas as what is becoming a scarce resource is now the difference between a farm surviving or failing.
Scoff and deny all you want, but those of us old enough to remember the weather in the 60's and 70's know that the weather has changed and that what we are seeing now simply is not normal.
That's not CO2 causing the smog in Beijing. Those are actual "dirty" particulates. Black Lung stuff. Burning coal in the last 50 years has become drastically better. Saying there have been no improvements is a lie. CO2 production isn't dropping but the truly poisonous stuff has largely been curtailed in the US. CO2 is a greenhouse gas not something causing Acid Rain. True it's helping warm the planet and disrupting the climate but then climate change is a fact of life on this planet. If you look at the output of a volcano such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines you'll see just how dirty mother nature can get. The incredible amount of sulfur dioxide pushed out by this one eruption was over 20 million tons. I think you'll see little reduction of CO2 without a massive change to another power source and currently the only viable alternative is Nuclear power but that comes with it's own problems.
And they're all great, right? Can never have too much water washing over your cities and farmland, and the more extreme weather, drought & crop failure, species extinction, refugees and political turmoil, the better.
Embrace the climate change! The tsunami of costs to adapt will wash over us, leaving us clean of funds and fresh of heart, ready to tackle the warm new challenges that await us!
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
what exactly is being added to the CO2 to make it poisonous?
CO, NOx, SO2, Hg, soot and fly ash mostly.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Tragedy of the commons. Whoever abuses the resource first wins.
Learn to love Alaska
The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The real problem is not that we are polluting more, the problem there are a lot more people. Get rid of half the population and you'll get rid of half the pollution. Feel free to go first to set the example.
That would coming mostly from China now, if you can find someone over there that cares.
They are easy to find. The prisons are full of them.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
>> take their heads out of their asses.
I would say the same about the engineers behind Three Mile Island. And Chernobyl. And Fukushima...
Three Mile Island? You mean that marvel of engineering in Pennsylvania in which, despite being the site of the nation's worst nuclear accident, NO ONE DIED and which did not result in a single case of cancer?
Methinks you're the one who needs to pull your head out of your ass.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Citations, please. Your numbers for Chernobyl are not reflected in the U.N. report.
Want more stupid bullshit? TFS only compares the past twenty years. Let us go back to my high school days.
The place is West Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Penn Power's electric plant in West Pittsburgh emitted a black column of smoke, 24/7, 365. Back in the day, it was common for housewives to do laundry at home, then hang laundry out on a clothes line. Not in West Pittsburgh, though. Clothes hanging outside would come back inside grungy on the best of days, and when the wind was blowing directly from the electric plant, clothes would turn black.
I can't remember the exact year - it may have been 1971 - when the government forced Penn Power to put up a huge chimney, with "scrubbers" inside of it. After the chimney was put up, a few years of normal weather eventually washed 99.9% of all that soot away, or the vegetation absorbed it. Today, West Pittsburgh is as clean and pretty as any other town in the Beaver Valley.
So, the summary is going back to an arbitrary point in time at which government had ALREADY forced industry to clean up their acts.
Granted - "clean" is a relative thing. Until we reach the point where there is zero pollution, there will always be room for improvement. But grabbing an arbitrary point in time, without any comparison to previous times, then claiming that there is little or no improvement since that time is misleading, even dishonest.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So - you're saying that the couple of decades from your youth are to be considered "normal". We're going to ignore all of the evidence that points to cyclical warming and cooling on planet earth, and use two decades to define "normal".
Does everyone forget that the Native Americans lived on this continent for untold thousand of years, before any Euros showed up? Maybe we should be asking them, "What is "normal" around here?"
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Well the time for " ZPG " is past .
It is time for a negative population growth
or remove some of the population ( or nature will do it for us -- and not in a nice way)
we DO need to be back to PRE World War 2 population levels
that WILL solve the energy and food needs
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
And those of us old enough to remember the weather in the 50's know that the weather in the 60's and 70's was simply not normal.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
According to my quick calculation, 2GW is equivalent to boiling off 13 cubic feet per second of water. That's in the range of a large groundwater supply, but would be a poor use of groundwater. 13 c.f.s. is a very modest river. Compare this to the Niagara River at 100,000 c.f.s..
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I was completely convinced by his argument until you replied with using bold letters and completely blew his argument out of the water. I'm totally on your side now.
A recent cover of Investor's Business Daily, citing information from the EPA, shows a graph of air pollution in the United States over the last 20 years. It's down 60%, while population and GDP has increased.
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The SEGS, a solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert uses ground water from a rapidly depleting aquifer to run the condensers for their generating station. The NREL report about trough-based solar thermal energy lists the SEGS's water consumption as 1000 gallons (about 3.5 tonnes in real units) evaporated per MWh generated.
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/faqs.html
Oceanside nuclear and other thermal power stations do not evaporate any water, they return seawater warmed by a few degrees from the condensers to the ocean.
The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design.
*Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design. *Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.
I don't like replying to my own posts, but I forgot to add that air-cooled condensers are avoided as much as possible. They use far less water, but use a lot more power to run the air fans. And the cooling surface must be much larger which also adds cost. And the entire cycle is less efficient with an air-cooled condenser because evaporative cooling can always reach a lower temperature (Carnot-type thermodynamics). In summary, cooling towers use more water per MW, but air-cooled condensers burn more fuel per MW.
If you can get the water permit, cooling towers are the way to go. Recently, I have seen air-cooled condensers becoming more popular for both desert applications and to satisfy permitting concerns.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.