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4 Prominent Scientists Say Renewables Aren't Enough, Urge Support For Nuclear
First time accepted submitter Paddy_O'Furniture writes "Four prominent scientists have penned a letter urging those concerned about climate change to support nuclear energy, saying that renewables such as wind and solar will not be sufficient to meet the world's energy needs. Among the authors is James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist, whose 1988 testimony before the United States Congress helped launch discussions of global warming into the mainstream."
let's do it right, please. no more melt-downs...
"Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs
The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Nobody can get obscenely rich from renewable easy to produce energy, therefore it is not, nor will ever be practical.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Logic is a wonderful thing and we need more critical thinking and less hyperbole with regards to green energy. Strident hyperbole with regards to the anti-nuclear energy has resulted in the real world build of coal power plants as renewals simply are suitable for baseline power. Coal power plants also release far more pollution and for the ignorant they also result in a lot of radiation being released into the air.
Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated. Thorium reactors are also starting to get planned for production and deserve a good look (and if fact a proof of concept plant was built in the past). Thorium reactors have the green advantages of nuclear reactors and should be included.
It's time to get real about getting green and put the likes of Greenpeace out to pasture. They have done far more harm to the environment than just about anyone short of the Koch brothers.
Geothermal ? Theres plenty of energy there...
1) Expense. nuclear power is incredibly expensive to do safely, because if bad things happen at a nuclear plant nobody can ever live in that County ever again. Just look at Fukishima and Chernobyl. If bad things happen at a coal or gas plant, OTOH, the worst consequence is that it blows and you need to buy a new one. You need lots of very smart people to monitor it 24/7, and sophisticated computerized systems and robots to make sure the people don't screw up, and even that won't save you forever.
2) If every democracy uses uses nuclear power everyone else will want it. And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program. Untrustworthy countries who probably shouldn't have the temptation of city-vaporizing weapons will want them. And it's kinda hard to convince an Iranian who thinks his country is perfectly trustworthy (to him it's those nasty Israelis you have to worry about) that everyone's life would be so much easier if his country didn't have the physical capability to finish the Holocaust. It's even harder to convince the Israelis, who (probably) currently have nuclear weapons, that everyone's lives would be so much simpler if they just switched to solar.
In other words if the choices are one or two more degrees of global warming, or letting every country in the world develop nuclear power, we're probably better off living with the warming.
Five nuclear power plants in the US have closed this year, due to a combination of competitive and operating issues. An industry analyst quoted in the article expects more plant closures to come.
Now we're stuck with these decommissioned plants. Anybody want a high-paying job? Sign up to help clean up and tear down those zombie plants.
Why does everybody overlook that uranium resources are limited and that what is available today barely can feed the existing reactors? Money talks is the only explanation I have. Nuclear energy has brought nothing but trouble and wasted shiploads of money.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserve_estimates
Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated.
Pure bullshit. Those regulations are there to stop the local energy company from cutting corners and blowing up something. Something that they do on a regular basis in non nuclear energy.
The most dangerous aspect of nuclear energy is the energy company.
What happened to the story about the Obomacare web site I clicked on. Was I imaging it?
That site crashed under the load.
You only need to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface with off-the-shelf 15% efficient PV panels to provide all of humanity all of its energy needs. If we covered all residential rooftops in the States with PV panels, we'd generate about as much electricity as the industrialized world needs -- and that's just residential rooftops just in the US.
To suggest that solar somehow isn't enough is just laughable. Hell, with the kind of abundance that solar offers, we've got far more than enough available to distill CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into hydrocarbons -- an incredibly energy-intensive process -- and use those hydrocarbons as our storage and transportation mechanisms just as we do today.
What we don't have is the willingness to invest our hydrocarbon inheritance in bootstrapping ourselves into such an energy-wealthy society. Instead, we'd rather squander our inheritance on monster SUVs and petroleum-based fertilizer to feed dozens of billions of people.
Here's some perspective from somebody who can actually do the math:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Nuclear is not just about uranium. Look at Thorium -- a plentiful and safe alternative that is more than just theoretical.
âoeNever underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts.â â" Henry Rosovsky, Harvard ec
Instead of giving power companies subsidies, why not install solar on every home and business and then the grid becomes a fall back and not a single point of failure. Power generation should be distributed rather than concentrated.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Stop getting your advice from Dan Quayle and Karl Rove.
is completely based on people. Everything starts out fine with the Gov't watching it and making sure it's safe, but safety costs a lot of $$$, and sooner or later somebody notices they could have that $$$ for themselves. The argument that every dollar gov't spends is just bureaucratic waste is pervasive and worse, it sounds plausible because it's easy to find pork projects and waste. Human's are pretty inefficient to begin with but when it's private waste you never know about it, because what company goes out of it's way to tell investors they spent $50 million on a software project that could've been done for $10 if it wasn't for hindsight :P. Gov't is public so that's all out in the open...
So the myth of bureaucratic waste passes the 'truthiness' test, and it gets applied to stuff like Nuclear safety inspections. They get privatized and before you know it a perfectly safe plant is now a disaster waiting to happen. The rich guy that pocketed the savings is 1000 miles away from ground zero so he doesn't care either. Worst case scenario he pays a $1 million dollar fine on $1 billion in profits...
I haven't been able to come up with a solution for this. Heck, most people don't even recognize it as a problem. They focus on the technical problems not the human ones. Until Nuclear can be done so safely that there's no money in ignoring safety it won't work...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
energy should be as 'cheap' as the market dictates...which, in a properly competitive market, means really large companies with big time resources would then fund the *best* Research and Development to compete with each other to bring the cheapest & most sustainable (read: clean) energy that modern science can provide
your idea attempts to solve the right problems, but does it in the most contentions, unworkable way possible...this is why you fail
see, you identify some problems most would agree with:
everyone agrees with this...hell even some Republican Wal-Mart executive would agree with this even though they profit from it...
your solution of purposefully, artificially inflating prices is nothing more than a **giveaway to energy companies for doing nothing**
your idea guarantees a revenue chain for said energy companies, takes away incentives to do R&D on better technology (instead its marketing R&D), and ensures that the current, **unsustainable** fossil fuel model will continue
you are way, way off from solving the problems you identify
Thank you Dave Raggett
Didn't take long for "shiver in the dark" environmentalism to raise its ugly head.
What most people don't realize is that nuclear waste can be treated to render it harmless more quickly. And it can be done with a sub-critical reactor design.
I don't understand how you can call yourself an environmentalist and not be in favor of this technology.
i think its like everything else, they want to make one huge machine to power an area rather than loads of smaller ones
This, this this, a thousand times this.
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
It absolutely amazes me that building codes haven't evolved to require incorporating one of those two technologies into every new building. The baseline residential load could become a net generator within a decade.
But, it then becomes hard for the utilities to justify charging people for power the people themselves produce. I don't want to suggest we have any sort of vast conspiracy here - More like hundreds of individual companies all actively dragging their feet and refusing to upgrade their infrastructure to make distributed generation practical.
"Funny" story - Five years ago, I started playing with a small plug-and-play solar installation at my house. During the day, with no one home, my old analog electric meter would actually spin backward and credit me for excess production. Two years ago, my local power company rolled out a forced upgrade to digital smartmeters (and when I say "forced", I mean we had actual protests and lengthy court cases trying to block the change). And whatd'ya know, the new meter doesn't go backward. I effectively give my extra power production to the grid for free.
Of course, I have the option of contracting with the utility for a second meter basically installed backward - For which they charge me to sell them electricity. Last time I checked the numbers, I'd realistically need to produce over a megawatt hour per month just to break even on their BS fees - And with my current toy 400W installation, that won't happen.
Funny you should mention Thorium.
Here are a couple of letters (postal+email) I have written to Senator Inhofe and Halliburton Corporate. They express my sense of urgency. I invite everyone to review them and comment. Flames are welcome too. Whopee! I have a 'foe' now! Movin' on up.
And if your own process of discovery also leads you to some conclusion that is best expressed by getting the word out -- please do so. Whether you are not a thorium advocate, please consider the underlying issue, the necessity for an urgent PUSH to develop energy independence.
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
It's about keeping the lights on.
Thanks for reading this, that and the other thing.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.
And I guess if global warming runs it's course, we'll all be to hot to shiver. :)
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Only if you ignore the costs. If I'm using energy it's because I get something useful out of it. If I "conserve" by not using that energy, I forego the benefits of that energy. Sure, I could just leave the heat off all year round, I'd save a fortune that way, even accounting for the cost of thermal underwear. But I don't want to live that way.
To the contrary, energy prices need to come down drastically to help us mitigate the risk of all of the issues we are facing in relation to sustainability. Lowering energy costs is critical for addressing poverty, and it will be vital for combatting global warming. So it isn't that we want fossil fuel costs to go up so that renewables are more competitive which will exasperate the economy, rather, we wish for nuclear power production to become far safer, flexible, efficient, and cost effective to drive fossil fuels out of the market. Completely eliminating fossil use while lowering energy costs must be the goal!
The authors are not saying "drop pursuit of renewables in favor of nuclear"; the point they make is that (FTA) "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" . Certainly work on renewables should continue. The authors assume that climate change is real and a solution to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is required now in order to stem it. Again, from the article: "[Environmentalists are] cheating themselves if they keep believing this fiction that all we need is renewable energy such as wind and solar....The time has come for those who take the threat of global warming seriously to embrace the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems" as part of efforts to build a new global energy supply."
âoeNever underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts.â â" Henry Rosovsky, Harvard ec
The world is not binary: there's a vast range of possibilities between leaving heating on the entire year and opening the windows when you get too hot to never turning it on.
Raising the price of energy would help push people away from the stupidity of the first of those (yes, some do), to be just as comfortable and healthy on much less. I've easily managed to halve my energy use while adding two children to my household: it is depressing that some will not even try at the risk of damning their successors...
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
IAAESS (I am an energy system scientist).
These are four of the most prominent *climate* scientists in the world. But not one of them has published a single paper on energy systems (as far as I can see in their online lists of publications). There is a whole field of science concerning integration of intermittent renewables, and these guys have never demonstrated any expertise in this area.
I'm sure all four of them get extremely annoyed when scientists in fields completely unrelated to climate change spout climate skeptic nonsense all over the media (I do too). Now they are guilty of the exact same sin.
What assumptions is Hansen making here? Of couse there will "enough" renewables if demand is scaled down by conservation and the price of fossil fuels is raised high enough. Global warming is an externalized envionmental cost of fossil fues. If those costs are internalized in the price of fossil energy, the free market will take care of the problem. Or we can just raise taxes on fossil energy and use the money to build renewables.
What Hansen is really saying is that there will not be enough renewables if we continue with business as usual, including subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear industires. That is true but it relies on the wrong assumtions.
The basic problem with conservation and demand being reduced by increased cost, is that countries will go to war over energy concerns. This means that if there is even the perception that a country will not have enough energy to meet its wants, then wars will break out as a result. Renewables cannot meet the need yet (if ever), and hydrocarbons are not acceptable for obvious reasons. That effectively leaves nuclear. If we rely on "conservation" to reduce demand, then we are setting ourselves up for failure, because there are far more people in the world who are set to increase their energy usage than there are who are set to decrease. The only way to stop these emerging economies from worsening the problem, is to give them non-hydrocarbon technology, or kill them. The latter is not really practical for a whole host of reasons, and the former is only practical with nuclear power.
Waiting for the "free market" to solve global warming is like waiting for the Chinese government to solve human rights abuses. It just aint gonna happen any more than Santa Claus is going to give us world peace for Christmas this year.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I live in the most energy efficient house in my county, based on good insulation, solar heating, and thermal mass. We just retrofitted my daughter's house (built in 1968) with insulation in attic, walls and crawl space. Nobody is wearing thermal underwear. Nobody is uncomfortable. And we are saving lots of money by NOT using energy. But "cheap" energy undercuts such efforts. The payback time is too long for most folks if energy stays cheap. But energy is only cheap if you ignore the cost of environmental damage. If that damage were included on your power bill each monty, insulation and solar power would look pretty good.
From the article: "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, "
But nuclear power is neither cheap nor reliable. So why do they suggest that as a replacement for renewables. As to the "fast enough" part of that, solar and wind can be ramped up much faster than nuclear. The rationale of the article is not logical.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
I think this could be a hoax. It's not a scientific paper, not in a peer-reviewed journal's letter section. It appears via a Google circles posting from Kerry Emanuel who is a well-known, though partially reformed, climate denier. It looks like the Google+ account the letter is published in was just created. Plus, the facts are either skimpy & wrong. Saying we cannot ramp up solar & wind power fast enough, but can ramp up nuclear, is directly in opposition to what's happening. Solar installations are going up by double-digit percentage points each year, and meanwhile we haven't had a new nuclear power plant in over 40 years. The only pair that is underway (which is pictured in the Yahoo! story) is years from completion. There are only 19 permit applications active for new nukes in the US, and the power industry (which is notoriously risk-averse) has for decades shied away from their huge liability and expense.
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
No, renewables can't meet the demand today, and possibly never will. You have made the classic mistake of assuming your experience is typical of everything everywhere. A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time. Even with neighborhood wind turbines, you will not cover 100% of the power needs. Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption. The overwhelming majority comes from industrial and commercial power use which has a much higher land density, and simply cannot be covered in any meaningful way with solar or wind power. Now you're back to needing industrial scale power generation which requires massive amounts of land for the scale required by industry and you're back to needing big again. If you covered the entire island of Manhattan (every square inch of exposed surface) with solar panels, you would only add up to about 1/4 of the total power demand. Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple. Also, how much deforestation are you willing to undertake to supply the energy needs of industrialized nations?
You are a very large part of the problem. Your arguments are bunk and fail to stand up to the realities of the world, and yet on the surface sound plausible enough to convince at least three moderators to mod you up on Slashdot (which I like to think has a smarter than average population). You and your ilk will have us so paralyzed following dead end projects that we'll all end up cooked thoroughly from global warming before any one of you will even be willing to concede that you're not half as smart as you think you are.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world tells you that renewables cannot be made sufficient to stop global warming, and you are going to tell the rest of us that they are wrong because of your own anecdotal experience? I think its high time we started calling your type out for the BS you're spewing.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Really, it's not the posters fault that he hasn't realized the stupidity of those around him.
You know how much energy could be saved if companies turned their lights out at night? Unfortunately, you guys are a bunch of savages that would gut every single one of those business.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Well I for one am against the freedom of "free to piss into common drinking water well" kind!
Whoever confuses personal commodity with freedom deserves none!
I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. The ones using the most wasteful energy can WELL afford any bullshit price hikes you an come up with, won't stop Rev Al Gore from farting around in a one man lear jet or having a fleet of SUVs like he's El Presidente, the ONLY ONES that price hikes hurt are the ones who can least afford it and who AL.READY CONSERVE and that is of course the poor.
I've said it before and I'll say it again the answer is NOT price hikes, just the opposite in fact, its making better choices cheap enough the masses can easily afford it. Why does the USA use so much gas? Because the average MPG is just 14 here, but why? Because the poor can only afford used cars for the most part and the cheapest ones are also piggies. What you need is a "people's car/truck" that runs on diesel so you can switch to biofuels when they are viable, gets a minimum of 40MPG and cots no more than $20K and then use "cash for clunkers" style program along with subsidies to get the poor out of the old gas hogs.
But I just love how the greenies want to fuck everybody with price hikes because THEY can afford them while ignoring that even a 40c a gallon gas hike raises the cost of food enough that more Americans will be going hungry. When you add to that a right wing owned by the "let 'em die!" teabaggers trying to gut food stamps and any other aid to the poor a price hike is the LAST fucking thing we need, too many are already going hungry as it is.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time.
The sun always shines somewhere. The wind always blows somewhere. And the tides ebb and flow with the regularity of... Well, of the tides.
Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption.
So every household needs to make 5x as much as they use. Hey, there you have an opportunity for the utilities to stay relevant - Pay me to install more capacity than I need, and sell the excess to industry.
Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple.
'Fusion" counts as hard in the sense of "we don't quite know how to do it yet".
A superconducting cable from the Mojave to Manhattan amounts to a mere matter of logistics. We have a known solution. We know how to build that solution. Doing so would cost less than many of our foreign boondoggles. The only real "limitation" to doing so amounts to debates over NIMBY and profit sharing.
Pave Death Valley with solar panels. The rest amounts to political pissing contests.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world
I can find you "four prominent scientists" who believe that God created mankind, who roamed the planet concurrent with the dinosaurs, 6000 years ago. Argument from authority doesn't validate; and when the argument flies directly counter to what anyone can plainly see for themselves, that argument has a higher than normal burden of proof.
If you want to tell me the world doesn't have enough gallium to pave Death Valley with CIGS-based PV panels, we can work with that. "Dr. So-and-so said so!", however, doesn't amount to squat.
You can conserve energy by insulating your house better.
By having your own washing machine instead of driving once a week the the washing shop.
By opening the window at the correct time of the day instead of running your AC around the clock etc etc.
There are hundrets of ways to reduce energy usage without losing any comfort.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You assume that there is a "market" that decides that the "cheapest energy" will win in the long run.
That is wrong on two scales.
First of all there is no market. Everything right now was casked in concrete over the previous 50 or more years mainly by government interests.
So in the actual situation a 30 year old nuclear plant produces energy relatively cheap (but not as cheap as you might think: maintanace and fuel costs and waste storage still cost money).
A new build nuclear plant would produce energy very expenisve, much more expensive than wind e.g.
You mix up scaling factors.
A new build nuclear plant, if we start today with the planning, will be ready in 15 years, at the soonest, if no court or other interference kills it mid term. That means we have a delay of 15 years to scale up in energy production by 4 - 6 GW. Or a similar delay in replacing a similar amount of coal power.
Wind and solar on the other hand makes it easy to connect power generation in small chunks to the grid continiously.
I can plan for a 4GW wind farm and comnect it while I build it in 100MW chunks to the grid. So instead of waiting 15 years for a new nuclear plant TO HAVE ANY EFFECT I have an imediate effect if I build wind and solar plants.
And obviously: a new build wind/solar plant generates energy cheaper than a new build nuclear plant.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There are ways to look after the poor without encouraging profligacy with energy.
We do it already: this really isn't black and white.
One way is to keep the first kWh cheap and have a rising block price per kWh against usage: if you're not running a McMansion with the windows wide open in winter you need never hit the punitive tariff bands. Just for example.
Or directly subsidise the energy bills of the poor. Take taxes from the top end (of energy usage or general taxation) to compensate.
I'm a fairly right-wing (at least by EU standards) investment banker "greenie" and I have no desire to mess up anybody else's life, including those further down the line when we've burnt way more fossil fuels than was in any way necessary and (a) certainly squandered the cheap stuff and (b) possibly ruined the climate.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Your assumption that it is only practical with nuclear power is wrong on many frontiers.
Japan is a 1st world country and can not handle the aftermath of Fukushima. The Soviet Union is minimum 2nd wordl, if not 1st world as well and can mot handle the aftermath of Chernobyl.
So, you want now nuclear power in the hands of 2nd and 3rd world nations? What exactly is practical about this? Where do you get the workers managing the plants?
The next thing about practical is: you have no clue about how an electric power grid operates. Or how a juclear plant actually works. It is pretty hard to run a grid with more than 50% nuclear power. The reason is if a plant gets powered up about certain ranges it is pretty difficult to power it down (quickly) in other words you can not use it good as a load following plant. The same is true in reverse, if you have powered down a nuclear plant to react on a power fluctuation, it takes hours or days that you are able to power it up again, so you can ot follow the load.
So, NO: there is absolutely nothing "practical" in building nuclear plants in 2nd and 3rd world nations. And there is also nothing practical in increasing the amount of nuclear plants e.g. in the USA.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Hey, I can do that too. Just let me know when you're going to do the baseline measurement so I can turn the heat and the A/C on at the same time during that period. The point being that conservation when you're wasteful is easy; conservation when you're not is not. Try cutting your energy use in half AGAIN without sacrificing comfort.
Yes, there are people who leave the heat on and open the windows when they get too hot. Mostly tenants who aren't paying for the heat and may not even have any real control over it. Raise energy prices, and rents will go up, but the stupidity will remain.
Sure, I've got an 80% efficient furnace. A 95% efficient furnace would save me about $150/year. Between furnace costs and installation costs (a condensing furnace requires a new vent and a condensate drain and pump), it would pay for itself in just a few years more than the expected lifetime of the furnace (ignoring time value of money). You'd have to increase energy costs by a huge amount for that to make any sense.
That 15 year timeline is 100% political. There's no engineering reason for a nuclear power plant to take 15 years to construct.
And that 4GW of intermittent power that you're adding incrementally has to be backed up by natural gas turbine generation.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
It's lots more complicated than that. E.g., most people don't live the places they live in.
That said, more complicated doesn't mean it can't be done, it means the incentives aren't straightforward. Additionally, despite people wanting to think about doing it on a small scale, that's not a complete solution. You still need the grid (as you recognized). In fact a distributed power generation system requires a better grid, one that is less subject to fluctuations. (A solar storm possibility also makes that a necessity. The current grid wouldn't survive a hit by a major solar storm.) There need to be fast acting and capacious buffer capacitors. There needs to be distributed power storage. (Water towers that you pump up when there's excess power, and drain when the power level is low is one good choice, that you can use when there's noting else available...even if you need to cart in the water. It's not great, as you can't store large amounts of power that way at a reasonable price, but it's a multiple use storage system, Etc,
And for the large installations, we don't use solar cells, we use mirrors, and turbines. I doubt that solar cells will improve enough that that's not a better solution. (The mirrors heat a working fluid which is stored until needed. So it's an energy storage system combined with solar power.) And you don't use Death Valley, you use the Mojave Desert. You'll need more stuff than would easily fit into Death Valley, and it's not really a very good place for solar. It gets hot, yes, but it's a VALLEY, which means that it's only bright part of the day. (Well, I may be wrong about that last, but Death Valley retains heat, it no brighter than the surrounding countryside.)
Solar->thermal->hot fluid->turbine generator is the way for a large installation to work. (I'm pretty sure turbine is the correct generator), and that depends on a large thermal delta between the working fluid and the local environment. (So you need to have shade, and desire a mild wind.) But it comes with a built in time delay that can be stretched for weeks with good thermal insulation. This probably couldn't come on-line quite as fast as a gas generator, but probably faster than coal.
OTOH, one shouldn't be too focused on one particular modality. Wind has a lot going for it, but there needs to be a way to store the power generated. So far the only proposals I've encountered involved pumping water uphill (or into a pressurized container). And those can be difficult to implement. (Well, small water towers are pretty easy, but also don't store much.) Hydro is already pretty well developed, but we don't have many "mill pond" they hydro power sources, and we certainly could. It's a stable source of power, but each individual one wouldn't be large. (OTOH, it might well interfere with fish spawning...though the "mill pond" itself can raise fish of a different kind.)
This could go on for a long time, and I bet it's already TL;DR for most people.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Can't handle?" What does that mean?
You do realize that 90% of what you hear about Fukushima in the news is BS, right? You realize that the source of your information is heavily funded (through advertising) by the same people who will directly benefit (via increased use of natural gas for electricity production) in reduced nuclear power use?
The media isn't exactly smart, but they know not to piss off the money people.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Insurance for nuclear power plants is set up by the government, but it is funded by the plant operators:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/funds-fs.html
It is true there's a top limit per incident, but that's true of any insurance policy.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
High levels of poverty is a result of high energy costs. Unfortunately, we do not have anything currently that can replace the low cost and convenience of fossil fuels. Renewable sources require equipment manufactured with primarily non-renewable sources to keep the costs down. This is a really bad place to be, and the real risk civilization faces here can not be underestimated.
To get out of this mess, we must dramatically lower the cost of clean energy, which will require massive innovation within the nuclear sector. There is simply no lower risk alternative, but the public remains superstitious with regards to radioactivity, the nuclear industry entrenched with obsolete technology, and nearly everyone remains mired in confusion when it comes to the fundamental relationship between energy production and poverty. We are not in an enviable situation, but it is conceivable that we can innovate ourselves out of this position with sufficient focus on the right kinds of energy-dense solutions. Molten salt reactor technology, pioneered in the 60s with a very successful prototype, remains are best hope in addressing the costs and liability associated with nuclear fission power production.
There will be no "new economy" without a new industrial revolution fueled by a new generation of low cost and easily deployable nuclear power plants. That is the realization that the public must come to if we are to overcome our current crisis. Not addressing this challenge appropriately can easily bring about conflicts far worse than what was experienced in the first half of the twentieth century (the world wars).
The baseline measurement would be the historical average values for a household in your area, maybe of your size.
And by the way I cut from >2x normal to 0.5x normal for electricity by that metric. While adding two kids to the house.
Halving again would be relatively easy in good housing stock such as PassiveHaus, but I have the house that I have for now.
Actually I *am* aiming to make it possible to reduce heat demand (again) by a factor of two with my FOSS 'smart zoning' project for which I have a small trial running this winter to see if my ideas stack up. The aim is to in fact improve comfort at the same time.
I *am* suggesting that people using (say) 4x the mean per person pay (say) 10x or more per unit, a little like the TEQ (Tradeable Emissions Quotas) concept, and I'd not necessarily have a cap (ie the multiplier continues to rise with total amount used) to ensure that even the top 1% would notice.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Please don't handwave "logistics" as if it's triviality. Logistics is a significant issue, IMO bigger than generating the power to begin with.
You say we can just lay down lots of superconducting cable? A quick google search tells me that last year, the "worlds largest" installation of superconducting cable was being deployed. How big is "worlds largest"? One kilometer.
For a long time now, we've had the ability to generated power in a variety of different ways. Getting the power delivered exactly where and when it needs to be, is a different story, as is far from a 'known solution'.
Combine that with NIMBYs and such, I'm not optimistic that we can get our collective thumbs out and do what needs to be done. Hell, the gov't of Ontario managed to squander several hundred million dollars in an (successful) effort to satisfy said NIMBYers.
The poor are not people spending $20K on cars. And as a poor person driving a cheap 1998 car, it actually gets over 30 MPG. The bad fuel economy is middle class and wealthy people buying giant SUVs and pickups.
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Hansen's principal point is moving fast enough. His point is that if you are too slow, certain irreversible things will happen. Therefore you have to go with currently executable plans. The United States went dam-happy after Hoover dam, so it is not like we have hydropower waiting to happen. Nuclear is the one thing that we can execute on large scales to provide 24x7x365 power for many nations right now.
Hansen's problems are not with leading engineers. They are with politicians, activists, amatueur busy-body fearmongers and their me-too hangers on. He thinks a tipping point is coming, and that the other side of that tipping point outweighs any worry you have about nuclear power. And you can theorize all you want about your solar panels, windmills, etc. Nuclear is what has been proven to provide a substantial portion of world power without carbon load.
He is not interested in theories. He is interested in precedented engineering. Nuclear provides 20% or so of electricity in the U.S. today, around 80% in France. There is no "renewable" that provides so much power to a major country today.
The fact is that a lot of the global warming band wagoners are only on board so they can bash the same enemies they have been bashing for 40 years. When they hear they have to team up with some of their old enemies or the world is going to flood, well, they get off the bandwagon. They do not give an actual rats ass about the planet. They forgot about it 30 years ago.
But would you really want a device that can store 180MJ and release it pretty much instantaneously in case of a malfunction in your house?
:)
Considering that I already have a small refridgerator-sized energy storage device just outside my house that stores 9.7 GJ and can release it... If not instantly, in well under a minute anyway... Yeah, I don't really have a problem with that.
/ 100 gallon LPG tank, for those curious.
Please don't handwave "logistics" as if it's triviality. Logistics is a significant issue, IMO bigger than generating the power to begin with.
Fair point, but "hard" still beats "we don't currently know how to even do it".
I think, though, that I probably took the wrong approach with following the GP's lead about death vallet to Manhattan. A properly distributed grid doesn't require any such massive-scale superconducting long haul transmission lines - It simply requires average population density over an area to match its (very literal) shadow. Manhattan can't possibly make enough solar power to meet demand - But in a 50 mile radius of Manhattan, you have vast tracts of former farming wasteland, an ocean, a "long" island with high steady winds perfect for a turbine farm...
I don't mean to sound overly flippant here, but the problem largely amounts to one of will, not practicality.
Because responding to massive fires across entire regions is cheap, responding to cat 4 and 5 hurricanes is cheap, dealing with drought and dehydration from two months of over 100 degree days is cheap. Because spending over a trillion a year to subsidize the oil industry with "defense spending" in the ME and around the world is cheap.
Why don't you try looking past your nose to see how your low prices have high costs.
As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.
You can't save enough energy to compensate. Population in the 1960's, 3 billion. Population in 2000, 6 billion. Population now, 7 billion. Assuming we all cut our energy usage by half, which is outright insane, give it another 30 years and we're right back here. Except quality of life is much worse, because we're all using half the energy. That's if you don't count the effect of developing nations using more energy as they join the first world. You don't even need to rely on the population growth.
The real question is why do you oppose nuclear energy? Even if it's not wind turbine clean, it's cleaner than most energy used now, so it's a step in the right direction.
Here's the real plausible and sustainable plan of lowering total energy usage. Ignore individual energy usage. Individually, we should be double, tripling, quadrupling energy usage. After all, the goal for any individual is to live the most comfortable and fulfilling life he can. So, what do you do if you want to save the Earth? Just have less kids. You don't even need to have zero kids. Have 1. You're contributing to negative population growth which makes you not only carbon neutral but actually better than neutral, and once everyone starts doing so (and they will as global standards of living rises, as it's something that happens naturally to educated individuals with a high standard of living), population will go down, and total energy usage will drop even as individual energy usage skyrockets. Everyone's happy. In the meantime, we move to cleaner energy to support the population we have now.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
That's fine for dropping energy usage somewhat in the US and other developed countries, but the biggest cost coming up is the billions of people in India, China, and other developing countries who are scaling up their energy usage. These are people who never had air conditioning before, and are going to start wanting it. You'll need more than tariffs and subsidies for these people.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Solar energy is a nearly ideal source for air conditioning power since generally when you need it the worst the Sun is shining brightly.
France gets 80% of its power from nuclear, so your "over 50%" number doesn't really ring true.