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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...
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.
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.
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.
This is one of the shittiest arguments ever. Out of all countries with nuclear capability, US happens to be the only one who has actually used nuclear weapons against another country. Additionally, the US has started several new wars in the past decade alone. So if we go along with your "trustworthy" line of reasoning, the US should be #1 on the list of countries to be denied any access to nuclear technology.
Geothermal and Solar have basically the same problem. Quite plentiful, way more than we'll ever use until we become truly space going (centuries) but dispersed enough that gathering and storing it becomes impractical.
The main problem with renewable sources isn't the availability, it's the storage for later use. Coal/oil/uranium already have this part solved by nature, though with all the downsides that go with them. Dams solve the storage issue for hydro, but can't really be built in many more places than they are already and have their own negatives as well.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserve_estimates
That's kind of my point.
If the country that helped defeat but the Nazis and the Soviets can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, why the fuck would we insist that all 54 African countries, everyone in Latin America, Asia, etc. has to build reactors capable of producing those weapons? Hell if the Japanese, who aren't known for inferior engineering, can't keep a non-weapons producing facility safe what are the odds that everyone else can pull that shit off?
Global warming is bad, but if it's a choice between moving all NYC residents to Detroit (we'd actually have room for a quarter of them within the Detroit city limits, the D' population has fallen that much since it's peak in '55), and giving all 192 countries in the world nuclear power then I'm gonna go with moving everyone to fucking Detroit.
This's one of the dumbest proposals ever.
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.
The problem is that when the "rare commodities run out," it would lead to a major reshape of our economies, states and societies. Historically that means: poverty and inequality, civil wars and wars.
IMO on the line here, is to prove that we as civilization are mature enough not to shoot ourselves into the foot.
Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
This is not politically viable in the US. A large percentage of the population has no problem with the government giving free stuff to companies but then get all up in arms when it gives stuff to the people.
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/
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
In other words, "third world people should stay in their place."
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 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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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."
France gets 80% of its power from nuclear, so your "over 50%" number doesn't really ring true.