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UN: Renewables, Nuclear Must Triple To Save Climate
An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of a study that concluded there was less than a 1% chance that current global warming could be simple fluctuations, U.N. scientists say energy from renewables, nuclear reactors and power plants that use emissions-capture technology needs to triple in order keep climate change within safe limits. From The Washington Post: 'During a news conference Sunday, another co-chair, Rajendra K. Pachauri of India, said the goal of limiting a rise in global temperatures "cannot be achieved without cooperation." He added, "What comes out very clearly from this report is that the high-speed mitigation train needs to leave the station soon, and all of global society needs to get on board."'"
It's been what, like 50 years we've been using old tech? Nuclear is cleaner than coal barring an accident. Coal is guaranteed to kill and hurt people. With Nuclear you at least have a chance of everyone being healthy. Even if the country doesn't adopt some grand scheme of making a bunch of nuclear plants, making one here or one there would get our technology levels higher and create jobs for smart people.
A lesser known situation is if you actually create an energy surplus, food costs, logistic costs, and transportation costs get cheaper. So if we ramped our energy production up by 2-8x what we got now, people could charge their hybrid car at home for even less than they do now. I think this dream is often grouped up with a superconductor power grid idea which is unrealistic for the short term. I think for a better world, we should be aiming to create energy surpluses.
Sometimes I even have the strange thought that energy conservation ideas hurt society's growth. It would be almost better if we used more power in the short term so energy could invest in itself and provide more power at lower costs down the road. I mean it is better to conserve electricity, but I don't hear people championing the idea of creating a global energy surplus.
God spoke to me
Humans are too greedy and too unreliable for nuclear to be the safest option.
Fix humans? That's way too hard.
Use something else? Doable.
Unless we just really have no problem with every X years some spot on earth becomes uninhabitable for the next 50,000 years...
The long and short of it..we're buggered. Thankfully, we will all be dead when it gets really shitty. If you think that the countries of the world can band together to reduce emissions and turn to renewables, you are smoking the funny tobacco. I install solar in countries that have the highest electricity prices and the most sun, but they refuse to implement renewables, preferring that good old diesel products. People are inherently stupid, short sighted and greedy. Nothing but war and pestilence will cause change. Nothing else ever has.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
Nuclear is cleaner than any fossil fuel, properly managed. Overall, despite the accidents, nuclear's impact has been a lot smaller than that of fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, accidents aren't seen as an opportunity to learn and eliminate old flaws, but to halfheartedly dump the whole thing, leaving behind ancient designs with known flaws instead of new, safer designs.
Human minds just aren't made to react to something so abstract, so distant, so far away. Look at the crisis building up with the US economy, national debt, and so on - something that could cause a whole generation to undergo a great depression yet nary a thought is given to it.
For example, on the economic situation, this guy was made the US's top accountant for over a decade, and appointed to posts by both R and D presidents and yet he makes videos that can barely garner 2k views about the situation (since September):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I guess if there was a girl twerking in it, it might work.
Anyway, that's how it is. We react, many don't think too far ahead. Both situations are basically simple concepts in theory (global warming is built on the green house effect which is simple to demonstrate, the economy on interest and other high school math), but so many interests go in and muddle issues, that the average guy doesn't know what to believe, so even those with a modicum of forethought are stymied by special interests.
And the special interests want status quo. Nothing will happen. That's the tragedy of democracy and why it never really lasts long. Power and money is like water, it always gathers and concentrates.
It think it would also help if we'd step away from the 'old fashion' reactors in favor of breeder reactors. Or the thorium based technology. When the kinks get worked out of that tech.
Any other old geezers remember just *who* it was that put the kibosh on the general use of nuclear power in the US?
Are we ever going to get an "oopsie, so sorry" from all the environmentalists who squashed the US nuclear power industry? Who have fought fracking tooth and nail, while it has been the prime enabler of decreasing US carbon emissions?
To paraphrase a movie: "Climate Change is People!" There's too many people on this world, all wanting the same thing and that's what's causing this. Depletion of our resources is occurring at an accelerated rate all because of more and more people and the rush for economic expansion. Fundamentally there will be two paths ahead, one which means controlling population growth and the second the upheaval of the worldwide economic engines both of which are driving the higher CO2 levels. Of course if a volcano or two erupt here and there it won't help but neither is allowing for commercial deforestation and destroying watersheds. Well before we all burn up, we'll have wars over water and other key strategic resources. We know it's on the horizon because we all can't get along on this planet and we'll never come to a consensus on wealthier nations changing their ways while allowing less developed nations a chance at economic growth. We're about due for another World War aren't we?
My suggestion is to invest in Mountain-top real estate in a Northern latitude and live like Euell Gibbons.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
France has done really well with nuclear.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As someone who works at the company that is the largest generator of wind and solar power in North America I know how hard it is to get Nuclear projects off the ground. Most people will agree that Nuclear is a very cost effective and efficient means of power generations but mention building it anywhere near their zip code and they go ballistic.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The "embodied energy" of a laptop is about 1500MJ, so let's call the Apple TV+HDMI a generous total of 2000MJ. Shipping energy is relatively low and fits easily in the 2000MJ upper bound.
The Xbox360 uses ~120W to watch a movie, while according to ArcadeMan the Apple TV uses 6W. Thus you make up the embodied energy in about 2000000000/114 seconds, or about 200 days.
The Xbox One is a bit more efficient, using ~75W, for a makeup time of about 335 days.
Either one is less than a year, so if you want to minimize energy consumption, it seems like a good plan to buy an Apple TV.
Of course it isn't clear that this is the right thing to be doing, but if it is, the benefit seems obvious.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
France imports electricity from Germany whenever it's too hot or too cold. In either case, limited cooling is available. In the winter, this is exacerbated by the enormous consumption due to the French preference for electrical heating combined with a lack of insulation, because electricity is cheap for consumers in France. Besides, the argument that stopping construction of new nuclear power plants is the reason for older designs remaining in service is bogus: Older designs remain in service no matter what (except for a total ban, which is happening in Germany). Keeping old plants online is simply the capitalist thing to do: They're bought and paid for and still work. Why would you shut them down?
Sometimes I even have the strange thought that energy conservation ideas hurt society's growth. It would be almost better if we used more power in the short term so energy could invest in itself and provide more power at lower costs down the road. I mean it is better to conserve electricity, but I don't hear people championing the idea of creating a global energy surplus.
The nations with the highest power consumption have ceased excessive breeding. They're all near or below replacement population growth among their indigenous population.
That right there is an outstanding argument for surplus energy.
A degree of conservation is a fine thing, but it's also a cop-out and a means of comfortable people to pull up the ladder behind themselves. Our millions of elite Al Gores will always live comfortably regardless of how hungry and cold they make you. Thousands of elderly Briton pensioners are learning all about that as the UK inflicts energy poverty on them.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Nuclear waste disposal from conventional fission reactors is a solved problem. Unfortunately, the storage of said waste kicks the NIMBY crowd into high gear. Here's an idea...how about converting it to relatively inert ceramic blocks (already available tech) and sink it at some remote subduction zone fault where it gradually gets folded back into the mantle? That ought to suffice until the perpetually "50 years from now" fusion energy generation crowd catches up.
Pebble bed reactors solve the cooling problem. China is currently building a few of those, so we'll have a chance to see how well they work.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
True, nuclear waste is not pollution unless it escapes in an accident. Fortunately, the volumes are so small that unlike with many other by-products of our industrial civilization, this one is actually amenable to being stored in controlled conditions, indefinitely.
Ezekiel 23:20
I guess I need to draw you a picture.
Om, nomnomnom...
And nuclear waste is not pollution.
Actually, that is correct. Nuclear waste is not pollution - until such time as a third party or the environment is exposed to it. Nuclear waste in a cooling pond is not pollution. Nuclear waste in your ground water is pollution.
Old stuff. Pebble bed reactors have their own problems. This one had atmospheric releases of radioactive material, contaminated the ground and groundwater below it (complete with increased Leukemia rates in the vicinity) and is currently much more radioactive than planned so that deconstruction can't begin: AVR Jülich. This one was decommissioned after just six years due to the continuous repairs driving the costs up: Thorium High Temperature Reactor 300MW.
The nuclear industry will always try to convince you that the solution to all nuclear power problems is waiting right around the corner, to convince the public that nuclear is still an option. Whenever and wherever they're allowed to continue, not only do they keep the old designs online, the "new" designs never deliver on the promises either. They keep covering up accidents, they keep playing down potential risks, they keep deferring risk to the public (nuclear power plants are uninsurable: if - when - the shit hits the fan, everybody pays the price, in more than one way.)
WikiPedia may be the wrong thing to point to if you want "scientific journals".
Nor are the real "scientific" journals doing such a wonderful job, either. "Peer review" is a joke, and the track record of scientific journals retracting controversial articles is too long to put much faith in it. The mathematical models cannot predict the present by using inputs from the past. Contra Michael "Chicken Little" Mann, the "Medieval Warm Period _DID_ exist, and his own emails (leaked as part of the HadCRUT archive) prove that he was trying without success to explain it away. Kilimanjaro's snows have not receded. The glaciers in the Himalayas have not disappeared. Billions of people have not starved, nor has Australia been overrun with panicked Malaysians and Indonesians.
I got really suspicious when I saw that the same Socialist/World Government nostrums that Carl Sagan tried to prescribe for Global Cooling in the 1970s were being prescribed now for Global Warming.
My degree is in Physics; I always believe the actual facts. I haven't seen many, and most of them are on the "It's not a problem now, and may never be" side. And if we can only avoid collapsing the world economy with phony scare tactics, the world of 2060 will be rich enough to mitigate what minor effects there may be.
And if Siberia and northern Canada warm up a bit, there will be millions of acres of additional cropland that we can't use now. Maybe that would be a good thing.
Old stuff. Pebble bed reactors have their own problems.
There is no power supply that doesn't have problems.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When it's the "UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change". Here's the BBC's description of IPCC: "The IPCC itself is a small organisation, run from Geneva with a full time staff of 12. All the scientists who are involved with it do so on a voluntary basis." http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
Relax, people. There's no U.N resolution here; there's no consensus of nations here recognizing the urgency that requires this "tripling" of non-carbon-based energy. It's easy for the press to say this is the report from the U.N., when it's not.
If you get 12 scientists in a room that have volunteered to produce a report on global warming, what would you expect them to produce? Something that says everything's peachy?
You won't see this old boy freaking out over something dumb like this.
The RK-9000 is a mechanical keyboard made by Rosewill which is the inhouse manufacturer for NewEgg. What does a keyboard have to do with anything?
You cannot find a more "green" keyboard then a mechanical keyboard. Each keyswitch is rated at 50 milliion keypresses. If a letter foes buy a new keyswitch. ( Though I would buy a whole bunch of them ).Desolder the old switch solder in the new. My miniUSB port just broke and I wil be soldering in a new one as soon as it arrives. If the controller goes I can get a new one. I can probably get a new PCB if I have to. They are made to last and when any part breaks, it can be repaired or replaced.
So why are they banned in Illinois. Thanks to our idiot of a governor. ( Second only to Gov Moonbeam ). He created a law regulating e-waste. The law says that for a manufacturer to sell their product, they have to register and certify that they recycle a certain amount of their products. [1] So for this reason, instead of being able to buy a long lasting green keyboard, you have to buy a cheap will fall apart soon keyboard.
More and more the wacked out conservationalists ae acting like this,.
[1] In fact when you sto[p and think about it, many electronics products can last forever,so companies may never even get the chance to recycle a large percentage.
don't put your nuclear plant in the most densely populated parts of the world. Problem solved. Please tell me you aren't suffering from the illusion that Asia is one giant city from one side to the other.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Actually, that's the only way it can be achieved: "without cooperation", through markets. Economic development both makes it easy for individuals and nations to cope with the effects of climate change, such as they are, and to develop and switch to other forms of energy.
The "cooperation" people like you propose are going to keep global economic development back by decades, hinder the development and deployment of more efficient energy sources and technologies, and worst of all form the basis for massive corruption and rent seeking as big corporations and their political cronies write huge handouts into the regulations.
What we should do, however, is stop subsidizing fossil fuels and stop propping up regimes in the Middle East that give us cheap fossil fuels. We should also stop subsidizing energy-inefficient industries like agriculture. Having to bear the true cost of fossil fuels would do wonders for the adoption of renewable energies. But, of course, cutting subsidies is not on the table, which already tells you that all this bloviating about the apocalypse isn't about saving the planet, it's about adding even more crony capitalism to the crony capitalism we already have, now courtesy of the UN.
Thanks, but get stuffed Mr. Pachauri.
Nuclear is cleaner than coal barring an accident. Coal is guaranteed to kill and hurt people. With Nuclear you at least have a chance of everyone being healthy.
I beg to differ: nuclear is cleaner than coal even if you include accidents. The calculations on that page are admittedly from early 2011, but it accounts for 4,000 deaths from Chernobyl. I could add up a bunch more from Wikipedia, but screw that, lets just throw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the mix - about 250,000 deaths. And then let's round that to an even one million for the heck of it.
The death rate is still lower than coal by an order of magnitude. Nuclear is cleaner than coal even if you include 4x the deaths of atomic acts of war.
That whole piece is fascinating, especially for insights such as
Coal and fossil fuel deaths usually do not include deaths caused during transportation. The more trucking and rail transport is used then the more deaths there are. The transportation deaths are a larger component of the deaths in the USA than direct industry deaths. Moving 1.2 billion tons of coal takes up 40% of the freight rail traffic and a few percent of the trucking in the USA.
and
Those who talk about PV solar power (millions of roofs) need to consider roof worker safety. About 1000 construction fatalities per year in the US alone. 33% from working at heights. Falls are the leading cause of fatalities in the construction industry. An average of 362 fatal falls occurred each year from 1995 to 1999, with the trend on the increase.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
You need to look no further than Germany renewables plan, flush with hundreds of billions of euro in funding has stalled. They can't add more wind or solar panels to the Germany grid. The problem isn't money. Every extra solar panel and wind turbine added to the grid increases grid instability a little more.
When are you environmentalist nuts start studying how the electrical grid actually works instead of having fantasies about how it should work.
If solar and wind were so great, Hawaii would have shutdown its oil based thermal plants already. They have very expensive electricity, making renewables cheap, yet it doesn't quite work, cause it's just not that simple.
Get a grip. Without nuclear, there's no hope to solve climate change. And nuclear is not the boogeyman your environmentalist friends have convinced you it is. Zero Fukushima deaths, zero confirmed radiation related cancers. Its been three years. It's already becoming another Chernobyl (as in the environmentalists overblow the problem about a thousand times).
Until the environmentalists show they understand the actual impact of nuclear accidents, accurately predicting the effects of nuclear accidents, in my view they are a bunch of looney tunes alarmists that should be given ZERO credit when the subject in nuclear power.
One of the problems is that the "wrong stance" on climate change is just a reason to stigmatize people as being morally unworthy. We have reinvented the Pharisees versus everyone else. The Pharisees were actually reasonably moral people, virtuous and giving donations to charity. In fact the deniers of climate change are not doing a thing to prevent any major renewable energy project from proceeding in the world. There has been a massive build-out in solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing capacity, and there are multiple giant installations being constructed in solar concentration and in offshore wind farms. The technologically super-advanced Germany, regardless of political party, is firmly committed to its Energiewende that will increase that country's usage of renewables to 60% by 2050. Whatever obstacles there are to renewables, the climate change deniers are for practical purposes unimportant. Failure is not because of others, it lies in ourselves. Stop blaming, start fixing.
There is another technology, Integral Fast Reactor, that also looks promising. My problem with nuclear power as we are doing it now is a lack of a plan for the spent fuel which has accumulated to unmanageable and dangerous levels. These technologies that burn spent fuel solve both the source and trash problems at once. We are still left with the proliferation problem but that is not as much an issue domestically. Both Thorium and IFR would create a good supply of Pu-238 we desperately need for NASA space probes.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Doesn't matter, petroleum and natural gas will eventually run out, whether it's 30 years or 300 years. We need to build nukes that can handle Uranium and Thorium and Plutonium for fuels, and breeder reactors to create more fuel and reprocess old fuel. Keep working on fusion, and someday fusion will be practical and our energy source will then be virtually inexhaustible.
If you look at countries like Germany and India who are becoming less and less dependant on fossil fuels, it's because of solar, not nuclear and in fact the trend is to get away from nuclear. They're always way over budget to build, way more expensive to run and in some cases cost too much to decommission so they sit there. .
The nuclear phase out in Germany has actually increased their dependance on fossil fuels. Coal burning has shot up. Germany has a huge energy cost problem coming if they continue down the no nuke path. Nuclear helped pay for a large portion of the solar/wind buildup. As nukes are shut down, that money source goes away. Much higher energy bill and/or taxes will be needed to offset the lost generation, not to mention the ever increasing cost of wind turbine overhauls and even replacement of first generation solar installations.
Meanwhile, after years of heavy investment and the richest subsidies ever seen for any power source, in 2013 solar generated less than one half of one percent of US electrical output. That includes commercial and residential solar. Wind has done much better in that regard.
The new nuclear plants coming on line in the US will offset much more carbon, much more quickly that equivalent solar investment.
Unrealistic risk perception driving uneducated fear is key problem for nuclear. Even at Fukushima, and accident that was easily preventable by simply not siting and designing for a known event, 4 Units experiencing the worst accident scenario, no detectable public health risk is expected, no deaths. A relatively small section of land will be off limits for some time period. A small price to pay for the many millions of tons of coal that was never burnt, CO2 and radioactive particulates never spewed, and coal ash never piled. Yes, nuclear waste is a big drawback, but put it scale with the benefits and its clearly our best proven technological path forward. Politics makes the waste problem worse, there are solutions.
And if the sun starts shining 24 hours a day, then maybe solar will be able to help a little.
It's not even all of the environmentalists, check out Patrick Moore:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
He used to be the President of Greenpeace and was *ahem* asked to leave, primarily due to his advocacy of Nuclear Energy
At this point Greenpeace is as stuck in its position of advocating against Nuclear Energy as the NRA is against gun control, and they are both looking like obstacles to any positive change in the status quo
By working against Nuclear Energy, Greenpeace has managed to be as big a supporter of continued fossil fuel dependence as the Koch bros.
There are plenty of smart environmentalists out there, and the uninformed ones should be donating their money somewhere besides Greenpeace
Wherever You Go, There You Are
the WTO has legal protection for polluters in developing nations the prevents other nations from raising trade barriers to using their goods
We need to reevaluate the designations that were made in the mid-nineties and make them relevant in a world where China and India are economic powers
Wherever You Go, There You Are
+1.
We have 50-60 years of technology advancements. Look how cars have advanced. Had there not been such a strong oil/coal lobby, there would be advancements that would be impossible in today's political climate:
1: Thermal depolymerization -- turn waste products back into crude ready for use again.
2: Droughts would be mitigated as issue with desalination plants combined with the infrastructure to pump it inland.
3: More technologies would be possible to reclaim used components. Waste can be recycled cleanly.
4: More expensive (expensive as in energy) chemical processes can be used to reclaim toxic sites.
I think future generations will think we are dolts as not to have moved to nuclear sooner, because more energy available per person can mean a lot more advances and a better quality of life.
Wrong. The US isn't the biggest wind energy producer, it's the biggest producer of hot air. China is the single country with the highest amount of energy extracted from wind. The EU combined produces twice as much electricity from wind as the USA, and also more than all of Asia. Germany alone accounts for more than a quarter of the EU's electricity from wind. http://www.gwec.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/GWEC-PRstats-2013_EN.pdf
Nuclear reactors aren't nuclear bombs. You need to refine the fission material very well in said reactors and then re-refine it in more specialized reactors to get a material that has the potential of wiping a large area. Even then, the offensive material degrades very quickly to manageable levels, Hiroshima or even the Nevada desert is far from uninhabitable, Chernobyl even continued generating electricity in it's other reactors for 20 years after the disaster. Even Three Mile Island, which was in a relatively densely populated area of the world is only expected to maybe cause ~300 cancers, far less than the average coal plant in it's life time.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
1970's? Global cooling? Are you serious? The prevailing opinion at the time was 'we don't know', that is the science available at the time was not capable of modelling the effect of man's activities on climate.
In this essay written by Carl Sagan in 1980 he expresses exactly this and makes a plea for support for such work.
The idea that there was a 'global cooling' consensus in the 1970's is the sheerest poppycock. Complete wishful thinking by people with a political agenda back by no rigorous assessment of the situation.
If you really are interested in just facts, you have failed to accumulate many.
Nuclear power on the other hand scares the hell out of me.
Learn about it. I've found that in doing so, I have become far less frightened of it.
You're right, only fossil fuels or nuclear have the capacity to provide the majority of our energy needs. Nuclear is historically the safest energy source as well - hydro has had quite a few disasters, for example. ALSO, we should acknowledge that the greenies have a good idea - use wind power when the wind happens to be blowing at the proper speed. If you happen to live on a fault line, geothermal is pretty good. For the 80% of of our energy needs that can't met by "alternatives" sources, we can choose nuclear or fossil fuels. That doesn't mean we should be anti-hydro, we should acknowledge that hydro is great. We just don't have any more 200 mile stretches of wilderness to flood, so we can't increase our hydro by much .
(I put solar in a separate category because the 95% of the solar industry that are scammers give the 5% who are honest a bad name.)
There are several proven designs that meet your two points. IFR burns the spent fuel that is bothering you. They deliberately shut down its cooling twice and the reactor finds thermal equilibrium without becoming dangerously hot because thermal expansion of the fuel shuts down fission. It can be done.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Portugal’s electricity network operator announced that renewable energy supplied 70 percent of total consumption in the first quarter of this year.
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
I somehow doubt what you are saying.
If one panel provides all you need during daylight hours you use 2 or 3 or 4 and store it in a battery.
This, and not nuclear it undisputably the way of the future. There is no such thing as a safe nuclear plant. I'm sure the people that had to leave Fukushima prefecture would disagree about the lack of danger to public health. Would you live there now?
Germany will be 100% renewable by 5050. Portugal is already 75%.
We can not afford, on many levels, and do not need: nukes. This has been shown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Germany is the world's top photovoltaics (PV) installer, with a solar PV capacity of 35.996 gigawatts (GW) at the end of February 2014.[2] The German new solar PV installations increased by about 7.6 GW in 2012, and solar PV provided 18 TWh (billion kilowatt-hours) of electricity in 2011, about 3% of total electricity.[3] Some market analysts expect this could reach 25 percent by 2050.[4] Germany has a goal of producing 35% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and 100% by 2050.[5]
"In July 2009, India unveiled a US$19 billion plan to produce 20 GW of solar power by 2020.[2] Under the plan, the use of solar-powered equipment and applications would be made compulsory in all government buildings, as well as hospitals and hotels.[3] On 18 November 2009, it was reported that India was ready to launch its National Solar Mission under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, with plans to generate 1,000 MW of power by 2013.[4] From August 2011 to July 2012, India went from 2.5 MW of grid connected photovoltaics to over 1,000 MW."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
" In 2012 China installed 5.0 GW of solar panel capacity. As of 2012, about 8.3 GW of photovoltaics contribute towards power generation in China.[1] Solar water heating is extensively implemented as well.[2]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
And we're not even trying hard. Hopefully soon, well. Anything to avoid those damn dirty dangerous nuclear disaster that endanger countless future generations.
Need Mercedes parts ?
A lesser known situation is if you actually create an energy surplus, food costs, logistic costs, and transportation costs get cheaper.
I think a lot of people have been talking about this recently. The US economy in particular is heavily dependent on energy costs. So, a lot of what has been floating Midwestern states is the fact that energy companies are hiring like mad and putting in oil/gas wells pretty much as fast as they can. This drives unemployment down, while helping to lower energy costs, all while the energy companies are making money hand over fist.
If something similar happened with nukes, it could happen nationally, and as you point out people would be more incentivised to buy leaf's and teslas if the monthly power bill were less than a single tank of gas.
Of course the other big advantage would be that it would make gas/oil wells less economically advantageous too, similar to what has been happening with coal vs natural gas.
Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat compiled an interesting list of "Global Cooling" references all through the 1970's.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
I may be old, but my memory is still MOSTLY here.....
Predicting local perturbations from data is very hard. Identifying long term trends is, by comparison, easy.
I hate printers.
On the heels of a study that concluded there was less than a 1% chance that current global warming could be simple fluctuations...
Now "less that 1%" sounds low but is less than a 3-standard deviation (or 3 sigma) signal. In physics 3 sigma is generally the level at which you can claim "evidence for" a given effect and to prove it to others you need a 5-sigma signal which is less than a 1 in ~1.7 million chance.
The reason that we use these levels is because it is next to impossible to remove all human bias from an experiment. Hence you have to accept that there will always be some and it has been found from experience that these levels of proof tend to be ones which, once reached, are rarely found to be wrong. Although 3 sigma is just at the level where you can say "this is something likely to be true".
While I think it likely that humans have caused some degree of global warming it is a little worrying that the evidence for it is still so flimsy. If we then ask say whether more than 50% of global warming is due to humans I expect that the probability becomes even less certain. So to start motivating a major change in direction from fossil to nuclear (which has its own but different problems) we need a 3-sigma signal (less than 0.27%) that mankind is responsible for at least 50% of the current warming.
If the rate is less than 1% more cancers than normal, then you just proven my point.
It will be really proven by the time Fukushima is some 10 years old, and we can show with statistics that cancers among even those most affected by the accidents radiation caused a small extra cancer and a tiny extra death rate. Like Chernobyl, the nuclear community learned very little from Fukushima, cause the mistake was disregard to common nuclear safety knowledge, rather than the need for fundamental redesign of state of the art reactors. The real problem is the reluctance of replacing all Gen II reactors with Gen III+ or Gen IV reactors. Not that I'm a big fan of AP1000 and similar designs, but they are safe enough to have two miles from my home.
Such a finding would both show that the anti nuclear community are very wrong on all of their predictions and should be ignored.
Most people are unaware that there are 435 operational nuclear reactors in the world with an output around 400GW electrical.
My contention is that if nuclear fission were really that unsafe, we would have many more accidents over the decades.
If France and USA can do safe nuclear for 30 years (top 2 users of nuclear fission today) why can't the whole world do safe nuclear ?
That's the problem with people who get their science from the front page of Time magazine and such. They confuse journalists with actual scientists. Actual scientists have known for a long, long time that the earth is warming and will continue to warm. Journalists continue to get it wrong.
You are clearly an intelligent person, which is what makes this so sad. Your post is full of errors which the actual facts you claim to believe have proven to be false.
1. The medieval warm period affected just the northern Atlantic area - it was not global, and so is rather irrelevant in this discussion without you also discussing the rest of the world's climate during this period. It was also colder then than now, so it's rather pointless to even bring it up in discussion.
2. The Himalayan glaciers *are* receding. It sounds like you are paraphrasing Christopher Monckton's claims that they are not, which is strange, as the man himself has recanted that particular belief in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In fact, they've been receding constantly, at least since satellite data has been available to demonstrate that fact.
3. Global cooling was not a scientifically-accepted hypothesis in the 1970s. It was, however, trotted around in the media for sensationalism, which is where this idea comes from that it was the scientific consensus at the time, when that is demonstrably nonsense.
4. Since the early 1900s, 80% of the ice on Kilimanjaro has disappeared. 80%. To say that the ice (which, colloquially, is what "Kilimanjaro's Snow" refers to) has not receded is patently false.
The source for your facts clearly needs some adjustment, as you are parroting the same debunked nonsense the anti-AGW crowd has been trotting around for years now. The facts are there - you don't seem to be wanting to look for them.
Canada's topsoil in the areas which will warm up were scraped away by glaciation, meaning those areas will be next to useless for crops. Siberia's permafrost contains a lot of methane, which will be released into the atmosphere if it melts, which is a potent greenhouse gas, which will cause even more warming. Its topsoil also isn't great for farming, plus the industry, skills, and workers required to farm Canada and Siberia's non-existent suitable farmland isn't in either Canada or Siberia, which is a bit of a problem for your notion. That spreading north of suitable climate for growing crops means that huge swathes of the US will no longer be able to produce crops, which doesn't sound like a good situation for the US to be in.
But whatever - you have your "facts", so I guess we can just ignore this stuff forever, with no ill-effects. Right?
>> True, nuclear waste is not pollution unless it escapes in an accident
Bullshit.
Nuclear waste will escape. why ? because it has billion years of time, will structurally degrade, and there is no known material to contain it.
It already escapes after a few years in every storage man has built for it.
During it's lifetime, it will inevitably mix with soil on a large scale., with all the consequences.
aaaaaaa
If solar and wind were so great, Hawaii would have shutdown its oil based thermal plants already. They have very expensive electricity, making renewables cheap, yet it doesn't quite work, cause it's just not that simple.
How ironic that you point out Hawaii. Hawaii exemplifies the political problems moving away from oil, not the technical problems. Our PUC is utterly impotent and lets our electric utility (HECO) get away with whatever they want. For example, if you want grid-tie solar HECO charges you $3,000 for an "interconnect study" which is complete and utter bullshit. They claim to the politicians that the grid can't handle more solar or wind with no technical basis whatsoever. Why? Because of the way they've got the PUC to structure they rates, they make more than double the profit from burning oil than from anything else, because they get to "pass-through" the cost of the oil, which amounts to more profit and the customer getting screwed.
Here's essentially how it works:
Generation from oil costs them 6.5 cents/kWh, plus the cost of oil.
They are allowed to charge 16-18 cents/kWh -ish (sorry, I don't remember the exact number offhand) PLUS the cost of the oil.
They buy wind power for 13 cents/kWh.
Customer cost per kWh of oil generated power = 40 cents, consisting 18 cents allowed rate + 22 cents for fuel , of which 11.5 cents is profit (18cents allowed - 6.5 cost not including oil).
Customer cost per kWh of wind power = 18 cents, of which 5 cents is profit (18cents allowed - 13 cents they buy it for)
Customer cost per kWh of home grid tie solar = 0 cents / kWh, so they manage to charge $3,000 upfront for the privilege even though there's already a base monthly charge for being connected to the grid.
HELLO, of course they are going to lobby (or bribe or give blow jobs or whatever it takes) the politicians. The PUC has got to be so utterly corrupt, and HECO so entrenched with the legislators to allow this to happen, but that's exactly why this is a political problem and not a technical problem.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you on the nuke subject, just pointing out how you don't know wtf you're talking about with Hawaii and solar+wind power. What's ironic is that people here are so utterly scared of nuclear just saying the word is worse than saying the other 'N' word, yet they revere the Navy's presence here and apparently don't realize what "Nuclear Submarine" means...there's at least 15 nuclear reactors running around the islands right now.
I live 60kms from a nuclear power plant (Koeberg Nuclear Power Station) and I'm not worried.
Even the third world has mostly ceased excessive breeding. The fertility rate in Bangladesh has fallen from over 6 in the 1960s to 2.2 today, and the same is true in other countries. Contraception and family planning schemes have worked pretty well. The focus is now on Africa, and a lot of progress is being made.
The world population will continue to rise due to the large number of children and child-baring age people we have now, but is looking like it will level off at about 11 billion later this century. That sounds like an unsustainable amount but it really isn't. Most of the growth will be in Africa, where there is also great opportunity to improve agriculture and feed all those people. The critical part will be getting them to do it cleanly, not like how the already developed nations did. Fortunately they have massive renewable resources like geothermal and solar, and little existing infrastructure which means they can build a distributed grid from the start.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Everyone seems to forget that half of the entire fucking nuclear power station is also "waste" - it's radioactive and damned fucking hard to get rid of.
Unless they factor in the dismantling and disposal costs of the reactor, the pro-nuclear crowd are full of shit.
And they NEVER do. If you factor in the total costs, nuclear power becomes vastly more expensive than the alternatives.
Let's all "do the google" and found out how many nuclear power stations have been completely decommissioned and paid for. Let's do it. Then come back here and talk sensibly...
No, usual figures from the ANTI-nuke hysterics is in the millions of years.
I'm assuming that by HLW you mean Pu-239 (which isn't really very high level - not like, say, Strontium-90).
On that basis, if you started with a mass of HLW the size of the planet (~6E24 kg), you'll be down to rather less than 1/4 of a nanogram of the stuff after three million years.
If the ENTIRE UNIVERSE were made of Pu-239, you'd have one ATOM of the stuff left after only SIX million years.
On the other hand, if we were talking reasonable amounts (no more than one million tons), it'll be decayed to less than one microgram in about a million years.
On the gripping hand, if we were talking about REAL HLW (the kind that emits enough radiation to actually be, you know, dangerous) we're not talking things with a 24KY halflife. We're rather more concerned with things with a century halflife or less.
For a 100 year halflife, your mass-of-the-planet wastes would be down into the milligram range in 10 KY. For a million tons of the stuff, it's down to less than a microgram in 5KY years.
And for really radioactive stuff (like, say Strontium-90), well, it'll be gone in a couple centuries.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I somehow doubt what you are saying.
If one panel provides all you need during daylight hours you use 2 or 3 or 4 and store it in a battery.
This, and not nuclear it undisputably the way of the future. There is no such thing as a safe nuclear plant. I'm sure the people that had to leave Fukushima prefecture would disagree about the lack of danger to public health. Would you live there now?
Convenient to just blow it off. Germany is already seeing grid problems, and are destined to buy their power from nuclear plants in France and those that Poland is likely to build.
Solar is costly without the battery. Adding batteries increases cost tremendously and reduces efficiency. Seems that you like to ignore the cost part. Cost factors heavily into any viable solution. Solar does look very attractive when you ignore the details.
There is no safe anything. Its a matter of risk vs benefit. No airplane is safe. No car is safe. No solar panel is safe.
Would I leave near Fukushima? Yes, in any area where folks are allowed to live I would live. In those areas cleared for living in the future I would live. Why would I be willing? Because I have experience in this area and understand the risks. I understand the fears of those who just get informed by the media and movies.
And remember, 1 MW of installed solar capacity on average generates less than 1/5 of the electrical energy of 1 MW of installed base load generation. Many conveniently ignore that when spouting numbers.
I am thinking for myself. I have college level physics education (engineering basic curriculum), and I have friends and relatives that are accomplished electrical engineers in transmission, industrial electricity consumption (MW+ levels) and some generation experience.
You seem to ignore that the grid has ZERO energy storage characteristics. Ohms law isn't the issue. It's that electricity flows at the speed of light, use it or it overloads the grid (too much electricity = high voltage, too little = low voltage).
Load following sources can't shift production like 1% up or down every sub second period.
So I don't see you showing how I'm wrong to say that specially too many wind turbines on the grid with their power output from 0 - 35Km/h winds proportional to wind speed cubed, a mere drop from 35Km/h to 30Km/h reduces production by 1/3. The theory that having thousands of turbines linked up smooths that is certainly true when looking at 15+ minute power production intervals, but electricity is nanosecond by nanosecond !
The solution is technically simple, but economically daunting which is having gigantic electrical battery storage systems to smooth out the oscilations. To date it's still acknowledged as uneconomical. Huge capacitors would be much better (very fast charge/discharge, even though they have low energy density).
Bottom line, I'm yet to see a self contained grid operating on at least 2/3 wind + solar year round. The case in point isn't Germany, it's the whole European grid, with nuclear + hydro + baseload fossil + peaking fossil producing well over 3/4 total electricity production, in that scenario, wind has plenty of buffer in the rest of the grid.
That's why I insist on something like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, Bermuda that is big enough to become an energy storage challenge to run without fossil or nuclear sources. Show just one of those running on solar+wind+geothermal+biomass+hydro alone... Make it happen. I'm indifferent to being proven wrong or not. I'm not cheering against renewables. I'm just posing the challenge hoping some of you is an accomplished transmission and generation electrical engineer that shows me with solid arguments I'm wrong (that I will run by my buddies, on of which is my dad, to verify it, BTW most of them are retired, they have zero vested interest in renewables failing).
Fukushima was nasty. It killed about two people. Hydroelectric killed 160,000 when Banqiao failed. When the original Niagra Falls dam failed, it wiped out a couple of towns. I don't know the inflation-adjusted cost off hand, but it wasn't minor. Coal mining accidents have killed thousands. There's liability risk for any workable option. For some reason , the safest option (by several orders of magnitude) is the one the government wants billions in liability reserve for.
Have you ever heard of a hydroelectric operator being required to deposit billions of dollars in case they have an accident? No, which is interesting since hydro has FAR more accidents.