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The IPCC's Shifting Position On Nuclear Energy
Lasrick writes Suzanne Waldman writes about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its stand on nuclear power over the course of its five well-known climate change assessment reports. The IPCC was formed in 1988 as an expert panel to guide the drafting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratified in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The treaty's objective is to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a safe level. Waldman writes: 'Over time, the organization has subtly adjusted its position on the role of nuclear power as a contributor to de-carbonization goals," and she provides a timeline of those adjustments.
In addition to the well known nuclear waste issue and well proven dangers of plant meltdowns, you also have proliferation issues with rogue states claiming peaceful use, liberation of waist heat dumped to the environment, and even after that, the more nuclear power you create, the more you get people used to unlimited power and the more their thirst for cheap fossil fuel power. The answer is conservation and population control, not escalation of generation.
Solar's production curve does not match the peak user curve of electrical power.
Where'd you get that idea? Most power is used in the middle of the day, when it's hot and everyone turns on their A/C. Solar produces the most power right in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining brightest. Solar is perfect for supplying peak loads in places where people use A/C.
1. Hydro
2. Nuclear
3. Geothermal.
1 and 3 are location limted.
2 is location limited too: you can't put nuclear close to a fault line, in a place where there's tornadoes or hurricanes, and you generally need to put it next to a river for cooling though you can also use giant cooling towers. And of course, you can't put it anywhere near a metro area.
Exactly how many nuclear disasters does it take before we figure out how to do what these other countries are already doing?
Nuclear energy is just about the safest form of energy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
Energy is really, really dangerous, end of story. Nuclear is somehow the "scariest," but not because it's statistically more dangerous.
And, while they are still debating all this, nuclear has been and continues to be the single energy technology that has already offset huge amounts of carbon generation. Nobody seems to want to give nuclear credit for what its already done.
The report is not moving in the direction you think. The trend over time has been to move away from recommending nuclear. In the first IPCC report, nuclear was considered the answer to AGW. Now it is considered something that should be minimized.
That's because the IPCC report is a political document, not a scientific one. Sure, they use scientific studies to justify their political position, but the purpose of the document is to drive a political agenda, one that calls for centralized authority.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I had to build a small datacenter (about 25 1u servers and some routing/switching hardware) that the client needed 5 days of reserve power. The battery unit for this was surprisingly small. It was about 5 foot cube, and packed full of lead acid batteries. This was in early 2003. I imagine today's battery technology can make that even denser. Tesla's battery technology has been released in to the wild, and it is light years beyond lead acid technology.
Greens have already clubbed all the good pumped-storage facilities, like Storm King in upstate New York, to death with the same combination of NIMBYism and legal bullying they have used against every other energy project. Watch for a campaign against battery arrays because "chemicals."
Once you factor in charging and discharging losses, batteries end up cutting solar's already-abysmal energy per $ ratio nearly in half. Pumped storage (pumping water uphill into a dam) is currently the best energy storage option, and even it sits at between 70%-80% efficiency.
Using the energy as it's produced (or in the case of fossil fuels and nuclear, producing the energy as it's needed) is always the best option. I mean hypothetically, if you're going to use PV solar to pump water uphill for storage, it's really no different from installing thousands of square km of cheap black-painted panels just underneath the ocean surface, raising the temperature of the top layer of ocean water, increasing the evaporation rate, resulting in more rainfall, giving you the same increase in water stored behind dams for probably a lot less cost. Why even bother with the intermediate lossy steps of converting solar to electricity, then electricity to mechanical motion?