What an unmitigated, colossal, inconceivably short-minded, pooch screw of a fuckup this flip-flopping is. It's guaranteed to cost lots of lives and billions of dollars.
And the chance of a 9.0 earthquake plus tsunami is - in case you are wondering - is pretty much next to NONEXISTANT in Germany.
If you don't like the current brand of nuclear reactors, use that reputed german engineering skill and build LFTRs and IFRs to take their place, don't cower under the utter spinelessness of this decision.
> Wikileaks isn't putting anyone at risk, when the US government put this charge forward to Wikileaks, Assange responded asking for an example > name of someone who would be put in trouble so they could negotiate over further redacting the documents to protect such people, the US > responded stating they wont negotiate over it and to hand it all back.
I think that falls under the header of 'refuse to negotiate with terrorists'. By vetting the documents, the US would have given implicit admission that the leaks were somehow legit.
They are not. It takes two to tango, and the fact that he chose to release them to the detriment of pretty much everybody (except perhaps underground movements like Al Quaeda who will use it as a recruiting tool against pretty much every arab government in existence).
Politics is a dirty business, and governments by necessity need to be given a measure of secrecy in their proceedings. They can't be given carte blanche, of course, but at the same time, they have to be free to be able to negotiate with a certain expectation that what they decide will be confidential. If wikileaks had gone through the documents and picked out bits and pieces which were warcrimes (ie: that directly lead to someone's death) that's one thing - full sale disclosure is quite another.
I HOPE that Mr. Asssange is caught and sentenced. Ironically, I think it paints the US in a pretty good light, considering exactly how restrained the response has been to the original leaks. Now that he has poked the eyes of much more dangerous governments (iran, north korea, etc) my guess is that his life is forfeit, and its only a matter of time.
> Wikileaks isn't on some quest to destroy the government: It is serving the purpose of saving it from itself, before it becomes completely > unaccountable to its citizens and eventually becomes destructive of its own ends.
bullshit guy..
There is no way that with this amount of volume of documents being released that they would possibly be able to vet all of the information contained therein and make it so that the people referred to could be free from repercussions from its publication. People will die because of this, and the moron who released it will likely get the death penalty.
who the hell moderated this comment as +5 funny? Everything in it rings true, especially the part about coal and mercury (one of the reasons, btw, for the rise in autism)
not to mention south africa's PBMR, and the travelling wave reactor (intellectual ventures). It's simple - make a mass-producable, small, efficient reactor, use it to boil water at both the pressure and temperature of your average coal-fired power plant, and *turn off the burning of coal altogether*. And do it in scale.
That way, there isn't a horrendous capital cost (pocket nuke reactors are small and you are only replacing the boiler), the fuel is cheaper, and as a side benefit current coal plants increase their capacity factor from ~75% to above 90%.
This is really the only way to combat global warming in a way that profits everybody; it allows developing countries to leverage their experience in building coal-fired power plants to build carbon-neutral sources, and given the factory approach is comprehensively scalable, as scalable as producing fighters or bombers in WWII.
We have to do this. We have to stop dicking around with solutions that only work 15% of the way, have appallingly low capacity factors (for 53 days in a row, the windmills in denmark produced basically nada in the way of electricity, texas has an average of 8.7% capacity (ref: here ).
The stakes are too high. I encourage everyone to watch:
which shows the true state of our affairs with regards to the climate (the person introducing Mr. Miller says, in short, "He's going to tell us all how we are really fucked".
no.. it's not 5000 nuclear power plants simply because when you compare electricity to fossil fuels you are comparing apples to oranges.
Right now, 104 nuclear reactors do 20% of our electricity. Hence, 500 nuclear reactors could supply it all.
As for transportation,40% of our energy supply is oil, mainly for use in transportation, which is at best 20% efficient. electric vehicles can approach 90% efficiency at point of the motor. Hence, the amount of true work to replace it is 40% / 4.5 or about 8% of our energy supply.
Anyways, you get the idea. When you see a 'million barrels of oil equivalent' chart it really is misleading, because they count million barrels of oil thermal in the case of coal, natural gas, etc. and million barrels of oil *electric* with nuclear, and hydro.
So all in all, less than 1000 nuclear plants could do it with a wide margin - the main trick of course is getting everything electrical which is no small trick..
It's ironic that you make this statement, because animals use sex solely for reproduction. Humans are the only species that have sex for recreation, and we of course have tons of contraceptive tools now to increase the amount of sex we have while decreasing pregnancy. The way humans have sex is a very uniquely human thing on this planet.
That's not strictly true -
Bonobos have sex in far greater frequency and variety than humans. They are called the 'hippie ape' for that reason, and have very low instances of violence (both inter and intra group).
The problem with releasing an organism is that people think what they will get is exactly the existing ecosystem completely unchanged except for the envisioned beneficial effects of the organism. There is really no other word for this kind of thinking than "stupid." Introducing a new organism changes the ecological equilibrium in all kinds of unexpected ways due to the nonlinear feedbacks within any ecosystem.
Weirdly, the same people who claim to understand the problem of unintended consequences of interventionist action in economies are often the ones who are most arrogantly certain that they can predict the exact results of introducing GM organisms into ecologies.
Oh come on.. Yes its true that there are perhaps unintended side effects, but you could just as easily say that about genetically modified food, or bacteria to clean up waste, or global trade, or even agriculture and husbandry.
The truth of the matter is that is what us humans do. We modify existing ecosystems and introduce changes in the ecological equilibrium in all kinds of unexpected ways. And the truth of the matter is that as soon as we stop doing this, we will be at the whims of the ecosystem and its various grisly ways of culling extra population (starvation, disease, predation).
The truth is also stark - about 500 million people get infected by malaria, and 3 million a year die, mostly under 5 years of age. If we kill off malaria carriers, we save lots of lives, and in the meantime nature has to find a way to evolve around the hosts' resistance, which imposes a cost on the parasite. Maybe we get lucky and the cost is too evolutionarily high, and malaria goes extinct.
As for the other diseases, none even come close to malaria in their impact. Dengue caused 2000 deaths in 2005, west nile less than 1000, yellow fever about 30000. Those who think 'oh, other diseases could rise therefore we shouldn't fight malaria this way' should really get a clue.
Ok, lets just assume that this is a real breakthrough, and that we can safely and cheaply:
* manufacture said compound (AlH3)
* store said compound
* use said compound with high efficiency in fuel vehicles
After all, its volumetric density is fair (I calculate it at.15 kg/L hydrogen * 120 MJ/kg or 5 kwh / liter versus 9.7 kwh/liter for gasoline) and with the extra efficiency boost it IS energy competitive.
My question is - where are we going to get the aluminum? This would require a MASSIVE production spike in aluminum - to provide a replacement for the ~ 400 million metric tons of gasoline that the US alone uses.
Right now, the amount of aluminum we produce globally per year is about 20 times lower - 23.8 million metric tons yearly to be exact (source: http://www.world-aluminum.org/stats/formServer.asp ?form=1) and aluminum production is very energy intensive (I calculate it as being 6 times *higher* - at 30 kilowatt hours/liter - than the hydrogen is meant to store. That becomes 90 kilowatt hours / liter considering that most of the energy used in aluminum production is electric)
So the only realistic way of doing this would be to recycle the aluminum and 'rehydrate it'. And there would be a hefty price premium on the creation of the fuel ($12 / gallon at current aluminum prices, which would probably go up dramatically if this took off)
Overall then this is a mixed bag. The infrastructure costs would be substantial in creating the distribution network for the fuel, both for hydrating and recycling the fuel containers, and the energy cost would be horrific in making the aluminum.
At 30 kilowatt hours / liter, and 700 grams CO2/ kilowatt hour (if the energy making the aluminum was coal), this corresponds to 19000 grams C02 / liter of fuel, versus the 2000 grams CO2 / kilowatt hour that you get by simply burning the gasoline to go! The aluminum had better be VERY recyclable.
I'm skeptical. It'd be cool if it works, but we'll see.
> * Nuclear power plants, which if they fail render the portion of the planet where they are > located and any territory down wind them un-inhabitable for several thousand years. > * Coal and oil plants who have the potential to render even larger portions of the planet > un-inhabitable than Nuclear accidents will because of sea-level rise and the rest of it > ill-inhabitable because of climate change. > > It's a choice between bad and worse.
Argh.. just a pet peeve here but nuclear is NOT THAT BAD. Its a complete urban legend, not to mention FUD of the highest degree, that a nuclear accident renders a portion of the world inhabitable for a long period of time. Where'd you get your risk analysis skills from, the China Syndrome?
Chernobyl shows exactly how false this is. It was about the worst it could get, yet the wildlife community around Chernobyl is thriving simply because MAN ISN'T THERE.
Nuclear has its problems, but please don't make them worse by spreading FUD.
1. building costs that westinghouse is billing out to china for its new 3rd gen reactors is $1000-1200/KW, and is expected to be completed at 2-3 years for a 1.1 GW plant. This is actually cheaper than the equivalent for coal.
2. demolishing is a cost, true, but is basically the same as a given coal plant. But nuke plants are turning out to be more durable than first anticipated, with most plants expected to last 60 years or so. This mitigates both cost of building and destruction.
3. storing the leftovers *is* actually built into the electricity cost itself, unlike any other generation source (solar, coal, gas, wind, whatever). It comes out to about.1 cent/kWh.)
4. insurance (Price-Anderson) has cost taxpayers a total of zero dollars since its inception.
Short answer - if you have any objections to nuclear power, please get over it. Its one of two proven tactics to overcome greenhouse emissions - the other being energy efficiency. And we are going to need a hell of a lot more of it in the coming years. http://www.nuclearinfo.net/ is a good site for more information and is useful for answering these basic questions (put together by some physicists in australia)
> wind and solar are as limitless. the difference : COST. I don't see fusion becoming cheap. fission, after 3-4 decades is > still very expensive, and it isn't getting cheaper; the reason : very complex technology, which means : difficult to > maintain and secure. If we compare with wind on the other hand : you can let a turbine turn until the blades fall of, and > then, you can put them back up with a few bolts here and there; nobody cares if a windmill collapses; if that happens on > a nuclear power plant OTOH...
wrong, wrong, wrong.. Westinghouse is bidding out its new AP1000 reactor to china for $1000-1200 / GW which - given how cheap a nuke plant is to run once it gets going - is cheaper than everything out there, including coal. United states generation costs of electrical energy from nukes is 1.63 cents, and should drop to 1 cent with the new technology, which is passively safe.
Wind on the other hand, has a 20% capacity factor (compared with 90% nuclear) which makes it a *very* difficult technology to make money off of. Ditto for solar.
Its worse than that. For 6 billion dollars a month, we could have gone a long way towards shuttering coal forever, and probably It takes an average of 1.5 billion now to produce the new power plants at 1 GW, which makes ~50 reactors a year. Total of 150 plants in the works so far, along with the engineering talent and jobs that would produce.
Of course this is simplistic (no way we could build out that fast at first) but hell, we would have gone a long way towards building out the infrastructure to do it. And I'd personally feel more comfortable if the 50% we are getting from coal was 5%/45% nuke..
Ok - speaking to someone 'in the know' - I have to ask your considered opinion about rTMS.
As I understand it, repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation works by inducing an electric current inside the head via a magnetic field.
Do you know if there are any plans for studies on this in the US? Personally, I have tinnitus (from motorcycle riding) and have heard that this is one of the first effective treatments for this as well as depression, without the risk of surgery. I'd very much like to hear your opinion on this and if its coming to the US soon, and if so, to what clinics.
1) you could fit all of the waste that we've produced so far with nuclear power into one football field
2) coal plants are not cheaper and faster to build. Its a common myth. see my other post.
3) 600 nuclear power plants could generate all the electricity we'd ever need (to about 2050). At approximately 15 hectares per plant, that equals.0003% of the land area of the united states. I'm sure we can find the space, even given the constraints you mention. Ditto for nuclear waste.
4) Since all the waste ever generated + 100 years of waste to come could be stuffed into a football field, you only need to "shove" the waste down a vastly small minority of people's throats. 99.99999% of the people in the US won't live 50 miles from yucca mountain; 99% won't live 250.
5) as for being 'easy' terrorist targets, that's another common myth. The containment towers simply don't offer enough of a profile to smash a large-scale airplane into them, and the distance of the (guarded) fence from the facility makes it highly unlikely that an ammonium nitrate bomb would have much effect on the facility itself. In addition, they are guarded by their own military force; the worst that could happen is probably the same as the worst-case scenario with a coal facility, ie: several people would be without power. A few people might die (from radiation poisoning vs smoke inhalation) but that's about it.
6) as for land value, since the impact, sizewise is so small, hardly anyone gets effected. Wind towers, on the other hand, have a huge impact. If you wanted to make wind supply us the same electricity, assuming that we could even do it (which is doubtful) , we'd need 5% of all the land area of the US. Everyone would have windmills in their back yard.
Why don't you stop spreading fud? What, do you *want* coal plants or something?
> Multiple coal plants could be built in the time it takes to PERMIT a nuclear > plant. I doubt the time to permit would be less than 10 years for a nuclear > plant in the US. Time is money. Not to mention the cost overruns common in the > nuclear energy field (in the US).
I'll ignore the sarcasm for now. Of course there's a political issue here. But even that is changing - Westinghouse got its third gen AP1000 reactor approved for construction in the US, and the new energy bill allows for the same 1.8 cent credit to nuclear power as it does wind power. Considering that you can run an nuclear plant at 1.5 cents/kWh, its basically letting operators get 1/3 cent for each kwH they produce.
As for cost overruns, well, the AP1000 (and other third gen plants) are modular, can be factory constructed and have the parts shipped to construction sites. So there isn't the "we're doing one-offs all over the place" debacle that caused the major cost overruns of the 60s-70s. It also simplifies the legal process and permitting process that you seem so fond of EMPHASIZING.
As a result, utilities are responding. In the southwest alone, there are 10 such plants being planned, and that's just starters there. Reference here.
In addition, we are very close to a carbon tax - the last vote being 55/45 in the senate, so this gives utilities a lot of pause before investing in coal. As a result, lots of the planned coal fired plants are being rethunk.
And since wind isn't a real competitor of natural gas/nuclear/coal - being about 3-12 times as expensive as coal or nuclear even before costs of backup facilities are included - that leaves nuclear.
Anyways, what's your point? The only *positive* point I think you could be making is that we need more lobbying for the sake of nuclear power. Think of nuclear power as a large train; once you get it truly going and some positive feedback loops in place, it will pretty much run over everything in its path. That's what happened in france, and that was with 30 year old technology.
> The real problem with nuclear power is that it's cheaper, faster and easier to > build coal power plants. Sure coal pollutes more and generates CO2 but the only > people that have to pay for that are your grandchildren. Pollution and CO2 are > officially somebody elses problem.
That used to be correct, but isn't any more..
New nuclear power plants are about as expensive (if not a little cheaper) and take as long to build as coal plants (3 years construction.)
There is no reason to still be building coal plants. We could replace coal with nuclear with an investment of $500-600 billion dollars, or about 30 billion a year. That by the way, is far less costly than certain wars .
Ed
(ps - oh, and btw, in the process we would be saving $100 billion/year in coal externalities, cleaning the air, saving 15000-50000 lives yearly, and greatly reducing global warming (if all were replaced, *global* emissions would go back to where they were in 1975). The effort would pay itself back in approximately 7 years, and be sheer profit from then on.)
> Also, it has now been shown that it may be possible to make LWR breeders, which > would pretty much solve or energy problems for the foreseeable future.
Just curious, but where did you hear this? I thought that light water was a neutron *absorber* hence making it impossible to sustain a breeding reaction..
Oh - and btw, the current nuke thing that IMO has the most promise is the Westinghouse AP1000. Just got certified in the US, modular, passively safe, and *cheap* (800-1000/KW construction costs they expect once mass production starts.) This, btw is cheaper than coal *and* natural gas, once you take into account lifecycle and fuel costs.
Nuclear is not that easy to set up and then switch off again, that is... the nuclear waste will always be there and after switching off the reactor it will stay hot for years.
bullshit. Nuclear plants have construction times of 3 years these days, equivalent to coal plants. They are also cost competitive, and are modular in design so they can be mass produced, and passively safe.
If I had to use one of the current technologies that provides most of our power (by no means all, Aussieland has quite a bit of wind power and solar these days) I would use natural gas, there's more of it than there is oil and it burns cleaner than coal.
wrong again. Look at that statistical energy review from bp. Reserves of nat gas are about 1 trillion barrels oil equivalent, and are by *far* harder to transfer than oil, coal, or especially uranium. Its also peaked in the US, and the world will soon follow. Burning natural gas for electricity is like burning money for the heat.
Also, while we are at it, the article got it wrong. The cost of wind, etc. is about 3-12+ *times* the cost of coal or nuclear, not even taking into account the cost of backup power source for base power. Reference here.
> Can vi(m) run a shell in an editable buffer, or are you just talking about the:shell command? If > the former, I'd like to know how to do it - it would be handy to use that when I'm on a system > that lacks Emacs. The problem with:shell on vi is that you have to terminate the shell to get > back to vi, and that you can't copy buffer contents to paste back to the editor. This is why I > prefer to run my sub-shell in a first class edit buffer as with Emacs. (Of course, I can have > multiple shells, and I usually have two or three. Don't know how to do that on vi either.)
vimshell, an addon to vim, does this. You can run shells inside of shells inside of shells. google for vimshell - I believe its slated to be added to vim7.
> Here's another killer feature that I'll bet vi(m) doesn't have (you have to use XEmacs > for this, I don't know if plain Emacs does it): you can remotely connect to a running copy of XEmacs.
I use 'screen' for this. Just ssh to the box, and type 'screen -list' to get a list of screens, and 'screen -x ' to attach to one of them.
> Getting rid of the cars is the only solution. There is no way on earth (or in hell) to provide three
> tons of scrap (and the energy needed to move them) to each human on the planet.
well, of course lugging around 1-3 tons of scrap metal per person isn't the answer; but how about a quarter of a ton? Or maybe one fifth?
That's the idea of composite cars and a fuel-cell drivetrain - carbon composites are just as strong as their steel analogues, and the drivetrains used to power them use 90% less components. Amory Lovins is the main proponent of this - and although I think some of his ideas are totally whacked out - this one seems to hold up to scrutiny.
How's your math look then, if cars are 5 times more efficient and run on hydrogen either refactored from natural gas or generated via electrolysis?
If the Nuclear Power Industry delivers this, it will likely place the price of electricity produced at around 3 US cents per KW-Hr.
Note that this is a big IF and the price is very sensitive to construction time and discount rate. Those are two assumptions that have been known to change fairly dramatically. (Wind is more sensitive to discount rates, and tends to have shorter construction times.)
Its not that big an 'if'. Overall, the AP1000 uses about 80% less materials than current generation II reactors, and has an expected operating cost of <.01/kWh, because it relies on passive safety rather than active safety. And since the parts are assembly-driven, there isn't the 'handmade' expense involved in construction that there was with second generation nuke plants.
Quoting upfront capital costs alone is rather useless- the important figure is the adjusted cost per KiloWatt-Hour. In this respect, wind is on course to beat these estimates from the nuclear industry. Even if this specific technology doesn't pan out, the trend is clear. And at $0.02/kWh, it will very likely be cheap enough to provide baseline power when coupled with hydrogen storage.
Well, I read awea's estimates for current wind energy costs, and they listed $.04/kwH, and I'm not sure what they've been huffing, but I work at a large utility (not in the wind-side of things but I have access to the numbers), and I can tell you that we get $.06/kwH if we are lucky - and that is just in generating the power on even the more modern units, not talking about startup costs. The turbines have to be cleaned, monitored for breakage, the distributed nature means that if there is a fault it takes a longer time to track down, truckrolls have to be done more often, and we can't rely on it for the basepower reasons mentioned here. They are basically a PITA.
On the other hand, our average operating cost *right now* for a nuke plant is approx $.015/kWH - and that is likely to drop down to less than $.01/kwH in the next generation. And when generation 4 kicks in, nukes will likely do co-generation, both doing electricity and hydrogen, when the operating temperature gets up to 1000 degrees C. Then you don't neet electrolysis; you can split hydrogen from oxygen directly using thermochemical reaction and get *real* high efficiencies for input > 80%. Here's a good site discussing this: gen IV reactors
Don't get me wrong, I like wind as much as the next guy, but its got a long, long, long, long way to go. IMO. It'll probably get there, yes, but I doubt it will ever be cost-effective for base conversion. And even if it does, I think throwing away *any* technology for energy right now would be tantamount to suicide.
Just a quick note, but "nuclear won't come even close to wind" is a bit misleading.
Right now, wind costs about $4000/kwH when startup costs, etc. are taken into account, wheras new nukes are approx $1000/kwH, which is getting in line with coal. New nuke designs are edging under 3 cents/kwH. Source here. Note that this is theory right now, in a couple of years we'll find out for sure; the chinese are building a couple of AP1000s as we speak.
I like wind as much as the next guy, but the fact that it's ill-suited to base power and is more expensive to boot doesn't make it a nuke killer. The only things that could kill nukes are natural gas (unlikely due to prices of gas), or coal.
Slashdot Mirror
you are right, you will go down in flames from the 'nuclear fanboys'. You deserve it.
We have much more pressing concerns to deal with than this inane bullshit:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/un-study-says-76-trillion-needs-to-be.html
and keep this in mind when you consider your excruciatingly stupid decision:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/20/us-germany-energy-idUSTRE75J42J20110620
And in case you are a 'climate change skeptic' I'd suggest you check the statisics on coal and oil deaths, in relation to nuclear:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html
What an unmitigated, colossal, inconceivably short-minded, pooch screw of a fuckup this flip-flopping is. It's guaranteed to cost lots of lives and billions of dollars.
And the chance of a 9.0 earthquake plus tsunami is - in case you are wondering - is pretty much next to NONEXISTANT in Germany.
If you don't like the current brand of nuclear reactors, use that reputed german engineering skill and build LFTRs and IFRs to take their place, don't cower under the utter spinelessness of this decision.
Ed
> Wikileaks isn't putting anyone at risk, when the US government put this charge forward to Wikileaks, Assange responded asking for an example
> name of someone who would be put in trouble so they could negotiate over further redacting the documents to protect such people, the US
> responded stating they wont negotiate over it and to hand it all back.
I think that falls under the header of 'refuse to negotiate with terrorists'. By vetting the documents, the US would have given implicit admission that the leaks were somehow legit.
They are not. It takes two to tango, and the fact that he chose to release them to the detriment of pretty much everybody (except perhaps underground movements like Al Quaeda who will use it as a recruiting tool against pretty much every arab government in existence).
Politics is a dirty business, and governments by necessity need to be given a measure of secrecy in their proceedings. They can't be given carte blanche, of course, but at the same time, they have to be free to be able to negotiate with a certain expectation that what they decide will be confidential. If wikileaks had gone through the documents and picked out bits and pieces which were warcrimes (ie: that directly lead to someone's death) that's one thing - full sale disclosure is quite another.
I HOPE that Mr. Asssange is caught and sentenced. Ironically, I think it paints the US in a pretty good light, considering exactly how restrained the response has been to the original leaks. Now that he has poked the eyes of much more dangerous governments (iran, north korea, etc) my guess is that his life is forfeit, and its only a matter of time.
But I think that he knows this already.
Ed
> Wikileaks isn't on some quest to destroy the government: It is serving the purpose of saving it from itself, before it becomes completely
> unaccountable to its citizens and eventually becomes destructive of its own ends.
bullshit guy..
There is no way that with this amount of volume of documents being released that they would possibly be able to vet all of the information contained therein and make it so that the people referred to could be free from repercussions from its publication. People will die because of this, and the moron who released it will likely get the death penalty.
I can't say I've got a lot of sympathy for him.
Ed
who the hell moderated this comment as +5 funny? Everything in it rings true, especially the part about coal and mercury (one of the reasons, btw, for the rise in autism)
Great - now we have to go that extra step and replace *100%* of the coal burned in a given plant with small, right sized nuclear reactors like:
not to mention south africa's PBMR, and the travelling wave reactor (intellectual ventures). It's simple - make a mass-producable, small, efficient reactor, use it to boil water at both the pressure and temperature of your average coal-fired power plant, and *turn off the burning of coal altogether*. And do it in scale.
That way, there isn't a horrendous capital cost (pocket nuke reactors are small and you are only replacing the boiler), the fuel is cheaper, and as a side benefit current coal plants increase their capacity factor from ~75% to above 90%.
This is really the only way to combat global warming in a way that profits everybody; it allows developing countries to leverage their experience in building coal-fired power plants to build carbon-neutral sources, and given the factory approach is comprehensively scalable, as scalable as producing fighters or bombers in WWII.
We have to do this. We have to stop dicking around with solutions that only work 15% of the way, have appallingly low capacity factors (for 53 days in a row, the windmills in denmark produced basically nada in the way of electricity, texas has an average of 8.7% capacity (ref: here ).
The stakes are too high. I encourage everyone to watch:
http://fora.tv/2009/08/18/A_REALLY_Inconvenient_Truth_Dan_Miller
which shows the true state of our affairs with regards to the climate (the person introducing Mr. Miller says, in short, "He's going to tell us all how we are really fucked".
Looking at the evidence, I agree with him.
Ed
no.. it's not 5000 nuclear power plants simply because when you compare electricity to fossil fuels you are comparing apples to oranges.
Right now, 104 nuclear reactors do 20% of our electricity. Hence, 500 nuclear reactors could supply it all.
As for transportation,40% of our energy supply is oil, mainly for use in transportation, which is at best 20% efficient. electric vehicles can approach 90% efficiency at point of the motor. Hence, the amount of true work to replace it is 40% / 4.5 or about 8% of our energy supply.
Anyways, you get the idea. When you see a 'million barrels of oil equivalent' chart it really is misleading, because they count million barrels of oil thermal in the case of coal, natural gas, etc. and million barrels of oil *electric* with nuclear, and hydro.
So all in all, less than 1000 nuclear plants could do it with a wide margin - the main trick of course is getting everything electrical which is no small trick..
It's ironic that you make this statement, because animals use sex solely for reproduction. Humans are the only species that have sex for recreation, and we of course have tons of contraceptive tools now to increase the amount of sex we have while decreasing pregnancy. The way humans have sex is a very uniquely human thing on this planet.
That's not strictly true -
Bonobos have sex in far greater frequency and variety than humans. They are called the 'hippie ape' for that reason, and have very low instances of violence (both inter and intra group).
Ed
The problem with releasing an organism is that people think what they will get is exactly the existing ecosystem completely unchanged except for the envisioned beneficial effects of the organism. There is really no other word for this kind of thinking than "stupid." Introducing a new organism changes the ecological equilibrium in all kinds of unexpected ways due to the nonlinear feedbacks within any ecosystem. Weirdly, the same people who claim to understand the problem of unintended consequences of interventionist action in economies are often the ones who are most arrogantly certain that they can predict the exact results of introducing GM organisms into ecologies.
Oh come on.. Yes its true that there are perhaps unintended side effects, but you could just as easily say that about genetically modified food, or bacteria to clean up waste, or global trade, or even agriculture and husbandry.
The truth of the matter is that is what us humans do. We modify existing ecosystems and introduce changes in the ecological equilibrium in all kinds of unexpected ways. And the truth of the matter is that as soon as we stop doing this, we will be at the whims of the ecosystem and its various grisly ways of culling extra population (starvation, disease, predation).
The truth is also stark - about 500 million people get infected by malaria, and 3 million a year die, mostly under 5 years of age. If we kill off malaria carriers, we save lots of lives, and in the meantime nature has to find a way to evolve around the hosts' resistance, which imposes a cost on the parasite. Maybe we get lucky and the cost is too evolutionarily high, and malaria goes extinct.
As for the other diseases, none even come close to malaria in their impact. Dengue caused 2000 deaths in 2005, west nile less than 1000, yellow fever about 30000. Those who think 'oh, other diseases could rise therefore we shouldn't fight malaria this way' should really get a clue.
Ed
Ok, lets just assume that this is a real breakthrough, and that we can safely and cheaply:
.15 kg/L hydrogen * 120 MJ/kg or 5 kwh / liter versus 9.7 kwh /liter for gasoline) and with the extra efficiency boost it IS energy competitive.
l ine_consumption_country.php
p ?form=1) and aluminum production is very energy intensive (I calculate it as being 6 times *higher* - at 30 kilowatt hours /liter - than the hydrogen is meant to store. That becomes 90 kilowatt hours / liter considering that most of the energy used in aluminum production is electric)
* manufacture said compound (AlH3)
* store said compound
* use said compound with high efficiency in fuel vehicles
After all, its volumetric density is fair (I calculate it at
My question is - where are we going to get the aluminum? This would require a MASSIVE production spike in aluminum - to provide a replacement for the ~ 400 million metric tons of gasoline that the US alone uses.
(source: http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/statistics/gaso
)
Right now, the amount of aluminum we produce globally per year is about 20 times lower - 23.8 million metric tons yearly to be exact (source: http://www.world-aluminum.org/stats/formServer.as
So the only realistic way of doing this would be to recycle the aluminum and 'rehydrate it'. And there would be a hefty price premium on the creation of the fuel ($12 / gallon at current aluminum prices, which would probably go up dramatically if this took off)
Overall then this is a mixed bag. The infrastructure costs would be substantial in creating the distribution network for the fuel, both for hydrating and recycling the fuel containers, and the energy cost would be horrific in making the aluminum.
At 30 kilowatt hours / liter, and 700 grams CO2/ kilowatt hour (if the energy making the aluminum was coal), this corresponds to 19000 grams C02 / liter of fuel, versus the 2000 grams CO2 / kilowatt hour that you get by simply burning the gasoline to go! The aluminum had better be VERY recyclable.
I'm skeptical. It'd be cool if it works, but we'll see.
Ed
> * Nuclear power plants, which if they fail render the portion of the planet where they are
> located and any territory down wind them un-inhabitable for several thousand years.
> * Coal and oil plants who have the potential to render even larger portions of the planet
> un-inhabitable than Nuclear accidents will because of sea-level rise and the rest of it
> ill-inhabitable because of climate change.
>
> It's a choice between bad and worse.
Argh.. just a pet peeve here but nuclear is NOT THAT BAD. Its a complete urban legend, not to mention FUD of the highest degree, that a nuclear accident renders a portion of the world inhabitable for a long period of time. Where'd you get your risk analysis skills from, the China Syndrome?
Chernobyl shows exactly how false this is. It was about the worst it could get, yet the wildlife community around Chernobyl is thriving simply because MAN ISN'T THERE.
Nuclear has its problems, but please don't make them worse by spreading FUD.
Ok, here goes (sigh):
.1 cent/kWh.)
1. building costs that westinghouse is billing out to china for its new 3rd gen reactors is $1000-1200/KW, and is expected to be completed at 2-3 years for a 1.1 GW plant. This is actually cheaper than the equivalent for coal.
2. demolishing is a cost, true, but is basically the same as a given coal plant. But nuke plants are turning out to be more durable than first anticipated, with most plants expected to last 60 years or so. This mitigates both cost of building and destruction.
3. storing the leftovers *is* actually built into the electricity cost itself, unlike any other generation source (solar, coal, gas, wind, whatever). It comes out to about
4. insurance (Price-Anderson) has cost taxpayers a total of zero dollars since its inception.
Short answer - if you have any objections to nuclear power, please get over it. Its one of two proven tactics to overcome greenhouse emissions - the other being energy efficiency. And we are going to need a hell of a lot more of it in the coming years. http://www.nuclearinfo.net/ is a good site for more information and is useful for answering these basic questions (put together by some physicists in australia)
> wind and solar are as limitless. the difference : COST. I don't see fusion becoming cheap. fission, after 3-4 decades is ...
> still very expensive, and it isn't getting cheaper; the reason : very complex technology, which means : difficult to
> maintain and secure. If we compare with wind on the other hand : you can let a turbine turn until the blades fall of, and
> then, you can put them back up with a few bolts here and there; nobody cares if a windmill collapses; if that happens on > a nuclear power plant OTOH
wrong, wrong, wrong.. Westinghouse is bidding out its new AP1000 reactor to china for $1000-1200 / GW which - given how cheap a nuke plant is to run once it gets going - is cheaper than everything out there, including coal. United states generation costs of electrical energy from nukes is 1.63 cents, and should drop to 1 cent with the new technology, which is passively safe.
Wind on the other hand, has a 20% capacity factor (compared with 90% nuclear) which makes it a *very* difficult technology to make money off of. Ditto for solar.
Ed
Its worse than that. For 6 billion dollars a month, we could have gone a long way towards shuttering coal forever, and probably It takes an average of 1.5 billion now to produce the new power plants at 1 GW, which makes ~50 reactors a year. Total of 150 plants in the works so far, along with the engineering talent and jobs that would produce.
Of course this is simplistic (no way we could build out that fast at first) but hell, we would have gone a long way towards building out the infrastructure to do it. And I'd personally feel more comfortable if the 50% we are getting from coal was 5%/45% nuke..
Ed
No seriously, why not just call the damn thing 'R'.
It both leverages the revolution moniker, AND gives them the team-building connotation they are looking for, as in 'our'. As in:
R controller
R new direction in gameplay,
etc. etc.
You can also call the controller the Rmote, make it cute by making it lower case (if they so desire). Plus of course NO DAMN SOPHMORIC JOKES.
Ed
(ps - just a disclaimer, I saw this on digg first, but it seems apropos to post it here, just to spread the meme.)
Ok - speaking to someone 'in the know' - I have to ask your considered opinion about rTMS.
As I understand it, repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation works by inducing an electric current inside the head via a magnetic field.
Do you know if there are any plans for studies on this in the US? Personally, I have tinnitus (from motorcycle riding) and have heard that this is one of the first effective treatments for this as well as depression, without the risk of surgery. I'd very much like to hear your opinion on this and if its coming to the US soon, and if so, to what clinics.
Ed
*sigh*.
.0003% of the land area of the united states. I'm sure we can find the space, even given the constraints you mention. Ditto for nuclear waste.
1) you could fit all of the waste that we've produced so far with nuclear power into one football field
2) coal plants are not cheaper and faster to build. Its a common myth. see my other post.
3) 600 nuclear power plants could generate all the electricity we'd ever need (to about 2050). At approximately 15 hectares per plant, that equals
4) Since all the waste ever generated + 100 years of waste to come could be stuffed into a football field, you only need to "shove" the waste down a vastly small minority of people's throats. 99.99999% of the people in the US won't live 50 miles from yucca mountain; 99% won't live 250.
5) as for being 'easy' terrorist targets, that's another common myth. The containment towers simply don't offer enough of a profile to smash a large-scale airplane into them, and the distance of the (guarded) fence from the facility makes it highly unlikely that an ammonium nitrate bomb would have much effect on the facility itself. In addition, they are guarded by their own military force; the worst that could happen is probably the same as the worst-case scenario with a coal facility, ie: several people would be without power. A few people might die (from radiation poisoning vs smoke inhalation) but that's about it.
6) as for land value, since the impact, sizewise is so small, hardly anyone gets effected. Wind towers, on the other hand, have a huge impact. If you wanted to make wind supply us the same electricity, assuming that we could even do it (which is doubtful) , we'd need 5% of all the land area of the US. Everyone would have windmills in their back yard.
Why don't you stop spreading fud? What, do you *want* coal plants or something?
Ed
> Multiple coal plants could be built in the time it takes to PERMIT a nuclear
> plant. I doubt the time to permit would be less than 10 years for a nuclear
> plant in the US. Time is money. Not to mention the cost overruns common in the
> nuclear energy field (in the US).
I'll ignore the sarcasm for now. Of course there's a political issue here. But even that is changing - Westinghouse got its third gen AP1000 reactor approved for construction in the US, and the new energy bill allows for the same 1.8 cent credit to nuclear power as it does wind power. Considering that you can run an nuclear plant at 1.5 cents/kWh, its basically letting operators get 1/3 cent for each kwH they produce.
As for cost overruns, well, the AP1000 (and other third gen plants) are modular, can be factory constructed and have the parts shipped to construction sites. So there isn't the "we're doing one-offs all over the place" debacle that caused the major cost overruns of the 60s-70s. It also simplifies the legal process and permitting process that you seem so fond of EMPHASIZING.
As a result, utilities are responding. In the southwest alone, there are 10 such plants being planned, and that's just starters there. Reference here.
In addition, we are very close to a carbon tax - the last vote being 55/45 in the senate, so this gives utilities a lot of pause before investing in coal. As a result, lots of the planned coal fired plants are being rethunk.
And since wind isn't a real competitor of natural gas/nuclear/coal - being about 3-12 times as expensive as coal or nuclear even before costs of backup facilities are included - that leaves nuclear.
Anyways, what's your point? The only *positive* point I think you could be making is that we need more lobbying for the sake of nuclear power. Think of nuclear power as a large train; once you get it truly going and some positive feedback loops in place, it will pretty much run over everything in its path. That's what happened in france, and that was with 30 year old technology.
Ed
> The real problem with nuclear power is that it's cheaper, faster and easier to
> build coal power plants. Sure coal pollutes more and generates CO2 but the only
> people that have to pay for that are your grandchildren. Pollution and CO2 are
> officially somebody elses problem.
That used to be correct, but isn't any more..
New nuclear power plants are about as expensive (if not a little cheaper) and take as long to build as coal plants (3 years construction.)
Source here .
There is no reason to still be building coal plants. We could replace coal with nuclear with an investment of $500-600 billion dollars, or about 30 billion a year. That by the way, is far less costly than certain wars .
Ed
(ps - oh, and btw, in the process we would be saving $100 billion/year in coal externalities, cleaning the air, saving 15000-50000 lives yearly, and greatly reducing global warming (if all were replaced, *global* emissions would go back to where they were in 1975). The effort would pay itself back in approximately 7 years, and be sheer profit from then on.)
> Also, it has now been shown that it may be possible to make LWR breeders, which
> would pretty much solve or energy problems for the foreseeable future.
Just curious, but where did you hear this? I thought that light water was a neutron *absorber* hence making it impossible to sustain a breeding reaction..
Oh - and btw, the current nuke thing that IMO has the most promise is the Westinghouse AP1000. Just got certified in the US, modular, passively safe, and *cheap* (800-1000/KW construction costs they expect once mass production starts.) This, btw is cheaper than coal *and* natural gas, once you take into account lifecycle and fuel costs.
Ed
Nuclear is not that easy to set up and then switch off again, that is... the nuclear waste will always be there and after switching off the reactor it will stay hot for years.
bullshit. Nuclear plants have construction times of 3 years these days, equivalent to coal plants. They are also cost competitive, and are modular in design so they can be mass produced, and passively safe.
If I had to use one of the current technologies that provides most of our power (by no means all, Aussieland has quite a bit of wind power and solar these days) I would use natural gas, there's more of it than there is oil and it burns cleaner than coal.
wrong again. Look at that statistical energy review from bp. Reserves of nat gas are about 1 trillion barrels oil equivalent, and are by *far* harder to transfer than oil, coal, or especially uranium. Its also peaked in the US, and the world will soon follow. Burning natural gas for electricity is like burning money for the heat.
Also, while we are at it, the article got it wrong. The cost of wind, etc. is about 3-12+ *times* the cost of coal or nuclear, not even taking into account the cost of backup power source for base power. Reference here.
Ed
> Can vi(m) run a shell in an editable buffer, or are you just talking about the :shell command? If :shell on vi is that you have to terminate the shell to get
> the former, I'd like to know how to do it - it would be handy to use that when I'm on a system
> that lacks Emacs. The problem with
> back to vi, and that you can't copy buffer contents to paste back to the editor. This is why I
> prefer to run my sub-shell in a first class edit buffer as with Emacs. (Of course, I can have
> multiple shells, and I usually have two or three. Don't know how to do that on vi either.)
vimshell, an addon to vim, does this. You can run shells inside of shells inside of
shells. google for vimshell - I believe its slated to be added to vim7.
> Here's another killer feature that I'll bet vi(m) doesn't have (you have to use XEmacs
> for this, I don't know if plain Emacs does it): you can remotely connect to a running copy of XEmacs.
I use 'screen' for this. Just ssh to the box, and type 'screen -list' to get a list of screens, and 'screen -x ' to attach to one of them.
Ed
> Getting rid of the cars is the only solution. There is no way on earth (or in hell) to provide three
> tons of scrap (and the energy needed to move them) to each human on the planet.
well, of course lugging around 1-3 tons of scrap metal per person isn't the answer; but how about a quarter of a ton? Or maybe one fifth?
That's the idea of composite cars and a fuel-cell drivetrain - carbon composites are just as strong as their steel analogues, and the drivetrains used to power them use 90% less components. Amory Lovins is the main proponent of this - and although I think some of his ideas are totally whacked out - this one seems to hold up to scrutiny.
How's your math look then, if cars are 5 times more efficient and run on hydrogen either refactored from natural gas or generated via electrolysis?
Ed
If the Nuclear Power Industry delivers this, it will likely place the price of electricity produced at around 3 US cents per KW-Hr.
.01/kWh, because it relies on passive safety rather than active safety. And since the parts are assembly-driven, there isn't the 'handmade' expense involved in construction that there was with second generation nuke plants.
Note that this is a big IF and the price is very sensitive to construction time and discount rate. Those are two assumptions that have been known to change fairly dramatically. (Wind is more sensitive to discount rates, and tends to have shorter construction times.)
Its not that big an 'if'. Overall, the AP1000 uses about 80% less materials than current generation II reactors, and has an expected operating cost of <
Quoting upfront capital costs alone is rather useless- the important figure is the adjusted cost per KiloWatt-Hour. In this respect, wind is on course to beat these estimates from the nuclear industry. Even if this specific technology doesn't pan out, the trend is clear. And at $0.02/kWh, it will very likely be cheap enough to provide baseline power when coupled with hydrogen storage.
Well, I read awea's estimates for current wind energy costs, and they listed $.04/kwH, and I'm not sure what they've been huffing, but I work at a large utility (not in the wind-side of things but I have access to the numbers), and I can tell you that we get $.06/kwH if we are lucky - and that is just in generating the power on even the more modern units, not talking about startup costs. The turbines have to be cleaned, monitored for breakage, the distributed nature means that if there is a fault it takes a longer time to track down, truckrolls have to be done more often, and we can't rely on it for the basepower reasons mentioned here. They are basically a PITA.
On the other hand, our average operating cost *right now* for a nuke plant is approx $.015/kWH - and that is likely to drop down to less than $.01/kwH in the next generation. And when generation 4 kicks in, nukes will likely do co-generation, both doing electricity and hydrogen, when the operating temperature gets up to 1000 degrees C. Then you don't neet electrolysis; you can split hydrogen from oxygen directly using thermochemical reaction and get *real* high efficiencies for input > 80%. Here's a good site discussing this: gen IV reactors
Don't get me wrong, I like wind as much as the next guy, but its got a long, long, long, long way to go. IMO. It'll probably get there, yes, but I doubt it will ever be cost-effective for base conversion. And even if it does, I think throwing away *any* technology for energy right now would be tantamount to suicide.
Ed
Just a quick note, but "nuclear won't come even close to wind" is a bit misleading.
Right now, wind costs about $4000/kwH when startup costs, etc. are taken into account, wheras new nukes are approx $1000/kwH, which is getting in line with coal. New nuke designs are edging under 3 cents/kwH. Source here. Note that this is theory right now, in a couple of years we'll find out for sure; the chinese are building a couple of AP1000s as we speak.
I like wind as much as the next guy, but the fact that it's ill-suited to base power and is more expensive to boot doesn't make it a nuke killer. The only things that could kill nukes are natural gas (unlikely due to prices of gas), or coal.
Ed
so...
;-)
Do you cede defeat?
Ed