The vast majority of our hydrocarbon usage is for energy. Plastic, fertilizer, chemicals, and so forth are essentially lost in the noise.
Furthermore, we can make virtually any hydrocarbon that we want out of coal, which is not running out any time soon despite what the nuttier peak oilers sometimes claim.
Parts of Australia are currently suffering from drought. There is trillions of tonnes of water in the Kuiper Belt. Doesn't mean that going into space and bringing it back to Australia is a cost-effective option for supplying water...
Wikipedia has some numbers: 6,000 MW peak capacity in 2006, now probably up to about 9000 MW peak capacity because of the rapid growth.
When you use a capacity factor of about 15%, that comes out at about the equivalent of an 1800 MW coal-fired power station with a capacity factor of 75%. I thought it was even less than that; I'm sorry about the mistake, but I think my broader point that it's a piddle in the ocean is correct.
That doesn't take into account solar hot water (pretty big, particularly in China), solar thermal electricity (not much yet), and passive solar - particularly solar drying of clothes. The USA uses about 6% of its electricity to run clothes in electric dryers, something that could be cut substantially if you got rid of your covenants that prevent people from hanging clothes in the sun to dry...
You may not be able to prove that your design was what you originally had in mind, but as I understand model checking you can certainly prove certain useful properties - for instance, that eventually it returns to a particular "state" (something akin to not getting stuck in some loop). That's something you can't do just on the basis of looking and testing your code.
That said, you do have a point that formulating the models is not justified for a lot of routine code. Furthermore, in practice, as I understand it, in many application domains model checking is still computationally infeasible despite the work done on tackling state explosion.
Grid-tied solar and wind only work well when they make up a relatively small fraction of energy production. It also helps if you've got a lot of hydropower in the grid as well. Denmark gets away with producing much of their energy from wind because they're part of a wider Scandinavian power grid.
I think you're the one who actually hasn't done your research, and your tone is offensive. How about a little civility?
Pal, I have been looking into this issue for years. I recently had an article published on the topic. I've got money invested in renewable energy companies. A mate of mine runs a magazine (not the one I was published in) on renewable power. So, yeah, I reckon I've done my research, and, yeah, I reckon the "distributed energy" crowd are full of crap - a combination of dreamers, snake-oil salespeople and closet medievalists. Sorry if that's not particularly civil.
Dunno what's going on in your neck of the woods. Australia's freshwater fish are still perfectly safe to eat.
But you missed the part about Greenpower - which means you're buying wind power, small-scale hydro etc. Even that is way cheaper than whacking solar panels on your roof.
Those two tired-old bullshit arguments won't matter until there is more solar capacity online than we can use in real time, which won't happen for two decades under even the most favorable set of assumptions.
Which essentially means we're not going to shut down a single baseload plant by replacing it with solar power any time in the next 20 years. So remind me again why solar is in any way an alternative to coal?
Have you done the sums on two alternative courses of action: 1) put solar panels in, or 2) continue to buy power off the grid (make it Greenpower) and invest the money you didn't spend on the solar panels in an index fund?
Where do you think the federal government gets that money from - the money tree in the bowels of Parliament House?
The scientists who are working on this give several reasons as to why it's plausible.
If you're pumping the CO2 into a depleted gas field, that gas field captured natural gas for many millions of years. Another type of disposal site that's been proposed is deep saline acquifers, in which case the CO2 will dissolve in the water, which has also stayed where it is for millions of years.
Finally, if you're really paranoid there's mineral sequestration, where you react the CO2 with various types of rock to form carbonates, which are very stable compounds (they're rocks, basically).
And it's only available 12 hours a day, costs a fortune to tap (and if you mention Nanosolar I suggest you call them up and offer them $1 per watt for their solar panels - the only response you'll get is fits of giggles), and battery backup is extremely expensive. The world's total solar power capacity is roughly equivalent to one unit of your average coal-fired power station. And while solar cells are large maintenance free, solar thermal power, which the people who've looked into the issue generally regard as a more serious solution, is not.
Please go away and actually do some research into the costs of the various energy options, and you might appreciate why research into carbon capture and storage is money well spent.
Keelty's copped a barrage of (deserved) criticism in the media for his speech. One of the major metropolitan dailies, The Age, editorialised thusly:
Controlling the flow on information is one of the pillars of a secret state and this "tension", or balance, can be a healthy sign of a democracy. The AFP is responsible for fighting terrorism, and it is acknowledged that such a fight involves enormous complexities. However, Mr Keelty has stepped into waters beyond his remit.
Although the AFP often operates in secret to investigate terrorism, its obligation to the public carries with it the greater principle of a duty to open justice. This principle can only be adjudged in the "court of public opinion", of which Mr Keelty is so dismissive. It only needs one example: Mohamed Haneef.
He's also been criticised heavily by the Federal Opposition spokeperson on justice matters, Christopher Pyne, whose party appointed Keelty to the job and under whose watch most of the contentious matters Keelty is referring to occurred.
The organization Keelty heads, the Australian Federal Police, screwed up a terrorism case badly (the guy was a doctor who had the misfortune to have some distant relatives amongst the British firebombers of last year) in a blaze of publicity. He's coming across as blaming the messenger for his organization's faults.
I wouldn't be quoting John Lott as an authority on anything. Have a look through Tim Lambert's weblog for a very extensive collection of stories on Lott's utter lack of credibility.
Frankly, the US healthcare system is so ridiculously inefficient compared to everywhere else in the developed world, you should be able to fund universal coverage, and get better outcomes, and spend less than you currently do. Heck, we fund near-universal health care here in Australia for the same proportion of national income that you guys spend on Medicare and the VA health system.
I support the idea of nuclear rocketry, in theory.
Let's however get back from engineering dreamland and take a cold hard look at political reality. Anything with the word "nuclear" in it scares the shit out of the vast majority of people. Most people seem to be convinced that every nuclear device is a potential nuclear weapon waiting to go off, and that any nuclear accident will inevitably result in thousands of deaths and an area the size of Texas rendered uninhabitable.
I am perfectly well aware that the actual situation is nothing like that (and, furthermore, the results of a chemical rocket malfunctioning aren't pretty either). But nuclear rocketry in Earth's atmosphere is a nonstarter for the next couple of decades at least.
Nah, I'm saying that people's irrationality is a fact of life, and we should include that consideration in our calculations. Certainly the bad guys do, that is why they commit acts of terror in the first place (e.g. the total costs of 9/11 were much greater than just the direct costs of the lives lost and the property destroyed by the act itself).
Perhaps, but frankly I'd prefer to live as long as possible. Spending money on bear patrols has a massive opportunity cost, and a lot of it is hidden.
The Wikipedia lists five incidents where these missiles have allegedly been launched at civilian aircraft.
Of the four confirmed firings, two planes were shot down, one was hit but landed safely, and another missed entirely.
That said, there are likely to be ways that $10 billion could be spent to save more lives. For instance, your chances of surviving a heart attack are better in a casino than in a hospital, because you're more likely to receive defibrillator treatment quickly in a casino. Would $10 billion spent there, or on making sure best practice for avoiding MRSA infections was adopted nationwide, be a better investment? Almost certainly. But people place a far higher value on avoiding spectacular deaths than mundane ones.
Yes, and you have to mine a lot of steel and whatnot to make solar panels and wind turbines, and nobody's using biodiesel for that either.
When you do life cycle analyses, most of the answers come back with nuclear roughly comparable to renewables, often a little higher than wind but lower than solar photovoltaic. Much of the life cycle costs come from using gas diffusion enrichment to prepare the nuclear fuel, which should be shut down completely over the next few years and replaced with the orders of magnitude more efficient centrifuge technology.
There are plenty of anti-nuclear people who claim that nuclear:
is too slow to build, compared to renewables which can be installed in a couple of weeks (which is complete crap, when you're talking the quantities required)
locks us into to the centralized generator model, whereas in their ideal world everybody should be able to generate their own energy
The second premise is some fantasyland idea where there can't be any more Enrons. What they don't seem to grasp is that Enrons will always be around, and people will always get shafted, if not in the energy industry than elsewhere.
Which proves that your power company can charge you more for it, not that it costs more. I realize coal is cheap, but if the externalities (environmental destruction from mining it, pollution and health issues caused by burning it) weren't born by society but were charged to industry, it wouldn't be so cheap.
Yes...and all the externalities to nuclear are charged to the industry.
The further point I'd make is that even new-build dirty coal is cheaper than new-build wind.
According to the EU's Externe study (a big, multi-year project), there are 300,000 premature deaths annually across the EU from air pollution.
And you're worried about not being able to eat the odd reindeer (which, frankly, you're probably not permitted to eat because of government paranoia rather than any actual risk)?
And if you have a look at the birth records, there is no evidence of increased birth defects, no matter how many pictures of deformed babies you might see in documentaries.
Wind turbines convert wind - when it happens to be blowing - into electricity.
The hard part is converting intermittent electricity into energy available in the form we want it, when we want it.
There is no large-scale energy storage method worth a damn. Well, except, um, dams and pumped-storage hydro, but there's bugger-all scope for extending that.
We don't have a clean energy problem. We have an energy storage problem, and the sooner more environmentalists figure out the difference the more chance they'll have of their preferred solutions getting up.
And wind is not cheap. I should know. Despite the energy storage issues not being relevant when it makes up a tiny fraction of the grid, I still pay a substantial premium to buy power from it over dirty coal.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are no decent treatments for Alzheimer's available yet. There are some drugs that give you a temporary respite, but that's it. There is evidence to suggest that your mind and body exercised helps reduce the chances of developing the disease, but beyond that there's nothing you can do right now.
It's likely that this will change in the future; sooner or later it's likely that somebody will figure out how to slow down or stop the damage to the brain characteristic of Alzheimer's, and if that was the case it'd definitely be worth knowing that you were on course to develop it. But that's not the current situation.
Saying coal or oil powered plants are dangerous would be FUD.
Possibly, but there is ample statistical evidence around to suggest that coal and oil powered plants are, indeed, highly dangerous, and cause lots of premature deaths.
I don't doubt that members of your family are suffering illnesses. I feel sorry for them, and hope that they are getting the best treatment available; I suspect that they probably aren't, and that gives me the shits.
What I am disputing is your assertion that they were definitely caused by Chernobyl.
Thyroid cancer sucks, and I would prefer that nobody got it (though, of the cancers to get, it's one of the least lethal and most treatable).
My points on thyroid cancer threefold: 1) that it may have been avoidable even given the accident if authorities had acted promptly, 2) it's the only disease for which there is good statistical evidence for increased prevalence after Chernobyl, and 3) compared to the number of Ukrainians who die in car accidents (roughly 4000 annually, I believe) and from tobacco smoking, the health effects of Chernobyl are at most a piddle in the ocean.
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The vast majority of our hydrocarbon usage is for energy. Plastic, fertilizer, chemicals, and so forth are essentially lost in the noise. Furthermore, we can make virtually any hydrocarbon that we want out of coal, which is not running out any time soon despite what the nuttier peak oilers sometimes claim.
Parts of Australia are currently suffering from drought. There is trillions of tonnes of water in the Kuiper Belt. Doesn't mean that going into space and bringing it back to Australia is a cost-effective option for supplying water...
That doesn't take into account solar hot water (pretty big, particularly in China), solar thermal electricity (not much yet), and passive solar - particularly solar drying of clothes. The USA uses about 6% of its electricity to run clothes in electric dryers, something that could be cut substantially if you got rid of your covenants that prevent people from hanging clothes in the sun to dry...
That said, you do have a point that formulating the models is not justified for a lot of routine code. Furthermore, in practice, as I understand it, in many application domains model checking is still computationally infeasible despite the work done on tackling state explosion.
Pal, I have been looking into this issue for years. I recently had an article published on the topic. I've got money invested in renewable energy companies. A mate of mine runs a magazine (not the one I was published in) on renewable power. So, yeah, I reckon I've done my research, and, yeah, I reckon the "distributed energy" crowd are full of crap - a combination of dreamers, snake-oil salespeople and closet medievalists. Sorry if that's not particularly civil.
But you missed the part about Greenpower - which means you're buying wind power, small-scale hydro etc. Even that is way cheaper than whacking solar panels on your roof.
If you're pumping the CO2 into a depleted gas field, that gas field captured natural gas for many millions of years. Another type of disposal site that's been proposed is deep saline acquifers, in which case the CO2 will dissolve in the water, which has also stayed where it is for millions of years.
Finally, if you're really paranoid there's mineral sequestration, where you react the CO2 with various types of rock to form carbonates, which are very stable compounds (they're rocks, basically).
Please go away and actually do some research into the costs of the various energy options, and you might appreciate why research into carbon capture and storage is money well spent.
He's also been criticised heavily by the Federal Opposition spokeperson on justice matters, Christopher Pyne, whose party appointed Keelty to the job and under whose watch most of the contentious matters Keelty is referring to occurred.
The organization Keelty heads, the Australian Federal Police, screwed up a terrorism case badly (the guy was a doctor who had the misfortune to have some distant relatives amongst the British firebombers of last year) in a blaze of publicity. He's coming across as blaming the messenger for his organization's faults.
I wouldn't be quoting John Lott as an authority on anything. Have a look through Tim Lambert's weblog for a very extensive collection of stories on Lott's utter lack of credibility.
Frankly, the US healthcare system is so ridiculously inefficient compared to everywhere else in the developed world, you should be able to fund universal coverage, and get better outcomes, and spend less than you currently do. Heck, we fund near-universal health care here in Australia for the same proportion of national income that you guys spend on Medicare and the VA health system.
Let's however get back from engineering dreamland and take a cold hard look at political reality. Anything with the word "nuclear" in it scares the shit out of the vast majority of people. Most people seem to be convinced that every nuclear device is a potential nuclear weapon waiting to go off, and that any nuclear accident will inevitably result in thousands of deaths and an area the size of Texas rendered uninhabitable.
I am perfectly well aware that the actual situation is nothing like that (and, furthermore, the results of a chemical rocket malfunctioning aren't pretty either). But nuclear rocketry in Earth's atmosphere is a nonstarter for the next couple of decades at least.
Perhaps, but frankly I'd prefer to live as long as possible. Spending money on bear patrols has a massive opportunity cost, and a lot of it is hidden.
You might think it's OK to piss away tens of billions of dollars on a very small threat, but I don't. I'd prefer to spend the money on beer, thanks.
Of the four confirmed firings, two planes were shot down, one was hit but landed safely, and another missed entirely.
That said, there are likely to be ways that $10 billion could be spent to save more lives. For instance, your chances of surviving a heart attack are better in a casino than in a hospital, because you're more likely to receive defibrillator treatment quickly in a casino. Would $10 billion spent there, or on making sure best practice for avoiding MRSA infections was adopted nationwide, be a better investment? Almost certainly. But people place a far higher value on avoiding spectacular deaths than mundane ones.
When you do life cycle analyses, most of the answers come back with nuclear roughly comparable to renewables, often a little higher than wind but lower than solar photovoltaic. Much of the life cycle costs come from using gas diffusion enrichment to prepare the nuclear fuel, which should be shut down completely over the next few years and replaced with the orders of magnitude more efficient centrifuge technology.
The second premise is some fantasyland idea where there can't be any more Enrons. What they don't seem to grasp is that Enrons will always be around, and people will always get shafted, if not in the energy industry than elsewhere.
Yes...and all the externalities to nuclear are charged to the industry.
The further point I'd make is that even new-build dirty coal is cheaper than new-build wind.
According to the EU's Externe study (a big, multi-year project), there are 300,000 premature deaths annually across the EU from air pollution.
And you're worried about not being able to eat the odd reindeer (which, frankly, you're probably not permitted to eat because of government paranoia rather than any actual risk)?
And if you have a look at the birth records, there is no evidence of increased birth defects, no matter how many pictures of deformed babies you might see in documentaries.
Wind turbines convert wind - when it happens to be blowing - into electricity.
The hard part is converting intermittent electricity into energy available in the form we want it, when we want it.
There is no large-scale energy storage method worth a damn. Well, except, um, dams and pumped-storage hydro, but there's bugger-all scope for extending that.
We don't have a clean energy problem. We have an energy storage problem, and the sooner more environmentalists figure out the difference the more chance they'll have of their preferred solutions getting up.
And wind is not cheap. I should know. Despite the energy storage issues not being relevant when it makes up a tiny fraction of the grid, I still pay a substantial premium to buy power from it over dirty coal.
It's likely that this will change in the future; sooner or later it's likely that somebody will figure out how to slow down or stop the damage to the brain characteristic of Alzheimer's, and if that was the case it'd definitely be worth knowing that you were on course to develop it. But that's not the current situation.
Possibly, but there is ample statistical evidence around to suggest that coal and oil powered plants are, indeed, highly dangerous, and cause lots of premature deaths.
What I am disputing is your assertion that they were definitely caused by Chernobyl.
Thyroid cancer sucks, and I would prefer that nobody got it (though, of the cancers to get, it's one of the least lethal and most treatable).
My points on thyroid cancer threefold: 1) that it may have been avoidable even given the accident if authorities had acted promptly, 2) it's the only disease for which there is good statistical evidence for increased prevalence after Chernobyl, and 3) compared to the number of Ukrainians who die in car accidents (roughly 4000 annually, I believe) and from tobacco smoking, the health effects of Chernobyl are at most a piddle in the ocean.