If companies can provide 'designated parking' then they can provide changing areas. Changing in a toilet cubicle isn't ideal but it is possible.
Fit employees are likely to be better employees who are ill less often and can think more clearly. As long as one showers regularly then a change of clothes deals with sweat. Firing someone for cycling? that's really nuts.
The poster says that existing ships are causing massive pollution, which articles say are killing many tens of thousands of people. And you link to info about a ship that isn't even built for you argument.
Just because B doesn't pollute does not mean that A also does not pollute.
Except that you would probably be more effective lobbying the EU which the UK is a member of.
Anyway, why stop at one region? Asia, North America and the EU are all big polluters, they should all curb their habits.
The US could probably make the easiest savings by discouraging low-mpg car use and encouraging more efficient electricity use, the amount of electricity the average US home uses is staggering relatively speaking.
Home automation system R&D should be funded, if homes managed themselves the same way computers can turn themselves off when they're not in use, the savings would be enough to shut many power stations.
Why go by an artificial boundary? What if china split up into 5 or 10?
And, who is buying all of the produce made in China? EU's emissions could be counted as 40% higher if you consider the fact that we have externalized our pollution to China.
Per capita is the fair measurement. US's per capita CO2 is dreadful. Nearly 1 in 3 new cars in the US are SUVs, I think that's indicative of a lot of people in the US either not giving a **** or being ignorant of the consequences of their actions.
Asia is the highest emitting continent, but the finger pointing is.. pointless, we need standards / taxes that target CO2 emissions and those standards should be global (Doesn't mean I support TTIP, I certainly don't).
I can't help but wonder how many more water sources will be have chemicals leach into them even after the fracking is finished. On the positive side, sometimes the contamination diminishes over time to safe levels.
A massively incompetent organisation who takes the BBCs programmes, sells them for £1.2 billion and then hands the BBC a little over 1 tenth of that amount!
They pay their employees an average of £79000 each to somehow lose over a billion pounds whilst selling the BBCs programmes.
I mean seriously, how much can it cost to sell a product that is fucking digital, according to BBC Worldwide it costs £524,700,000 to sell stuff, WTF? (and that's excluding wages of 144,000,000)
Because the price of gas is expected to go up, reasons being: dozens of gas power stations currently being built and the fact that gas is currently so cheap that some of the Frackers are selling their gas at below cost. Also relevant is that the cheapest resources are typically mined first, this is particularly the case with the current gas fracking boom, the current low gas price is highly unlikely to remain low after a handful of years.
Wind and sunlight OTOH are expected to remain very cheap.
I'm not a geologist, an educated guess would be that the answer is part cosmology - the mercury was present in the materials that formed the Earth in the first place and part geology, the mercury got to where it was after billions of years of earth changes through tectonic plates shifting, volcanoes, erosion, compression etc.
Wikipedia says "It is found either as a native metal (rare) or in cinnabar, corderoite, livingstonite and other minerals, with cinnabar (HgS) being the most common ore.[23] Mercury ores usually occur in very young orogenic belts where rocks of high density are forced to the crust of the Earth, often in hot springs or other volcanic regions.[24]"
I'd certainly support anti-pollution tariffs. Regarding that, the WTO, TTIP, NAFTA etc trade treaties are all rabidly against tariffs, no matter what they try to protect (anti-dumping tariffs are allowed).
Mercury is 'mined'. It was locked up nicely in rocks that were below ground. Once released it is then in the air, water soil etc - not where you want it.
Whilst I'm not condoning China's pollution record, most of their industrialisation capacity-wise has been this last decade. The article shows that mercury has been entering the environment for over a century with the amounts being released in the year 1900 being similar to that released in the year 2000.
5 thousandths of a gram is a lot of mercury for 1 cf bulb. 720,000 tons of mercury amounts to about 100grams per human, so cf bulbs are likely responsible for less than 100th of 1% of the total mercury pollution.
I decided to do the math. 1 year producing 411,000 batteries which could kick out 128 Gigawatts at maximum output! Or the output of a hundred power stations for a short period of time.
Politicians smart? They are only smart about lining their own pockets.
Hinkley point will get tens of billions in subsidies at the guaranteed rate of £92.5/MWh - roughly double what will be paid for gas, coal, wind etc.
If renewables are so unobtainable why are Scotland aiming for 100% renewable by 2020 after having beat their goal of 31% renewable by 2011 set in only 2007. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-sco...
Portugal hit 58% renewable electricity in 2013 and in January of this year renewables supplied 91% of their electricity. Iceland is 100% renewable electricity, and much of their heating is renewable. Norway is 99% renewable electricity. Germany hit over 30% renewable electricity for last year and has peaked at 74% of renewable electricity.
Note that Tepco itself has admitted that 300 tons of highly radioactive water is leaking.
"so to provide 2-week long backup" I don't see any need to do that, I never suggested that. Just make up some crazy math why don't you.
The point is 0.007km3 is absolutely miniscule compared with hundred of massively larger reservoirs around the world which rand from hundres to thousands of km3 which givens them huge pumped hydro potential.
"spend it on buying Westinghouse AP1000 reactors (which cost ~£4.25 billion a pop if you look at the Vogtle 3&4 project), build about 30 of them"
That would cost a lot more than £450 billion, at the rate our stupid gov't wants to pay for nuclear power the subsidies for the electricity would cost us over a trillion, no thanks.
It boggles the mind that you can say "dick all would have happened (and that's mostly what did happen" regarding Fukushima. It's clear that the vast majority of the population of japan do not agree with you.
Nuclear can do no wrong in your eyes. Are you aware that Fukushima is leaking at least 400 tonnes of highly radioactive water every day and it could be over 1000 tonnes a day, the ice wall the tried failed.
If wind costs 3c per kWh and nuclear costs 10c per kwh, what is the cost difference for 1GW of generation over 40 years? Answer over $24 billion. So how much storage could be built for $24 billion? Enough to store enough to produce 1GW for quite a long time I'd bet.
(3c for wind because current PPAs are averaging 2.5c and the subsidy is 2.2c for the first ten years)
If Hoover dam was built as pumped hydro, could they not install 5x as many turbines... or 10x or 20x or 100x? What would the capacity be? (It initially cost $1 billion taking inflation into account.)
Hoover dam capacity: 352,000km3 Dinorwig capacity is only 0.007km3 but is still useful as a 1.8GW pumped hydro station (which is profitable)
We haven't even started to store energy on a large scale because we cheat by digging a very finite amount of fossil and nuclear fuels out of the ground. I think stored energy could match renewables and still produce cheaper electricity in the long run.
So if Uranium is 10% of TCO and reprocessed Uranium costs over 10x as much then nuclear would end up costing well over 20c per kWh would it not.
Sooner or later we will have to go 100% renewable, why wait, why not invest in renewables whilst is easy to do, if we leave it until it's too late the shit will hit the fan.
Nuclear power is a short term solution which causes long term problems.
If humans were capable of handling nuclear power without cocking it up regularly then I would support it, but they are not.
Nearly all nuclear reactors are over 20 years old and about half are over 30.
Capital costs represent between 60 and 75 percent of the cost of a nuclear plant,
Re Nuclear capital costs, the simple fact is US nuclear plants capital costs are already paid. In 25 years the energy from Wind and solar being installed today will likely be a lot cheaper than 44 per MWh. (Turbines are expected to last over 40 years, solar PV loses about 12-20% of it's efficiency over 25 years.)
I should have known better than to quote the worldnuclear site, no doubt they are leaving costs out. Every other site states nuclear costs about 10c/kWh. In the UK the govt are offering EDF over 15c for every kWh. The Govt site states current wind energy here costs 5 to 6.6c per kWh.
How many more Hanfords, Fukushimas and Chernobyls are there going to be be we realise we are no good at managing nuclear power?
Such as what ways? Oh right, you mean like running fossil fuel plants and emitting CO2
No, like Hydro, pumped hydro, wave power, tidal schemes, solar thermal, solar PV, compressed air storage, biowaste energy, battery storage etc.
Cheap gas and oil won't be around for long, coal is the only real fossil fuel problem.
There is currently enough Uranium reserve to continue to power the nuclear industry at it 10% of global energy rate for 200 years. So if every country were to go nuclear like France, how long would that last?
Yea, that website doesn't have a dog in this hunt now does it.. The US Department of Energy's numbers are flat wrong then? In the USA, I don't think so."
Don't like the message so moan about the messenger eh. That 5c / kWh is a signed 20 year deal. Does it matter who is reporting that deal?
Did I say the sun shines at night? A lot of energy is used for air conditioning in the US, what better way to supply the energy needed with solar PV.
Like it or not, solar is a lot cheaper than you seem to think it is, the US DOE figures are clearly out of date.
"The DOE says that PV Solar is at least 4 times more expensive"
Where do they say that, take a look at the date the figure is referring to.
another 40% cost drop is not in the future
Perhaps you'd like to back that up with reasoning. I have solid reason to believe the price will drop - there are a lot of solar PV factories being built right now globally, when the investment for the factories is paid off, the price of solar will fall, that also goes for the factories built over the last decade. So, there is a lot of competition, constant improvements in solar PV manufacture and efficiency. That is why the price of solar panels will continue to fall - like it has over the last 3+ decades, from about $75 per KW to 0.75 per KW.
If you don't believe me, do your homework, google solar PV prices plummet.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to attack China, why not attack their appalling lack of civil rights, I doubt you'd get many arguments there.
Coal use is leveling off in China this year.
http://m.greenpeace.org/eastas...
Coal use should drop in china:
http://america.aljazeera.com/a...
Coal mines are closing:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com...
Clothes can be changed.
If companies can provide 'designated parking' then they can provide changing areas. Changing in a toilet cubicle isn't ideal but it is possible.
Fit employees are likely to be better employees who are ill less often and can think more clearly. As long as one showers regularly then a change of clothes deals with sweat. Firing someone for cycling? that's really nuts.
The poster says that existing ships are causing massive pollution, which articles say are killing many tens of thousands of people. And you link to info about a ship that isn't even built for you argument.
Just because B doesn't pollute does not mean that A also does not pollute.
Health risks of shipping pollution have been 'underestimated'
Except that you would probably be more effective lobbying the EU which the UK is a member of.
Anyway, why stop at one region? Asia, North America and the EU are all big polluters, they should all curb their habits.
The US could probably make the easiest savings by discouraging low-mpg car use and encouraging more efficient electricity use, the amount of electricity the average US home uses is staggering relatively speaking.
Home automation system R&D should be funded, if homes managed themselves the same way computers can turn themselves off when they're not in use, the savings would be enough to shut many power stations.
Why go by an artificial boundary? What if china split up into 5 or 10?
And, who is buying all of the produce made in China? EU's emissions could be counted as 40% higher if you consider the fact that we have externalized our pollution to China.
Per capita is the fair measurement. US's per capita CO2 is dreadful. Nearly 1 in 3 new cars in the US are SUVs, I think that's indicative of a lot of people in the US either not giving a **** or being ignorant of the consequences of their actions.
Asia is the highest emitting continent, but the finger pointing is.. pointless, we need standards / taxes that target CO2 emissions and those standards should be global (Doesn't mean I support TTIP, I certainly don't).
Indeed, in a few years, they'll be emitting as much per capita as Germany 9.5t, the UK 7.7t and the US 17.5t
t=tonnes of CO2 per annum per capita..
I'm no fan of China's pollution 7t record but it seems odd to single them out.
Doesn't sound safe to me:
DEP finds 243 water sources contaminated by gas exploration
I can't help but wonder how many more water sources will be have chemicals leach into them even after the fracking is finished. On the positive side, sometimes the contamination diminishes over time to safe levels.
Actually this comes from 'BBC Worldwide'
A massively incompetent organisation who takes the BBCs programmes, sells them for £1.2 billion and then hands the BBC a little over 1 tenth of that amount!
They pay their employees an average of £79000 each to somehow lose over a billion pounds whilst selling the BBCs programmes.
I mean seriously, how much can it cost to sell a product that is fucking digital, according to BBC Worldwide it costs £524,700,000 to sell stuff, WTF? (and that's excluding wages of 144,000,000)
Because the price of gas is expected to go up, reasons being: dozens of gas power stations currently being built and the fact that gas is currently so cheap that some of the Frackers are selling their gas at below cost. Also relevant is that the cheapest resources are typically mined first, this is particularly the case with the current gas fracking boom, the current low gas price is highly unlikely to remain low after a handful of years.
Wind and sunlight OTOH are expected to remain very cheap.
I'm not a geologist, an educated guess would be that the answer is part cosmology - the mercury was present in the materials that formed the Earth in the first place and part geology, the mercury got to where it was after billions of years of earth changes through tectonic plates shifting, volcanoes, erosion, compression etc.
Wikipedia says
"It is found either as a native metal (rare) or in cinnabar, corderoite, livingstonite and other minerals, with cinnabar (HgS) being the most common ore.[23] Mercury ores usually occur in very young orogenic belts where rocks of high density are forced to the crust of the Earth, often in hot springs or other volcanic regions.[24]"
3 Occurrence
I'd certainly support anti-pollution tariffs. Regarding that, the WTO, TTIP, NAFTA etc trade treaties are all rabidly against tariffs, no matter what they try to protect (anti-dumping tariffs are allowed).
Correct, mercury is mined from fish. (sarcasm)
Mercury is 'mined'. It was locked up nicely in rocks that were below ground. Once released it is then in the air, water soil etc - not where you want it.
Whilst I'm not condoning China's pollution record, most of their industrialisation capacity-wise has been this last decade. The article shows that mercury has been entering the environment for over a century with the amounts being released in the year 1900 being similar to that released in the year 2000.
Except CFLs are regulated to have less than 2.5mg of mercury in and some will no doubt have a lot less.
CFLs prevent more mercury from being released into the environment via coal than they release: ...
How much Mercury is in Compact Fluorescent ( CFL ) bulbs , watch
Of course LEDs are better, do you have an argument against those?
Not much:
http://earthtechling.com/2011/...
5 thousandths of a gram is a lot of mercury for 1 cf bulb. 720,000 tons of mercury amounts to about 100grams per human, so cf bulbs are likely responsible for less than 100th of 1% of the total mercury pollution.
That is expensive.
A quick hunt finds 1GB in the UK costing $12.45
$30 would buy you unlimited data, unlimited texts and 2000 minutes of phone time to most networks (ie not premium rate).
Then you must be blind.
I decided to do the math. 1 year producing 411,000 batteries which could kick out 128 Gigawatts at maximum output! Or the output of a hundred power stations for a short period of time.
You seem to have reduced renewables to just wind and assumed that I think the country should be powered 100% by wind, That is incorrect.
Tepco lie habitually. Their own statements show they don't know what's going on. http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Politicians smart? They are only smart about lining their own pockets.
Hinkley point will get tens of billions in subsidies at the guaranteed rate of £92.5/MWh - roughly double what will be paid for gas, coal, wind etc.
If renewables are so unobtainable why are Scotland aiming for 100% renewable by 2020 after having beat their goal of 31% renewable by 2011 set in only 2007.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-sco...
Portugal hit 58% renewable electricity in 2013 and in January of this year renewables supplied 91% of their electricity.
Iceland is 100% renewable electricity, and much of their heating is renewable.
Norway is 99% renewable electricity.
Germany hit over 30% renewable electricity for last year and has peaked at 74% of renewable electricity.
Renewable energy provides 21.7% of electricity generation worldwide as of 2013
Renewables trend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://enenews.com/japan-times...
Note that Tepco itself has admitted that 300 tons of highly radioactive water is leaking.
"so to provide 2-week long backup"
I don't see any need to do that, I never suggested that. Just make up some crazy math why don't you.
The point is 0.007km3 is absolutely miniscule compared with hundred of massively larger reservoirs around the world which rand from hundres to thousands of km3 which givens them huge pumped hydro potential.
"spend it on buying Westinghouse AP1000 reactors (which cost ~£4.25 billion a pop if you look at the Vogtle 3&4 project), build about 30 of them"
That would cost a lot more than £450 billion, at the rate our stupid gov't wants to pay for nuclear power the subsidies for the electricity would cost us over a trillion, no thanks.
It boggles the mind that you can say "dick all would have happened (and that's mostly what did happen" regarding Fukushima. It's clear that the vast majority of the population of japan do not agree with you.
Nuclear can do no wrong in your eyes. Are you aware that Fukushima is leaking at least 400 tonnes of highly radioactive water every day and it could be over 1000 tonnes a day, the ice wall the tried failed.
If wind costs 3c per kWh and nuclear costs 10c per kwh, what is the cost difference for 1GW of generation over 40 years? Answer over $24 billion. So how much storage could be built for $24 billion? Enough to store enough to produce 1GW for quite a long time I'd bet.
(3c for wind because current PPAs are averaging 2.5c and the subsidy is 2.2c for the first ten years)
If Hoover dam was built as pumped hydro, could they not install 5x as many turbines... or 10x or 20x or 100x? What would the capacity be? (It initially cost $1 billion taking inflation into account.)
Hoover dam capacity: 352,000km3
Dinorwig capacity is only 0.007km3 but is still useful as a 1.8GW pumped hydro station (which is profitable)
We haven't even started to store energy on a large scale because we cheat by digging a very finite amount of fossil and nuclear fuels out of the ground. I think stored energy could match renewables and still produce cheaper electricity in the long run.
Let me put it another way.
On one side you have the intermittant supplies:
Wind, solar, wave, tidal.
On the other side you have matching supplies which you ramp up as necessary:
Geothermal, Solar thermal, Hydro, Biogas.
And for short term peaking demand, you also use storage such as Pumped Hydro, battery, compressed air, flywheel, etc.
I think pumped hydro is a hugely underused resource, all you need is a (small) lake next to a hill, the rest is engineering, see:
Dinorwig Power Station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Whilst some of these technologies are not cheap, this would change if we invested a fraction of what we have put into nuclear and fossil fuels
Solar PV has gone from $76 per w to $0.74 per watt of capacity and that price will continue to fall.
Some countries are already proving that 100% renewable is possible, it simply requires effort.
Uranium is finite, nuclear reprocessing is prohibitively expensive:
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar...
So if Uranium is 10% of TCO and reprocessed Uranium costs over 10x as much then nuclear would end up costing well over 20c per kWh would it not.
Sooner or later we will have to go 100% renewable, why wait, why not invest in renewables whilst is easy to do, if we leave it until it's too late the shit will hit the fan.
Nuclear power is a short term solution which causes long term problems.
If humans were capable of handling nuclear power without cocking it up regularly then I would support it, but they are not.
Re Nuclear capital costs, the simple fact is US nuclear plants capital costs are already paid. In 25 years the energy from Wind and solar being installed today will likely be a lot cheaper than 44 per MWh. (Turbines are expected to last over 40 years, solar PV loses about 12-20% of it's efficiency over 25 years.)
I should have known better than to quote the worldnuclear site, no doubt they are leaving costs out. Every other site states nuclear costs about 10c/kWh. In the UK the govt are offering EDF over 15c for every kWh. The Govt site states current wind energy here costs 5 to 6.6c per kWh.
How many more Hanfords, Fukushimas and Chernobyls are there going to be be we realise we are no good at managing nuclear power?
Such as what ways? Oh right, you mean like running fossil fuel plants and emitting CO2
No, like Hydro, pumped hydro, wave power, tidal schemes, solar thermal, solar PV, compressed air storage, biowaste energy, battery storage etc.
Cheap gas and oil won't be around for long, coal is the only real fossil fuel problem.
There is currently enough Uranium reserve to continue to power the nuclear industry at it 10% of global energy rate for 200 years. So if every country were to go nuclear like France, how long would that last?
Renewables are the only long term solution.
Don't like the message so moan about the messenger eh. That 5c / kWh is a signed 20 year deal. Does it matter who is reporting that deal?
Did I say the sun shines at night? A lot of energy is used for air conditioning in the US, what better way to supply the energy needed with solar PV.
Like it or not, solar is a lot cheaper than you seem to think it is, the US DOE figures are clearly out of date.
"The DOE says that PV Solar is at least 4 times more expensive"
Where do they say that, take a look at the date the figure is referring to.
Perhaps you'd like to back that up with reasoning. I have solid reason to believe the price will drop - there are a lot of solar PV factories being built right now globally, when the investment for the factories is paid off, the price of solar will fall, that also goes for the factories built over the last decade. So, there is a lot of competition, constant improvements in solar PV manufacture and efficiency. That is why the price of solar panels will continue to fall - like it has over the last 3+ decades, from about $75 per KW to 0.75 per KW.
If you don't believe me, do your homework, google solar PV prices plummet.
http://costofsolar.com/managem...