That works too. The point is that the tighter they squeeze the more slip between their fingers. With "they" defined as the government, manufacturers, or the combination of the two.
I admit I didn't put too much thought into it, only that this seemed like a somewhat obvious solution to the problem. The 3D printers might have a "fingerprint" that is gathered from the big manufacturers to trace people that might print a gun or some other device that someone would want to trace back to the origin at some point. What will inevitably happen though is the development of an underground of people making their own printers to defeat such tracing. A 3D printer can be used to make another 3D printer. The "fingerprint" of the first printer is unlikely to show in the products of the second printer. Or, as you point out, people will simply make modifications to off the shelf devices to defeat this fingerprinting.
This has been discussed to no end on a "fingerprint" for guns. Not the 3D printed kind, just guns in general. There have been claims of taking the rifling "fingerprint" from one fired bullet to that of another. The problem with this right off the top is that modern machining is so consistent that such rifling is nearly indistinguishable from one new gun to the next from the same factory. Then there is the wear on the barrel making the rifling change over time. Then with people knowing that such fingerprinting might take place will make efforts to make such fingerprinting difficult, through switching out barrels (which can take only minutes on some firearms by an experienced gunsmith) or just running an abrasive down the barrel to mess up the rifling a bit (or removing the rifling completely but that will be detrimental to the accuracy). Oh, and shotguns don't leave any kind of unique markings on the projectile.
The whole idea of matching the composition of the projectiles to a manufactured batch has also been rendered impossible with modern quality controls.
There is no solution to this fingerprinting of machines that cannot be defeated once it gets out on how the fingerprinting was done. As soon as people figure out what the determining factor is then it will be defeated by randomizing the factors or making them so minute that they can no longer be measured accurately. This is also often dependent on the cooperation of the manufacturers to collect the "fingerprint" of what they make and where it went, which will also in time be defeated with some home brew workarounds or just plain old identity fraud.
Your comment of fixing things into the (2D) printer firmware as an anti-forgery measure made me think of something, people 3D printing 2D printers.
A printer, 2D or 3D, are things people have made on their own. These are not trivial devices, assuming they produce quality results, but it's not rocket surgery either. People are getting a bit fed up with the BS pulled by printer manufacturers on locking people into buying expensive ink from them later. Well, make your own printer then. With 3D printing getting as cheap as it is now there is the potential for this technology being advanced enough that someone could 3D print the parts needed to make their own inkjet printer.
Wind and solar are already hitting some very real limits already on replacing coal. Any national grid is a delicate balance of supply and demand, and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar interfere with this balance.
Wind and solar are legally protected energy sources. Kind of like the law "thou shall not kill a bald eagle" there's "thou shall not refuse energy from wind power". Well, that is you will be punished for killing a bald eagle unless you did so with a windmill. It's apparently okay to kill a protected species of bird with a windmill, because reasons.
So utilities must treat wind power like a "negative load", something that shows up on their demand side of the equation with a negative sign in front. They have to work the control levers on the supply they can control, like their coal and natural gas, but only with larger swings given the wind and solar power they cannot control or refuse service. As more wind and solar is added to the grid then these swings get larger. This comes with a cost. Part of that cost is fuel, because turning fossil fuel generators on and off takes fuel and there's no electricity generated at these times.
Ah, but you mentioned batteries. Well, unless there is some requirement that these people that put up the windmills and solar collectors also bring the batteries with them then we will continue to see rising costs.
The problem is that the laws dictate a method and ignore the result. The goal should be reductions in CO2, not a contest on how quickly people can put up windmills. Nuclear power is a low CO2 energy source but it is not recognized as such in any CO2 reduction calculations I've seen. If a windmill goes up but produces no power then that is counted as a "win". A new nuclear power plant, or upgrades on an existing plant, is not counted as a "win". It's not counted as a "loss" either but that's of little consolation because when a nuclear power plant gets no zero emissions credits, and has to reduce output when the wind blows strong, then it's simply priced out of the market even though the unsubsidized costs are half that of wind power.
Wind and solar are not going to get a ramp up like it has in the past. The laws on the books might make it beneficial for now but the laws of physics will make it clear sooner or later that growth will fall off quickly.
Batteries won't save wind and solar because the batteries don't care where the electricity comes from. Pair a battery bank with a nuclear power plant and just watch your demand for natural gas turbines fall off a cliff. We can build nuclear power plants very quickly if we want. We saw more nuclear power come online in 2016 than all of wind and solar, because of just one nuclear reactor. Let's build just 10 reactors per year, I know we can if we just tried in the least bit.
But after the Fukushima disaster, they closed down all their nuclear power plants.
What did Fukushima have to do with nuclear power in Germany? Fukushima was hit by an earthquake and then a once in 500 year high wave. Are these German nuclear power plants prone to earthquakes? Are they even close enough to an ocean to even have the possibility of a once in a thousand year wave?
Fukushima had nothing to do with nuclear power in Germany. All it did was give an excuse for the already anti-nuke politicians to shut them down. A very weak excuse. If Germany was serious about reducing their CO2 output then they'd keep their nuclear power plants open and build more of them for the future.
The German government has already announced that they'd fail to meet their CO2 reduction goals set during the Paris Agreement. If they kept their nuclear power running then they might have been able to meet their goals.
No nation that wants a modern economy will be able to get one or keep it without nuclear power. That includes Germany.
And in the car context, there is only one methodology that allows to reliably reduce CO2 emissions: burning less fuel.
False. Burn a fuel not derived from carbon, that would reduce CO2 emissions. Burning a fuel derived from carbon taken from the air would reduce CO2 emissions, because that's not CO2 from long sequestered sources in the ground.
There are many many ways to reduce CO2 without having to burn less fuel, stop telling me otherwise because I know what you assert is not true.
As solar and energy storage get better, the need for large centralized fission plants will fade.
Until that happens we need nuclear power today.
I keep hearing on how we need to act RIGHT NOW on lowering CO2 but when nuclear power is brought up the response is how solar and batteries will be better than nuclear in 5 or 10 years. Well, can we wait for this to happen or do we have to act RIGHT NOW? If we can wait then let's wait, and shut up already on having to act RIGHT NOW. If we can't wait then stop coming up with excuses on why we can't use the safest and lowest CO2 producing energy source we have today.
Oh, but it takes 10 years to finish a nuclear power plant build? Well, then what are we waiting for? Even if we get this new solar technology on the time frame it is promised it will still take years for it to be brought to market and deployed. In the mean time we'll be building an electricity source that can power the factories that will be building these next generation solar collectors.
Here's what I'm suspecting on why solar and wind advocates oppose nuclear power, they can't compete against nuclear power.
I have no problem with wind and solar power, only the people that say we need to use these and not even try with nuclear power. We have seen the US government issue only a handful of permits to build a new nuclear power plant in the last 40 years. Before then they were issuing dozens per year. It's not that people weren't asking for permits, applications were still being submitted. The government simply stopped issuing permits. There's nuclear power plants that have been under the application process for decades and still did not get a permit. Stop this madness, fix the process, and issue some permits already.
Whatever problem one can raise opposing nuclear power is nothing compared to global warming. If global warming is the threat that it's claimed to be then any problems nuclear power might cause are nothing by comparison.
At this point if you oppose nuclear power then you are denying the catastrophic effects of global warming. If we should fear nuclear power more than global warming then global warming cannot be all that bad.
Second the improvements in the grid often take place on the decades scale, not necessarily in time to make a large change to vehicles bought today.
The longer we wait to start those improvements the longer it will take to complete.
I remember having a conversation where oil drilling in ANWR came up. I argued that we know that there is oil there, lots of it, and if we went to go get it that would lower energy prices. The person I was conversing with said that drilling in ANWR was pointless because it would take years for oil to flow and make prices go down. Five years later oil price reached record highs. Would oil have still peaked at that point if we drilled in ANWR five years prior? We can't know for sure but it is unlikely to have made it worse.
You want to see CO2 emissions lower in 20 years? Then start building lots of nuclear power plants today. I don't care if it takes 10 years to build a reactor because by not building them we are placing all our faith in solar and wind to save us. That's waiting at port for a ship that might not come. We know we can build a nuclear power plant in less than 5 years because we did this regularly decades ago. The reason it takes so long to build a nuclear power plant today is politics, not technology. Get rid of the politics and make it happen.
Maybe someone should consider putting a nuclear power plant next to Hoover Dam. Use the dam for load balancing to offset that the nuclear reactor not being able to do so, and use the water behind the dam as a heat sink. Nuclear power is the lowest CO2 producing energy source we have today, that will reduce the climate effects of global warming.
Except nuclear power stations are usually built from vast quantities of concrete, the production of which creates enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.
Actually, I suppose a lot of hydro dams also use vast quantities of concrete. As you were.
Nuclear power also produces enormous amounts of electric energy, more than enough to offset the CO2 produced and make it far lower CO2 than any other energy source we have today.
Nuclear power is also far safer than anything else and uses far less material resources compared to the energy produced.
If CO2 production concerns you then you'd be supporting nuclear power. If we are going to see any meaningful reduction in CO2, without driving prices through the roof, then we need nuclear, wind, and hydro. Solar costs too much, is inherently unreliable, takes too much materials, and really isn't all that great on CO2 when compared to wind, nuclear, and hydro.
I believe that synthetic liquid fuels are the future of transportation. We won't have electric airplanes. We won't have transoceanic shipping. We might be able to electrify trains but that requires lots of infrastructure which requires lots of costs. Trains will be running on diesel fuels for a very long time. Personal commuter cars are just a part of our transportation needs. Lots of people and goods move by long haul trucks and buses, and those won't be running on electricity any time soon. Electric trains cannot solve this either because trains need rails and a truck needs only a beaten down track of dirt.
In fact, CO2 isn't even the main concern when trying to reduce emissions from ICE cars.
We've got fuels that are very low in sulfur so that's not much of a concern. Catalytic converters and other technology means there's little particulate or carbon monoxide emissions any more. There might be some NOx but I have to wonder how much even that is a concern.
Then there's increasing evidence that CO2 isn't all that great of a concern. I'm sure that comment will get me modded down. Whatever, the debate is not over no matter how much Al Gore says it is.
just look at all the graphs of costs for renewable costs,, cheaper and cheaper with improving tech every year as technology improves.
How did that happen? I have a good idea. We saw governments dump all kinds of money into research and development. Governments encouraged private investment through tax breaks and laws preferential to their use. Governments bought energy from these sources, often at prices far higher than market rates. Most importantly the government issued permits for the construction of facilities producing power using these technologies.
How is nuclear power treated by comparison? Few to zero permits issued for construction of a new nuclear reactor for 40 years. Nuclear power did get tax breaks but not near the same as wind and solar on a per MWh basis. If there was power produced by wind or solar then the utilities were legally required to buy it, whether they needed it or not. This meant other plants, such as nuclear and coal, were forced to idle if there was a surplus of capacity.
Tell me something, how long can this price reduction over time for wind and solar continue? Wind and solar simply cannot be priced to zero with continued development, there will be a bottom. I'm guessing that they are real close to that bottom now if they haven't hit it already. On the other hand nuclear barely got started to figure out how to reduce their costs. Again, no new nuclear power plant got permission to build for 40 years. During that time people didn't stop thinking of new ways to lower costs. If the US government starts issuing licenses for some of this new technology that people thought up then maybe we could see nuclear power costs drop just as quickly as wind and solar. What do we have to lose by trying?
Give me some numbers to convince me of what energy source we should be using then. Pick a metric to rate the danger of each energy source and then put numbers to them. Imagine I'm the government regulator that will be issuing permits to allow these energy sources to put energy to the electrical grid. Convince me that nuclear power is dangerous. Show me how dangerous nuclear power is to society and how much safer the alternatives are by comparison. Give some numbers and cite some sources.
Certainly you must have seen such numbers in order to decide that nuclear power is so dangerous. Share them with me.
Why should anyone believe this next version will be different?
You are absolutely right, why should I believe the next version will be cheaper? We've dumped all kinds of money into research and development for decades, and for what? It's still more expensive than coal, less reliable than natural gas, uses all kinds of resources with the mining for ores and such. Why should I believe the next version of wind and solar should be cheaper than the last?
Oh, wait. You were asking about nuclear power? My mistake.
I guess we assume the next version of nuclear will be different for the same reasons we expect wind and solar to be different on the next version. As I recall the theory with wind and solar was that we'd "bootstrap" the industry with all kinds of government subsidies and legal protections with the promise that they'd be viable on their own in the future. Here's where nuclear is different than wind and solar, we've already proven nuclear power to be competitive because we use it for 10% of our electricity worldwide and have been doing so for many years. The problem we are having now is that since the nuclear power industry has been coasting downhill for the last 40 years many of the people that knew how to build reactors are retired, senile, or dead. Now we have to start nearly from nothing, but what we have is decades of proof that nuclear power is safe, low CO2, inexpensive, and reliable. We figure out what was lost and then we can learn on how to make it even better. We aren't going to make it better until we start building them again.
If we had the same attitude for wind and solar as you expressed for nuclear then we'd have abandoned them a long time ago.
Obviously it is not the safest. Not even if you use your idiotic "death per TWh" metric.
Then what metric would you like to use? If we want to establish the safest energy source then we need something on which to make this decision, no? Tell me how to make that decision and then let's go about collecting data.
That's a non-answer as it tells me nothing on how to act. If this means we can't have nuclear power then you are by default kicking the problem down the path hoping for a solution to present itself before the problems of global warming are upon us. We can continue down this path, keep looking for a non-nuclear solution, but that is waiting for a ship that may never come to port.
But nuclear power is still plenty dangerous. The first problem is that it can provide the material to make nuclear weapons. Won't do us much good to avert Global Warming if some rogue nation starts World War III with nukes.
The material to make nuclear weapons is in the dirt and dissolved in seawater. Where do you think that the U-235 for the first nuclear weapons came from? They didn't need a reactor to make it, they just "distilled" it from the dirt. This was done with 1940s technology, repeating this with modern materials and equipment is becoming nearly trivial any more. The limitation is primarily the energy needed to enrich the U-235.
The second, more insidious problem is that human corruption and incompetence is scarily likely to lead to another major accident such as Fukushima.
This again? All a bunch of bullshit based on 50 year old nuclear technology. Nobody builds reactors like those any more.
We know how to operate nuclear power with reasonable safety, but can we do so, for all nuclear power plants, for decades?
Yes, we do in fact know how to operate nuclear power plants safely for decades. There are over 400 operating commercial nuclear power reactors on this planet. There's at least 100 military nuclear power plants in ships at sea as well. We know how to make this work. Bringing this up as scaremongering for not implementing what is demonstrably the safest energy source we have today is unbelievable.
You want me to fear nuclear power more than global warming? Really? Then tell me that global warming isn't the threat it's been made out to be, because I'm really thinking that we are running out of options right now and nuclear power it looking really nice by comparison.
And burning stuff still generates oxides of nitrogen... tsk tsk...
Whatever. I just showed you an energy source that can produce zero carbon fuels that run in current engines with no modifications and you complain about NOx? Go piss up a rope. Nothing is perfect but this is really REALLY close, and the technology exists now.
I keep hearing about how if we don't reduce our CO2 immediately then we will create runaway global warming. We have a technology that can provide energy that is zero carbon (or rather closer to zero than wind and solar), plentiful, inexpensive (again compared to wind and solar), reliable, domestically sourced (no matter how you define "domestic"), and exists today.
Why don't we have more nuclear power? Because some nuclear waste is "scary"? You want me to believe that some nuclear waste is a greater threat to humanity than global warming? I'm not convinced. You want me to believe that "any day now" wind and solar will displace coal, oil, and natural gas? Well, we've been trying to do that for decades now and it's not happening very quickly. For an island nation like the UK the ability to meet their energy needs from wind and solar is likely impossible. Maybe they have enough friendly neighbors across the channel to get more wind and sun. What of Japan? They don't have any friendly neighbors, what should they do?
Again, which am I to fear more, nuclear power or global warming? Pick one, because we are running out of time for wind and sun to save us.
So, you want to tell me that we should run the risk of runaway global warming because a bit of nuclear waste scares you? Are you telling me that nuclear power poses a greater threat to humanity than global warming? Seriously? That's messed up.
First, molten salt reactors. Done. Now let's start building them.
Second, assuming we can't fix all those problems you still have to choose, global warming or nuclear power. Which is it? Global warming or nuclear power? Pick one. Wind and solar are not replacing coal for energy fast enough so we need to consider solutions that we would not consider before. There aren't a whole lot of choices left except nuclear power. Seems to me that molten salt reactors solve every issue you raised, except not needing refueling which is plain nonsense since it's going to need fuel. If you reject MSR because it does not fit your definition of an existing technology then you must still choose, nuclear power or global warming. Waiting for some future technology is still a choice but if this new technology does not come to be then we are still left with nuclear power or global warming.
What it comes down to is that there is no ideal solution here, so we must choose less than ideal solutions. If global warming threatens to kill us all then we must then choose a source of energy that has the potential to render portions of the planet uninhabitable for centuries. If you fear nuclear power more than global warming then I believe you have a seriously misplaced set of priorities.
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That works too. The point is that the tighter they squeeze the more slip between their fingers. With "they" defined as the government, manufacturers, or the combination of the two.
I admit I didn't put too much thought into it, only that this seemed like a somewhat obvious solution to the problem. The 3D printers might have a "fingerprint" that is gathered from the big manufacturers to trace people that might print a gun or some other device that someone would want to trace back to the origin at some point. What will inevitably happen though is the development of an underground of people making their own printers to defeat such tracing. A 3D printer can be used to make another 3D printer. The "fingerprint" of the first printer is unlikely to show in the products of the second printer. Or, as you point out, people will simply make modifications to off the shelf devices to defeat this fingerprinting.
This has been discussed to no end on a "fingerprint" for guns. Not the 3D printed kind, just guns in general. There have been claims of taking the rifling "fingerprint" from one fired bullet to that of another. The problem with this right off the top is that modern machining is so consistent that such rifling is nearly indistinguishable from one new gun to the next from the same factory. Then there is the wear on the barrel making the rifling change over time. Then with people knowing that such fingerprinting might take place will make efforts to make such fingerprinting difficult, through switching out barrels (which can take only minutes on some firearms by an experienced gunsmith) or just running an abrasive down the barrel to mess up the rifling a bit (or removing the rifling completely but that will be detrimental to the accuracy). Oh, and shotguns don't leave any kind of unique markings on the projectile.
The whole idea of matching the composition of the projectiles to a manufactured batch has also been rendered impossible with modern quality controls.
There is no solution to this fingerprinting of machines that cannot be defeated once it gets out on how the fingerprinting was done. As soon as people figure out what the determining factor is then it will be defeated by randomizing the factors or making them so minute that they can no longer be measured accurately. This is also often dependent on the cooperation of the manufacturers to collect the "fingerprint" of what they make and where it went, which will also in time be defeated with some home brew workarounds or just plain old identity fraud.
Your comment of fixing things into the (2D) printer firmware as an anti-forgery measure made me think of something, people 3D printing 2D printers.
A printer, 2D or 3D, are things people have made on their own. These are not trivial devices, assuming they produce quality results, but it's not rocket surgery either. People are getting a bit fed up with the BS pulled by printer manufacturers on locking people into buying expensive ink from them later. Well, make your own printer then. With 3D printing getting as cheap as it is now there is the potential for this technology being advanced enough that someone could 3D print the parts needed to make their own inkjet printer.
I hear it's also good for detecting the presence of dinosaurs.
Wind and solar are already hitting some very real limits already on replacing coal. Any national grid is a delicate balance of supply and demand, and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar interfere with this balance.
Wind and solar are legally protected energy sources. Kind of like the law "thou shall not kill a bald eagle" there's "thou shall not refuse energy from wind power". Well, that is you will be punished for killing a bald eagle unless you did so with a windmill. It's apparently okay to kill a protected species of bird with a windmill, because reasons.
So utilities must treat wind power like a "negative load", something that shows up on their demand side of the equation with a negative sign in front. They have to work the control levers on the supply they can control, like their coal and natural gas, but only with larger swings given the wind and solar power they cannot control or refuse service. As more wind and solar is added to the grid then these swings get larger. This comes with a cost. Part of that cost is fuel, because turning fossil fuel generators on and off takes fuel and there's no electricity generated at these times.
Ah, but you mentioned batteries. Well, unless there is some requirement that these people that put up the windmills and solar collectors also bring the batteries with them then we will continue to see rising costs.
The problem is that the laws dictate a method and ignore the result. The goal should be reductions in CO2, not a contest on how quickly people can put up windmills. Nuclear power is a low CO2 energy source but it is not recognized as such in any CO2 reduction calculations I've seen. If a windmill goes up but produces no power then that is counted as a "win". A new nuclear power plant, or upgrades on an existing plant, is not counted as a "win". It's not counted as a "loss" either but that's of little consolation because when a nuclear power plant gets no zero emissions credits, and has to reduce output when the wind blows strong, then it's simply priced out of the market even though the unsubsidized costs are half that of wind power.
Wind and solar are not going to get a ramp up like it has in the past. The laws on the books might make it beneficial for now but the laws of physics will make it clear sooner or later that growth will fall off quickly.
Batteries won't save wind and solar because the batteries don't care where the electricity comes from. Pair a battery bank with a nuclear power plant and just watch your demand for natural gas turbines fall off a cliff. We can build nuclear power plants very quickly if we want. We saw more nuclear power come online in 2016 than all of wind and solar, because of just one nuclear reactor. Let's build just 10 reactors per year, I know we can if we just tried in the least bit.
But after the Fukushima disaster, they closed down all their nuclear power plants.
What did Fukushima have to do with nuclear power in Germany? Fukushima was hit by an earthquake and then a once in 500 year high wave. Are these German nuclear power plants prone to earthquakes? Are they even close enough to an ocean to even have the possibility of a once in a thousand year wave?
Fukushima had nothing to do with nuclear power in Germany. All it did was give an excuse for the already anti-nuke politicians to shut them down. A very weak excuse. If Germany was serious about reducing their CO2 output then they'd keep their nuclear power plants open and build more of them for the future.
The German government has already announced that they'd fail to meet their CO2 reduction goals set during the Paris Agreement. If they kept their nuclear power running then they might have been able to meet their goals.
No nation that wants a modern economy will be able to get one or keep it without nuclear power. That includes Germany.
And in the car context, there is only one methodology that allows to reliably reduce CO2 emissions: burning less fuel.
False. Burn a fuel not derived from carbon, that would reduce CO2 emissions. Burning a fuel derived from carbon taken from the air would reduce CO2 emissions, because that's not CO2 from long sequestered sources in the ground.
There are many many ways to reduce CO2 without having to burn less fuel, stop telling me otherwise because I know what you assert is not true.
As solar and energy storage get better, the need for large centralized fission plants will fade.
Until that happens we need nuclear power today.
I keep hearing on how we need to act RIGHT NOW on lowering CO2 but when nuclear power is brought up the response is how solar and batteries will be better than nuclear in 5 or 10 years. Well, can we wait for this to happen or do we have to act RIGHT NOW? If we can wait then let's wait, and shut up already on having to act RIGHT NOW. If we can't wait then stop coming up with excuses on why we can't use the safest and lowest CO2 producing energy source we have today.
Oh, but it takes 10 years to finish a nuclear power plant build? Well, then what are we waiting for? Even if we get this new solar technology on the time frame it is promised it will still take years for it to be brought to market and deployed. In the mean time we'll be building an electricity source that can power the factories that will be building these next generation solar collectors.
Here's what I'm suspecting on why solar and wind advocates oppose nuclear power, they can't compete against nuclear power.
I have no problem with wind and solar power, only the people that say we need to use these and not even try with nuclear power. We have seen the US government issue only a handful of permits to build a new nuclear power plant in the last 40 years. Before then they were issuing dozens per year. It's not that people weren't asking for permits, applications were still being submitted. The government simply stopped issuing permits. There's nuclear power plants that have been under the application process for decades and still did not get a permit. Stop this madness, fix the process, and issue some permits already.
Whatever problem one can raise opposing nuclear power is nothing compared to global warming. If global warming is the threat that it's claimed to be then any problems nuclear power might cause are nothing by comparison.
At this point if you oppose nuclear power then you are denying the catastrophic effects of global warming. If we should fear nuclear power more than global warming then global warming cannot be all that bad.
There is no way to reduce CO2, other than by making the engine more efficient.
Not true, we can synthesize the fuels, recycling the CO2 in the air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Synthetic fuels are the future. Synthetic fuels from nuclear power.
Second the improvements in the grid often take place on the decades scale, not necessarily in time to make a large change to vehicles bought today.
The longer we wait to start those improvements the longer it will take to complete.
I remember having a conversation where oil drilling in ANWR came up. I argued that we know that there is oil there, lots of it, and if we went to go get it that would lower energy prices. The person I was conversing with said that drilling in ANWR was pointless because it would take years for oil to flow and make prices go down. Five years later oil price reached record highs. Would oil have still peaked at that point if we drilled in ANWR five years prior? We can't know for sure but it is unlikely to have made it worse.
You want to see CO2 emissions lower in 20 years? Then start building lots of nuclear power plants today. I don't care if it takes 10 years to build a reactor because by not building them we are placing all our faith in solar and wind to save us. That's waiting at port for a ship that might not come. We know we can build a nuclear power plant in less than 5 years because we did this regularly decades ago. The reason it takes so long to build a nuclear power plant today is politics, not technology. Get rid of the politics and make it happen.
Maybe someone should consider putting a nuclear power plant next to Hoover Dam. Use the dam for load balancing to offset that the nuclear reactor not being able to do so, and use the water behind the dam as a heat sink. Nuclear power is the lowest CO2 producing energy source we have today, that will reduce the climate effects of global warming.
Except nuclear power stations are usually built from vast quantities of concrete, the production of which creates enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.
Actually, I suppose a lot of hydro dams also use vast quantities of concrete. As you were.
Nuclear power also produces enormous amounts of electric energy, more than enough to offset the CO2 produced and make it far lower CO2 than any other energy source we have today.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2...
Nuclear power is also far safer than anything else and uses far less material resources compared to the energy produced.
If CO2 production concerns you then you'd be supporting nuclear power. If we are going to see any meaningful reduction in CO2, without driving prices through the roof, then we need nuclear, wind, and hydro. Solar costs too much, is inherently unreliable, takes too much materials, and really isn't all that great on CO2 when compared to wind, nuclear, and hydro.
So coal and gas is less than 50% ... how many other countries manage that?
France. Tell me, where do they get the bulk of their electricity?
I think that electric is the future
I believe that synthetic liquid fuels are the future of transportation. We won't have electric airplanes. We won't have transoceanic shipping. We might be able to electrify trains but that requires lots of infrastructure which requires lots of costs. Trains will be running on diesel fuels for a very long time. Personal commuter cars are just a part of our transportation needs. Lots of people and goods move by long haul trucks and buses, and those won't be running on electricity any time soon. Electric trains cannot solve this either because trains need rails and a truck needs only a beaten down track of dirt.
In fact, CO2 isn't even the main concern when trying to reduce emissions from ICE cars.
We've got fuels that are very low in sulfur so that's not much of a concern. Catalytic converters and other technology means there's little particulate or carbon monoxide emissions any more. There might be some NOx but I have to wonder how much even that is a concern.
Then there's increasing evidence that CO2 isn't all that great of a concern. I'm sure that comment will get me modded down. Whatever, the debate is not over no matter how much Al Gore says it is.
just look at all the graphs of costs for renewable costs,, cheaper and cheaper with improving tech every year as technology improves.
How did that happen? I have a good idea. We saw governments dump all kinds of money into research and development. Governments encouraged private investment through tax breaks and laws preferential to their use. Governments bought energy from these sources, often at prices far higher than market rates. Most importantly the government issued permits for the construction of facilities producing power using these technologies.
How is nuclear power treated by comparison? Few to zero permits issued for construction of a new nuclear reactor for 40 years. Nuclear power did get tax breaks but not near the same as wind and solar on a per MWh basis. If there was power produced by wind or solar then the utilities were legally required to buy it, whether they needed it or not. This meant other plants, such as nuclear and coal, were forced to idle if there was a surplus of capacity.
Tell me something, how long can this price reduction over time for wind and solar continue? Wind and solar simply cannot be priced to zero with continued development, there will be a bottom. I'm guessing that they are real close to that bottom now if they haven't hit it already. On the other hand nuclear barely got started to figure out how to reduce their costs. Again, no new nuclear power plant got permission to build for 40 years. During that time people didn't stop thinking of new ways to lower costs. If the US government starts issuing licenses for some of this new technology that people thought up then maybe we could see nuclear power costs drop just as quickly as wind and solar. What do we have to lose by trying?
Give me some numbers to convince me of what energy source we should be using then. Pick a metric to rate the danger of each energy source and then put numbers to them. Imagine I'm the government regulator that will be issuing permits to allow these energy sources to put energy to the electrical grid. Convince me that nuclear power is dangerous. Show me how dangerous nuclear power is to society and how much safer the alternatives are by comparison. Give some numbers and cite some sources.
Certainly you must have seen such numbers in order to decide that nuclear power is so dangerous. Share them with me.
Why should anyone believe this next version will be different?
You are absolutely right, why should I believe the next version will be cheaper? We've dumped all kinds of money into research and development for decades, and for what? It's still more expensive than coal, less reliable than natural gas, uses all kinds of resources with the mining for ores and such. Why should I believe the next version of wind and solar should be cheaper than the last?
Oh, wait. You were asking about nuclear power? My mistake.
I guess we assume the next version of nuclear will be different for the same reasons we expect wind and solar to be different on the next version. As I recall the theory with wind and solar was that we'd "bootstrap" the industry with all kinds of government subsidies and legal protections with the promise that they'd be viable on their own in the future. Here's where nuclear is different than wind and solar, we've already proven nuclear power to be competitive because we use it for 10% of our electricity worldwide and have been doing so for many years. The problem we are having now is that since the nuclear power industry has been coasting downhill for the last 40 years many of the people that knew how to build reactors are retired, senile, or dead. Now we have to start nearly from nothing, but what we have is decades of proof that nuclear power is safe, low CO2, inexpensive, and reliable. We figure out what was lost and then we can learn on how to make it even better. We aren't going to make it better until we start building them again.
If we had the same attitude for wind and solar as you expressed for nuclear then we'd have abandoned them a long time ago.
Obviously it is not the safest. Not even if you use your idiotic "death per TWh" metric.
Then what metric would you like to use? If we want to establish the safest energy source then we need something on which to make this decision, no? Tell me how to make that decision and then let's go about collecting data.
Both.
That's a non-answer as it tells me nothing on how to act. If this means we can't have nuclear power then you are by default kicking the problem down the path hoping for a solution to present itself before the problems of global warming are upon us. We can continue down this path, keep looking for a non-nuclear solution, but that is waiting for a ship that may never come to port.
But nuclear power is still plenty dangerous. The first problem is that it can provide the material to make nuclear weapons. Won't do us much good to avert Global Warming if some rogue nation starts World War III with nukes.
The material to make nuclear weapons is in the dirt and dissolved in seawater. Where do you think that the U-235 for the first nuclear weapons came from? They didn't need a reactor to make it, they just "distilled" it from the dirt. This was done with 1940s technology, repeating this with modern materials and equipment is becoming nearly trivial any more. The limitation is primarily the energy needed to enrich the U-235.
The second, more insidious problem is that human corruption and incompetence is scarily likely to lead to another major accident such as Fukushima.
This again? All a bunch of bullshit based on 50 year old nuclear technology. Nobody builds reactors like those any more.
We know how to operate nuclear power with reasonable safety, but can we do so, for all nuclear power plants, for decades?
Yes, we do in fact know how to operate nuclear power plants safely for decades. There are over 400 operating commercial nuclear power reactors on this planet. There's at least 100 military nuclear power plants in ships at sea as well. We know how to make this work. Bringing this up as scaremongering for not implementing what is demonstrably the safest energy source we have today is unbelievable.
You want me to fear nuclear power more than global warming? Really? Then tell me that global warming isn't the threat it's been made out to be, because I'm really thinking that we are running out of options right now and nuclear power it looking really nice by comparison.
The US Navy figured this out. All we have to do is scale it up and deploy it widely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Problem solved!
Yeah, OK, if it isn't $8 / gallon...
How much will the end of civilization cost?
And burning stuff still generates oxides of nitrogen... tsk tsk...
Whatever. I just showed you an energy source that can produce zero carbon fuels that run in current engines with no modifications and you complain about NOx? Go piss up a rope. Nothing is perfect but this is really REALLY close, and the technology exists now.
The means to get to a zero carbon economy exists today, nuclear power and hydrocarbon synthesis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I keep hearing about how if we don't reduce our CO2 immediately then we will create runaway global warming. We have a technology that can provide energy that is zero carbon (or rather closer to zero than wind and solar), plentiful, inexpensive (again compared to wind and solar), reliable, domestically sourced (no matter how you define "domestic"), and exists today.
Why don't we have more nuclear power? Because some nuclear waste is "scary"? You want me to believe that some nuclear waste is a greater threat to humanity than global warming? I'm not convinced. You want me to believe that "any day now" wind and solar will displace coal, oil, and natural gas? Well, we've been trying to do that for decades now and it's not happening very quickly. For an island nation like the UK the ability to meet their energy needs from wind and solar is likely impossible. Maybe they have enough friendly neighbors across the channel to get more wind and sun. What of Japan? They don't have any friendly neighbors, what should they do?
Again, which am I to fear more, nuclear power or global warming? Pick one, because we are running out of time for wind and sun to save us.
Problem solved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Next question?
What's the error bars on those readings?
So, you want to tell me that we should run the risk of runaway global warming because a bit of nuclear waste scares you?
Are you telling me that nuclear power poses a greater threat to humanity than global warming? Seriously? That's messed up.
I have two possible answers for you.
First, molten salt reactors. Done. Now let's start building them.
Second, assuming we can't fix all those problems you still have to choose, global warming or nuclear power. Which is it? Global warming or nuclear power? Pick one. Wind and solar are not replacing coal for energy fast enough so we need to consider solutions that we would not consider before. There aren't a whole lot of choices left except nuclear power. Seems to me that molten salt reactors solve every issue you raised, except not needing refueling which is plain nonsense since it's going to need fuel. If you reject MSR because it does not fit your definition of an existing technology then you must still choose, nuclear power or global warming. Waiting for some future technology is still a choice but if this new technology does not come to be then we are still left with nuclear power or global warming.
What it comes down to is that there is no ideal solution here, so we must choose less than ideal solutions. If global warming threatens to kill us all then we must then choose a source of energy that has the potential to render portions of the planet uninhabitable for centuries. If you fear nuclear power more than global warming then I believe you have a seriously misplaced set of priorities.