People have been working on electric propulsion on sea (and land) for over 100 years and it's still not competing with nuclear, wind, or diesel. You think this will change all that quickly? Even if the problems on this are solved tomorrow this will still have to be brought up to mass production and that will not only take a long time but still face resistance over fears of performance, long term economics, and so on.
What we know does work is nuclear power. It's as "green" as anything and has had 60 years of experience to prove it viable. There is an existing capacity to build these ships right now. It might take a while to ramp up production but this shouldn't be too difficult. The engineering behind naval reactors might take 21st century computing and technology but the actual construction is something from the early 20th century. Making the reactors is one small step up from hammer and tongs steelworks.
Another long standing technology is synthetic fuels. This can be synthesized hydrocarbons, which again is 100 years old, and can use energy from most any heat and/or electrical source. Synthetic ammonia is a good choice for fuel, another century old technology. These fuels will burn in existing engines, with little or no modification. Any resistance to this should be easily overcome since it requires nothing or next to nothing done by the ship operators to adopt.
Battery electric propulsion still faces a lot of technological hurdles. The problems with nuclear propulsion, or synthetic fuels, are largely problems of policy. We can change the political rules that keep these ships from sailing. Changing the rules of physics and/or economics are far greater challenges.
We can keep working on electric ships. I'm certainly not going to stop you. What should we do until these ships arrive? What do we do if this technology never gets beyond the prototype? I say we try nuclear power and synthetic fuels. We can do that today and with century old technology.
In the longer-term, floating solar swarms can be installed along trade routes currently followed by container ships, and used to recharge them in mid-journey. Larger and larger percentages of motive power can be supplied to hybrid ships over time, until they are finally using their ICEs only for emergencies or in inclement weather.
Or, we could keep those solar collectors on shore and use them to produce synthetic fuels. Then the fuel can be poured into any existing ship that burns diesel fuel, with no sulfur like in bunker fuel or low grade marine fuel. That means no stopping in the middle of their route, no dangerous at sea recharges, and no fancy batteries that don't exist yet.
Waiting for battery powered ships to become economically viable is, quite literally in this case, waiting at port for a ship that may never come. We've been synthesizing hydrocarbons for a very long time. This hasn't been done to make fuel, except in times of war, due to the costs. It has been used for a long time now to make high performance lubricants. The US Navy has a program to both bring down the cost and scale up production. https://www.zmescience.com/res...
Which is more likely to be successful sooner? These solar swarms of recharging ships for cargo carriers that do not yet exist? Or, a fuel synthesis process that allows the use of most any source of electricity to produce fuels that work in every ship at sea, and every plane in the air, right now?
Another alternative for large "green" ships is the use of nuclear power. This is a technology that has been at sea for decades. A technology that 60 years ago, almost to the day, sailed to the North Pole. A technology used in Russian icebreakers. If you want to discuss "inclement weather" then I believe that nuclear power passed that test a long time ago.
From your own source, 21% of the world's energy already comes from renewables, and 11% from nuclear. So scaling up renewables seems like it'd be easier than scaling up nuclear, and a heck of a lot safer.
Are you certain of that? Can you show me your math?
They say that to match the power generated by fossil fuels or nuclear power stations, the construction of solar energy farms and wind turbines will gobble up 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminum and 50 times more iron, copper and glass. Right now wind and solar energy meet only about 1 percent of global demand; hydroelectricity meets about 7 percent.
Just think about the environmental impact of having to dig up that much material to build all these windmills and solar panels. Then tell me how "easy" it would be to meet that demand for these materials.
Ballast is just dead weight, by definition. It is used to balance the ship for safe transport. To do this the ballast has to be able to be moved with relative convenience and speed. A battery pack is unlikely to meet this definition.
A typical Panamax container ship will carry over a million gallons of fuel. To fit through the Panama Canal the ship will have to meet the very tight constraints on depth, width, and length. Taking on enough batteries to make any kind of impact on the fuel burned will make an impact on the cargo it can carry. Then there are maximum sizes for the Suez Canal and for the ports these ships serve.
If a Panamax ship needs 1,000,000 gallons of fuel to complete it's journey, and just 10% of that fuel is replaced by batteries, then how much extra weight, length, depth, and so on would this ship have to be to carry the same amount of cargo? If my math is correct 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel weighs 300 tons. To get the same energy in a battery would mean carrying 30,000 tons. That's half the cargo capacity of a Panamax ship.
We have inexpensive rare earth elements for now because China is just dumping the waste in a lake, where it can contaminate the ground water for miles around. This is a huge problem and if countries like the USA would mine this responsibly then they'd do so only at a price that included proper management of the waste, which means higher prices for the minerals. This will affect the prices of windmills and electric cars that rely on tons of this stuff.
Unless you can show me the math on how to get sustainable electric vehicles then I see the future in diesel engines and synthetic fuels.
Production follows demand. As we start building more windmills, more rare earth will be mined. It's not like it's actually rare.
This is where it gets funny. The earth is 7.3% silicon, you know.
Yes, I know that. These are exceedingly common elements. Now, tell me, just how much dirt would we need to dig up and sift through to get these metals? I am truly curious. I've seen the math done before but I'd like to see you verify these numbers yourself and see how they match with other computations.
While digging up these metals there will be the stuff left over. These leftovers will have some very toxic elements in them, and having dug them up we've introduced them to the environment. What do we do with those?
A nuclear power plant takes no more resources to build than a coal or natural gas plant. The fuel for a nuclear power plant is part of the "leftovers" from mining the rare earth elements we need for things like windmills and electric cars. It's essentially a fuel we don't even have to mine, because it comes up as a byproduct of rare earth mining we already do. China and Australia mine a lot of rare earth elements, and they use the uranium that comes up as fuel for nuclear reactors. The Australian government has a ban on nuclear reactors of their own but they sell the uranium to other nations for their nuclear power plants.
We, in the USA, could mine rare earth elements but disposing of the uranium and thorium that is in the ore makes it very expensive under current law. If there was a sufficient market for this uranium and thorium, such as for nuclear power plants, then this problem solves itself and we'd have plenty of cheap rare earth elements. This would mean domestic sources of rare earth elements, domestic sources of electricity, and quite likely all kinds of cheap electric cars running on plenty of cheap electricity from nuclear and wind energy.
Did you do the math before you replied to me? I'm quite certain that you had not.
Battery technology today has an energy density that is two orders of magnitude worse than diesel fuel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This might mean batteries working for very very short haul ships. Weight, even on something as weight insensitive as a ship at sea, will become an issue with this kind of energy density differential. Electric drive systems on ships of most any size is fairly common practice. Even on land, with locomotives and big earth movers, electric drive systems are the norm. We're seeing this making it's way into smaller vehicles like cars and trucks. What we are not likely to see is a removal of the internal combustion engine.
In all of history the big successes in marine propulsion has been wind, diesel, and nuclear power. Coal had a good run for a while but that's not likely to make a return. If the goal is to be "green" in shipping then there are few choices. Wind isn't likely to make a complete return because it's simply too fickle. There's a phenomenon on the sea winds called the "horse latitude", so called because sailors in the age of sail caught in these calm winds long ago would often toss the horses overboard to lighten the load and save on resources in an attempt to free themselves. This did not always work and the sailors would be left to die of lack of fresh water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Can diesel engines run on bio-fuels to make them "green"? No, if anyone does the math on that there simply is not enough bio-mass that can serve all of our needs for such fuel, especially if this is used for other transportation that cannot rely on electricity, like aircraft. This means nuclear power, or liquid fuels derived from nuclear power.
Batteries on long haul ships don't do much to help with balancing peaks and valleys in the load, as claimed in the article. Once long haul ships leave port they set the engines to maximum efficient burn rate and stay there for a large portion of their voyage. Maybe this might help at port but this is such a small portion of the voyage as to be near useless, or a detriment to efficiency for having to carry the weight of the batteries all this way. Maybe they could use electric tugs near port but that doesn't solve the problem of the long haul at sea.
This is not helpful in the great scheme of things, especially since we rely so much on coal for electricity. Can we use more "green" electrical sources? Sure, but that means more nuclear power as well. In the future any ship of sufficient size should be nuclear powered. How big is "sufficient"? I'm guessing Panamax or bigger, that would be about 50,000 ton displacement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe ships as small as 10,000 tons could be nuclear powered, like the old US Navy nuclear powered cruisers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In other words VW is "too big to fail"? Where have I heard that before?
If a company is "too big to fail" then it is too big to exist. If a nation's economy is so tied up into these large corporations then they are essentially free to break the rules as they please. Break them up into smaller companies and make them compete against each other.
I'm old enough to remember the bailout of the "big three" automakers in the USA. Well, Ford was doing just fine economically but if the government only bailed out the other two then that might be considered some kind of violation of the law. Ford was forced to take the money. At the time Tesla was just salivating at the idea of scooping up Detroit automotive factories at fire sale prices. The workers at those factories might be out of a job for like a month or two, until Tesla was able to finalize the sale and retool for making electric cars. Well, maybe they couldn't make electric cars that quickly but those factories would be making cars under a new badge and with improved efficiency. Tesla would have made out like a bandit on the deal and they'd be on much better financial footing now.
What killed the electric car? That's a question that's been asked many times. The answer is a government too scared to let the market forces work it's way out.
I don't believe that electric cars would dominate today, only 10 years after this automobile industry "crisis". I do believe that we'd probably see an industry more willing to innovate past the problem of tailpipe emissions rather than trying to game the system. We'd likely be seeing more electric hybrids, more natural gas vehicles, and a healthier economy in the long term.
Why is there so much concern on diesel cycle engines? As heat engines go they are quite efficient devices. As far as providing a lightweight and compact power source for transportation these things are close to miraculous. So, where is the problem? It's not the engine, it's the fuel.
Right now diesel fuel is primarily petroleum. I use the modifier "primarily" because there are places that burn bio-mass derived diesel in their engines, either pure bio-fuel or as a mix with petroleum fuel. The US Army has been burning 20% bio-diesel in their trucks on bases all over the world for at least a decade. I can say that because I saw the fuel pumps on an Army base while serving and I have a friend that works for the National Guard. The trucks the Army uses on bases at home and in "friendly" nations are just commercial off the shelf stuff. The battlefield vehicles though will run on just about anything. I had a conversation with someone about this and he told me those Army helicopters will run on just about anything that is liquid and flammable. I asked if that included Wild Turkey and cheap perfume, he said it might not like it but that will get you home if you are in dire need.
I hear people claim that electric cars are the future, charged up by electricity from wind, water, and sun. But has anyone done the math on what it would take to make that happen? It turns out that people have and the math does not work out for such a world.
Here's how we start with that math. The world uses about 2.3 TW of electricity. That's the consumption if we were to average out all the use in the world. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In 2008, the world total of electricity production was 20.279 petawatt-hours (PWh). This number corresponds to an average power of 2.31 TW continuously during the year.
So, let's do the math on everyone in the world driving an electric car. First thing is to do the math on how much in resources we'd need to just make up for the electrical use right now and replace that with wind, water, and solar. Looking at the page I linked to above we see that we are about 1/4 the way there, with most of that in water. A common one megawatt windmill takes one ton of rare earth elements in its magnets. Does it have to use rare earth metals? No, but then it's not as efficient, will need more copper and steel to make, and therefore will not be as cheap as it is now with rare earth metals. Windmills don't run all the time at maximum output, in real life they produce maybe 30% of their maximum rated output. So we don't need 2.3 TW of wind to replace what we need, we'd have to start with 3 times that, 7 TW. But, as I pointed out before, existing renewable energy has 1/4 of the total electrical supply already so, in round numbers we'd need about 5 TW of new wind, water, and sun to replace the coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear (if you believe nuclear is "bad").
Go figure out how much rare earth metals we'd need in windmills to replace even half of the current electrical production, assuming that solar and hydro would make up the rest. Then add in the rare earth metals needed for those electric cars. Then add in the steel and concrete needed, because those windmills need something to hold them up. Then do the math on how much silicon we'd need for the solar panels. Then compare all of this to current production of these materials worldwide. There simply is not enough of current production to switch over to anything "green", except nuclear power.
Can we improve our output of things like rare earth metals, concrete, steel, copper, silicon, and whatever else we might need? Sure, given enough time I would expect that to happen. Here's another thing to add to your calculations, how much dirt would we have to dig up, sift through, and process, to get these materials we need? You think mining for coal and uranium is bad for the environment, how muc
Right, because the best way to keep people quiet about government conspiracies is to shut down news networks.
By the way, how is Alex Jones doing now? Seems like the attempts to "de-platform" him is only making him more popular. He was a nobody until these new media platforms tried to shut him down, and now everyone knows his name.
The IPCC has shown that nuclear has a smaller footprint than any form of solar power. Nuclear is marginally worse than onshore wind, as soon as you run out of land to plant windmills the carbon footprint for wind grows considerably for the concrete and steel needed to anchor those windmills to the floor of the bay. Hydroelectric beats them all, which is great until you've dammed up all the rivers and are still needing more power.
Seriously, this carbon footprint claim against nuclear power is really old and tired and easily proven false. Even the biggest advocates of solar and wind find it very hard to "prove" that nuclear has a larger CO2 footprint.
I know that much of the CO2 output for nuclear comes from the concrete used to build it. This is also true for wind and solar thermal. If we can reduce the CO2 footprint of wind and solar through low carbon sources of concrete, such as mining basalt instead of limestone for making it, then those same processes can be applied to the concrete for nuclear. Mining the steel, aluminum, copper, silicon, or whatever for the windmills and solar panels has a CO2 cost. Same for mining the uranium for nuclear power. If there is a means to reduce the CO2 footprint for mining then this can be applied equally to nuclear, wind, and solar.
Note that Nuclear power stations require cooling water and this is one reason they are located near the coasts and rivers. However, the recent heatwave caused several European Nuclear power plants and coal fired power plants to be temporarily shutdown or run at reduced power because the outside water was too hot to be effective at cooling for the steam turbines. This means electricity generated using steam turbines is not immune from the effects of climate change.
Any steam based power plant will need access to water for cooling, this includes current second generation nuclear and most or all third generation nuclear. Many fourth generation nuclear reactor designs have the option for air cooling, the turbines don't run on steam but on hot air. By running at much higher temperatures, temperatures that water cooled plants can not safely attain, brings the option for cooling by forced air while producing power and unpowered convection cooling in a shutdown. Without water there's no reduction of power output because the water reservoir gets too hot. Without water there is no possibility of a flash boil explosion like at Chernobyl, or a hydrogen gas explosion like at Fukushima.
Just because fourth generation nuclear promises so much does not mean we should not invest in third generation nuclear. In fact it is quite possible we will need the third generation nuclear reactors to breed the fuel for "jump starting" the fourth generation reactors. Solid fuel heavy water moderated reactors are very safe, and offer fuel breeding capability that in some cases outperform fourth generation molten salt reactors. These "gen 3+" or "gen 3.5" reactors is where we should be heading in the short term, while we prototype fourth generation reactors that free us from the need for water cooling.
I would like to see Nuclear power, renewables and energy storage be the final solution.
I have to wonder about the value of wind and solar power in an age with inexpensive energy storage. I keep hearing on how once we figure out how to build grid scale electrical batteries that wind and solar power will be able to replace base load power like coal and nuclear. I find the opposite to be true, once we have grid scale batteries then base load power will be able to displace wind and sun through lowered costs. I believe that wind will have a place on the future electrical grid as it is quite inexpensive. Solar on the other hand will likely be in the realm of off grid power, like satellites and pocket calculators.
Lets hope Nuclear fusion power becomes a thing sooner rather than later.
Fusion has been proven to be so elusive that I find little reason to consider this viable within the lifespan of anyone alive today. There is simply too much we must learn and in the mean time we have ample supply of cheap and clean fission power. I can see value in doing research in fusion for the sake of discovering how the universe works, just not much value as any kind of energy source. I have seen consideration of fusion as a source of neutrons to breed fuel for fission, and/or disposing of some of the more problematic fission products, so that alone might make it very valuable in energy. Getting fusion to be energy positive is likely to require a reactor so large that we simply cannot afford to build one, even with the financial backing from the government of a large nation.
People will accept nuclear power when everyone advocating it move to within a few kilometers of a nuclear reactor and settle there, along with their entire family.
And yes, that includes you.
I do in fact live near a nuclear power plant. Like many across the USA it is scheduled for being shutdown in the next 10 years or so. Given how long it takes for the federal government to issue a license for building a new reactor we'll need to start planning for a replacement now.
I remember growing up during the Cold War and hearing people talk about how the local nuclear power plant was supposedly a secondary target for the Soviet nuclear missiles. Also nearby are vital dams for navigation and hydroelectric power, these were also secondary targets if not primary targets. In the local phone directories are evacuation plans in case of a meltdown at the power plant, and how the public would be notified of an emergency.
After growing up in the shadow of a nuclear power plant I do not fear nuclear power. What I fear more is a future without nuclear power.
Don't give me shit about "not in my backyard". I'd be quite pleased with a nuclear power plant in my back yard. Here's the problem I have, it's not the NIMBY crowd that bother me, it's the BANANA crowd. (That's "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything" for the acronym impaired.) Every state in the USA has a nuclear energy commission of their own, let's put the states in charge of nuclear power instead of the federal government dictating this from afar. I don't want some "left coast" politician tell me that I can't have nuclear power in my backyard.
I suspect that given enough feet dragging by federal regulators that the states will in fact start to issue nuclear power licenses on their own. Some DC politician from some other state doesn't like this? Well, it's not in their backyard, why should they care?
Everyone knows that. Question is, who really cares among the powerful? Does a 72 year old business man, mired in scandals and in lobbies commitments, eager to succeed politically at all costs, having a single (short-term) objective in mind to that end: 'improve his economy'... don't expect this man to care about something likely happening in the future to the planet, even if the proof was as clear as 1+1 = 2.
Does this 72 year old man have grandchildren? If so then I suspect that this man does in fact care how "his" economy performs in the future.
I remember someone pointing out how many childless politicians there are around the world, all of them running up the national debt and living high on big government spending. They don't much care what happens after they are gone. Consider this the next time you have a chance to vote, does this candidate have grandchildren? Having children may not be enough because unless their children have children of their own they may see the next generation as the end of the line. With grandchildren there is going to be a concern on how well things go for the next century.
For politicians to live it up until they die they could set the economy on a slow dive that could last decades before it collapses. For people that have to plan for the next century they will plant seeds for trees that they will never taste the fruit. It's the thinking of the next century that brought us the Hoover Dam and Empire State Building. I want politicians with a plan for the next century. Of course no one can make definitive plans that far out, as a lot can change in 100 years, but they can set us on a path to where we have something to build upon in the future.
When I see new nuclear power plants getting built then I will believe that politicians and the public are taking global warming seriously. I have read some encouraging news recently that US federal regulators are making real investments in the future of nuclear power. There's already been a shift in how nuclear power is viewed, and people are starting to embrace it again. One real reason people are embracing it is very self serving, a lot of nuclear power plants are reaching end of life and will be shut down soon and without a new reactor in its place a lot of jobs will be lost as well as a large source of electrical generation capacity in that region.
I don't much care why people are embracing nuclear power, only that people embrace it. Nuclear power is safe, low carbon, domestically sourced, and inexpensive.
Say what you will about past accidents with nuclear power, like Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island, all of them are irrelevant to embracing third and fourth generation nuclear power. All of those past accidents were with second generation nuclear, and as safe as second generation nuclear power has been on the aggregate we will see even safer power with third generation nuclear that is being built now. Fourth generation nuclear, such as molten salt reactors, will be safer still.
I've seen the numbers and models on a national grid based on wind, water, and sun. This is not a future with inexpensive, reliable, and safe electricity. It's quite likely not low in CO2 either. There is no future with inexpensive, plentiful, safe, clean, and "green", electricity that does not include nuclear power.
printed out the papers, so they can look through it one and then throw it away?
They are sequestering carbon. If everyone prints out enough papers and tosses them in a landfill then we are removing carbon from the atmosphere.
I'm only half joking. The use of trees as carbon sinks, and then removing that carbon by burial, has been proposed by prominent climate scientists. The problem is the tree huggers that studied "international gender studies" in college instead of any real science. We could sequester a lot of carbon with proper management of forests. I don't mean by burying reams upon reams of once read papers but by using the trees for building material, or whatever else we could use that plant fiber for. When the material has served it's purpose as housing or whatever else then we make sure this carbon based material continues as a carbon sink by putting it in a landfill. The houses are a carbon sink while standing, and continue as one when torn down and another built in it's place.
Forest fires are in the news again. Maybe we could both fight the fires and create a carbon sink by cutting down fire breaks in the forest. Just cut a wide swath in the forest to remove the fuel. Take those trees and turn them into lumber, or just bury them all right now, either way we'd stop the fire and make room for more trees to grow.
Instead of complaining on how the problem continues I suggest we work on solutions. If the solutions make a good business case, such as creating cheap building material, then it will be economically beneficial as well as environmentally beneficial.
But how do we make sure that we pick the right person? Maybe have a law that people are assured a freedom to speak.
Like this prevented people like GW and Trump being elected in the US.
Everyone knew who Trump was when they voted for him. He's been living a very public life for at least 40 years. If someone didn't know who he was by the time they were old enough to vote then they've been living in a hole. Trump hosted his own TV show for 15 years, right up until he announced his intention to run for POTUS. No one can claim that Trump was some kind of mystery.
Nearly every country can mine rare earth minerals.
Of course, but only China and Australia able to do so at a profit. They can do this because the laws there allow for the mining of uranium and thorium that are common in rare earth rich ores. In the USA the rare earth mines are limited to less profitable ores that have less uranium and thorium. So, either these nations need to be serious about competing with China on rare earth metals and change the laws, or continue to be at the whim of China for rare earth elements. It's not like these mines can just start digging up ore tomorrow, there will be lead time on starting production even if there is a price hike or law change that makes mining profitable.
And: they are not needed to make magnet. Iron is enough-
Citation needed.
So: no, China has no monopoly.
I already gave a citation that proves otherwise. Try again.
Wow, you know that solar panels are made from silicon, but you don't know that the silicon is refined from sand?
Again, turning sand into the high purity silicon needed for making PV cells is not a simple process. The factories to do this are very expensive, take years to build, and little to none exist in the USA, or pretty much anywhere outside of Asia.
Lucky you have fanbois who mod you up anyway.
I noticed that happens when one provides links to backup their claims.
Nope, most wind power plants are build in USA, Denmark and Germany. China is not even making a dent.
That's not what I said. I said wind turbine production is reliant on rare earth magnets imported from China. I know lots of windmills are made in the USA, I see them getting moved down the highway everyday. That just means they assemble the parts here, the magnets are largely still imported. According to these people China produces a majority of all magnets and the magnets made in the USA are mostly low quality kinds used in toys and novelties. https://www.allianceorg.com/pd...
Most Silicon as a source for chips and solar panels is made by "Wacker Chemie", a German company, from sand...
Right, didn't their polysilicon plant blow up last year? I'm pretty sure that happened. I'll let you Google that one yourself.
Solar isn't limited to PV. What is wrong with people like you that cannot see beyond solar=PV?
Maybe it's because concentrated solar power is difficult to do, requires a large land area to build, and produces more CO2 per energy produced than nuclear, wind, or solar PV. Look at the chart about halfway down this page: https://www.carbonbrief.org/so...
You do not need to feed the grid, you do not need to store power in batteries. Stop associating solar with PV! Pumping water into reservoirs during the day and using gravity to feed turbines is proven tech and has been in operation since the late 1800s. Again, why is it not being implemented?
Here's my guess, this is not popular because to implement it takes a place with a lot of sun, a lot of water, and a river suitable for a dam. Places with a lot of sun tend to not have a lot of water. Places with water and a river worth a dam may not have a lot of sun. Even if they have all three this water is likely to contain a lot of salt, which eats away at turbines. To resolve the issue of salt water on turbines means desalinating the water, but that water is far too valuable as water for drinking to run through a turbine and dump in the sea.
PV is a dead-end. Always has been, always will be.
I won't go that far. PV is great for communication satellites and pocket calculators.
This is, of course, irrelevant to nuclear power. Pu-239 is produced for use in nuclear weapons only. A standard reactor doesn't produce Pu-239 any more than a gasoline engine produces plastics as a side-effect.
Huh?
In any operating nuclear reactor containing U-238, some plutonium-239 will accumulate in the nuclear fuel.
Of course Pu-239 is produced in a reactor, that's what's called "reactor grade plutonium".
Reactor-grade plutonium/RGPu is the isotopic grade of plutonium that is found in spent nuclear fuel after the primary fuel, that of Uranium-235 that a nuclear power reactor uses, has (burnt up/burnup).
It's not "reactor grade" only because it is produced in a reactor but because it's only use is in producing power in a reactor, it's worthless for weapons because it contains too much Pu-240 and/or Pu-238.
In a 2008 paper, Kessler et al. used a thermal analysis to conclude that a hypothetical nuclear explosive device was "technically unfeasible" using reactor grade plutonium from a reactor that had a burn up value of 30 GWd/t using "low technology" designs akin to Fat Man with spherical explosive lenses, or 55 GWd/t for "medium technology" designs.
According to the Kessler et al. criteria, "high-technology" hypothetical nuclear explosive devices(HNEDs), that could be produced by the experienced nuclear weapons states(NWSs) would be technically unfeasible with reactor-grade plutonium containing more than approximately 9% of the heat generating Pu-238 isotope.
What this reactor grade plutonium is good for is jump starting fourth generation nuclear power plants. https://articles.thmsr.nl/the-...
In IEO-2017, renewable energy and natural gas are forecast to be the worldâ(TM)s fastest growing energy sources over 2015-2040. Renewables increase at 2.8%/year, and by 2040 will provide 31% of electricity generation, equal to coal; natural gas increases by 2.1%/year. Generation from nuclear is forecast to increase by 1.6% each year. The net nuclear capacity increase is all in non-OECD countries (growth in South Korea is offset by decreases in both Canada and Europe), and China accounts for 67% of the capacity growth. By 2032, the outlook sees China surprass the United States as the country with the most nuclear generating capacity.
Is it likely that solar will play an important part in the global energy production? Yes, quite likely. What it will not do is replace nuclear power. We will need both.
No, solar panels are made of silicon and the USA produces very little of it. The kind the USA does produce is predominately low grade used in producing steel and aluminum. https://minerals.usgs.gov/mine...
Wind turbines from carbon fiber positioned on steel masts.
Mining rare earth metals means also digging up a lot of other nasty minerals, like thorium and uranium, that unless there is a market for them they can contaminate the environment. What on earth could we possibly do with all this uranium and thorium? I'm just tossing out an idea here, nuclear power?
The USA does not have the capacity to produce solar panels, and has limited capacity to produce windmills, without imported materials. On the other hand the USA already produces several nuclear power plants every year to supply it's nuclear powered navy. Increasing the capacity to produce nuclear power in the USA is near trivial, we need only remove the political barriers to larger production. To produce more wind and solar in the USA would take years and billions of dollars to build the plants that can turn sand into PV panels and ore into rare earth magnets.
The monopoly that China has on silicon and rare earth metals is not in the raw material in the ground, it's in the factories that turn that raw material into something valuable. Overturning that monopoly will take lots of money and time in making factories.
The entire world is relying on China to play nice for it's supply of wind and solar power. By destroying their ability to produce domestic nuclear power these nations place a very vital resource, energy, at the whimsy of China. Much of Europe is now reliant on Chinese solar and Russian natural gas for energy. If there is ever a trade dispute then I can expect to see Europe get real dark and cold.
I have been informed by a dozen anonymous cowards in this thread, or maybe the same one posting multiple times, that wind and solar are now cheaper than coal and nuclear. Therefore we have solved the problem of global warming. Even greedy bastards that can't be bothered to "think of the children" will be investing in windmills and buying electric cars, because they are now cheaper than everything else.
Nothing to see, move along.
Here's something that bothers me though. China and a handful of other nations have a near monopoly on the materials needed to make wind and solar power cheap. It would be quite embarrassing for a first world nation to abandon nuclear power only to see the price of energy spike because the supply of new wind and solar, and the spare parts to keep current systems running, saw a shortage over a tariff war.
Nuclear power is domestic power. That is unless these first world nations have domestic sources of rare earth metals for wind turbines, and PV fabrication plants for solar collectors.
The article says that new wind and solar is cheaper than old coal and nuclear. But how does it compare to new coal and nuclear? I have a guess. My guess is that new nuclear beats them all. If new nuclear was more expensive than new wind and solar then I'm guessing they would have included that in their report. They speak quite loudly but what they don't say.
If you actually read the report upon which this articles is based then you'd see that the report points out that the price differential does not include any storage. Wind and solar need backup power or the grid becomes unreliable. Just ask UK and Germany how their wind and solar plans are working out for them.
Oh, and another thing is that this is a comparison with utility scale wind and solar. Your rooftop solar and backyard windmill will cost double what it does for utility scale, which puts the price well over the top of nuclear power.
You mean scientific solutions like nuclear power? The complaints against nuclear power boil down to it being unsafe. Okay, which is the greater risk to our safety, nuclear power or global warming? If someone wishes to make a case that nuclear power is in fact a greater threat then my response is, "Problem solved!" If nuclear power is a greater threat to humanity than global warming then we have solved all our energy problems. Move along, nothing to see here.
If nuclear power is less of a threat to humanity than global warming then we need to build nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow, because if the fear mongers on global warming are to be believed then there may not be a tomorrow.
So, you "scientifically minded" global warming fear mongers, which is it? Have we solved the problem or not?
The science tells us that nuclear power is as safe and "green" as wind, water, and sun for power. Science tells us we can build nuclear power plants that are "walk away safe", and will shut themselves down if there is a problem and no one is there to activate the safety mechanisms. All the safety systems would be driven by natural processes like gravity to dump in neutron absorbing solutions and convection of air to cool everything. The production of CO2 in building and operating a nuclear power plant is as low as any "carbon free" energy source like wind and solar. The problems of waste products from nuclear fission are solvable with proper processing to extract the valuable isotopes that are produced (and direct them for use in medicine or industry, if not for making new fuel), and the rest can be vitrified and buried underground where it can hurt no one. Any problems with nuclear power is either a myth or solvable with application of science.
Here's what really boggles me, with all the scientific advancement we've had in reducing humanities impact on the environment there are very few people that will recognize how far we have come. We are doing an excellent job in protecting the environment. This isn't just in relation to the shit job of environmental protection in the past but in absolute terms in getting more food from less land, using fewer resources (in money, manpower, etc.), and creating more open land for wildlife than would have happened naturally. It would be nice if once in a while I was able to see some recognition of how well things are going. Things can certainly improve but we are already doing very well right now.
Slashdot Mirror
People have been working on electric propulsion on sea (and land) for over 100 years and it's still not competing with nuclear, wind, or diesel. You think this will change all that quickly? Even if the problems on this are solved tomorrow this will still have to be brought up to mass production and that will not only take a long time but still face resistance over fears of performance, long term economics, and so on.
What we know does work is nuclear power. It's as "green" as anything and has had 60 years of experience to prove it viable. There is an existing capacity to build these ships right now. It might take a while to ramp up production but this shouldn't be too difficult. The engineering behind naval reactors might take 21st century computing and technology but the actual construction is something from the early 20th century. Making the reactors is one small step up from hammer and tongs steelworks.
Another long standing technology is synthetic fuels. This can be synthesized hydrocarbons, which again is 100 years old, and can use energy from most any heat and/or electrical source. Synthetic ammonia is a good choice for fuel, another century old technology. These fuels will burn in existing engines, with little or no modification. Any resistance to this should be easily overcome since it requires nothing or next to nothing done by the ship operators to adopt.
Battery electric propulsion still faces a lot of technological hurdles. The problems with nuclear propulsion, or synthetic fuels, are largely problems of policy. We can change the political rules that keep these ships from sailing. Changing the rules of physics and/or economics are far greater challenges.
We can keep working on electric ships. I'm certainly not going to stop you. What should we do until these ships arrive? What do we do if this technology never gets beyond the prototype? I say we try nuclear power and synthetic fuels. We can do that today and with century old technology.
In the longer-term, floating solar swarms can be installed along trade routes currently followed by container ships, and used to recharge them in mid-journey. Larger and larger percentages of motive power can be supplied to hybrid ships over time, until they are finally using their ICEs only for emergencies or in inclement weather.
Or, we could keep those solar collectors on shore and use them to produce synthetic fuels. Then the fuel can be poured into any existing ship that burns diesel fuel, with no sulfur like in bunker fuel or low grade marine fuel. That means no stopping in the middle of their route, no dangerous at sea recharges, and no fancy batteries that don't exist yet.
Waiting for battery powered ships to become economically viable is, quite literally in this case, waiting at port for a ship that may never come. We've been synthesizing hydrocarbons for a very long time. This hasn't been done to make fuel, except in times of war, due to the costs. It has been used for a long time now to make high performance lubricants. The US Navy has a program to both bring down the cost and scale up production.
https://www.zmescience.com/res...
Which is more likely to be successful sooner? These solar swarms of recharging ships for cargo carriers that do not yet exist? Or, a fuel synthesis process that allows the use of most any source of electricity to produce fuels that work in every ship at sea, and every plane in the air, right now?
Another alternative for large "green" ships is the use of nuclear power. This is a technology that has been at sea for decades. A technology that 60 years ago, almost to the day, sailed to the North Pole. A technology used in Russian icebreakers. If you want to discuss "inclement weather" then I believe that nuclear power passed that test a long time ago.
From your own source, 21% of the world's energy already comes from renewables, and 11% from nuclear. So scaling up renewables seems like it'd be easier than scaling up nuclear, and a heck of a lot safer.
Are you certain of that? Can you show me your math?
Here's an example of some people that did the math.
http://www.climatecentral.org/...
They say that to match the power generated by fossil fuels or nuclear power stations, the construction of solar energy farms and wind turbines will gobble up 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminum and 50 times more iron, copper and glass. Right now wind and solar energy meet only about 1 percent of global demand; hydroelectricity meets about 7 percent.
Just think about the environmental impact of having to dig up that much material to build all these windmills and solar panels. Then tell me how "easy" it would be to meet that demand for these materials.
Perhaps the batteries can replace some of the ballast?
Ballast free ship designs are likely to be a thing in the very near future.
https://shipinsight.com/articl...
Ballast is just dead weight, by definition. It is used to balance the ship for safe transport. To do this the ballast has to be able to be moved with relative convenience and speed. A battery pack is unlikely to meet this definition.
A typical Panamax container ship will carry over a million gallons of fuel. To fit through the Panama Canal the ship will have to meet the very tight constraints on depth, width, and length. Taking on enough batteries to make any kind of impact on the fuel burned will make an impact on the cargo it can carry. Then there are maximum sizes for the Suez Canal and for the ports these ships serve.
If a Panamax ship needs 1,000,000 gallons of fuel to complete it's journey, and just 10% of that fuel is replaced by batteries, then how much extra weight, length, depth, and so on would this ship have to be to carry the same amount of cargo? If my math is correct 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel weighs 300 tons. To get the same energy in a battery would mean carrying 30,000 tons. That's half the cargo capacity of a Panamax ship.
Production follows demand. As we start building more windmills, more rare earth will be mined. It's not like it's actually rare.
That rare earth production has an impact on the environment.
https://earthjournalism.net/st...
We have inexpensive rare earth elements for now because China is just dumping the waste in a lake, where it can contaminate the ground water for miles around. This is a huge problem and if countries like the USA would mine this responsibly then they'd do so only at a price that included proper management of the waste, which means higher prices for the minerals. This will affect the prices of windmills and electric cars that rely on tons of this stuff.
Unless you can show me the math on how to get sustainable electric vehicles then I see the future in diesel engines and synthetic fuels.
Production follows demand. As we start building more windmills, more rare earth will be mined. It's not like it's actually rare.
This is where it gets funny. The earth is 7.3% silicon, you know.
Yes, I know that. These are exceedingly common elements. Now, tell me, just how much dirt would we need to dig up and sift through to get these metals? I am truly curious. I've seen the math done before but I'd like to see you verify these numbers yourself and see how they match with other computations.
While digging up these metals there will be the stuff left over. These leftovers will have some very toxic elements in them, and having dug them up we've introduced them to the environment. What do we do with those?
A nuclear power plant takes no more resources to build than a coal or natural gas plant. The fuel for a nuclear power plant is part of the "leftovers" from mining the rare earth elements we need for things like windmills and electric cars. It's essentially a fuel we don't even have to mine, because it comes up as a byproduct of rare earth mining we already do. China and Australia mine a lot of rare earth elements, and they use the uranium that comes up as fuel for nuclear reactors. The Australian government has a ban on nuclear reactors of their own but they sell the uranium to other nations for their nuclear power plants.
We, in the USA, could mine rare earth elements but disposing of the uranium and thorium that is in the ore makes it very expensive under current law. If there was a sufficient market for this uranium and thorium, such as for nuclear power plants, then this problem solves itself and we'd have plenty of cheap rare earth elements. This would mean domestic sources of rare earth elements, domestic sources of electricity, and quite likely all kinds of cheap electric cars running on plenty of cheap electricity from nuclear and wind energy.
Did you do the math before you replied to me? I'm quite certain that you had not.
Battery technology today has an energy density that is two orders of magnitude worse than diesel fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This might mean batteries working for very very short haul ships. Weight, even on something as weight insensitive as a ship at sea, will become an issue with this kind of energy density differential. Electric drive systems on ships of most any size is fairly common practice. Even on land, with locomotives and big earth movers, electric drive systems are the norm. We're seeing this making it's way into smaller vehicles like cars and trucks. What we are not likely to see is a removal of the internal combustion engine.
In all of history the big successes in marine propulsion has been wind, diesel, and nuclear power. Coal had a good run for a while but that's not likely to make a return. If the goal is to be "green" in shipping then there are few choices. Wind isn't likely to make a complete return because it's simply too fickle. There's a phenomenon on the sea winds called the "horse latitude", so called because sailors in the age of sail caught in these calm winds long ago would often toss the horses overboard to lighten the load and save on resources in an attempt to free themselves. This did not always work and the sailors would be left to die of lack of fresh water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Can diesel engines run on bio-fuels to make them "green"? No, if anyone does the math on that there simply is not enough bio-mass that can serve all of our needs for such fuel, especially if this is used for other transportation that cannot rely on electricity, like aircraft. This means nuclear power, or liquid fuels derived from nuclear power.
Batteries on long haul ships don't do much to help with balancing peaks and valleys in the load, as claimed in the article. Once long haul ships leave port they set the engines to maximum efficient burn rate and stay there for a large portion of their voyage. Maybe this might help at port but this is such a small portion of the voyage as to be near useless, or a detriment to efficiency for having to carry the weight of the batteries all this way. Maybe they could use electric tugs near port but that doesn't solve the problem of the long haul at sea.
This is not helpful in the great scheme of things, especially since we rely so much on coal for electricity. Can we use more "green" electrical sources? Sure, but that means more nuclear power as well. In the future any ship of sufficient size should be nuclear powered. How big is "sufficient"? I'm guessing Panamax or bigger, that would be about 50,000 ton displacement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe ships as small as 10,000 tons could be nuclear powered, like the old US Navy nuclear powered cruisers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In other words VW is "too big to fail"? Where have I heard that before?
If a company is "too big to fail" then it is too big to exist. If a nation's economy is so tied up into these large corporations then they are essentially free to break the rules as they please. Break them up into smaller companies and make them compete against each other.
I'm old enough to remember the bailout of the "big three" automakers in the USA. Well, Ford was doing just fine economically but if the government only bailed out the other two then that might be considered some kind of violation of the law. Ford was forced to take the money. At the time Tesla was just salivating at the idea of scooping up Detroit automotive factories at fire sale prices. The workers at those factories might be out of a job for like a month or two, until Tesla was able to finalize the sale and retool for making electric cars. Well, maybe they couldn't make electric cars that quickly but those factories would be making cars under a new badge and with improved efficiency. Tesla would have made out like a bandit on the deal and they'd be on much better financial footing now.
What killed the electric car? That's a question that's been asked many times. The answer is a government too scared to let the market forces work it's way out.
I don't believe that electric cars would dominate today, only 10 years after this automobile industry "crisis". I do believe that we'd probably see an industry more willing to innovate past the problem of tailpipe emissions rather than trying to game the system. We'd likely be seeing more electric hybrids, more natural gas vehicles, and a healthier economy in the long term.
Why is there so much concern on diesel cycle engines? As heat engines go they are quite efficient devices. As far as providing a lightweight and compact power source for transportation these things are close to miraculous. So, where is the problem? It's not the engine, it's the fuel.
Right now diesel fuel is primarily petroleum. I use the modifier "primarily" because there are places that burn bio-mass derived diesel in their engines, either pure bio-fuel or as a mix with petroleum fuel. The US Army has been burning 20% bio-diesel in their trucks on bases all over the world for at least a decade. I can say that because I saw the fuel pumps on an Army base while serving and I have a friend that works for the National Guard. The trucks the Army uses on bases at home and in "friendly" nations are just commercial off the shelf stuff. The battlefield vehicles though will run on just about anything. I had a conversation with someone about this and he told me those Army helicopters will run on just about anything that is liquid and flammable. I asked if that included Wild Turkey and cheap perfume, he said it might not like it but that will get you home if you are in dire need.
I hear people claim that electric cars are the future, charged up by electricity from wind, water, and sun. But has anyone done the math on what it would take to make that happen? It turns out that people have and the math does not work out for such a world.
Here's how we start with that math. The world uses about 2.3 TW of electricity. That's the consumption if we were to average out all the use in the world. Citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In 2008, the world total of electricity production was 20.279 petawatt-hours (PWh). This number corresponds to an average power of 2.31 TW continuously during the year.
So, let's do the math on everyone in the world driving an electric car. First thing is to do the math on how much in resources we'd need to just make up for the electrical use right now and replace that with wind, water, and solar. Looking at the page I linked to above we see that we are about 1/4 the way there, with most of that in water. A common one megawatt windmill takes one ton of rare earth elements in its magnets. Does it have to use rare earth metals? No, but then it's not as efficient, will need more copper and steel to make, and therefore will not be as cheap as it is now with rare earth metals. Windmills don't run all the time at maximum output, in real life they produce maybe 30% of their maximum rated output. So we don't need 2.3 TW of wind to replace what we need, we'd have to start with 3 times that, 7 TW. But, as I pointed out before, existing renewable energy has 1/4 of the total electrical supply already so, in round numbers we'd need about 5 TW of new wind, water, and sun to replace the coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear (if you believe nuclear is "bad").
Go figure out how much rare earth metals we'd need in windmills to replace even half of the current electrical production, assuming that solar and hydro would make up the rest. Then add in the rare earth metals needed for those electric cars. Then add in the steel and concrete needed, because those windmills need something to hold them up. Then do the math on how much silicon we'd need for the solar panels. Then compare all of this to current production of these materials worldwide. There simply is not enough of current production to switch over to anything "green", except nuclear power.
Can we improve our output of things like rare earth metals, concrete, steel, copper, silicon, and whatever else we might need? Sure, given enough time I would expect that to happen. Here's another thing to add to your calculations, how much dirt would we have to dig up, sift through, and process, to get these materials we need? You think mining for coal and uranium is bad for the environment, how muc
Right, because the best way to keep people quiet about government conspiracies is to shut down news networks.
By the way, how is Alex Jones doing now? Seems like the attempts to "de-platform" him is only making him more popular. He was a nobody until these new media platforms tried to shut him down, and now everyone knows his name.
How much coal would you like to burn mining the uranium and refining it? Solar/wind are *far* better options.
Citation needed.
Here's mine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The IPCC has shown that nuclear has a smaller footprint than any form of solar power. Nuclear is marginally worse than onshore wind, as soon as you run out of land to plant windmills the carbon footprint for wind grows considerably for the concrete and steel needed to anchor those windmills to the floor of the bay. Hydroelectric beats them all, which is great until you've dammed up all the rivers and are still needing more power.
Seriously, this carbon footprint claim against nuclear power is really old and tired and easily proven false. Even the biggest advocates of solar and wind find it very hard to "prove" that nuclear has a larger CO2 footprint.
I know that much of the CO2 output for nuclear comes from the concrete used to build it. This is also true for wind and solar thermal. If we can reduce the CO2 footprint of wind and solar through low carbon sources of concrete, such as mining basalt instead of limestone for making it, then those same processes can be applied to the concrete for nuclear. Mining the steel, aluminum, copper, silicon, or whatever for the windmills and solar panels has a CO2 cost. Same for mining the uranium for nuclear power. If there is a means to reduce the CO2 footprint for mining then this can be applied equally to nuclear, wind, and solar.
Note that Nuclear power stations require cooling water and this is one reason they are located near the coasts and rivers. However, the recent heatwave caused several European Nuclear power plants and coal fired power plants to be temporarily shutdown or run at reduced power because the outside water was too hot to be effective at cooling for the steam turbines. This means electricity generated using steam turbines is not immune from the effects of climate change.
Any steam based power plant will need access to water for cooling, this includes current second generation nuclear and most or all third generation nuclear. Many fourth generation nuclear reactor designs have the option for air cooling, the turbines don't run on steam but on hot air. By running at much higher temperatures, temperatures that water cooled plants can not safely attain, brings the option for cooling by forced air while producing power and unpowered convection cooling in a shutdown. Without water there's no reduction of power output because the water reservoir gets too hot. Without water there is no possibility of a flash boil explosion like at Chernobyl, or a hydrogen gas explosion like at Fukushima.
Just because fourth generation nuclear promises so much does not mean we should not invest in third generation nuclear. In fact it is quite possible we will need the third generation nuclear reactors to breed the fuel for "jump starting" the fourth generation reactors. Solid fuel heavy water moderated reactors are very safe, and offer fuel breeding capability that in some cases outperform fourth generation molten salt reactors. These "gen 3+" or "gen 3.5" reactors is where we should be heading in the short term, while we prototype fourth generation reactors that free us from the need for water cooling.
I would like to see Nuclear power, renewables and energy storage be the final solution.
I have to wonder about the value of wind and solar power in an age with inexpensive energy storage. I keep hearing on how once we figure out how to build grid scale electrical batteries that wind and solar power will be able to replace base load power like coal and nuclear. I find the opposite to be true, once we have grid scale batteries then base load power will be able to displace wind and sun through lowered costs. I believe that wind will have a place on the future electrical grid as it is quite inexpensive. Solar on the other hand will likely be in the realm of off grid power, like satellites and pocket calculators.
Lets hope Nuclear fusion power becomes a thing sooner rather than later.
Fusion has been proven to be so elusive that I find little reason to consider this viable within the lifespan of anyone alive today. There is simply too much we must learn and in the mean time we have ample supply of cheap and clean fission power. I can see value in doing research in fusion for the sake of discovering how the universe works, just not much value as any kind of energy source. I have seen consideration of fusion as a source of neutrons to breed fuel for fission, and/or disposing of some of the more problematic fission products, so that alone might make it very valuable in energy. Getting fusion to be energy positive is likely to require a reactor so large that we simply cannot afford to build one, even with the financial backing from the government of a large nation.
People will accept nuclear power when everyone advocating it move to within a few kilometers of a nuclear reactor and settle there, along with their entire family.
And yes, that includes you.
I do in fact live near a nuclear power plant. Like many across the USA it is scheduled for being shutdown in the next 10 years or so. Given how long it takes for the federal government to issue a license for building a new reactor we'll need to start planning for a replacement now.
I remember growing up during the Cold War and hearing people talk about how the local nuclear power plant was supposedly a secondary target for the Soviet nuclear missiles. Also nearby are vital dams for navigation and hydroelectric power, these were also secondary targets if not primary targets. In the local phone directories are evacuation plans in case of a meltdown at the power plant, and how the public would be notified of an emergency.
After growing up in the shadow of a nuclear power plant I do not fear nuclear power. What I fear more is a future without nuclear power.
Don't give me shit about "not in my backyard". I'd be quite pleased with a nuclear power plant in my back yard. Here's the problem I have, it's not the NIMBY crowd that bother me, it's the BANANA crowd. (That's "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything" for the acronym impaired.) Every state in the USA has a nuclear energy commission of their own, let's put the states in charge of nuclear power instead of the federal government dictating this from afar. I don't want some "left coast" politician tell me that I can't have nuclear power in my backyard.
I suspect that given enough feet dragging by federal regulators that the states will in fact start to issue nuclear power licenses on their own. Some DC politician from some other state doesn't like this? Well, it's not in their backyard, why should they care?
Everyone knows that. Question is, who really cares among the powerful? Does a 72 year old business man, mired in scandals and in lobbies commitments, eager to succeed politically at all costs, having a single (short-term) objective in mind to that end: 'improve his economy'... don't expect this man to care about something likely happening in the future to the planet, even if the proof was as clear as 1+1 = 2.
Does this 72 year old man have grandchildren? If so then I suspect that this man does in fact care how "his" economy performs in the future.
I remember someone pointing out how many childless politicians there are around the world, all of them running up the national debt and living high on big government spending. They don't much care what happens after they are gone. Consider this the next time you have a chance to vote, does this candidate have grandchildren? Having children may not be enough because unless their children have children of their own they may see the next generation as the end of the line. With grandchildren there is going to be a concern on how well things go for the next century.
For politicians to live it up until they die they could set the economy on a slow dive that could last decades before it collapses. For people that have to plan for the next century they will plant seeds for trees that they will never taste the fruit. It's the thinking of the next century that brought us the Hoover Dam and Empire State Building. I want politicians with a plan for the next century. Of course no one can make definitive plans that far out, as a lot can change in 100 years, but they can set us on a path to where we have something to build upon in the future.
Nuclear power.
When I see new nuclear power plants getting built then I will believe that politicians and the public are taking global warming seriously. I have read some encouraging news recently that US federal regulators are making real investments in the future of nuclear power. There's already been a shift in how nuclear power is viewed, and people are starting to embrace it again. One real reason people are embracing it is very self serving, a lot of nuclear power plants are reaching end of life and will be shut down soon and without a new reactor in its place a lot of jobs will be lost as well as a large source of electrical generation capacity in that region.
I don't much care why people are embracing nuclear power, only that people embrace it. Nuclear power is safe, low carbon, domestically sourced, and inexpensive.
Say what you will about past accidents with nuclear power, like Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island, all of them are irrelevant to embracing third and fourth generation nuclear power. All of those past accidents were with second generation nuclear, and as safe as second generation nuclear power has been on the aggregate we will see even safer power with third generation nuclear that is being built now. Fourth generation nuclear, such as molten salt reactors, will be safer still.
I've seen the numbers and models on a national grid based on wind, water, and sun. This is not a future with inexpensive, reliable, and safe electricity. It's quite likely not low in CO2 either. There is no future with inexpensive, plentiful, safe, clean, and "green", electricity that does not include nuclear power.
Here's a couple websites that do the numbers:
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co...
http://withouthotair.com/
printed out the papers, so they can look through it one and then throw it away?
They are sequestering carbon. If everyone prints out enough papers and tosses them in a landfill then we are removing carbon from the atmosphere.
I'm only half joking. The use of trees as carbon sinks, and then removing that carbon by burial, has been proposed by prominent climate scientists. The problem is the tree huggers that studied "international gender studies" in college instead of any real science. We could sequester a lot of carbon with proper management of forests. I don't mean by burying reams upon reams of once read papers but by using the trees for building material, or whatever else we could use that plant fiber for. When the material has served it's purpose as housing or whatever else then we make sure this carbon based material continues as a carbon sink by putting it in a landfill. The houses are a carbon sink while standing, and continue as one when torn down and another built in it's place.
Forest fires are in the news again. Maybe we could both fight the fires and create a carbon sink by cutting down fire breaks in the forest. Just cut a wide swath in the forest to remove the fuel. Take those trees and turn them into lumber, or just bury them all right now, either way we'd stop the fire and make room for more trees to grow.
Instead of complaining on how the problem continues I suggest we work on solutions. If the solutions make a good business case, such as creating cheap building material, then it will be economically beneficial as well as environmentally beneficial.
But how do we make sure that we pick the right person? Maybe have a law that people are assured a freedom to speak.
Like this prevented people like GW and Trump being elected in the US.
Everyone knew who Trump was when they voted for him. He's been living a very public life for at least 40 years. If someone didn't know who he was by the time they were old enough to vote then they've been living in a hole. Trump hosted his own TV show for 15 years, right up until he announced his intention to run for POTUS. No one can claim that Trump was some kind of mystery.
Nearly every country can mine rare earth minerals.
Of course, but only China and Australia able to do so at a profit. They can do this because the laws there allow for the mining of uranium and thorium that are common in rare earth rich ores. In the USA the rare earth mines are limited to less profitable ores that have less uranium and thorium. So, either these nations need to be serious about competing with China on rare earth metals and change the laws, or continue to be at the whim of China for rare earth elements. It's not like these mines can just start digging up ore tomorrow, there will be lead time on starting production even if there is a price hike or law change that makes mining profitable.
And: they are not needed to make magnet. Iron is enough-
Citation needed.
So: no, China has no monopoly.
I already gave a citation that proves otherwise. Try again.
Wow, you know that solar panels are made from silicon, but you don't know that the silicon is refined from sand?
Again, turning sand into the high purity silicon needed for making PV cells is not a simple process. The factories to do this are very expensive, take years to build, and little to none exist in the USA, or pretty much anywhere outside of Asia.
Lucky you have fanbois who mod you up anyway.
I noticed that happens when one provides links to backup their claims.
Nope, most wind power plants are build in USA, Denmark and Germany. China is not even making a dent.
That's not what I said. I said wind turbine production is reliant on rare earth magnets imported from China. I know lots of windmills are made in the USA, I see them getting moved down the highway everyday. That just means they assemble the parts here, the magnets are largely still imported. According to these people China produces a majority of all magnets and the magnets made in the USA are mostly low quality kinds used in toys and novelties.
https://www.allianceorg.com/pd...
Most Silicon as a source for chips and solar panels is made by "Wacker Chemie", a German company, from sand ...
Right, didn't their polysilicon plant blow up last year? I'm pretty sure that happened. I'll let you Google that one yourself.
Solar isn't limited to PV. What is wrong with people like you that cannot see beyond solar=PV?
Maybe it's because concentrated solar power is difficult to do, requires a large land area to build, and produces more CO2 per energy produced than nuclear, wind, or solar PV. Look at the chart about halfway down this page:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/so...
You do not need to feed the grid, you do not need to store power in batteries. Stop associating solar with PV! Pumping water into reservoirs during the day and using gravity to feed turbines is proven tech and has been in operation since the late 1800s. Again, why is it not being implemented?
Here's my guess, this is not popular because to implement it takes a place with a lot of sun, a lot of water, and a river suitable for a dam. Places with a lot of sun tend to not have a lot of water. Places with water and a river worth a dam may not have a lot of sun. Even if they have all three this water is likely to contain a lot of salt, which eats away at turbines. To resolve the issue of salt water on turbines means desalinating the water, but that water is far too valuable as water for drinking to run through a turbine and dump in the sea.
PV is a dead-end. Always has been, always will be.
I won't go that far. PV is great for communication satellites and pocket calculators.
This is, of course, irrelevant to nuclear power. Pu-239 is produced for use in nuclear weapons only. A standard reactor doesn't produce Pu-239 any more than a gasoline engine produces plastics as a side-effect.
Huh?
In any operating nuclear reactor containing U-238, some plutonium-239 will accumulate in the nuclear fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course Pu-239 is produced in a reactor, that's what's called "reactor grade plutonium".
Reactor-grade plutonium/RGPu is the isotopic grade of plutonium that is found in spent nuclear fuel after the primary fuel, that of Uranium-235 that a nuclear power reactor uses, has (burnt up/burnup).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's not "reactor grade" only because it is produced in a reactor but because it's only use is in producing power in a reactor, it's worthless for weapons because it contains too much Pu-240 and/or Pu-238.
In a 2008 paper, Kessler et al. used a thermal analysis to conclude that a hypothetical nuclear explosive device was "technically unfeasible" using reactor grade plutonium from a reactor that had a burn up value of 30 GWd/t using "low technology" designs akin to Fat Man with spherical explosive lenses, or 55 GWd/t for "medium technology" designs.
According to the Kessler et al. criteria, "high-technology" hypothetical nuclear explosive devices(HNEDs), that could be produced by the experienced nuclear weapons states(NWSs) would be technically unfeasible with reactor-grade plutonium containing more than approximately 9% of the heat generating Pu-238 isotope.
What this reactor grade plutonium is good for is jump starting fourth generation nuclear power plants.
https://articles.thmsr.nl/the-...
So people can talk about nuclear power, but the facts are all the growth is in solar and the numbers will only get better.
Here's some facts...
Its overall share of global power generation remains low (1.7%), but that share has more doubled in just three years.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/c...
All growth is not in solar.
In IEO-2017, renewable energy and natural gas are forecast to be the worldâ(TM)s fastest growing energy sources over 2015-2040. Renewables increase at 2.8%/year, and by 2040 will provide 31% of electricity generation, equal to coal; natural gas increases by 2.1%/year. Generation from nuclear is forecast to increase by 1.6% each year. The net nuclear capacity increase is all in non-OECD countries (growth in South Korea is offset by decreases in both Canada and Europe), and China accounts for 67% of the capacity growth. By 2032, the outlook sees China surprass the United States as the country with the most nuclear generating capacity.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Is it likely that solar will play an important part in the global energy production? Yes, quite likely. What it will not do is replace nuclear power. We will need both.
China and a handful of other nations have a near monopoly on the materials needed to make wind and solar power cheap
How do you come to that retarded idea?
https://www.worldatlas.com/art...
https://www.statista.com/stati...
Solar panels are made out of: sand!
No, solar panels are made of silicon and the USA produces very little of it. The kind the USA does produce is predominately low grade used in producing steel and aluminum.
https://minerals.usgs.gov/mine...
Wind turbines from carbon fiber positioned on steel masts.
And with rare earth magnets on top of those steel masts.
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/...
Mining rare earth metals means also digging up a lot of other nasty minerals, like thorium and uranium, that unless there is a market for them they can contaminate the environment. What on earth could we possibly do with all this uranium and thorium? I'm just tossing out an idea here, nuclear power?
The USA does not have the capacity to produce solar panels, and has limited capacity to produce windmills, without imported materials. On the other hand the USA already produces several nuclear power plants every year to supply it's nuclear powered navy. Increasing the capacity to produce nuclear power in the USA is near trivial, we need only remove the political barriers to larger production. To produce more wind and solar in the USA would take years and billions of dollars to build the plants that can turn sand into PV panels and ore into rare earth magnets.
The monopoly that China has on silicon and rare earth metals is not in the raw material in the ground, it's in the factories that turn that raw material into something valuable. Overturning that monopoly will take lots of money and time in making factories.
The entire world is relying on China to play nice for it's supply of wind and solar power. By destroying their ability to produce domestic nuclear power these nations place a very vital resource, energy, at the whimsy of China. Much of Europe is now reliant on Chinese solar and Russian natural gas for energy. If there is ever a trade dispute then I can expect to see Europe get real dark and cold.
I have been informed by a dozen anonymous cowards in this thread, or maybe the same one posting multiple times, that wind and solar are now cheaper than coal and nuclear. Therefore we have solved the problem of global warming. Even greedy bastards that can't be bothered to "think of the children" will be investing in windmills and buying electric cars, because they are now cheaper than everything else.
Nothing to see, move along.
Here's something that bothers me though. China and a handful of other nations have a near monopoly on the materials needed to make wind and solar power cheap. It would be quite embarrassing for a first world nation to abandon nuclear power only to see the price of energy spike because the supply of new wind and solar, and the spare parts to keep current systems running, saw a shortage over a tariff war.
Nuclear power is domestic power. That is unless these first world nations have domestic sources of rare earth metals for wind turbines, and PV fabrication plants for solar collectors.
The article says that new wind and solar is cheaper than old coal and nuclear. But how does it compare to new coal and nuclear? I have a guess. My guess is that new nuclear beats them all. If new nuclear was more expensive than new wind and solar then I'm guessing they would have included that in their report. They speak quite loudly but what they don't say.
If you actually read the report upon which this articles is based then you'd see that the report points out that the price differential does not include any storage. Wind and solar need backup power or the grid becomes unreliable. Just ask UK and Germany how their wind and solar plans are working out for them.
Oh, and another thing is that this is a comparison with utility scale wind and solar. Your rooftop solar and backyard windmill will cost double what it does for utility scale, which puts the price well over the top of nuclear power.
You mean scientific solutions like nuclear power? The complaints against nuclear power boil down to it being unsafe. Okay, which is the greater risk to our safety, nuclear power or global warming? If someone wishes to make a case that nuclear power is in fact a greater threat then my response is, "Problem solved!" If nuclear power is a greater threat to humanity than global warming then we have solved all our energy problems. Move along, nothing to see here.
If nuclear power is less of a threat to humanity than global warming then we need to build nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow, because if the fear mongers on global warming are to be believed then there may not be a tomorrow.
So, you "scientifically minded" global warming fear mongers, which is it? Have we solved the problem or not?
The science tells us that nuclear power is as safe and "green" as wind, water, and sun for power. Science tells us we can build nuclear power plants that are "walk away safe", and will shut themselves down if there is a problem and no one is there to activate the safety mechanisms. All the safety systems would be driven by natural processes like gravity to dump in neutron absorbing solutions and convection of air to cool everything. The production of CO2 in building and operating a nuclear power plant is as low as any "carbon free" energy source like wind and solar. The problems of waste products from nuclear fission are solvable with proper processing to extract the valuable isotopes that are produced (and direct them for use in medicine or industry, if not for making new fuel), and the rest can be vitrified and buried underground where it can hurt no one. Any problems with nuclear power is either a myth or solvable with application of science.
Here's what really boggles me, with all the scientific advancement we've had in reducing humanities impact on the environment there are very few people that will recognize how far we have come. We are doing an excellent job in protecting the environment. This isn't just in relation to the shit job of environmental protection in the past but in absolute terms in getting more food from less land, using fewer resources (in money, manpower, etc.), and creating more open land for wildlife than would have happened naturally. It would be nice if once in a while I was able to see some recognition of how well things are going. Things can certainly improve but we are already doing very well right now.