Translation: We can just happily increase emissions, confident that we can contain the crisis outside our borders.
I'm not sure I agree with you but let's run with this and see where it takes us.
So, we have a series of heat waves around the world and so the developed nations are supposed to reduce their carbon footprint. How? Well, reduce the use of electrical devices in the home. Like air conditioning.... During a heat wave.... That's not going to be convincing. People in these developed nations make up perhaps 1/4 of the world's population. They look around and they have it pretty nice. They have iPhones, air conditioning, plenty of food and clean water, and general social order.
Let's take some people in these developed nations that took a few history courses in college. They know that wars are the norm. At any given time some group is trying to kill another group. They fight over all kinds of things, including things like oil, water, land, and who's god is better. There's no reason to believe peace can ever be achieved. So long as it happens somewhere else to someone else then they'll maybe read about it in newspapers and history books. Also in these history books these people learn that climate has changed in the past, both colder and warmer than it is now. These changes were very gradual. People adjusted to the climate, developing new traditions, growing different crops, and so on. Things were hard at time but things are always hard at times.
Maybe some of these people in the developed countries simply like to read. They'll read about Sherlock Holmes, and his flatmate Dr. Watson. They'll learn that Dr. Watson was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, because there's always a war in Afghanistan. Global warming won't change this, and neither will turning off their air conditioning to prevent it.
Except if a great power like the US loses food security, suddenly what happens outside its borders becomes orders of a magnitude more important.
Why would anyone believe that the USA, or any other developed nation, "suddenly" have a food security problem? Global warming might shift rain patterns and such but this doesn't happen overnight. The developed world produces plenty of food, and exports plenty to the underdeveloped world. Underdeveloped nations like Afghanistan, where if they stopped fighting each other then maybe they could plant some crops (besides opium poppies) and learn to feed themselves. There's not likely to be many people upset in the developed world if they have to stop exporting food due to shortages at home, or another resource war making shipments difficult. Maybe that's not "nice" or "fair" but it is human nature.
What if the bulk of the US's food ends up being grown in Canada?
Well, again, that's not going to happen overnight. The USA and Canada have been on friendly terms for a very long time, and there's really no reason to suspect this will change any time soon.
At that point, a foreign nation is in control of a significant aspect of US stability.
The USA and Canada have always been in control of the other's stability. Both nations rely on the other for things like natural gas, oil, uranium, coal, lumber, milk/cheese/dairy, maple syrup, corn syrup, fruits, vegetables, pork, beef, corn, wheat, soybeans, steel, aluminum, copper, and so on. This trade often goes both ways because it's easier to go up and down coasts than across the continental divide. Global warming or not this will not change.
Traditionally, when nations have found themselves beholden to external markets for their wellbeing, they have done something about it. Britain built an empire, in no small part because its economic wellbeing, including feeding its populace, became a pre-eminent problem.
I can imagine a lot of island nations will feel beholden to foreign markets. Again, this will not cha
No, the claim is it is more appropriate energy infrastructure for the 21st century, now that we've had the internet for decades and we can read.
Yes, I can read and I do have access to the internet. That does not exempt you from citing a source to back up your claims. I'm not going to try to chase down your claims for you, tell you I can't find it, and then you simply get smug and tell me I'm not looking hard enough. Cut the unsubstantiated claims and provide a link once in a while.
I think lead cooled reactors would be better.
Why? And cite a source.
Yeah, except in the technology your thinking of leaves a brand new waste stream and doesn't address the old one.
Bullshit. Citation needed.
So what. They don't take up multiple exclusion zones when they blow up (3600sqKm for Chernobyl) and they can be put in places where people aren't.
No one has any plans to duplicate the RBMK reactor at Chernobyl, so bringing that up as a case against a future design does not follow. You can bring up solar power and I can point to Boy Scouts getting food poisoning from a "solar oven". You can bring up wind power and I can bring up Grandpa's windmill on the farm used to pump water. Ford's Pinto was not a safe vehicle but that has nothing to do with the decision on the purchase of a 2018 model year F-150.
If you want to criticize nuclear power then do so on designs that people are actually proposing to build. I can agree that these old nuclear reactors, built about the same time as those at Chernobyl, should be replaced. They cannot be replaced by wind and solar any time soon at current rates of development. That can only be done with new nuclear. Citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Which is a non-issue as residential use, again, is less than 15% of the state's water usage. Half the population could move out tomorrow and the other half could stop bathing, and you wouldn't even notice the difference.
I'd like to see the numbers on that. If California was able to drop it's consumption of water overnight by 10% and still have problems supplying the water it needs then they are in very serious need of more infrastructure to get water.
When the vast majority of water use in the state comes from farmers...but....it's not about farmers? That's a lovely square peg you have but I don't see it fitting into this round hole.
Northern California has a lot of agriculture, built upon local sources of water. Southern California is where the drought is, and they have been piping in water from the north to get water for the population centers and industry. If the farmers in the north have enough water but the industry and residences in the south do not then that is a sign of poor management of the local governments there to make sure they have sufficient water supply.
When the vast majority of water use in the state comes from farmers...but....it's not about farmers? That's a lovely square peg you have but I don't see it fitting into this round hole.
That's right, it's not about the farmers. They drilled the wells and dug the canals to get water for themselves. They've been nice to sell some to the south but the local governments' inability to plan for a drought in the south does not mean the governments and private citizens in the north are obligated to just give them water.
How about this: if oil companies want fracking so bad, they can get together with cattle ranchers - sure it was great to steal bragging rights to being the cheese capital of the US but they could really let that go back to Wisconsin - or almond farmers who use one gallon of water to produce a single nut - and pay billions to build desalinization plants themselves.
Water is a commodity. Water rights are a thing. These ranchers with wells on their property and canals to their land own that water. If you want some of it then you have to buy it from them at the price they demand. If they don't want to sell then you need to look elsewhere.
Again, industry is the first sector hurt by these water hogs. Let's say you move to California and purchase some land to have a nice pot farm. You have a crew hired and buyers lined up for hemp products, medical oils, and Willie Nelson's tour bus - BUT WAIT! You find out that upstream from you is a fucking rice farmer, using the finest 12 century agriculture techniques (and I mean 12th century BC) and grandfathered water rights to flood his paddies, and all the other "job creators" in the vicinity can go screw themselves. Why would you want an equal tax burden for a desalinization plant when the rate of use is very, very, very far from equal?
Then don't make the desalination plant a public project. Allow private industry to build their own desalination plants and allow them to sell the water to the highest bidder.
If people are so stupid to line up a farm or ranch and not plan properly for their water supply then they deserve to go out of business. If that rice farmer can make more money growing rice than selling the water then I say let the guy keep his water. If the guy could make more selling water than growing rice, but still decides to not sell the water then I say let the guy keep the water. It's his water, he should be able to do with it as he pleases.
Again, this is a problem of the city governments in the south of the state not planning properly for the water needs of the people they are supposed to serve. Desalination is a thing, it's done all over the world, and there is no reason that the cities cannot build desalination plants, or allow private corporations to build them.
You mean spend fantastic sums of money just so said cattle ranchers and almond farmers can go on living beyond the water supply's means. How about....no.
I mean California should spend "fantastic" sums of money so people can eat, drink, bathe, and flush their toilets. Failing to do so could result in a sanitation nightmare. There's already an odorous fog about many California cities from the feces in the street and unwashed hippies.
California has had a water supply problem for a very long time. If they intend to keep the population happy and healthy then they need to get water from somewhere. It doesn't have to be from desalination but that's the most logical source given that they've tapped out most every river and aquifer in the state, and the states that share a border with them.
Don't tell me that desalination is out of line, that's standard practice around the world for coastal cities to get the water they need. This isn't about the farmers, this is about the state. The state has failed to meet the needs of the people that need water. You can pick on the low hanging fruit and blame them but in the end, assuming that California desires to grow it's population and/or industry, they will need more desalination plants.
California is in a very unique position, they have access to the sea and arid landlocked states as neighbors. If they were smart then they'd be producing more than enough water for themselves so they could sell the excess to their neighbors. Civilization needs clean water. If California wants to drive out farmers, industry, and residents to save "fantastic" sums of money by not desalinating water then they are very very stupid.
Because that is your Nuclear Ideology, it is your ism, your belief system that wants to make us believe the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing when it is hot.
That's not what I claimed and you know it. I stated that wind and solar have reduced output in a heatwave, just as nuclear power has reduced output in a heat wave. I suspect you know this otherwise you would have provided a citation on that. I did some searching and found that PV panels can see a 10% to 35% reduction in output in high heat. If you don't believe me then I'd like to see what you believe a more accurate number would be.
Solar Thermal is an immediate, viable, long term, economical and technologically underdeveloped base-load replacement for nuclear power.
Yes, I've seen that. The claim is that the sun can heat a molten salt, used to heat air in open or closed cycle gas turbines, do so without the use of water as a heat sink, and therefore perfect for use in hot arid climates. This allows for long term storage of energy (long term = hours or days, not months), load follow capability, as well as waste heat suitable for desalination and other industrial processes. I do not dispute this. Want to know why I don't dispute this? Because this exact same technology is what is planned for in future molten salt nuclear reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Go ahead, bring on the molten salt solar thermal power. That will prove the technology for use in nuclear reactors. You think energy storage only helps wind and solar? It helps nuclear power just as much, if not more. Here's where nuclear beats out solar on the molten salt storage, it doesn't take multiple square miles to achieve 1 gigawatt of power. It might take the area of a medium sized airport, but that's mostly to provide an ample security buffer around a vital civil asset, no different than that around a water reservoir, hydroelectric dam, or... well, an airport.
Domestic Solar is the perfect peaking solution to replace nuclear power. Wind is a new type of power generation mechanism with a vastly more dynamic upgrade cycle than anything we've see so far, it has massive promise to replace nuclear power.
I'll believe it when I see it. Since nuclear power provides 20% of the electricity consumed in the USA, and you claim that wind and solar are going to replace it, do I really need to provide a citation for you on the current viability of nuclear power? It seems you've admitted to that already.
Maybe it's more of your rhetoric. As you said of nuclear "they still produce power" the only difference is solar and wind don't explode and cause mass evacuations like a nuclear plant does when they overheat, they just make less power.
Unlike Nuclear, coal and everything else developed in the 19th and 20th century that produce heat, solar and wind is a 21st century solution that reduces the heat load
I've got a Chevy Citation that I'm going to use to run your stupid face over with. Go to wikipedo if you want.
I did go to Wikipedia, that's how I found the citation I gave in my previous post. I'm curious how you came to believe nuclear to be orders of magnitude more expensive than wind and solar. I must have missed what you saw on Wikipedia. Help me out and point to where you found what you believe you found.
You really are a useless cunt aren't you.
That may also be true, but I'd like a citation on that as well.
Where are you going to get the various rare earths and other metals needed to prevent embrittlement of the structures and housing of the nuclear plant?
The problem of the USA not producing the rare earth metals it needs domestically is due to existing policy on producing thorium and uranium. Rare earth metals exist in the ground in ores that also have high concentrations of thorium and uranium. Removing uranium and thorium from the ground, and concentrating them as a byproduct of extracting the rare earth metals is, in the eyes of the federal government, "producing weapons grade materials" and places such mines under considerable scrutiny and regulations on what is done with the tails of extraction. With any other mining the tails are simply placed back in the hole they came from and the government simply pretends it was never disturbed.
If we allow for more sane regulation on the mining of thorium then we'd be able to get a domestic supply of rare earth metals. The bonus to this is that mining for rare earth metals means producing nuclear fuel in the form of the uranium and thorium left over in the extraction process. It just falls out of the processing in a bin as the other metals are separated.
Any costing of nuclear power should include how supply will be guaranteed for the lifetime of the plant. Given that many of the elements are in high demand from other industrial sectors, that's not a simple task. Furthermore, the estimates are likely to be very rubbery when projected over 20+ years.
The solutions for the rare earth metal shortage, and it's cause from bad thorium policy, is covered well by Gordon McDowell in his videos. I suggest you take a look at a few of them. https://www.youtube.com/user/g...
I don't know if this is a "simple task" but it's a failure of policy, not physics.
Remember when people used to talk about how nuclear would bring about a future where power was "too cheap to meter"?
No. I've read about it though. How old are you? I'm pretty sure those claims died out in the 1960s or 1970s. Three Mile Island and the movie China Syndrome put an end to claims of being too cheap to meter, as far as I can tell. Those were in 1979 but the protestations on nuclear power predated both by quite a margin. "Too cheap to meter" would have been in the days when Thunderbirds and Star Trek were on TV, which were visions of a nuclear powered future.
Residential water use is under 15% of California's water supply - the rest is industry. If you want to do something about limited water, ban fracking, cattle ranching, almond & rice farming.
In other words ban the things that make money in the state, and therefore pay the taxes, and when the money runs out to pay for wind subsidies, public education, and all the other goodies the taxes pay for, the people will leave. That works for me... except the part where these people might come to my state.
Here's another idea. Build some water reservoirs, desalination plants, and power plants to make them work, and everyone can have water. If you want to argue that this would cost too much then consider this, what costs more, driving out industry and therefore the people paying the taxes, or raising the taxes more to get more water and driving out industry anyway from the higher costs they bear? Or, maybe, just perhaps, the state is spending far too much money on wind and solar subsidies that created this shortage of tax dollars and electricity, and by eliminating the subsidies they solve the problems of not having money for making more drinking water, while also decreasing their spending. Everyone wins... except the wind lobby that's been living off the subsidies.
What impact will not doing it have on our society? What happens when rain belts shift northward and major industrial powers suddenly have food security problems?
The major industrial powers will not "suddenly" have food insecurity problems. The USA imports a lot of food. The USA also exports a lot of food. What is exported are things like beef, wheat, and corn. What's imported are things like coffee, bananas, and avocados. This might mean Americans have a shortage of caffeine and guacamole but they will be able to get enough calories and nutrients.
Other industrial nations have similar capacity to feed themselves. Maybe not to the extent of the USA but if they maintain peaceful relations with their neighbors, the ability to transport commodities is maintained to a reasonable level, and general order of society is maintained, then the shifting of climate patterns will not be a cause of societal collapse.
Could shifting rain patterns cause "climate change refugees", resource wars, and other societal problems? I guess that it might, but this is a problem of places with existing problems of poor infrastructure, corrupt government, and civil unrest, spilling over into stable nations. This sucks but this is not a problem in the industrial nations, it's a problem of industrial nations having to deal with external problems migrating in to become internal problems. They can address this by a number of means, which could fix itself with a collapse of transportation. If these industrialized nations are so handicapped by climate change that they cannot continue trade with nations that produce the coffee and avocados they consume then the ability for the importation of refugees will also be handicapped.
The problems in this potential future is no different than it is now. These nations will have to clean up their own house or live in the shit hole they made for themselves.
I remember a conversation with a Persian man (he refused to call himself Iranian). He said that he'd eat Wonder Bread, Corn Flakes, and other foods imported from the USA. He recognized everything on the grocery stores in the USA as things he had in "Persia". If the industrialized nations stopped burning oil then nations that sell oil for food will be hit first and hit hardest. Those nations that sell oil for food are also among the least industrialized.
All you do is you orient the solar panels such that they produce the most power when the power is needed most. Problem solved with solar and with no need for nuclear, once again.
Citation needed.
I've seen the data and power is needed most shortly before sunset, when orienting your solar panels does nothing. Unless you are "orienting" your panels about 1000 miles off shore it's not helpful.
Not cost effective, just like nuclear power.
Citation needed.
I see that California has several desalination plants already, with plans for many more. I admit that pumping the water to another state could be more trouble than it's worth but building desalination plants is worth the trouble otherwise they would not be building them now, and if they build up reservoirs for the fresh water (which I'm sure that they already have) then they should be able to "tank up" fresh water when energy is cheap and stop desalination when it's expensive.
You leave out of the equation building high voltage DC transmission lines to move the electricity to distant markets.
If you do that while still keeping the subsidies for windmills to produce power, even when that power isn't needed, then those power lines just export the problems of subsidies to other states.
California is just one pile of mismanagement on top of more mismanagement. They created this shortage of storage with an abundance of wind and solar subsidies. Stop subsidizing this and the problem will resolve itself.
Every nation that has nuclear power also has a national fund to decommission them, paid for by the utilities that own the nuclear power plants. If the amount of money in these funds is insufficient to pay for the decommissioning then that is a failure in government policy to properly tax the utilities for this fund, or a failure of the government to control the costs of decommissioning.
Government estimates not meeting demands is not a failure of physics, that's a failure of government and policy to create proper estimates.
If the cost of decommissioning grows with the government estimates, because of some property of physics, then the government can lower the costs by lowering the estimates. Here's an idea, estimate the costs to be negative and see what happens.
I can hear it now... "WTF? Nuclear power? But nuclear power plants had to reduce output because of the heat! Jackass!"
If the problem is carbon emissions from electricity then the solution is more electricity from energy sources with the lowest carbon emissions. That would be nuclear power. The nuclear power plants had to reduce output but that's not the same as no output, they still produce power.
Also, any power plant that uses a heat differential between the sea water and the heat source will see reduced output as temperatures rise. That would be true of nuclear, coal, natural gas, wood, cattle dung, or solar thermal. Reduced output from nuclear power because of the heat is for some reason a headline worth printing. Reduced output of solar and wind from the heat is not something any dinosaur news source is willing to write. Or rather not a headline Slashdot moderators would be wiling to bring up.
It's not too hard to find sources giving the reduced output from PV panels and solar thermal systems in high heat, but that's not headline material for some reason. Maybe it's because we get so little of our energy from solar. But then why do we get so little of our energy from solar? Maybe because when we need it most the power isn't there?
I don't really understand paying to get rid of surplus electricity. Isn't the point to sell electricity?
No, the point is to make money.
Because of subsidies for wind and solar there is an incentive to "sell" electricity at a negative price. Let's consider a scenario of wind and solar getting a subsidy of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour when electricity is on average costing about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The costs borne by wind and solar are in capital, labor, and so forth, and nothing for fuel. They want to get paid as much as they can, as often as they can. If that means paying people 2, 3, or or even 4 cents, per kilowatt-hour to take their electricity to get 5 cents from the government then they still make a profit. If they simply don't produce electricity at that time then they are effectively losing money.
The people running the windmills don't much care what the people do with the electricity, they just want a profit. If the people are paid to pump water up a hill then we, as a country/state/society/whatever, see a benefit in cheaper power in the future and/or more water available for drinking and irrigation. If the people buying the power are just opening the doors on their warehouses and turning on the electric heaters inside then we lose out on this, that's just wasted tax money.
We've seen things like this happen, so we should do something to stop it. The easiest way to end this waste is end the wind subsidies. Another way is to create a civil project that pumps water up a hill to drive electric turbines and/or desalination systems downstream. Given that a desalination plant and/or desalination facility would be willing to buy excess electrical generation capacity at low prices then we don't need a government to help this along, we'd just need government to get out of the way and allow these facilities to get built.
The profit motive is very powerful. It's not "bad" or "good", it just is. People inherently desire profit because it's through profit from our labor and investment that we can live. If we simply create laws and government policy to direct this profit motive, instead of fighting it, then we could see many great things done for the benefit of all. This application of profit motive does mean that some people will profit more than others, but this is preferable to all being equal in misery and poverty.
If wind and solar needs storage to provide power that is inexpensive, low carbon, and reliable, then we need storage that is inexpensive, reliable and low carbon. That means we need nuclear power, because fuel is storage and uranium is a low carbon fuel.
We will see an expansion of the use of nuclear power because no president will allow the lights to go out in the country, and that applies to any country that has a president. The sooner we come to this realization and start building nuclear power the less stress this will have on the economy and the environment.
Whatever problems people have brought up against nuclear power they have always been problems of policy, not physics. We can change policy, we can't change the laws of physics.
Desalination plants are ineffective, even more costly, and there are over a dozen better options including using the power to convince farmers to not waste so much water.
The farmers are "wasting" water? I grew up on a farm and like any business we went to great lengths to eliminate waste. I dispute your claim solely on the basis that wasting water diminishes their profits. You can claim they value money over saving water but I claim they save the water because they value money. What it comes down to is that California is unwilling to tell the "environmentalists" that the environment includes people. People need water for food, and the farmers know how to turn water into food. Give them water or people go hungry.
If you are so self hating that you believe the delta smelt are more valuable than your fellow humans then I suggest you go jump in a lake. I'm assuming you are human, but on the internet no one can be sure you are not a dog.
The natural gas people must just love those wind and solar subsidies. What wind and solar power need to provide reliable electricity is a source of backup power. Right now, in most every part of the world, this means natural gas. The difference though between burning natural gas in a thermal plant (meaning boiling water) and a turbine is that the turbine needs twice the volume of natural gas than the thermal plant for the same energy out. This is because a turbine is 20% to 40% efficient and a combined cycle plant is 50% to 65% efficient.
The more windmills and solar power out there the more natural gas is burned in backup power turbines instead of base load thermal plants.
The one competitor to natural gas as backup power is hydroelectric, as hydroelectric power shares the property with turbines of being able to follow rapidly shifting demand. Pumped storage hydro extends the ability of a dam to provide storage, as it's no longer limited to snow melt and rainfall in the level of water behind the dam. What dams still need though to be affordable storage is favorable geography. It may be possible to build a pumped hydro storage plant on land that is as flat as a pancake but that would be extremely expensive. So, what is done instead is fuel is used as storage.
At the moment, natural gas is cheap, but its not at all clear how costs will play out in the future.
No, it's becoming exceedingly clear how the costs will play out in the future. The price of electricity will double or triple. First, there is the capital cost of the wind and solar. Second, there is the capital cost of the storage and/or backup. Given that the primary means for storage right now is in the form of natural gas not burned when the sun shines and wind blows we have a third reason for rising costs, burning natural gas in inefficient turbines instead of efficient thermal plants.
The natural gas industry would love for everything to be shifted over to natural gas. But the cost of natural gas is not fixed. The more we use, the higher the price.
That is correct, the more we rely on natural gas as backup for wind and solar the more expensive natural gas becomes. We can address this to a point with pumped hydro storage but we've only started doing this because we've exceeded the natural storage capability of damming up a river and allowing the water to flow past the turbines as we need the power.
Wind and solar only make sense up to the point it exceeds the capacity of the power grid to soak up it's variability within the bounds of the natural variability of the demand. Beyond that we would be building excess storage and backup solely for the purpose of addressing the variability of wind as solar as primary energy sources.
If we have not already met the limits of wind and solar to provide affordable electricity then we will meet that limit very soon. After that we are wasting money on variable energy sources and then tossing more into that money pit with building storage to address that variability.
On shore wind, nuclear, and coal are all about the same cost, within the error bars of each other. Solar is expensive, and needs storage to follow load, making it cost even more. Wind also needs storage but if coupled with natural gas (the cheapest means we have to produce electricity right now), coal, and nuclear then it's a viable energy source. Assuming the goal is reducing CO2 then we'll rule out coal, leaving nuclear (a tiny fraction of CO2 compared to coal) and natural gas (about half the CO2 of coal), as backup for the wind. But, as the article points out, the problem with wind is the lack of storage. Here's the solution...
Fuel is storage.
With a mix of wind, nuclear, and natural gas we can get energy that is inexpensive, low CO2, and reliable. This means that states like California would have to start building new nuclear power plants and natural gas burning power plants to go along with the wind power. Sure, California is a sunny place so maybe they have locations where solar is as cheap as the rest so go with it if it makes sense.
The problem is storage and California has been destroying their storage capacity with the shutting down of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Stop doing that and the problem disappears.
There's an excess of energy according to TFS and TFA. So what exactly are we wasting here?
What's wasted is the capacity to use that energy later, when it's needed.
Los Angeles has a chronic problem of a shortage of power production in the summer, when the sun is high and winds are low. They might have an excess of power in the morning with all that solar power but unless people want to cool their houses and buildings to freezing and then still have them get unbearably hot in the afternoon this will continue to be a problem.
Here's what I propose as an alternate solution, and I accept that this may be unfeasible. I propose California build desalination plants along the shore to use that excess power. This will address their water shortages as well. The energy storage aspect comes in pumping desalinated water to the Hoover Dam, this addresses a water shortage problem downstream of the Hoover Dam. While they are at it maybe they can dump some of that water in the Rio Grande. So much water is taken from the Rio Grande that there are times the river no longer reaches the ocean, or the flow reverses and salt water invades the ecosystem. There's already a tunnel connecting the Colorado river to the Rio Grande but I do not know how much water can and does flow through it.
There's my proposal, don't build a pipe from a downstream location and pump water up to Lake Mead to get electricity storage for LA. Have LA pump the energy to the lake in the form of desalinated water. LA gets water, those downstream of the Hoover Dam get water, and LA still gets the electricity storage they need.
I'm done with this. We've gone far off track and your arguments are taking what I said, cranking a "what if" scenario up to 11, and claiming this makes it immoral/unfeasible/whatever in every instance.
Also, I can't reason you out of what you didn't reason yourself into. Go calm down, have a glass of warm milk or something, and perhaps we can pick this up some other time.
Then don't pay them. This does two things, it gets rid of the costs and overhead of managing the money, and it filters out the con artists that take the government check for themselves and abuse the children. People don't generally take foster children in to get paid, they do it as a service to the community.
Meanwhile, if your parents were even vaguely eligible for a school lunch program
The national school lunch program has been a thing since the 1940s and grown ever since. It's allowed for not only schools to provide subsidized lunches but also things like churches and summer camps to get funding. The school I attended had a budget for the school year on food, with an expected amount from families that applied to the government for a subsidy. The school had to manage this with "tokens" that they'd provide students to "buy" a lunch at the cafeteria. The claim was that children wouldn't know who got the free lunch since (supposedly) everyone would be buying tokens to pay for the lunch. This didn't hide anything because students that had the parents pay would often just pay in cash at the cafeteria line, and those with free or subsidized lunches would pay with the tokens. Paying in cash became something of a status symbol, a form of conspicuous consumption perhaps.
If the school did their budget correctly the total at the end of the year, from students paying in cash and students that had parents apply for government subsidy, would match what was spent at the beginning of the year. The school held various events through the year to promote donations from the community, in part to pay for the lunches.
My parents understood that there is no such thing as a free lunch. In this case it was quite literal. They knew that their taxes were paying for those "free" lunches and so they decided to not participate in the scam. This goes with the public schools as well, the parents will end up paying for the education in the end. This will be directly with taxes or indirectly in higher prices because the people they buy products and services have to pay that tax. This is a problem because the government now takes a cut on the federal, state, county, and city level to manage this distribution of funds. We'd all be better off if the public school system disappeared and the schools were private. At a minimum schools should be managed at the lowest level that is practical, that being at the level of the county, city, or other similar level of government.
My parents knew that they were effectively paying double for education, they funded the public school and then they paid tuition at the private school. They wanted their children to get an education better than "good enough for government work". If everyone figured this out then we'd have far better education in this country, and the public school teachers can lecture to empty rooms.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: We can just happily increase emissions, confident that we can contain the crisis outside our borders.
I'm not sure I agree with you but let's run with this and see where it takes us.
So, we have a series of heat waves around the world and so the developed nations are supposed to reduce their carbon footprint. How? Well, reduce the use of electrical devices in the home. Like air conditioning.... During a heat wave.... That's not going to be convincing. People in these developed nations make up perhaps 1/4 of the world's population. They look around and they have it pretty nice. They have iPhones, air conditioning, plenty of food and clean water, and general social order.
Let's take some people in these developed nations that took a few history courses in college. They know that wars are the norm. At any given time some group is trying to kill another group. They fight over all kinds of things, including things like oil, water, land, and who's god is better. There's no reason to believe peace can ever be achieved. So long as it happens somewhere else to someone else then they'll maybe read about it in newspapers and history books. Also in these history books these people learn that climate has changed in the past, both colder and warmer than it is now. These changes were very gradual. People adjusted to the climate, developing new traditions, growing different crops, and so on. Things were hard at time but things are always hard at times.
Maybe some of these people in the developed countries simply like to read. They'll read about Sherlock Holmes, and his flatmate Dr. Watson. They'll learn that Dr. Watson was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, because there's always a war in Afghanistan. Global warming won't change this, and neither will turning off their air conditioning to prevent it.
Except if a great power like the US loses food security, suddenly what happens outside its borders becomes orders of a magnitude more important.
Why would anyone believe that the USA, or any other developed nation, "suddenly" have a food security problem? Global warming might shift rain patterns and such but this doesn't happen overnight. The developed world produces plenty of food, and exports plenty to the underdeveloped world. Underdeveloped nations like Afghanistan, where if they stopped fighting each other then maybe they could plant some crops (besides opium poppies) and learn to feed themselves. There's not likely to be many people upset in the developed world if they have to stop exporting food due to shortages at home, or another resource war making shipments difficult. Maybe that's not "nice" or "fair" but it is human nature.
What if the bulk of the US's food ends up being grown in Canada?
Well, again, that's not going to happen overnight. The USA and Canada have been on friendly terms for a very long time, and there's really no reason to suspect this will change any time soon.
At that point, a foreign nation is in control of a significant aspect of US stability.
The USA and Canada have always been in control of the other's stability. Both nations rely on the other for things like natural gas, oil, uranium, coal, lumber, milk/cheese/dairy, maple syrup, corn syrup, fruits, vegetables, pork, beef, corn, wheat, soybeans, steel, aluminum, copper, and so on. This trade often goes both ways because it's easier to go up and down coasts than across the continental divide. Global warming or not this will not change.
Traditionally, when nations have found themselves beholden to external markets for their wellbeing, they have done something about it. Britain built an empire, in no small part because its economic wellbeing, including feeding its populace, became a pre-eminent problem.
I can imagine a lot of island nations will feel beholden to foreign markets. Again, this will not cha
No, the claim is it is more appropriate energy infrastructure for the 21st century, now that we've had the internet for decades and we can read.
Yes, I can read and I do have access to the internet. That does not exempt you from citing a source to back up your claims. I'm not going to try to chase down your claims for you, tell you I can't find it, and then you simply get smug and tell me I'm not looking hard enough. Cut the unsubstantiated claims and provide a link once in a while.
I think lead cooled reactors would be better.
Why? And cite a source.
Yeah, except in the technology your thinking of leaves a brand new waste stream and doesn't address the old one.
Bullshit. Citation needed.
So what. They don't take up multiple exclusion zones when they blow up (3600sqKm for Chernobyl) and they can be put in places where people aren't.
Nuclear power is still safer than any other energy source we have access to.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
No one has any plans to duplicate the RBMK reactor at Chernobyl, so bringing that up as a case against a future design does not follow. You can bring up solar power and I can point to Boy Scouts getting food poisoning from a "solar oven". You can bring up wind power and I can bring up Grandpa's windmill on the farm used to pump water. Ford's Pinto was not a safe vehicle but that has nothing to do with the decision on the purchase of a 2018 model year F-150.
If you want to criticize nuclear power then do so on designs that people are actually proposing to build. I can agree that these old nuclear reactors, built about the same time as those at Chernobyl, should be replaced. They cannot be replaced by wind and solar any time soon at current rates of development. That can only be done with new nuclear. Citation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Which is a non-issue as residential use, again, is less than 15% of the state's water usage. Half the population could move out tomorrow and the other half could stop bathing, and you wouldn't even notice the difference.
I'd like to see the numbers on that. If California was able to drop it's consumption of water overnight by 10% and still have problems supplying the water it needs then they are in very serious need of more infrastructure to get water.
When the vast majority of water use in the state comes from farmers...but....it's not about farmers? That's a lovely square peg you have but I don't see it fitting into this round hole.
Northern California has a lot of agriculture, built upon local sources of water. Southern California is where the drought is, and they have been piping in water from the north to get water for the population centers and industry. If the farmers in the north have enough water but the industry and residences in the south do not then that is a sign of poor management of the local governments there to make sure they have sufficient water supply.
When the vast majority of water use in the state comes from farmers...but....it's not about farmers? That's a lovely square peg you have but I don't see it fitting into this round hole.
That's right, it's not about the farmers. They drilled the wells and dug the canals to get water for themselves. They've been nice to sell some to the south but the local governments' inability to plan for a drought in the south does not mean the governments and private citizens in the north are obligated to just give them water.
How about this: if oil companies want fracking so bad, they can get together with cattle ranchers - sure it was great to steal bragging rights to being the cheese capital of the US but they could really let that go back to Wisconsin - or almond farmers who use one gallon of water to produce a single nut - and pay billions to build desalinization plants themselves.
Water is a commodity. Water rights are a thing. These ranchers with wells on their property and canals to their land own that water. If you want some of it then you have to buy it from them at the price they demand. If they don't want to sell then you need to look elsewhere.
Again, industry is the first sector hurt by these water hogs. Let's say you move to California and purchase some land to have a nice pot farm. You have a crew hired and buyers lined up for hemp products, medical oils, and Willie Nelson's tour bus - BUT WAIT! You find out that upstream from you is a fucking rice farmer, using the finest 12 century agriculture techniques (and I mean 12th century BC) and grandfathered water rights to flood his paddies, and all the other "job creators" in the vicinity can go screw themselves. Why would you want an equal tax burden for a desalinization plant when the rate of use is very, very, very far from equal?
Then don't make the desalination plant a public project. Allow private industry to build their own desalination plants and allow them to sell the water to the highest bidder.
If people are so stupid to line up a farm or ranch and not plan properly for their water supply then they deserve to go out of business. If that rice farmer can make more money growing rice than selling the water then I say let the guy keep his water. If the guy could make more selling water than growing rice, but still decides to not sell the water then I say let the guy keep the water. It's his water, he should be able to do with it as he pleases.
Again, this is a problem of the city governments in the south of the state not planning properly for the water needs of the people they are supposed to serve. Desalination is a thing, it's done all over the world, and there is no reason that the cities cannot build desalination plants, or allow private corporations to build them.
Droug
I just handed you your head on a platter and that's the best you got?
You mean spend fantastic sums of money just so said cattle ranchers and almond farmers can go on living beyond the water supply's means. How about....no.
I mean California should spend "fantastic" sums of money so people can eat, drink, bathe, and flush their toilets. Failing to do so could result in a sanitation nightmare. There's already an odorous fog about many California cities from the feces in the street and unwashed hippies.
California has had a water supply problem for a very long time. If they intend to keep the population happy and healthy then they need to get water from somewhere. It doesn't have to be from desalination but that's the most logical source given that they've tapped out most every river and aquifer in the state, and the states that share a border with them.
Don't tell me that desalination is out of line, that's standard practice around the world for coastal cities to get the water they need. This isn't about the farmers, this is about the state. The state has failed to meet the needs of the people that need water. You can pick on the low hanging fruit and blame them but in the end, assuming that California desires to grow it's population and/or industry, they will need more desalination plants.
California is in a very unique position, they have access to the sea and arid landlocked states as neighbors. If they were smart then they'd be producing more than enough water for themselves so they could sell the excess to their neighbors. Civilization needs clean water. If California wants to drive out farmers, industry, and residents to save "fantastic" sums of money by not desalinating water then they are very very stupid.
Because that is your Nuclear Ideology, it is your ism, your belief system that wants to make us believe the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing when it is hot.
That's not what I claimed and you know it. I stated that wind and solar have reduced output in a heatwave, just as nuclear power has reduced output in a heat wave. I suspect you know this otherwise you would have provided a citation on that. I did some searching and found that PV panels can see a 10% to 35% reduction in output in high heat. If you don't believe me then I'd like to see what you believe a more accurate number would be.
Solar Thermal is an immediate, viable, long term, economical and technologically underdeveloped base-load replacement for nuclear power.
Yes, I've seen that. The claim is that the sun can heat a molten salt, used to heat air in open or closed cycle gas turbines, do so without the use of water as a heat sink, and therefore perfect for use in hot arid climates. This allows for long term storage of energy (long term = hours or days, not months), load follow capability, as well as waste heat suitable for desalination and other industrial processes. I do not dispute this. Want to know why I don't dispute this? Because this exact same technology is what is planned for in future molten salt nuclear reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Go ahead, bring on the molten salt solar thermal power. That will prove the technology for use in nuclear reactors. You think energy storage only helps wind and solar? It helps nuclear power just as much, if not more. Here's where nuclear beats out solar on the molten salt storage, it doesn't take multiple square miles to achieve 1 gigawatt of power. It might take the area of a medium sized airport, but that's mostly to provide an ample security buffer around a vital civil asset, no different than that around a water reservoir, hydroelectric dam, or... well, an airport.
Domestic Solar is the perfect peaking solution to replace nuclear power. Wind is a new type of power generation mechanism with a vastly more dynamic upgrade cycle than anything we've see so far, it has massive promise to replace nuclear power.
I'll believe it when I see it. Since nuclear power provides 20% of the electricity consumed in the USA, and you claim that wind and solar are going to replace it, do I really need to provide a citation for you on the current viability of nuclear power? It seems you've admitted to that already.
Maybe it's more of your rhetoric. As you said of nuclear "they still produce power" the only difference is solar and wind don't explode and cause mass evacuations like a nuclear plant does when they overheat, they just make less power.
Wind and solar kill more people than nuclear. Citation:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
If you want to reduce nuclear accident deaths further then stop evacuating people needlessly. Citation:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/w...
Unlike Nuclear power, wind and solar plants are upgradeable.
Then explain this list of articles on nuclear power plants getting upgrades:
https://www.power-eng.com/nucl...
Unlike Nuclear, coal and everything else developed in the 19th and 20th century that produce heat, solar and wind is a 21st century solution that reduces the heat load
I've got a Chevy Citation that I'm going to use to run your stupid face over with. Go to wikipedo if you want.
I did go to Wikipedia, that's how I found the citation I gave in my previous post. I'm curious how you came to believe nuclear to be orders of magnitude more expensive than wind and solar. I must have missed what you saw on Wikipedia. Help me out and point to where you found what you believe you found.
You really are a useless cunt aren't you.
That may also be true, but I'd like a citation on that as well.
Where are you going to get the various rare earths and other metals needed to prevent embrittlement of the structures and housing of the nuclear plant?
The problem of the USA not producing the rare earth metals it needs domestically is due to existing policy on producing thorium and uranium. Rare earth metals exist in the ground in ores that also have high concentrations of thorium and uranium. Removing uranium and thorium from the ground, and concentrating them as a byproduct of extracting the rare earth metals is, in the eyes of the federal government, "producing weapons grade materials" and places such mines under considerable scrutiny and regulations on what is done with the tails of extraction. With any other mining the tails are simply placed back in the hole they came from and the government simply pretends it was never disturbed.
If we allow for more sane regulation on the mining of thorium then we'd be able to get a domestic supply of rare earth metals. The bonus to this is that mining for rare earth metals means producing nuclear fuel in the form of the uranium and thorium left over in the extraction process. It just falls out of the processing in a bin as the other metals are separated.
Any costing of nuclear power should include how supply will be guaranteed for the lifetime of the plant. Given that many of the elements are in high demand from other industrial sectors, that's not a simple task. Furthermore, the estimates are likely to be very rubbery when projected over 20+ years.
The solutions for the rare earth metal shortage, and it's cause from bad thorium policy, is covered well by Gordon McDowell in his videos. I suggest you take a look at a few of them.
https://www.youtube.com/user/g...
I don't know if this is a "simple task" but it's a failure of policy, not physics.
Remember when people used to talk about how nuclear would bring about a future where power was "too cheap to meter"?
No. I've read about it though. How old are you? I'm pretty sure those claims died out in the 1960s or 1970s. Three Mile Island and the movie China Syndrome put an end to claims of being too cheap to meter, as far as I can tell. Those were in 1979 but the protestations on nuclear power predated both by quite a margin. "Too cheap to meter" would have been in the days when Thunderbirds and Star Trek were on TV, which were visions of a nuclear powered future.
Residential water use is under 15% of California's water supply - the rest is industry. If you want to do something about limited water, ban fracking, cattle ranching, almond & rice farming.
In other words ban the things that make money in the state, and therefore pay the taxes, and when the money runs out to pay for wind subsidies, public education, and all the other goodies the taxes pay for, the people will leave. That works for me... except the part where these people might come to my state.
Here's another idea. Build some water reservoirs, desalination plants, and power plants to make them work, and everyone can have water. If you want to argue that this would cost too much then consider this, what costs more, driving out industry and therefore the people paying the taxes, or raising the taxes more to get more water and driving out industry anyway from the higher costs they bear? Or, maybe, just perhaps, the state is spending far too much money on wind and solar subsidies that created this shortage of tax dollars and electricity, and by eliminating the subsidies they solve the problems of not having money for making more drinking water, while also decreasing their spending. Everyone wins... except the wind lobby that's been living off the subsidies.
What impact will not doing it have on our society? What happens when rain belts shift northward and major industrial powers suddenly have food security problems?
The major industrial powers will not "suddenly" have food insecurity problems. The USA imports a lot of food. The USA also exports a lot of food. What is exported are things like beef, wheat, and corn. What's imported are things like coffee, bananas, and avocados. This might mean Americans have a shortage of caffeine and guacamole but they will be able to get enough calories and nutrients.
Other industrial nations have similar capacity to feed themselves. Maybe not to the extent of the USA but if they maintain peaceful relations with their neighbors, the ability to transport commodities is maintained to a reasonable level, and general order of society is maintained, then the shifting of climate patterns will not be a cause of societal collapse.
Could shifting rain patterns cause "climate change refugees", resource wars, and other societal problems? I guess that it might, but this is a problem of places with existing problems of poor infrastructure, corrupt government, and civil unrest, spilling over into stable nations. This sucks but this is not a problem in the industrial nations, it's a problem of industrial nations having to deal with external problems migrating in to become internal problems. They can address this by a number of means, which could fix itself with a collapse of transportation. If these industrialized nations are so handicapped by climate change that they cannot continue trade with nations that produce the coffee and avocados they consume then the ability for the importation of refugees will also be handicapped.
The problems in this potential future is no different than it is now. These nations will have to clean up their own house or live in the shit hole they made for themselves.
I remember a conversation with a Persian man (he refused to call himself Iranian). He said that he'd eat Wonder Bread, Corn Flakes, and other foods imported from the USA. He recognized everything on the grocery stores in the USA as things he had in "Persia". If the industrialized nations stopped burning oil then nations that sell oil for food will be hit first and hit hardest. Those nations that sell oil for food are also among the least industrialized.
All you do is you orient the solar panels such that they produce the most power when the power is needed most. Problem solved with solar and with no need for nuclear, once again.
Citation needed.
I've seen the data and power is needed most shortly before sunset, when orienting your solar panels does nothing. Unless you are "orienting" your panels about 1000 miles off shore it's not helpful.
Not cost effective, just like nuclear power.
Citation needed.
I see that California has several desalination plants already, with plans for many more. I admit that pumping the water to another state could be more trouble than it's worth but building desalination plants is worth the trouble otherwise they would not be building them now, and if they build up reservoirs for the fresh water (which I'm sure that they already have) then they should be able to "tank up" fresh water when energy is cheap and stop desalination when it's expensive.
You leave out of the equation building high voltage DC transmission lines to move the electricity to distant markets.
If you do that while still keeping the subsidies for windmills to produce power, even when that power isn't needed, then those power lines just export the problems of subsidies to other states.
California is just one pile of mismanagement on top of more mismanagement. They created this shortage of storage with an abundance of wind and solar subsidies. Stop subsidizing this and the problem will resolve itself.
Maybe the government could change their policies so that farmers are not encouraged to waste the water?
You are blaming the farmers for acting within the rules, rules that encourage them to waste water. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Every nation that has nuclear power also has a national fund to decommission them, paid for by the utilities that own the nuclear power plants. If the amount of money in these funds is insufficient to pay for the decommissioning then that is a failure in government policy to properly tax the utilities for this fund, or a failure of the government to control the costs of decommissioning.
Government estimates not meeting demands is not a failure of physics, that's a failure of government and policy to create proper estimates.
If the cost of decommissioning grows with the government estimates, because of some property of physics, then the government can lower the costs by lowering the estimates. Here's an idea, estimate the costs to be negative and see what happens.
What action is necessary?
More nuclear power.
I can hear it now... "WTF? Nuclear power? But nuclear power plants had to reduce output because of the heat! Jackass!"
If the problem is carbon emissions from electricity then the solution is more electricity from energy sources with the lowest carbon emissions. That would be nuclear power. The nuclear power plants had to reduce output but that's not the same as no output, they still produce power.
Also, any power plant that uses a heat differential between the sea water and the heat source will see reduced output as temperatures rise. That would be true of nuclear, coal, natural gas, wood, cattle dung, or solar thermal. Reduced output from nuclear power because of the heat is for some reason a headline worth printing. Reduced output of solar and wind from the heat is not something any dinosaur news source is willing to write. Or rather not a headline Slashdot moderators would be wiling to bring up.
It's not too hard to find sources giving the reduced output from PV panels and solar thermal systems in high heat, but that's not headline material for some reason. Maybe it's because we get so little of our energy from solar. But then why do we get so little of our energy from solar? Maybe because when we need it most the power isn't there?
I noticed no citations in your post.
I don't really understand paying to get rid of surplus electricity. Isn't the point to sell electricity?
No, the point is to make money.
Because of subsidies for wind and solar there is an incentive to "sell" electricity at a negative price. Let's consider a scenario of wind and solar getting a subsidy of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour when electricity is on average costing about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The costs borne by wind and solar are in capital, labor, and so forth, and nothing for fuel. They want to get paid as much as they can, as often as they can. If that means paying people 2, 3, or or even 4 cents, per kilowatt-hour to take their electricity to get 5 cents from the government then they still make a profit. If they simply don't produce electricity at that time then they are effectively losing money.
The people running the windmills don't much care what the people do with the electricity, they just want a profit. If the people are paid to pump water up a hill then we, as a country/state/society/whatever, see a benefit in cheaper power in the future and/or more water available for drinking and irrigation. If the people buying the power are just opening the doors on their warehouses and turning on the electric heaters inside then we lose out on this, that's just wasted tax money.
We've seen things like this happen, so we should do something to stop it. The easiest way to end this waste is end the wind subsidies. Another way is to create a civil project that pumps water up a hill to drive electric turbines and/or desalination systems downstream. Given that a desalination plant and/or desalination facility would be willing to buy excess electrical generation capacity at low prices then we don't need a government to help this along, we'd just need government to get out of the way and allow these facilities to get built.
The profit motive is very powerful. It's not "bad" or "good", it just is. People inherently desire profit because it's through profit from our labor and investment that we can live. If we simply create laws and government policy to direct this profit motive, instead of fighting it, then we could see many great things done for the benefit of all. This application of profit motive does mean that some people will profit more than others, but this is preferable to all being equal in misery and poverty.
If wind and solar needs storage to provide power that is inexpensive, low carbon, and reliable, then we need storage that is inexpensive, reliable and low carbon. That means we need nuclear power, because fuel is storage and uranium is a low carbon fuel.
Here's a short (about 2 minutes) video explaining the problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Here's a longer (24 minute) video explaining the problem in more detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We will see an expansion of the use of nuclear power because no president will allow the lights to go out in the country, and that applies to any country that has a president. The sooner we come to this realization and start building nuclear power the less stress this will have on the economy and the environment.
Whatever problems people have brought up against nuclear power they have always been problems of policy, not physics. We can change policy, we can't change the laws of physics.
Desalination plants are ineffective, even more costly, and there are over a dozen better options including using the power to convince farmers to not waste so much water.
The farmers are "wasting" water? I grew up on a farm and like any business we went to great lengths to eliminate waste. I dispute your claim solely on the basis that wasting water diminishes their profits. You can claim they value money over saving water but I claim they save the water because they value money. What it comes down to is that California is unwilling to tell the "environmentalists" that the environment includes people. People need water for food, and the farmers know how to turn water into food. Give them water or people go hungry.
If you are so self hating that you believe the delta smelt are more valuable than your fellow humans then I suggest you go jump in a lake. I'm assuming you are human, but on the internet no one can be sure you are not a dog.
That sounds like natural gas industry propaganda.
It's not propaganda if it's true. Right?
The natural gas people must just love those wind and solar subsidies. What wind and solar power need to provide reliable electricity is a source of backup power. Right now, in most every part of the world, this means natural gas. The difference though between burning natural gas in a thermal plant (meaning boiling water) and a turbine is that the turbine needs twice the volume of natural gas than the thermal plant for the same energy out. This is because a turbine is 20% to 40% efficient and a combined cycle plant is 50% to 65% efficient.
The more windmills and solar power out there the more natural gas is burned in backup power turbines instead of base load thermal plants.
The one competitor to natural gas as backup power is hydroelectric, as hydroelectric power shares the property with turbines of being able to follow rapidly shifting demand. Pumped storage hydro extends the ability of a dam to provide storage, as it's no longer limited to snow melt and rainfall in the level of water behind the dam. What dams still need though to be affordable storage is favorable geography. It may be possible to build a pumped hydro storage plant on land that is as flat as a pancake but that would be extremely expensive. So, what is done instead is fuel is used as storage.
At the moment, natural gas is cheap, but its not at all clear how costs will play out in the future.
No, it's becoming exceedingly clear how the costs will play out in the future. The price of electricity will double or triple. First, there is the capital cost of the wind and solar. Second, there is the capital cost of the storage and/or backup. Given that the primary means for storage right now is in the form of natural gas not burned when the sun shines and wind blows we have a third reason for rising costs, burning natural gas in inefficient turbines instead of efficient thermal plants.
The natural gas industry would love for everything to be shifted over to natural gas. But the cost of natural gas is not fixed. The more we use, the higher the price.
That is correct, the more we rely on natural gas as backup for wind and solar the more expensive natural gas becomes. We can address this to a point with pumped hydro storage but we've only started doing this because we've exceeded the natural storage capability of damming up a river and allowing the water to flow past the turbines as we need the power.
Wind and solar only make sense up to the point it exceeds the capacity of the power grid to soak up it's variability within the bounds of the natural variability of the demand. Beyond that we would be building excess storage and backup solely for the purpose of addressing the variability of wind as solar as primary energy sources.
If we have not already met the limits of wind and solar to provide affordable electricity then we will meet that limit very soon. After that we are wasting money on variable energy sources and then tossing more into that money pit with building storage to address that variability.
Except wind and solar are orders of magnitude cheaper and easier in every way than nuclear, but other than that yeah you're right.
Orders of magnitude? Citation needed. Here's mine:
https://www.instituteforenergy...
On shore wind, nuclear, and coal are all about the same cost, within the error bars of each other. Solar is expensive, and needs storage to follow load, making it cost even more. Wind also needs storage but if coupled with natural gas (the cheapest means we have to produce electricity right now), coal, and nuclear then it's a viable energy source. Assuming the goal is reducing CO2 then we'll rule out coal, leaving nuclear (a tiny fraction of CO2 compared to coal) and natural gas (about half the CO2 of coal), as backup for the wind. But, as the article points out, the problem with wind is the lack of storage. Here's the solution...
Fuel is storage.
With a mix of wind, nuclear, and natural gas we can get energy that is inexpensive, low CO2, and reliable. This means that states like California would have to start building new nuclear power plants and natural gas burning power plants to go along with the wind power. Sure, California is a sunny place so maybe they have locations where solar is as cheap as the rest so go with it if it makes sense.
The problem is storage and California has been destroying their storage capacity with the shutting down of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Stop doing that and the problem disappears.
There's an excess of energy according to TFS and TFA. So what exactly are we wasting here?
What's wasted is the capacity to use that energy later, when it's needed.
Los Angeles has a chronic problem of a shortage of power production in the summer, when the sun is high and winds are low. They might have an excess of power in the morning with all that solar power but unless people want to cool their houses and buildings to freezing and then still have them get unbearably hot in the afternoon this will continue to be a problem.
Here's what I propose as an alternate solution, and I accept that this may be unfeasible. I propose California build desalination plants along the shore to use that excess power. This will address their water shortages as well. The energy storage aspect comes in pumping desalinated water to the Hoover Dam, this addresses a water shortage problem downstream of the Hoover Dam. While they are at it maybe they can dump some of that water in the Rio Grande. So much water is taken from the Rio Grande that there are times the river no longer reaches the ocean, or the flow reverses and salt water invades the ecosystem. There's already a tunnel connecting the Colorado river to the Rio Grande but I do not know how much water can and does flow through it.
There's my proposal, don't build a pipe from a downstream location and pump water up to Lake Mead to get electricity storage for LA. Have LA pump the energy to the lake in the form of desalinated water. LA gets water, those downstream of the Hoover Dam get water, and LA still gets the electricity storage they need.
I'm done with this. We've gone far off track and your arguments are taking what I said, cranking a "what if" scenario up to 11, and claiming this makes it immoral/unfeasible/whatever in every instance.
Also, I can't reason you out of what you didn't reason yourself into. Go calm down, have a glass of warm milk or something, and perhaps we can pick this up some other time.
FOSTER parents are paid by the state
Then don't pay them. This does two things, it gets rid of the costs and overhead of managing the money, and it filters out the con artists that take the government check for themselves and abuse the children. People don't generally take foster children in to get paid, they do it as a service to the community.
Meanwhile, if your parents were even vaguely eligible for a school lunch program
The national school lunch program has been a thing since the 1940s and grown ever since. It's allowed for not only schools to provide subsidized lunches but also things like churches and summer camps to get funding. The school I attended had a budget for the school year on food, with an expected amount from families that applied to the government for a subsidy. The school had to manage this with "tokens" that they'd provide students to "buy" a lunch at the cafeteria. The claim was that children wouldn't know who got the free lunch since (supposedly) everyone would be buying tokens to pay for the lunch. This didn't hide anything because students that had the parents pay would often just pay in cash at the cafeteria line, and those with free or subsidized lunches would pay with the tokens. Paying in cash became something of a status symbol, a form of conspicuous consumption perhaps.
If the school did their budget correctly the total at the end of the year, from students paying in cash and students that had parents apply for government subsidy, would match what was spent at the beginning of the year. The school held various events through the year to promote donations from the community, in part to pay for the lunches.
My parents understood that there is no such thing as a free lunch. In this case it was quite literal. They knew that their taxes were paying for those "free" lunches and so they decided to not participate in the scam. This goes with the public schools as well, the parents will end up paying for the education in the end. This will be directly with taxes or indirectly in higher prices because the people they buy products and services have to pay that tax. This is a problem because the government now takes a cut on the federal, state, county, and city level to manage this distribution of funds. We'd all be better off if the public school system disappeared and the schools were private. At a minimum schools should be managed at the lowest level that is practical, that being at the level of the county, city, or other similar level of government.
My parents knew that they were effectively paying double for education, they funded the public school and then they paid tuition at the private school. They wanted their children to get an education better than "good enough for government work". If everyone figured this out then we'd have far better education in this country, and the public school teachers can lecture to empty rooms.