- Electricity is cheap because it increasingly comes from wind and solar which are cheaper than coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Whatever.
- ICE engines are complex and fragile and require lots of maintenance (oil changes, tune ups, etc.)
Just because you keep repeating it does not make it true. I addressed this already in that the complexity is no more or less than a current gasoline engine, therefore this does not change current owner, driver, or mechanics behavior. It's the same thing only burning cheaper fuel.
- Natural gas in an ICE engine inherits all of the inefficiencies of an ICE engine (only about 30% efficient). NG electricity (combined cycle) is much more efficient.
That's true but also irrelevant.
What matters to people is dollars per mile, comfort, and convenience. A CNG car offers the fuel at home convenience of an electric, as well as fast refill at a filling station. A gasoline/electric hybrid also offers this convenience but with greater complexity, and therefore greater cost. CNG offers the comfort of heat to the cabin like a gasoline car without the "range anxiety" that electric cars have in cold weather. If I'm correct that increased use of wind, solar, and nuclear will displace natural gas for producing electricity then natural gas is likely to be cheap enough that it will become a competitor to gasoline.
All of your complaints come down to mismanagement by government, not from the nuclear power industry. We can fix the government by getting the right people in office. What we need are some people that want to make America great again. Wait, I heard someone say that before.... Anyway, the point is that if we can open up Yucca Mountain then we have the means to dispose of nuclear waste. Putting nuclear waste in a hole is a completely viable method of disposal. Recycling would be better but holes in rocks work too.
When it comes to Japan's problem's they created them because of their own government mishandling the problems. Fukushima was built before Chernobyl. After Chernobyl blew it's top Japan didn't do much on their end to fix things, even though they knew of problems at Fukushima. It's not that Fukushima was old....
FUKUSHIMA IS OLDER THAN CHERNOBYL!!!
Japan could have made the problem disappear if they had kept building new reactors to replace the old. Now that one blew up in their face they are now taking the problem much more seriously and building new reactors again. We know how to build reactors so that they can't blow their top but it will take government action to allow it to happen. In the USA we are still operating nuclear power under rules created in the 1950s. We need new rules.
Again, all you did was complain about the rules the government has imposed on the nuclear power industry. On that we can agree. What you seem to be stuck on is that there is no way for us to change the rules.
What you also seem to miss is that there are many other nations in the world, and 13 of them are building nuclear power plants. http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
You can point to cancelled nuclear power plants here and there if you like. I can point to failed solar power plants as well. Seems to me that solar has the upper hand for now but if even half of these current nuclear sites come to completion then we'll have experienced and motivated people to build more, and for less money in a shorter period of time. We lost a lot of experience because we stopped building nuclear power for 40 years, it will take time to make up for that. When we do then we will see these old nuclear power plants we have now being replaced with new ones. Oh, and it's quite possible that these new reactors could use the "spent" fuel already on these sites to fuel the next generation reactors. It's probably a good thing we didn't just drop that all in a hole in the ground.
It doesn't matter how cheap natural gas goes since you still have a complex ICE engine with maintenance.
That's not true because anyone switching from gasoline to natural gas will see no change. They are already used to this "complexity". Someone with an electric car might find this problematic but they are a much smaller part of the current market.
The reason your electricity is so cheap is because much of it is produced by cheap natural gas. If this connection between natural gas prices and electric prices becomes decoupled with a greater use of wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear, then natural gas prices could fall below that of an equivalent amount of electricity. Admittedly this cannot be decoupled completely since if natural gas gets too cheap then utilities will just burn natural gas again.
What natural gas vehicles do is eliminate the conversion losses of combustion to electricity, then electricity to battery, then battery to moving the vehicle. The combustion directly moves the car. Alternatively the combustion could be in an on board electric power plant for driving an electric transmission. There's your inherent price advantage over using that same fuel to run a generator to charge a battery.
Also, as you point out, traditional ICE makers have large investments in ICE manufacturing. What would be easier for them? Switching to CNG or to electric? My guess is CNG.
Getting back to the cost of CNG vs. electric, it only takes CNG getting within near parity of electricity per mile for many advantages to pile up in it's favor. CNG cars can fill up at home or in minutes at a filling station, much like a more "complex" hybrid. It's nearly indistinguishable from a gasoline car in how it operates for the driver and mechanic, so who's to complain about things being unfamiliar? No "range anxiety" in cold weather either. Maybe electric cars might dominate in warm climates but in places where the heat off the engine can warm the cabin the use of CNG will look like a plus.
I agree, they seem to be doing just fine making electric cars people want to buy.
NG cars combine all the problems with gas with all of the problems of EVs without any of the benefits. You have to build a new energy distribution system (EV's problem) but its still a highly explosive material (gas's problem).
Natural gas has an existing distribution system right now. Perhaps where you live natural gas to the home is a rarity but in many parts of the USA and the rest of the world people routinely heat their homes and cook with natural gas. If people want to fuel up at home it's just a matter of installing the pipe. Years ago I looked at buying a natural gas car and discovered that natural gas filling stations do in fact exist right now.
When it comes to the explosive nature of natural gas I again refer to it commonly being used to heat homes. Natural gas cars already exist and so they've been deemed road worthy. I'm merely suggesting that the growth of solar and wind to produce electricity will replace natural gas, therefore the price of natural gas will go down, and this will lead to people buying more natural gas vehicles. If this gains any kind of traction then I can foresee rapid growth because a lot of the infrastructure exists already and people are familiar with natural gas as they use it everyday for heating and cooking.
In other words Ford has been working on an electric car for the past 5 years or so and all major car makers now offer electric vehicles. The claim was that the traditional ICE car makers would be hurt from competition from companies that offer electric vehicles. I suppose that there is time for some late comers to the market, like Ford, to in time find themselves unable to compete in the future but as it is now it seems that the ICE car makers are making a very smooth transition to electric cars and will continue to enjoy being profitable.
Also, Ford is not new to electric vehicles, they've competed in solar car and electric car competitions since the 1980s. Ford produced electric commercial trucks as late as 2012.
Ford bet on higher-efficiency ICE, and hydrogen. They did develop some very efficient ICE, but hydrogen has been eclipsed by advances in batteries.
Hydrogen killed hydrogen as a fuel. Hydrogen is a terrible fuel. The small molecules like to squeeze out of the smallest crack. Hydrogen will corrode many metals. It burns with an invisible flame, a safety hazard. Hydrogen is not very energy dense and so must be liquified or stored at incredible pressures, adding additional safety concerns. It turns out that the best way to store and transport hydrogen is when it's attached to an oxygen and/or carbon. Also, hydrogen is not an energy source, it is only a means to store and transport energy. Oil is an energy source that is easily stored and transported.
But those cars use the same drivetrain. That's the point: Making natural gas ICE for the US and EVs for Europe is less efficient than EVs everywhere, and that drives up costs.
Major car makers do this all the time. As long as someone comes along with a large enough order they'll do just about anything. I happened across the Ford Transit and saw it's offered in versions that run on natural gas, diesel fuel, gasoline, electric, and propane. It's not only been done, it's happening right now.
I grew up on a farm and when younger I wondered how Dad got all that sand in the machine shed to cover the ground. When I got older Dad built another shed and I got my answer. Dad picked a spot in our large back yard to build the shed where we kept the grass mowed. The shed went up but the grass in the shed remained. I waited for a dump truck to spread the sand on the ground in the shed but it never came. What happened was the ground "died" and what was once black dirt with beautiful green grass on top turned to white sand over just a few years.
Those people that cover cropland with solar panels are ruining the soil. Fertile soil is "alive", containing bacteria, worms, and obviously plants with roots in that soil. You take away the sun and all that life in the soil just dries up and dies.
Maybe with panels spread out enough and high enough that the sun can reach the soil below something can grow but this is rarely done. Land is expensive and panels raised off the ground are more expensive to maintain. Growing anything on the ground around the solar panels is expensive as that demands labor to maintain, it's far cheaper to just spray everything with herbicide than anything.
I know how many people will respond, we'll pass a law! Solar power is already expensive because of its inherent intermittent nature, requiring that these solar power companies keep the land under the panels from turning to sand will only make it more expensive. What of putting the panels on already "dead" land like parking lots or out in a desert? Putting panels on parking lots adds to the cost. As people that wanted to put solar panels in the American southwest found out there is an endangered desert turtle that lives out there. A desert is not necessarily "dead" soil, it's just not as visible as that in a forest.
Ethanol was mentioned and that's also a bad idea, civilizations have ended because they burned their food for fuel. Let's not repeat that mistake. There's plenty of natural gas to burn yet, and we can synthesize fuels from nuclear power.
You assume that an electric car is similar enough to an ICE car that current car manufacturers can jump right in.
Can you name any current manufacturer of ICE vehicles that has not ever produced an electric car in the last 10 or 20 years? Dusting off the EV1 and selling it now might be a stretch but that would be a possibility for GM to get in the market assuming they've never produced the Chevy Bolt. Also, given all the parts in a modern car the engine that makes it go is a pretty small part in reality.
However, the major manufacturing issue is the battery pack, and current ICE car manufacturers have no experience with that.
Tesla has been buying their batteries from the open market for a very long time, nothing prevents a new entrant in the electric car market from doing the same. Might not be an ideal vehicle design but it will at least buy them some time and gain them experience for the future. Given that a battery maker could gain a lot of future sales by helping out a car maker I'd imagine a battery maker might offer some engineering expertise to such a car maker.
Also, the vehicle control is much different with electric motors, and Tesla is gaining a lot of experience with that.
Again, can you name any current car manufacturer that has not come out with an electric vehicle in the last 20 years? I know 20 years is a long time but automotive technology moves slow enough, IMHO, that this is sufficient to compete. Even if we narrow that down to even 5 years the number of such manufacturers is still very small if not zero.
As far as natural gas, I don't think that would fly. Large parts of Europe depend on Russia for natural gas, and they wouldn't feel comfortable increasing that dependency. And if they can't sell them in Europe, it's not very interesting for car manufacturers. They don't want to make totally different cars for different markets.
You do realize that major car makers already make different cars for different markets, don't you? Left hand drive vs. right hand drive already separate the markets so international companies already produce completely different cars for these markets.
Next is that there are many buyers of natural gas cars right now. These are mostly corporate owned vehicles but they are produced right now in limited quantities. The current offerings are pretty much just gasoline conversions so they have many nagging problems that don't make them popular with those that buy cars one at a time as oppose to those that order them by the hundreds. If the market grows to be large enough then it makes economic sense to expend the resources for a vehicle designed specifically for natural gas. If the goal is to simply take advantage of what they perceive as a larger potential market then all they need to enter this market space to offer something has in the past been only available to corporate buyers to the wider public. I expect that this demand already exists among many future buyers.
While I'll admit that what you point out is not completely invalid those are pretty weak points.
Solar with energy storage has a capacity factor that's near that of nuclear.
That's only true if you redefine what capacity factor means.
Now imagine energy storage with nuclear power. That's cheap energy that does not rely on the sun shining to work. With a big honkin' battery on site for managing shifting demand through the day and night the nuclear power plant won't ever have to even slow down until it runs out of fuel. With next generation reactors capable of refueling while operating they'd not have to even shut down for that. Military reactors already run for 30 years without ever having to be shutdown. Much of this has to do with the rich fuel military reactors run but the same thing can happen with a civil reactor capable of refuel on the fly.
One complaint of nuclear power is its inability to load follow. This goes away with electric storage on site.
Another complaint of nuclear power is cost. We can add up the cost of a nuclear power plant and the storage it would need to manage the shifting demand through the day. We can also add up the cost of solar power and the storage to meet the same demand. Nuclear power has a capacity factor of 90%. Solar power, at best, has 30% capacity factor. How much generation capacity of each will we need? How much storage has to go with each?
If the goal is to replace natural gas peak power generation for load following with battery storage then that means solar will be at a huge disadvantage over nuclear. It is common for electrical demand to peak in the mornings and evenings when solar output is already diminished. That means more storage for this demand.
Coal is dead.
Is it? What happens if we add cheap battery storage to that 80 year old coal plant you mentioned? Right now capacity factor of a typical coal fired power plant is about 60%. If batteries allow for that to run at peak operating conditions regardless of the shifting demands then what does that mean for it's total costs at the end of the day? My guess is that it looks much better.
There is no doubt in my mind that grid scale storage is good for wind and solar power. I'm also quite sure that this kind of storage is even better for nuclear and coal.
The big losers in the future will probably be gasoline producers and ICE car manufacturers.
A large portion of the people that make ICE cars also make electric cars. They won't be hurt by this, they'll just shift their production as the market shifts.
The people that produce gasoline also produce diesel fuel, heating oil, jet fuel, lubricants, and so much more. They'll just shift their production to less octane to more cetane, butane, and propane. They won't even flinch.
Gas stations and repair shops will either switch or go out of business (Teslas don't have many moving parts, and so don't need many repairs).
Cars need maintenance, even electric ones. They'll still replace tires, take out dents, fix window cracks, and so on. There's also a large market for diesels. Tow trucks, snow plows, and delivery trucks will burn diesel fuel for a long time.
Here's my prediction, electric cars will be replaced soon. As more electricity is produced by wind and solar that will make natural gas get cheaper. At some point someone is going to offer a real deal natural gas car instead of a crappy gasoline conversion. Early electric cars sucked because they weren't electric cars, they were gasoline cars with electric motors put in them. Natural gas cars of the past sucked because the pressure tank for the fuel could not fit in the same spot as the gasoline tank so the pressure tank tended to be put in the trunk. Given that by this time electric charging points will be more common than natural gas filling stations I also expect the first few natural gas cars to be electric hybrids. They'll offer the ability to fill up with cheap natural gas at home and charge up next to the Teslas on long trips. As natural gas catches on then filling stations will start to offer natural gas.
Does my prediction of natural gas replacing electric cars sound implausible? I'm guessing that it's more plausible than claiming Ford or GM having financial troubles because they can't figure out how to make an electric car to compete with Tesla. Think about that for a second. If Ford can't figure out how to compete with Tesla in the electric car market then why would they not simply take on the task of trying to compete with natural gas? What else have they got to lose at that point? If they make it work then they can take Teslas lunch with a car that fills up at home from the same natural gas people use to cook with. I've seen a lot of garages with natural gas heaters in them, it won't take much to hook up a spigot to fill up a car. The selling point for electric cars is never having to visit a filling station again, well natural gas offers that too.
Using "suddenly" and "over 12 years" together does not compute. I'd be interested in seeing some kind of evidence on how these trees fared in the past. It's quite amazing for these trees to have lived for so long but it would seem feasible to me that 1000 years ago we could have seen trees of this type die off then too. The changing of the climate then could have also done them in.
Consider an analogous situation on a human. We see a 150 year old man fall ill and die. Do we blame this on climate change too? Perhaps his diet of only fresh milk and fruit killed him. Maybe it was the pipes he smoked when he was in his 40s, 50s, and 60s. Or maybe it just that he's 150 years old and a person living this long is quite unusual to begin with and it's impossible to tell what the final nail in his coffin was.
A more humorous take on this human analogy... I recall a TV character making fun of another about how he takes such great care to eat healthy, exercise, abstain from alcohol, not smoke, and generally fixate on living for a long time. The punch line was something about looking foolish in his old age, lying in a hospital bed, dying of NOTHING. Everything alive dies sometime, pinning the cause on something specific can be a fool's errand.
You're wrong on this. Nuclear is twice the cost of solar and wind. Citation above.
Your citation only shows nuclear being twice the cost of solar and wind when comparing the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) case numbers from a single source. EIA shows wind and solar being far more expensive as do numerous studies from other nations. There is still the matter of the cost of the storage.
There's also the non-trivial matter of the waste stream, which is not covered in the pricing in that citation.
Every nuclear power plant in the USA, and in most nations in the world, are required to pay in advance for the cost of decommissioning the plant at the end of its life. In the USA the government "rents" the nuclear fuel to the power plants. They buy the fuel from the government and then must pay the government to dispose of the waste. Unless there is proof otherwise I'm quite certain that the cost of the waste management is included in the cost estimates.
As long as we are on the subject, has the cost of managing the solar and wind power waste been included in the cost estimates? As I recall the problems of disposing of solar panel waste has not been resolved just yet. I read about it on this web site called "Slashdot", perhaps you've heard of it.
Turns out pretending nuclear is cheap is not an optimal strategy.
Pretending that wind and solar is the future of our electricity supply is not an optimal strategy either.
I've seen the studies on how people pretend to be able to provide the electricity we need from wind and sun and it is not a pretty picture. Without some nuclear and natural gas in the mix with the wind and sun we can look forward to an economic and environmental disaster. We can provide all the electricity we need from nuclear and natural gas, and do so with very low environmental impact. How do we know this? France is pretty much doing this right now. Japan is not far from it either, or was until a few years ago. Japan is restarting their nuclear power industry right now having learned that running nuclear power plants decades beyond their designed life span is not wise. Also not wise is burning gobs of imported oil, coal, and natural gas.
We can put some wind and sun in the mix but without nuclear providing a large portion of the electricity on the grid it does not work. How large of a portion? My guess would be something like 50% to 90%. Energy storage on the grid only makes the prospect of more nuclear look better. Storage technology does not just benefit wind and sun as sources of energy, it benefits them all.
The other issue is that I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
That's a false dichotomy.
We can both improve our standard of living and reduce the impact we've had on the environment. We do this with nuclear power. Perhaps in the future we will have another choice but right now the choice is petroleum (and the effects that has on the environment), reducing our standard of living, or nuclear power. I may have just given my own falsifiable set of choices but you've only given the first two in my list, oil and ecological disaster, or wind and sun and reduced quality of life.
There is a third choice and ignoring nuclear power as that choice means misery.
Second, there's no guarantee costs should come down.
There is no guarantee that wind and solar prices will come down either.
We've been trying to make solar power viable beyond pocket calculators and communication satellites for a very long time now, and we've come a long way. The problem is that even with massive economies of scale, excessive government subsidies, and decades of pouring money into research, solar power still produces a fraction of a percent of the energy we consume today.
Wind energy has come a long way in recent times and I believe it can become a large portion of the electricity we use. I'd rather see wind power be used to pump water and perform other mechanical work as I believe that would be far more efficient than to use it to produce electricity but whatever, it works fairly well and it has a future.
What is quite clear is that given the freedom to develop we can see nuclear power be inexpensive enough to provide vast amounts of energy for a national grid. We've seen this happen already in places like the USA, France, and Japan.
And the executive and legislative powers of countries have to sign on that.
We can change these laws easily enough given the right incentive. What we cannot do, even with infinite willpower, is change the laws of physics and economics. Nuclear power works today, solar power does not. Ignoring the longstanding history of nuclear power to produce cheap, safe, and effectively infinite energy is not only foolish but borderline suicidal. We have the high standard of living we enjoy because of nuclear power. Not expanding our fleet of nuclear power plants would mean going backwards in the quality of life on this planet.
We don't have to "junk" the nuclear power industries as you propose, we'd have to grow the industry to where economies of scale can reduce costs. We've had companies compete over the nuclear power market before and we can restore that to bring down prices with competition, research and development, and the natural market forces that bring down costs and improve quality like any other industry.
I love when people trot this out. Household cats kill 1000 to 10,000 times more birds than wind power generation. Yet I don't see the same people so worried about it in wind generation propose banning cats.
House cats don't kill falcons, vultures, eagles, and other large birds. In fact its the other way around, these large birds have been known to hunt small cats. I love it when people trot out the greater threat household cats pose to birds over windmills as it demonstrates an obvious lack of comprehension of the problem. Birds have evolved to manage the threat cats hold to them but windmills are a new threat. Perhaps in time birds will evolve the means to manage the threat windmills pose to them but considering the damage already done to large birds the widespread use of windmills would likely render these bird extinct long before they could adapt their behavior. Like I said, I'm a bit ambivalent towards the threat windmills pose to birds but if the goal is to save the birds then windmills simply will not do. We don't have many windmills now but if we were to replace 25% of our electricity production with wind in the near future then we'd likely see many large birds go extinct.
Also, your sources on solar are 1) funded by the coal and natural gas industries, or 2) citing reports funded by the coal and natural gas industries. There might be a wee bit of bias in their studies.
I'll admit to the bias in my sources. I'd like to see your sources with a counter argument. I've seen people write a articles that claims to point out that wind and solar are superior but they often are able to do so only through lies and careful manipulation of the data. It's quite clear that nuclear power is the safest energy source we have. It is also quite clear that nuclear power produces the lowest CO2 output per energy produced with the possible exception of hydro power. I'm sure nuclear power kills birds too because birds tend to run into things. Birds are stupid and run into trees and buildings, bashing in their own heads. Why don't we see these dead birds littering the landscape? I'll point to your earlier comment on how cats like to hunt birds, cats and other animals will eat these dead birds.
The USA has some of the cleanest air and water in the world. We don't have smog warnings where people are encouraged to stay indoors to avoid the coal dust and suffocating gas from factories. If someone in the USA dies from lung conditions then it's likely from smoking and not from working conditions or having to burn cow dung to cook their food at home.
Certainly the USA can improve but as one nation among about 200 on this planet the USA is doing far more in improving the lives of those that inhabit this planet than so many more. I could argue the USA has improved more lives than all the other nations combined.
USA does not have to be unique in this. There is nothing about America that other nations could not bring to their own nation. Instead of these "climate summits" that do nothing more than try to transfer the wealth of the USA to other nations perhaps these nations in the summit should shut up and hear what the USA can teach them in producing a nation where the air and water is so clean.
No. If you cannot explain what you're on about without referring to a video, you probably don't understand it to begin with.
I can explain it but someone else explained it better already. I can transcribe or paraphrase what was said for your benefit but I'm not willing to waste my time because you are too lazy to click a link and watch a 15 minute video. If you use the 2x speed option on Youtube and skip over some of the boring parts you'd get the general idea in 5 minutes or less.
Wind and solar don't have the risk of rendering areas uninhabitable for thousands of years. Willfully ignoring that doesn't change it.
Bringing up first and second generation nuclear power plants as an argument against fourth and fifth generation power plants makes as much sense as me talking about the windmill on my grandfather's farm in opposition of current wind power. Or as much sense as bringing up Ralph Nader's book on car safety as a reflection on the safety of modern automobiles. The Soviets screwed up on the building of Chernobyl decades ago, but no one is insane enough to build a reactor like that again. If the safety of nuclear power concerns you then the quickest way to address that is to build new reactors to replace the old ones. We don't have the manufacturing ability to replace our current fleet of nuclear power plants with anything other than new nuclear power plants.
Wind and solar have far greater waste problems than nuclear. Can we reduce the waste from wind and solar? Sure, just as we can learn to reduce the waste produced from nuclear energy. Can we improve the methods of recycling and disposing of waste produced from wind and solar? I imagine we can, just as we can with waste from nuclear power.
Solar power is not only an environmental disaster it is an economical disaster. Perhaps in the future solar power can improve beyond what nuclear offers now but that's assuming nuclear does not also improve. Solar is trying to hit a moving target and falling behind every year. I'm generally okay with wind, it's not all that reliable but it also is not that expensive, does not produce terrible amounts of toxic waste, and allows for use of the land below for farming and ranching. Wind does kill birds but birds are jerks, I say let them die.
Nuclear power is safer than wind and solar. Nuclear power is less expensive than wind and solar, with some exceptions in a few locations. Nuclear power produces less CO2 per energy produced, with perhaps hydro being better in a few locations. Nuclear power produces less waste than wind and solar. Nuclear power is the best source of energy we have right now and we'd be fools to not expand our fleet of nuclear power plants.
Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years but we're seeing effects on the scale of decades which is hundreds of times faster than normal.
I keep hearing this but never really sat down to think what this means. Let's imagine this means the expansion of the tropical climate towards the poles.
I grew up on a farm and my dad would rotate crops like any modern farmer would. To do this we'd have equipment for the planting and harvesting of crops like alfalfa, corn, and soybeans. Just for harvesting this meant a combine harvester with a bean head and a corn head, and a "haybine" (so called as it was a kind of combine for alfalfa and other hay type crops). We also had balers and such for bringing in the crops. This equipment wears out in a few decades like most anything else. Often the farmers will trade in equipment before its worn out completely so they can get something bigger and better. Those that buy the used equipment maybe someone in another state as this kind of equipment can be very expensive and putting it on a truck for the best price can be profitable.
So, assuming the climate is shifting on a scale of decades we'll see farmers that used to rotate corn, beans, and alfalfa like my dad did have to at some point have to stop growing beans and instead rotate in something like wheat. Maybe in the time of a young 20-something farmer today seeing in the next 40 or 50 years of working the same plot of land see the crops they grow be completely different than what they started with. During that time the farmer would have had to swap out his equipment three or four times over and maybe have only a small tractor he keeps for sentimental reasons as the same thing he started with. Also in this time the farmer would have done things like install irrigation, put in drainage ditches, or made other changes to the land itself.
But that's just farming, what about things like forests and other wild areas? A tree can't simply walk away. That's true but trees of all kinds are able to survive through floods, fires, and droughts. They spread seeds by wind, water, and animals that eat their fruit. A tree doesn't move but a tree line does in fact move. Assume a tree lives as long as 50 years. Assume that this tree matures to where it is a prodigious producer of seeds in 10 or 15 years. In the lifetime of a single tree natural processes will spread those seeds miles around, a single tree in a prairie can turn into a forest in 50 years.
Sea life moves, adapts, and shifts quite well on the scale of decades. We have protected areas around the most sensitive areas of the sea already to protect this life. The unprotected areas still have lots of life in them. This life may have shifted because of mining, fishing, and farming, but there is life in the sea yet.
I started with assuming that global warming meant simply the shifting of tropical areas to the poles but it's not that simple. As the climate changes the local climate in a given area may be in fact much warmer/cooler, drier/wetter, or whatever. This produces areas for plant and animal life to move to and adapt for.
In short, I'm not seeing anything to get all that alarmed about. We can adapt to the shifting climate and the wildlife can adapt to the shifting climate. Does this mean we do nothing? Of course not. Just as the hypothetical farmer shifts the crop he grows over the years so must we all adapt. We should continue to reduce, recycle, and reuse. People seem to forget just how far we've come. Does anyone even talk about acid rain any more? Well, outside of communist hellholes like China?
I reject your premise that nature cannot adapt to the speed of current climate change. As proof of this I can point to all kinds of examples around the world. I know plenty of people can point to barren places as "proof" of the opposite but this is always a temporary situation. Return to this same barren place in 50 years and it will quite likely have been replaced with wildlife again.
I cannot take anyone seriously if they willfully ignore the severe real-world drawbacks of nuclear power.
Line up the drawbacks of nuclear power to that of wind and solar and nuclear power will always win. As you point out we can put a nuclear power plant on something as small and mobile as an aircraft carrier or submarine. An aircraft carrier might not seem all that "small" in many ways but it is far smaller than any wind farm or solar collector of similar output.
The US Navy doesn't have to be profitable. Private power generation does. Nuclear power generation is not profitable without subsidies.
Wind and solar cannot be profitable without subsidies either. We subsidize wind and solar with the promise that it will be profitable in the future. If wind and solar can be profitable in the future with advancement in technology then so can nuclear.
There's actually no sense in using it for anything but aircraft. Hydrogen storage is too heavy to be practical for them, and hydrogen is too volatile. But hydrogen fuel cells are viable for naval vessels. They're also viable for land vehicles. The military is gearing up to use hydrogen there already.
This is proof you did not even bother to comprehend what was proposed. Go watch the video and read a few articles on the topic before you comment again.
The sun goes down. There is no "math" needed. I guess one could say that they can just use big batteries and that is where the math comes in. Then go look at the cost of solar power now, the cost of battery storage now (because in a desert nation cheaper storage like pumped hydro storage is not all that viable), and then compare that to the cost of nuclear power right now.
You can claim that solar power and battery storage will be cheaper in the future but in the mean time we have a nation with ever increasing electrical demands (from a growing population and desire for improved standard of living) so they have to act now to meet the expected demands in five years. They simply cannot wait.
We are not going to get a carbon neutral electrical grid without nuclear power.
Smart grids and energy storage can do a lot on making wind and solar more viable for producing reliable energy but it can't do it all. Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power. I know people will claim that wind and solar will get less expensive with advancements in technology but then so can nuclear power. We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now. We used to build a lot of nuclear power plants but we effectively stopped for four decades. Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down.
Storage also helps nuclear power as much as wind and solar. Any steam based energy source does not follow load well, whether that steam is produced by natural gas, coal, solar collectors, or nuclear fission. If we are going to add energy storage to the grid then nuclear power starts to look even better. We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear. Prices will come down for all of these energy sources in time. I see no reason to expect that the development of solar will allow for energy cheaper than nuclear any time soon. Wind is pretty cheap but it needs storage. Once we start adding storage to the grid then cheap energy sources we already have now start to look even cheaper, like coal, nuclear, and natural gas. If the goal is to replace coal and natural gas then the technologies that replace them will include nuclear power.
Not using nuclear power means increased prices, brownouts and blackouts, or burning more natural gas.
It won't happen unless we start building nuclear power at any price.
I hear this all the time, "We can't use nuclear power, it's too expensive." What of solar power? What do people have to say about that? "We have to subsidize solar power so we can develop the technology and make it cheaper than coal." Okay then, why not subsidize nuclear power so we can develop the technology until it is cheaper than coal?
We dumped a lot of money into solar power and it still costs two or three time that of natural gas. We put next to nothing into nuclear power and it's about 1-1/2 times natural gas. Just think if we did some research on nuclear power and took bringing down the cost seriously. If we put the price reduction curve of solar energy from the research we had in the last 40 years and put that on what nuclear energy cost then we would in fact have nuclear power too cheap to meter by now.
Here's the thing on nuclear power, it's already cheaper than coal. That might have a lot to do with the taxes and regulation on coal in the past decade or so but if being cheaper than coal is the benchmark then we've reached it already. Solar power is not yet cheaper than coal and it is not likely to get there in the next decade. I'm fine with subsidies on solar power so long as nuclear power gets something too. Nuclear power isn't even asking for subsidies anymore, they are merely asking permission to build.
This Navy project is not new but they have people on the project go around to conventions and such to speak on it. They show good economics, being able to convert CO2 and hydrogen from any natural water source into a liquid fuel for aircraft and other uses. All they need is some funding to ramp this up to something that actually produces fuel for military aircraft.
The largest consumer of fuel in the USA is the US Air Force. The largest air force in the world is the US Air Force. The second largest air force in the world is the US Navy. The third largest air force in the world is the US Marine Corps. If we can get the US military to use the technology that they already have to produce jet fuel then that would be a major win in so many ways.
This idea of carbon neutral fuel production is dependent on a carbon neutral energy source. We have this carbon neutral energy source in nuclear power. The US Navy knows how to operate nuclear power safely. The US Coast Guard is desperate for some new ice breakers, let them have them and make them nuclear powered. Making more nuclear powered US Navy and US Coast Guard surface ships, and this fuel synthesis process to fuel the support aircraft and auxiliary boats, means a big dent in consumed petroleum. Add in some nuclear power on shore to power airports and military bases, and make the fuel for the vehicles that come and go, and that's another big dent in petroleum consumed.
Electricity might work for cars and trains but that won't work for boats and planes. A large enough ship can be nuclear powered, and we should embrace that wholeheartedly for military and civilian ships. Planes won't fly without kerosene. We now get kerosene from digging it up from the ground but we can get it from seawater if we just develop the technology and take the problems of digging up petroleum seriously.
I can't take anyone seriously on the threat of global warming if they do not include nuclear power in the solution. They mention this great process of pulling carbon from the air to turn into fuel but say nothing of where the energy to power it comes from. That says a lot to me. They can't bring themselves to admit that nuclear power is necessary to make this viable. The US Navy has no such aversion to nuclear power. We can at least allow the US Navy to develop the technology they have. Like so many things the US military develops it is likely to find its way into the civilian market in time.
Saudi Arabia has been investing in nuclear power as well. Electric vehicles are only useful in reducing domestic use of oil if they have sources of electricity that do not depend on burning oil to produce. I know that people will claim that electric cars will use less oil per mile even if the oil is burned to produce electricity, because a central power plant is more efficient in converting oil burned to miles traveled. You know what burns even less oil per mile than an electric vehicle charged from an oil fired power plant? One charged from nuclear power.
I know that Saudi Arabia has lots of sun, and is building solar collectors to produce electricity. They did the math just like anyone else can do, solar power will not provide the electricity they need. The only solution they have is to build nuclear power or face an impending energy crisis.
Right now Saudi Arabia burns 1/3rd of the oil they produce to meet domestic energy needs. Whatever they don't burn domestically they can sell to foreign markets. While electric cars are great in reducing oil burned for transportation there is no alternative right now for making planes fly. When it comes to shipping there have been three modes of power that have been shown successful at some point in the past, wind, oil, and nuclear fission. Wind powered shipping hasn't been profitable for about a century now. Oil fired shipping is the norm, and will likely remain so for some time. There's been experimentation in civilian ships powered by nuclear fission in the past and the results were mixed. Military ships powered by a nuclear reactor are obviously a thing but the cost/benefit calculation on that is very different.
Electric cars and solar panels will get us only so far. Barring some leap in technology the future looks bright for nuclear power to take over for when oil gets too expensive. This switch to nuclear power will happen at some point. It will be because oil prices get high enough to exceed the cost of producing energy from nuclear reactors, or because we've advanced nuclear fission technology to the point its price fell to below that from oil. I expect both will be a factor in the switch over.
Oh, and as best I can tell many energy companies have been focusing on one kind of energy to produce. The big oil companies did at one time invest a lot into solar power but that had problems. One problem is that making solar collectors and drilling for oil called for very different skill sets and markets. This meant solar power tended to distract from oil production or oil production distracted from making solar collectors, its difficult for any one company to be good at both. Another problem was more political. Governments did not like the idea of companies getting a monopoly on energy, so companies that in the past only focused on drilling for oil would have to defend their practice of buying up the competition. This was also a political problem for investors and customers. Customers would accuse oil companies of holding up the competition by holding patents and other intellectual property for making solar collectors. Investors also saw a company that was developing solar power and oil as a bad investment because their investments would be devalued if either oil or solar power took a dive, they preferred holding stock in one or the other.
We'll see BP advertise itself as being "Beyond Petroleum", as one example, but they are still focusing on liquid fuels, like ethanol and bio-diesel. Even so the haters will simply claim such investments by BP and other companies that deal in petroleum is just "greenwashing". Well, haters are going to hate. Such investments don't gain them any favors from the anti-oil crowd and bring scrutiny from government regulators.
Slashdot Mirror
- Electricity is cheap because it increasingly comes from wind and solar which are cheaper than coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Whatever.
- ICE engines are complex and fragile and require lots of maintenance (oil changes, tune ups, etc.)
Just because you keep repeating it does not make it true. I addressed this already in that the complexity is no more or less than a current gasoline engine, therefore this does not change current owner, driver, or mechanics behavior. It's the same thing only burning cheaper fuel.
- Natural gas in an ICE engine inherits all of the inefficiencies of an ICE engine (only about 30% efficient). NG electricity (combined cycle) is much more efficient.
That's true but also irrelevant.
What matters to people is dollars per mile, comfort, and convenience. A CNG car offers the fuel at home convenience of an electric, as well as fast refill at a filling station. A gasoline/electric hybrid also offers this convenience but with greater complexity, and therefore greater cost. CNG offers the comfort of heat to the cabin like a gasoline car without the "range anxiety" that electric cars have in cold weather. If I'm correct that increased use of wind, solar, and nuclear will displace natural gas for producing electricity then natural gas is likely to be cheap enough that it will become a competitor to gasoline.
All of your complaints come down to mismanagement by government, not from the nuclear power industry. We can fix the government by getting the right people in office. What we need are some people that want to make America great again. Wait, I heard someone say that before.... Anyway, the point is that if we can open up Yucca Mountain then we have the means to dispose of nuclear waste. Putting nuclear waste in a hole is a completely viable method of disposal. Recycling would be better but holes in rocks work too.
When it comes to Japan's problem's they created them because of their own government mishandling the problems. Fukushima was built before Chernobyl. After Chernobyl blew it's top Japan didn't do much on their end to fix things, even though they knew of problems at Fukushima. It's not that Fukushima was old....
FUKUSHIMA IS OLDER THAN CHERNOBYL!!!
Japan could have made the problem disappear if they had kept building new reactors to replace the old. Now that one blew up in their face they are now taking the problem much more seriously and building new reactors again. We know how to build reactors so that they can't blow their top but it will take government action to allow it to happen. In the USA we are still operating nuclear power under rules created in the 1950s. We need new rules.
Again, all you did was complain about the rules the government has imposed on the nuclear power industry. On that we can agree. What you seem to be stuck on is that there is no way for us to change the rules.
What you also seem to miss is that there are many other nations in the world, and 13 of them are building nuclear power plants.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
You can point to cancelled nuclear power plants here and there if you like. I can point to failed solar power plants as well. Seems to me that solar has the upper hand for now but if even half of these current nuclear sites come to completion then we'll have experienced and motivated people to build more, and for less money in a shorter period of time. We lost a lot of experience because we stopped building nuclear power for 40 years, it will take time to make up for that. When we do then we will see these old nuclear power plants we have now being replaced with new ones. Oh, and it's quite possible that these new reactors could use the "spent" fuel already on these sites to fuel the next generation reactors. It's probably a good thing we didn't just drop that all in a hole in the ground.
It doesn't matter how cheap natural gas goes since you still have a complex ICE engine with maintenance.
That's not true because anyone switching from gasoline to natural gas will see no change. They are already used to this "complexity". Someone with an electric car might find this problematic but they are a much smaller part of the current market.
The reason your electricity is so cheap is because much of it is produced by cheap natural gas. If this connection between natural gas prices and electric prices becomes decoupled with a greater use of wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear, then natural gas prices could fall below that of an equivalent amount of electricity. Admittedly this cannot be decoupled completely since if natural gas gets too cheap then utilities will just burn natural gas again.
What natural gas vehicles do is eliminate the conversion losses of combustion to electricity, then electricity to battery, then battery to moving the vehicle. The combustion directly moves the car. Alternatively the combustion could be in an on board electric power plant for driving an electric transmission. There's your inherent price advantage over using that same fuel to run a generator to charge a battery.
Also, as you point out, traditional ICE makers have large investments in ICE manufacturing. What would be easier for them? Switching to CNG or to electric? My guess is CNG.
Getting back to the cost of CNG vs. electric, it only takes CNG getting within near parity of electricity per mile for many advantages to pile up in it's favor. CNG cars can fill up at home or in minutes at a filling station, much like a more "complex" hybrid. It's nearly indistinguishable from a gasoline car in how it operates for the driver and mechanic, so who's to complain about things being unfamiliar? No "range anxiety" in cold weather either. Maybe electric cars might dominate in warm climates but in places where the heat off the engine can warm the cabin the use of CNG will look like a plus.
First, Ford and GM can make EVs just fine.
I agree, they seem to be doing just fine making electric cars people want to buy.
NG cars combine all the problems with gas with all of the problems of EVs without any of the benefits. You have to build a new energy distribution system (EV's problem) but its still a highly explosive material (gas's problem).
Natural gas has an existing distribution system right now. Perhaps where you live natural gas to the home is a rarity but in many parts of the USA and the rest of the world people routinely heat their homes and cook with natural gas. If people want to fuel up at home it's just a matter of installing the pipe. Years ago I looked at buying a natural gas car and discovered that natural gas filling stations do in fact exist right now.
When it comes to the explosive nature of natural gas I again refer to it commonly being used to heat homes. Natural gas cars already exist and so they've been deemed road worthy. I'm merely suggesting that the growth of solar and wind to produce electricity will replace natural gas, therefore the price of natural gas will go down, and this will lead to people buying more natural gas vehicles. If this gains any kind of traction then I can foresee rapid growth because a lot of the infrastructure exists already and people are familiar with natural gas as they use it everyday for heating and cooking.
Ford (Ok, they finally started this model year).
In other words Ford has been working on an electric car for the past 5 years or so and all major car makers now offer electric vehicles. The claim was that the traditional ICE car makers would be hurt from competition from companies that offer electric vehicles. I suppose that there is time for some late comers to the market, like Ford, to in time find themselves unable to compete in the future but as it is now it seems that the ICE car makers are making a very smooth transition to electric cars and will continue to enjoy being profitable.
Also, Ford is not new to electric vehicles, they've competed in solar car and electric car competitions since the 1980s. Ford produced electric commercial trucks as late as 2012.
Ford bet on higher-efficiency ICE, and hydrogen. They did develop some very efficient ICE, but hydrogen has been eclipsed by advances in batteries.
Hydrogen killed hydrogen as a fuel. Hydrogen is a terrible fuel. The small molecules like to squeeze out of the smallest crack. Hydrogen will corrode many metals. It burns with an invisible flame, a safety hazard. Hydrogen is not very energy dense and so must be liquified or stored at incredible pressures, adding additional safety concerns. It turns out that the best way to store and transport hydrogen is when it's attached to an oxygen and/or carbon. Also, hydrogen is not an energy source, it is only a means to store and transport energy. Oil is an energy source that is easily stored and transported.
But those cars use the same drivetrain. That's the point: Making natural gas ICE for the US and EVs for Europe is less efficient than EVs everywhere, and that drives up costs.
Major car makers do this all the time. As long as someone comes along with a large enough order they'll do just about anything. I happened across the Ford Transit and saw it's offered in versions that run on natural gas, diesel fuel, gasoline, electric, and propane. It's not only been done, it's happening right now.
Except that solar panels don't deplete soil...
Bullshit!
I grew up on a farm and when younger I wondered how Dad got all that sand in the machine shed to cover the ground. When I got older Dad built another shed and I got my answer. Dad picked a spot in our large back yard to build the shed where we kept the grass mowed. The shed went up but the grass in the shed remained. I waited for a dump truck to spread the sand on the ground in the shed but it never came. What happened was the ground "died" and what was once black dirt with beautiful green grass on top turned to white sand over just a few years.
Those people that cover cropland with solar panels are ruining the soil. Fertile soil is "alive", containing bacteria, worms, and obviously plants with roots in that soil. You take away the sun and all that life in the soil just dries up and dies.
Maybe with panels spread out enough and high enough that the sun can reach the soil below something can grow but this is rarely done. Land is expensive and panels raised off the ground are more expensive to maintain. Growing anything on the ground around the solar panels is expensive as that demands labor to maintain, it's far cheaper to just spray everything with herbicide than anything.
I know how many people will respond, we'll pass a law! Solar power is already expensive because of its inherent intermittent nature, requiring that these solar power companies keep the land under the panels from turning to sand will only make it more expensive. What of putting the panels on already "dead" land like parking lots or out in a desert? Putting panels on parking lots adds to the cost. As people that wanted to put solar panels in the American southwest found out there is an endangered desert turtle that lives out there. A desert is not necessarily "dead" soil, it's just not as visible as that in a forest.
Ethanol was mentioned and that's also a bad idea, civilizations have ended because they burned their food for fuel. Let's not repeat that mistake. There's plenty of natural gas to burn yet, and we can synthesize fuels from nuclear power.
You assume that an electric car is similar enough to an ICE car that current car manufacturers can jump right in.
Can you name any current manufacturer of ICE vehicles that has not ever produced an electric car in the last 10 or 20 years? Dusting off the EV1 and selling it now might be a stretch but that would be a possibility for GM to get in the market assuming they've never produced the Chevy Bolt. Also, given all the parts in a modern car the engine that makes it go is a pretty small part in reality.
However, the major manufacturing issue is the battery pack, and current ICE car manufacturers have no experience with that.
Tesla has been buying their batteries from the open market for a very long time, nothing prevents a new entrant in the electric car market from doing the same. Might not be an ideal vehicle design but it will at least buy them some time and gain them experience for the future. Given that a battery maker could gain a lot of future sales by helping out a car maker I'd imagine a battery maker might offer some engineering expertise to such a car maker.
Also, the vehicle control is much different with electric motors, and Tesla is gaining a lot of experience with that.
Again, can you name any current car manufacturer that has not come out with an electric vehicle in the last 20 years? I know 20 years is a long time but automotive technology moves slow enough, IMHO, that this is sufficient to compete. Even if we narrow that down to even 5 years the number of such manufacturers is still very small if not zero.
As far as natural gas, I don't think that would fly. Large parts of Europe depend on Russia for natural gas, and they wouldn't feel comfortable increasing that dependency. And if they can't sell them in Europe, it's not very interesting for car manufacturers. They don't want to make totally different cars for different markets.
You do realize that major car makers already make different cars for different markets, don't you? Left hand drive vs. right hand drive already separate the markets so international companies already produce completely different cars for these markets.
Next is that there are many buyers of natural gas cars right now. These are mostly corporate owned vehicles but they are produced right now in limited quantities. The current offerings are pretty much just gasoline conversions so they have many nagging problems that don't make them popular with those that buy cars one at a time as oppose to those that order them by the hundreds. If the market grows to be large enough then it makes economic sense to expend the resources for a vehicle designed specifically for natural gas. If the goal is to simply take advantage of what they perceive as a larger potential market then all they need to enter this market space to offer something has in the past been only available to corporate buyers to the wider public. I expect that this demand already exists among many future buyers.
While I'll admit that what you point out is not completely invalid those are pretty weak points.
Solar with energy storage has a capacity factor that's near that of nuclear.
That's only true if you redefine what capacity factor means.
Now imagine energy storage with nuclear power. That's cheap energy that does not rely on the sun shining to work. With a big honkin' battery on site for managing shifting demand through the day and night the nuclear power plant won't ever have to even slow down until it runs out of fuel. With next generation reactors capable of refueling while operating they'd not have to even shut down for that. Military reactors already run for 30 years without ever having to be shutdown. Much of this has to do with the rich fuel military reactors run but the same thing can happen with a civil reactor capable of refuel on the fly.
One complaint of nuclear power is its inability to load follow. This goes away with electric storage on site.
Another complaint of nuclear power is cost. We can add up the cost of a nuclear power plant and the storage it would need to manage the shifting demand through the day. We can also add up the cost of solar power and the storage to meet the same demand. Nuclear power has a capacity factor of 90%. Solar power, at best, has 30% capacity factor. How much generation capacity of each will we need? How much storage has to go with each?
If the goal is to replace natural gas peak power generation for load following with battery storage then that means solar will be at a huge disadvantage over nuclear. It is common for electrical demand to peak in the mornings and evenings when solar output is already diminished. That means more storage for this demand.
Coal is dead.
Is it? What happens if we add cheap battery storage to that 80 year old coal plant you mentioned? Right now capacity factor of a typical coal fired power plant is about 60%. If batteries allow for that to run at peak operating conditions regardless of the shifting demands then what does that mean for it's total costs at the end of the day? My guess is that it looks much better.
There is no doubt in my mind that grid scale storage is good for wind and solar power. I'm also quite sure that this kind of storage is even better for nuclear and coal.
Look behind you.
The big losers in the future will probably be gasoline producers and ICE car manufacturers.
A large portion of the people that make ICE cars also make electric cars. They won't be hurt by this, they'll just shift their production as the market shifts.
The people that produce gasoline also produce diesel fuel, heating oil, jet fuel, lubricants, and so much more. They'll just shift their production to less octane to more cetane, butane, and propane. They won't even flinch.
Gas stations and repair shops will either switch or go out of business (Teslas don't have many moving parts, and so don't need many repairs).
Cars need maintenance, even electric ones. They'll still replace tires, take out dents, fix window cracks, and so on. There's also a large market for diesels. Tow trucks, snow plows, and delivery trucks will burn diesel fuel for a long time.
Here's my prediction, electric cars will be replaced soon. As more electricity is produced by wind and solar that will make natural gas get cheaper. At some point someone is going to offer a real deal natural gas car instead of a crappy gasoline conversion. Early electric cars sucked because they weren't electric cars, they were gasoline cars with electric motors put in them. Natural gas cars of the past sucked because the pressure tank for the fuel could not fit in the same spot as the gasoline tank so the pressure tank tended to be put in the trunk. Given that by this time electric charging points will be more common than natural gas filling stations I also expect the first few natural gas cars to be electric hybrids. They'll offer the ability to fill up with cheap natural gas at home and charge up next to the Teslas on long trips. As natural gas catches on then filling stations will start to offer natural gas.
Does my prediction of natural gas replacing electric cars sound implausible? I'm guessing that it's more plausible than claiming Ford or GM having financial troubles because they can't figure out how to make an electric car to compete with Tesla. Think about that for a second. If Ford can't figure out how to compete with Tesla in the electric car market then why would they not simply take on the task of trying to compete with natural gas? What else have they got to lose at that point? If they make it work then they can take Teslas lunch with a car that fills up at home from the same natural gas people use to cook with. I've seen a lot of garages with natural gas heaters in them, it won't take much to hook up a spigot to fill up a car. The selling point for electric cars is never having to visit a filling station again, well natural gas offers that too.
Just not yet, and not this suddenly ...
Using "suddenly" and "over 12 years" together does not compute. I'd be interested in seeing some kind of evidence on how these trees fared in the past. It's quite amazing for these trees to have lived for so long but it would seem feasible to me that 1000 years ago we could have seen trees of this type die off then too. The changing of the climate then could have also done them in.
Consider an analogous situation on a human. We see a 150 year old man fall ill and die. Do we blame this on climate change too? Perhaps his diet of only fresh milk and fruit killed him. Maybe it was the pipes he smoked when he was in his 40s, 50s, and 60s. Or maybe it just that he's 150 years old and a person living this long is quite unusual to begin with and it's impossible to tell what the final nail in his coffin was.
A more humorous take on this human analogy... I recall a TV character making fun of another about how he takes such great care to eat healthy, exercise, abstain from alcohol, not smoke, and generally fixate on living for a long time. The punch line was something about looking foolish in his old age, lying in a hospital bed, dying of NOTHING. Everything alive dies sometime, pinning the cause on something specific can be a fool's errand.
You're wrong on this. Nuclear is twice the cost of solar and wind. Citation above.
Your citation only shows nuclear being twice the cost of solar and wind when comparing the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) case numbers from a single source. EIA shows wind and solar being far more expensive as do numerous studies from other nations. There is still the matter of the cost of the storage.
There's also the non-trivial matter of the waste stream, which is not covered in the pricing in that citation.
Every nuclear power plant in the USA, and in most nations in the world, are required to pay in advance for the cost of decommissioning the plant at the end of its life. In the USA the government "rents" the nuclear fuel to the power plants. They buy the fuel from the government and then must pay the government to dispose of the waste. Unless there is proof otherwise I'm quite certain that the cost of the waste management is included in the cost estimates.
As long as we are on the subject, has the cost of managing the solar and wind power waste been included in the cost estimates? As I recall the problems of disposing of solar panel waste has not been resolved just yet. I read about it on this web site called "Slashdot", perhaps you've heard of it.
Turns out pretending nuclear is cheap is not an optimal strategy.
Pretending that wind and solar is the future of our electricity supply is not an optimal strategy either.
I've seen the studies on how people pretend to be able to provide the electricity we need from wind and sun and it is not a pretty picture. Without some nuclear and natural gas in the mix with the wind and sun we can look forward to an economic and environmental disaster. We can provide all the electricity we need from nuclear and natural gas, and do so with very low environmental impact. How do we know this? France is pretty much doing this right now. Japan is not far from it either, or was until a few years ago. Japan is restarting their nuclear power industry right now having learned that running nuclear power plants decades beyond their designed life span is not wise. Also not wise is burning gobs of imported oil, coal, and natural gas.
We can put some wind and sun in the mix but without nuclear providing a large portion of the electricity on the grid it does not work. How large of a portion? My guess would be something like 50% to 90%. Energy storage on the grid only makes the prospect of more nuclear look better. Storage technology does not just benefit wind and sun as sources of energy, it benefits them all.
The other issue is that I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
That's a false dichotomy.
We can both improve our standard of living and reduce the impact we've had on the environment. We do this with nuclear power. Perhaps in the future we will have another choice but right now the choice is petroleum (and the effects that has on the environment), reducing our standard of living, or nuclear power. I may have just given my own falsifiable set of choices but you've only given the first two in my list, oil and ecological disaster, or wind and sun and reduced quality of life.
There is a third choice and ignoring nuclear power as that choice means misery.
Second, there's no guarantee costs should come down.
There is no guarantee that wind and solar prices will come down either.
We've been trying to make solar power viable beyond pocket calculators and communication satellites for a very long time now, and we've come a long way. The problem is that even with massive economies of scale, excessive government subsidies, and decades of pouring money into research, solar power still produces a fraction of a percent of the energy we consume today.
Wind energy has come a long way in recent times and I believe it can become a large portion of the electricity we use. I'd rather see wind power be used to pump water and perform other mechanical work as I believe that would be far more efficient than to use it to produce electricity but whatever, it works fairly well and it has a future.
What is quite clear is that given the freedom to develop we can see nuclear power be inexpensive enough to provide vast amounts of energy for a national grid. We've seen this happen already in places like the USA, France, and Japan.
And the executive and legislative powers of countries have to sign on that.
We can change these laws easily enough given the right incentive. What we cannot do, even with infinite willpower, is change the laws of physics and economics. Nuclear power works today, solar power does not. Ignoring the longstanding history of nuclear power to produce cheap, safe, and effectively infinite energy is not only foolish but borderline suicidal. We have the high standard of living we enjoy because of nuclear power. Not expanding our fleet of nuclear power plants would mean going backwards in the quality of life on this planet.
We don't have to "junk" the nuclear power industries as you propose, we'd have to grow the industry to where economies of scale can reduce costs. We've had companies compete over the nuclear power market before and we can restore that to bring down prices with competition, research and development, and the natural market forces that bring down costs and improve quality like any other industry.
I love when people trot this out. Household cats kill 1000 to 10,000 times more birds than wind power generation. Yet I don't see the same people so worried about it in wind generation propose banning cats.
House cats don't kill falcons, vultures, eagles, and other large birds. In fact its the other way around, these large birds have been known to hunt small cats. I love it when people trot out the greater threat household cats pose to birds over windmills as it demonstrates an obvious lack of comprehension of the problem. Birds have evolved to manage the threat cats hold to them but windmills are a new threat. Perhaps in time birds will evolve the means to manage the threat windmills pose to them but considering the damage already done to large birds the widespread use of windmills would likely render these bird extinct long before they could adapt their behavior. Like I said, I'm a bit ambivalent towards the threat windmills pose to birds but if the goal is to save the birds then windmills simply will not do. We don't have many windmills now but if we were to replace 25% of our electricity production with wind in the near future then we'd likely see many large birds go extinct.
Also, your sources on solar are 1) funded by the coal and natural gas industries, or 2) citing reports funded by the coal and natural gas industries. There might be a wee bit of bias in their studies.
I'll admit to the bias in my sources. I'd like to see your sources with a counter argument. I've seen people write a articles that claims to point out that wind and solar are superior but they often are able to do so only through lies and careful manipulation of the data. It's quite clear that nuclear power is the safest energy source we have. It is also quite clear that nuclear power produces the lowest CO2 output per energy produced with the possible exception of hydro power. I'm sure nuclear power kills birds too because birds tend to run into things. Birds are stupid and run into trees and buildings, bashing in their own heads. Why don't we see these dead birds littering the landscape? I'll point to your earlier comment on how cats like to hunt birds, cats and other animals will eat these dead birds.
The US doesn't have to do shit.
Exactly.
The USA has some of the cleanest air and water in the world. We don't have smog warnings where people are encouraged to stay indoors to avoid the coal dust and suffocating gas from factories. If someone in the USA dies from lung conditions then it's likely from smoking and not from working conditions or having to burn cow dung to cook their food at home.
Certainly the USA can improve but as one nation among about 200 on this planet the USA is doing far more in improving the lives of those that inhabit this planet than so many more. I could argue the USA has improved more lives than all the other nations combined.
USA does not have to be unique in this. There is nothing about America that other nations could not bring to their own nation. Instead of these "climate summits" that do nothing more than try to transfer the wealth of the USA to other nations perhaps these nations in the summit should shut up and hear what the USA can teach them in producing a nation where the air and water is so clean.
No. If you cannot explain what you're on about without referring to a video, you probably don't understand it to begin with.
I can explain it but someone else explained it better already. I can transcribe or paraphrase what was said for your benefit but I'm not willing to waste my time because you are too lazy to click a link and watch a 15 minute video. If you use the 2x speed option on Youtube and skip over some of the boring parts you'd get the general idea in 5 minutes or less.
Wind and solar don't have the risk of rendering areas uninhabitable for thousands of years. Willfully ignoring that doesn't change it.
Bringing up first and second generation nuclear power plants as an argument against fourth and fifth generation power plants makes as much sense as me talking about the windmill on my grandfather's farm in opposition of current wind power. Or as much sense as bringing up Ralph Nader's book on car safety as a reflection on the safety of modern automobiles. The Soviets screwed up on the building of Chernobyl decades ago, but no one is insane enough to build a reactor like that again. If the safety of nuclear power concerns you then the quickest way to address that is to build new reactors to replace the old ones. We don't have the manufacturing ability to replace our current fleet of nuclear power plants with anything other than new nuclear power plants.
You are correct, I didn't point that out. Here's a few links to put the waste problems of solar and wind power into perspective.
https://instituteforenergyrese...
https://www.nationalreview.com...
http://dailycaller.com/2017/07...
https://thoughtscapism.com/201...
Wind and solar have far greater waste problems than nuclear. Can we reduce the waste from wind and solar? Sure, just as we can learn to reduce the waste produced from nuclear energy. Can we improve the methods of recycling and disposing of waste produced from wind and solar? I imagine we can, just as we can with waste from nuclear power.
Solar power is not only an environmental disaster it is an economical disaster. Perhaps in the future solar power can improve beyond what nuclear offers now but that's assuming nuclear does not also improve. Solar is trying to hit a moving target and falling behind every year. I'm generally okay with wind, it's not all that reliable but it also is not that expensive, does not produce terrible amounts of toxic waste, and allows for use of the land below for farming and ranching. Wind does kill birds but birds are jerks, I say let them die.
Nuclear power is safer than wind and solar. Nuclear power is less expensive than wind and solar, with some exceptions in a few locations. Nuclear power produces less CO2 per energy produced, with perhaps hydro being better in a few locations. Nuclear power produces less waste than wind and solar. Nuclear power is the best source of energy we have right now and we'd be fools to not expand our fleet of nuclear power plants.
Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years but we're seeing effects on the scale of decades which is hundreds of times faster than normal.
I keep hearing this but never really sat down to think what this means. Let's imagine this means the expansion of the tropical climate towards the poles.
I grew up on a farm and my dad would rotate crops like any modern farmer would. To do this we'd have equipment for the planting and harvesting of crops like alfalfa, corn, and soybeans. Just for harvesting this meant a combine harvester with a bean head and a corn head, and a "haybine" (so called as it was a kind of combine for alfalfa and other hay type crops). We also had balers and such for bringing in the crops. This equipment wears out in a few decades like most anything else. Often the farmers will trade in equipment before its worn out completely so they can get something bigger and better. Those that buy the used equipment maybe someone in another state as this kind of equipment can be very expensive and putting it on a truck for the best price can be profitable.
So, assuming the climate is shifting on a scale of decades we'll see farmers that used to rotate corn, beans, and alfalfa like my dad did have to at some point have to stop growing beans and instead rotate in something like wheat. Maybe in the time of a young 20-something farmer today seeing in the next 40 or 50 years of working the same plot of land see the crops they grow be completely different than what they started with. During that time the farmer would have had to swap out his equipment three or four times over and maybe have only a small tractor he keeps for sentimental reasons as the same thing he started with. Also in this time the farmer would have done things like install irrigation, put in drainage ditches, or made other changes to the land itself.
But that's just farming, what about things like forests and other wild areas? A tree can't simply walk away. That's true but trees of all kinds are able to survive through floods, fires, and droughts. They spread seeds by wind, water, and animals that eat their fruit. A tree doesn't move but a tree line does in fact move. Assume a tree lives as long as 50 years. Assume that this tree matures to where it is a prodigious producer of seeds in 10 or 15 years. In the lifetime of a single tree natural processes will spread those seeds miles around, a single tree in a prairie can turn into a forest in 50 years.
Sea life moves, adapts, and shifts quite well on the scale of decades. We have protected areas around the most sensitive areas of the sea already to protect this life. The unprotected areas still have lots of life in them. This life may have shifted because of mining, fishing, and farming, but there is life in the sea yet.
I started with assuming that global warming meant simply the shifting of tropical areas to the poles but it's not that simple. As the climate changes the local climate in a given area may be in fact much warmer/cooler, drier/wetter, or whatever. This produces areas for plant and animal life to move to and adapt for.
In short, I'm not seeing anything to get all that alarmed about. We can adapt to the shifting climate and the wildlife can adapt to the shifting climate. Does this mean we do nothing? Of course not. Just as the hypothetical farmer shifts the crop he grows over the years so must we all adapt. We should continue to reduce, recycle, and reuse. People seem to forget just how far we've come. Does anyone even talk about acid rain any more? Well, outside of communist hellholes like China?
I reject your premise that nature cannot adapt to the speed of current climate change. As proof of this I can point to all kinds of examples around the world. I know plenty of people can point to barren places as "proof" of the opposite but this is always a temporary situation. Return to this same barren place in 50 years and it will quite likely have been replaced with wildlife again.
I cannot take anyone seriously if they willfully ignore the severe real-world drawbacks of nuclear power.
Line up the drawbacks of nuclear power to that of wind and solar and nuclear power will always win. As you point out we can put a nuclear power plant on something as small and mobile as an aircraft carrier or submarine. An aircraft carrier might not seem all that "small" in many ways but it is far smaller than any wind farm or solar collector of similar output.
The US Navy doesn't have to be profitable. Private power generation does. Nuclear power generation is not profitable without subsidies.
Wind and solar cannot be profitable without subsidies either. We subsidize wind and solar with the promise that it will be profitable in the future. If wind and solar can be profitable in the future with advancement in technology then so can nuclear.
There's actually no sense in using it for anything but aircraft. Hydrogen storage is too heavy to be practical for them, and hydrogen is too volatile. But hydrogen fuel cells are viable for naval vessels. They're also viable for land vehicles. The military is gearing up to use hydrogen there already.
This is proof you did not even bother to comprehend what was proposed. Go watch the video and read a few articles on the topic before you comment again.
The sun goes down. There is no "math" needed. I guess one could say that they can just use big batteries and that is where the math comes in. Then go look at the cost of solar power now, the cost of battery storage now (because in a desert nation cheaper storage like pumped hydro storage is not all that viable), and then compare that to the cost of nuclear power right now.
You can claim that solar power and battery storage will be cheaper in the future but in the mean time we have a nation with ever increasing electrical demands (from a growing population and desire for improved standard of living) so they have to act now to meet the expected demands in five years. They simply cannot wait.
We are not going to get a carbon neutral electrical grid without nuclear power.
Smart grids and energy storage can do a lot on making wind and solar more viable for producing reliable energy but it can't do it all. Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power. I know people will claim that wind and solar will get less expensive with advancements in technology but then so can nuclear power. We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now. We used to build a lot of nuclear power plants but we effectively stopped for four decades. Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down.
Storage also helps nuclear power as much as wind and solar. Any steam based energy source does not follow load well, whether that steam is produced by natural gas, coal, solar collectors, or nuclear fission. If we are going to add energy storage to the grid then nuclear power starts to look even better. We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear. Prices will come down for all of these energy sources in time. I see no reason to expect that the development of solar will allow for energy cheaper than nuclear any time soon. Wind is pretty cheap but it needs storage. Once we start adding storage to the grid then cheap energy sources we already have now start to look even cheaper, like coal, nuclear, and natural gas. If the goal is to replace coal and natural gas then the technologies that replace them will include nuclear power.
Not using nuclear power means increased prices, brownouts and blackouts, or burning more natural gas.
It won't happen unless we start building nuclear power at any price.
I hear this all the time, "We can't use nuclear power, it's too expensive." What of solar power? What do people have to say about that? "We have to subsidize solar power so we can develop the technology and make it cheaper than coal." Okay then, why not subsidize nuclear power so we can develop the technology until it is cheaper than coal?
We dumped a lot of money into solar power and it still costs two or three time that of natural gas. We put next to nothing into nuclear power and it's about 1-1/2 times natural gas. Just think if we did some research on nuclear power and took bringing down the cost seriously. If we put the price reduction curve of solar energy from the research we had in the last 40 years and put that on what nuclear energy cost then we would in fact have nuclear power too cheap to meter by now.
Here's the thing on nuclear power, it's already cheaper than coal. That might have a lot to do with the taxes and regulation on coal in the past decade or so but if being cheaper than coal is the benchmark then we've reached it already. Solar power is not yet cheaper than coal and it is not likely to get there in the next decade. I'm fine with subsidies on solar power so long as nuclear power gets something too. Nuclear power isn't even asking for subsidies anymore, they are merely asking permission to build.
Here's a 3 year old video on a US Navy project doing this same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This Navy project is not new but they have people on the project go around to conventions and such to speak on it. They show good economics, being able to convert CO2 and hydrogen from any natural water source into a liquid fuel for aircraft and other uses. All they need is some funding to ramp this up to something that actually produces fuel for military aircraft.
The largest consumer of fuel in the USA is the US Air Force. The largest air force in the world is the US Air Force. The second largest air force in the world is the US Navy. The third largest air force in the world is the US Marine Corps. If we can get the US military to use the technology that they already have to produce jet fuel then that would be a major win in so many ways.
This idea of carbon neutral fuel production is dependent on a carbon neutral energy source. We have this carbon neutral energy source in nuclear power. The US Navy knows how to operate nuclear power safely. The US Coast Guard is desperate for some new ice breakers, let them have them and make them nuclear powered. Making more nuclear powered US Navy and US Coast Guard surface ships, and this fuel synthesis process to fuel the support aircraft and auxiliary boats, means a big dent in consumed petroleum. Add in some nuclear power on shore to power airports and military bases, and make the fuel for the vehicles that come and go, and that's another big dent in petroleum consumed.
Electricity might work for cars and trains but that won't work for boats and planes. A large enough ship can be nuclear powered, and we should embrace that wholeheartedly for military and civilian ships. Planes won't fly without kerosene. We now get kerosene from digging it up from the ground but we can get it from seawater if we just develop the technology and take the problems of digging up petroleum seriously.
I can't take anyone seriously on the threat of global warming if they do not include nuclear power in the solution. They mention this great process of pulling carbon from the air to turn into fuel but say nothing of where the energy to power it comes from. That says a lot to me. They can't bring themselves to admit that nuclear power is necessary to make this viable. The US Navy has no such aversion to nuclear power. We can at least allow the US Navy to develop the technology they have. Like so many things the US military develops it is likely to find its way into the civilian market in time.
Saudi Arabia has been investing in nuclear power as well. Electric vehicles are only useful in reducing domestic use of oil if they have sources of electricity that do not depend on burning oil to produce. I know that people will claim that electric cars will use less oil per mile even if the oil is burned to produce electricity, because a central power plant is more efficient in converting oil burned to miles traveled. You know what burns even less oil per mile than an electric vehicle charged from an oil fired power plant? One charged from nuclear power.
I know that Saudi Arabia has lots of sun, and is building solar collectors to produce electricity. They did the math just like anyone else can do, solar power will not provide the electricity they need. The only solution they have is to build nuclear power or face an impending energy crisis.
Right now Saudi Arabia burns 1/3rd of the oil they produce to meet domestic energy needs. Whatever they don't burn domestically they can sell to foreign markets. While electric cars are great in reducing oil burned for transportation there is no alternative right now for making planes fly. When it comes to shipping there have been three modes of power that have been shown successful at some point in the past, wind, oil, and nuclear fission. Wind powered shipping hasn't been profitable for about a century now. Oil fired shipping is the norm, and will likely remain so for some time. There's been experimentation in civilian ships powered by nuclear fission in the past and the results were mixed. Military ships powered by a nuclear reactor are obviously a thing but the cost/benefit calculation on that is very different.
Electric cars and solar panels will get us only so far. Barring some leap in technology the future looks bright for nuclear power to take over for when oil gets too expensive. This switch to nuclear power will happen at some point. It will be because oil prices get high enough to exceed the cost of producing energy from nuclear reactors, or because we've advanced nuclear fission technology to the point its price fell to below that from oil. I expect both will be a factor in the switch over.
Oh, and as best I can tell many energy companies have been focusing on one kind of energy to produce. The big oil companies did at one time invest a lot into solar power but that had problems. One problem is that making solar collectors and drilling for oil called for very different skill sets and markets. This meant solar power tended to distract from oil production or oil production distracted from making solar collectors, its difficult for any one company to be good at both. Another problem was more political. Governments did not like the idea of companies getting a monopoly on energy, so companies that in the past only focused on drilling for oil would have to defend their practice of buying up the competition. This was also a political problem for investors and customers. Customers would accuse oil companies of holding up the competition by holding patents and other intellectual property for making solar collectors. Investors also saw a company that was developing solar power and oil as a bad investment because their investments would be devalued if either oil or solar power took a dive, they preferred holding stock in one or the other.
We'll see BP advertise itself as being "Beyond Petroleum", as one example, but they are still focusing on liquid fuels, like ethanol and bio-diesel. Even so the haters will simply claim such investments by BP and other companies that deal in petroleum is just "greenwashing". Well, haters are going to hate. Such investments don't gain them any favors from the anti-oil crowd and bring scrutiny from government regulators.