Wind and Solar power is cheaper than coal all over the world.
I don't live all over the world, I live in the American Midwest. Solar and wind is not cheaper here, therefore it is not cheaper all over the world. If it was cheaper than coal then my electric utility would not have mailed me an offer to increase my electric rate to fund more windmills. Instead they'd be mailing me a letter that they've reduced my rates because of all the windmills they built.
There is nothing to recycle, you simply put them again into a silicon plant, how retarded are you?
Citation needed. I've searched the internet for how PV cells are recycled and all I've found are articles that say that PV cells contain heavy metals and therefore must be disposed of as hazardous waste, and people that claim they can recycle PV cells real soon now.
This has been a problem for electronics for a long time now. No one has figured out how to recycle silicon once it's been doped. After that all they can do is leach out as many heavy metals as they can and dump the remains in a hole.
You forget that building a nuclear is extremely expensive, running it is relatively cheap.
No, I did not. The material expense is nearly identical to that of a coal plant, I've seen an engineering analysis of this. The regulatory expense is high right now but that is merely a matter of politics and politics can change. Other one time costs like design and engineering can be spread over multiple reactors.
Material costs for wind is higher than nuclear, many times higher. They can save on things like assembly line production but nuclear reactors can be built assembly line style too. Finding real world numbers on the costs of solar is nearly impossible. Everyone likes to talk about how much solar will cost in 10 or 20 years but few will give actual numbers for today.
So in order to get the investment back, you need to get revenue for over fifty years. For solar you only need ten to twenty years.
Which will supposedly happen 20 years from now. In that 20 years we could also have small modular reactors built on an assembly line. The engineering and licensing costs would be minimal, a lot like how commercial aircraft are built and licensed. As of right now, today, solar still costs more than nuclear so investing in solar right now, today, is not a good bet.
Wind and solar is cheaper than coal since 5 years or more.
Sure, in places like Hawaii and Arizona. Once all that cheap land in sunny places is "used up" then where can they go? There's a lot of that land so "used up" does not mean covered in solar panels, it means close enough to demand that it is profitable. Running wires to far off places costs money. Wind has a similar problem. It's cheap to put some windmills outside Chicago, St. Louis, and Dallas on some ranch and let the cattle graze underneath but at some point the windy places aren't so close to demand any more.
Solar has a lot of issues Care to point out such an issue?
Sure. First is the well known issue of being available for about 8 hours per day. I hear people say that solar is cheaper than whatever in cost of new build capacity. This may in fact be true but solar capacity is not the same as coal capacity, or even wind. Solar has a capacity factor of about 30% while coal and nuclear have a capacity factor of 90%. If I build 10 nuclear power plants I can be assured that I'll get something like 80% of that maximum capacity at any time, day or night. To get that same assurance from solar I'd need 3 times the installed capacity with storage, and storage is not free. If I have a mix of wind, solar, and hydro, then maybe I can get away with not needing the storage (hydro is effectively the storage) but I'd still need 3 times the installed capacity over if I had a mix of coal, nuclear, and natural gas. This reliability problem translates into costs for materials, land, and just plain more money.
Second is the fragility of solar. For solar panels (and wind mills too) to work they need to be out in the weather. That means being exposed to things like hail, wind, and lightning. I remember a few hail storms around here and insurance companies had to bring in people from all over to handle the claims of broken windows, dented cars, and damaged roofs. What would a solar farm look like after that? How long would it take to repair? I'm sure with thick enough glass it could take quite a beating but that adds to the cost and reduces efficiency. Coal, nuclear, and natural gas don't have that problem. It's cheap insurance to put them in big concrete bunkers to hold up to even a direct hit by an F4 tornado. A nuclear power plant can likely take an even bigger beating since they've been tested against things like airplane collisions.
Land area. Solar power needs area and there is no way to get around that. Not only a lot of area but area free of obstructions. Solar can be put on rooftops but that adds to maintenance costs since now lifting up the panels involves cranes and more time than if on the ground. This land cannot be used for crops, grazing, hunting, or much of anything really. This land is going to be as lifeless as an asphalt parking lot. So you can park underneath the panels, which is nice I suppose but we need only so many parking lots. Nuclear power can be done anywhere, including under those solar panels, parking lots, and green spaces. We're not there just yet but we're close. The problem isn't so much the technology, we have nuclear power running under water in submarines, but more of the politics and logistics. Ignoring that we still can have a nuclear power plant in the middle of a green space where we can grow trees, crops, or whatever. It can be done on a frozen tundra in the Arctic circle, or in the shadow of a mountain.
Waste. Many people will make a big deal about the waste created by a nuclear or coal power plant. Not many people think of the waste from a solar plant. Those panels will wear out and break but we don't know yet how to recycle that. There's also the concrete pads they sit on and/or the steel and aluminum structures to hold them up. We know how to recycle steel, aluminum, and to some extent concrete too, but that is going to be a lot to handle. To keep up with demand and wear on solar we'd have to
Problem with nuclear is that it is getting too expensive. It can, maybe, do 5 cents per kWh for new installations, but uncertainties are huge. Solar can now, as today, do it at 20 cents, and it is rapidly declining. If it is cheaper than nuclear withing twenty years, building a nuclear plant today is "negative" investment.
That doesn't make sense. If I build a new nuclear power plant and a new solar farm, today, I'll need the loans for those and pay them off for something like that same 20 years it would take for solar to catch up. If the nuclear costs 5 cents per kWh today and the solar costs 20 cents per kWh today then in 20 years those two energy sources will still cost the same, because the cost for both is largely in stable costs like that loan for initial construction, labor, taxes, land, and so on. That same nuclear power plant will still be there in 20 years as will that same solar farm. For that solar farm to be profitable the price of energy would have to be above 20 cents per kWh for the next 20 years. If energy can be sold at that price then that nuclear power plant will make me a pile of money after those 20 years since my costs are 1/4 of what the solar cost.
If the costs of solar is dropping as quickly as you claim then investing in it today is the negative investment. It would be better to invest in nuclear today and then invest in solar when or if it gets cheaper. That rapid decline in solar pricing is in itself an uncertainty, which as you point out is something investors want to avoid.
And there will not be any "future" nuclear reactors, nobody can invest that amount of money to unknwon technology (unknown as "will it be cheap enough").
This next generation solar is also unknown. For new photovoltaic cells no one will know if it can last for 20 years in the weather for precisely 20 years. For new thermal solar technologies like molten salts people will not know the wear life of the piping for 20 years. Solar is as much an unknown as nuclear. You can claim solar will get cheaper all you like but we cannot know for sure until it actually happens. As it is right now nuclear is less of an unknown if we use current designs that are very safe and profitable. Nuclear is cheaper than solar today, you admitted this already. We can make it cheaper in the future just like we can make solar cheaper in the future.
I might have believed you ten years ago that no private entity has the kind of money needed to fund a nuclear power plant. Today we have private companies investing in a lot of huge projects that even governments ten years ago could not afford. The next ten years will be very interesting.
Obama was wrong to weasel us into the Paris shit without actually putting it to congress.
That's putting it mildly. He wrote a check that he new he didn't have to cash. It was the last days of his term and he could not run for office again. It was an agreement to last decades while he had only weeks left in office, but he signed it. People cheered and he got to leave office a "hero". Without putting it to Congress it was an agreement that the next POTUS could discard like a used tissue. Maybe he was betting on Democrats to win the White House and Congress. That did not happen though.
You mean like effectively abandoning nuclear power development?
Nuclear power is as "zero carbon" as wind or solar but the world effectively stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago. Had they not stopped then perhaps we could have shut down a lot of aging nuclear power plants by now because we'd have the electrical capacity to replace them.
As it is now we can expect many nuclear power plants to still be in service 80 years after they were built, triple their intended life span. If we should see another Fukushima style incident then we'll get a bunch of people in a panic, plans for new nuclear reactors will get set back by a decade, and we'll keep burning coal.
Yep, if people had listened 30 years ago it is possible we'd be living in a nuclear powered world. Safe from the nonsense in the Middle East. Safe from nuclear reactors stretched beyond their limits. Safe from global warming.
We lost a lot of experienced nuclear engineers and technicians in that time. They're all retired, senile, or dead now. It's going to take a long time to get that back.
Molten salt energy storage? Could we use something else to heat this salt? Something "green"? Molten salt nuclear reactors sound like a great idea to do just that.
I like solar thermal. Not because I think that they'd ever be viable but because they'll do the research in materials and such that would be directly applicable to molten salt reactors. Solar might work for quite a large band of area at the equator, perhaps between 30 or 45 degrees north and south, but outside that area solar does not work so well. Nuclear power would work though.
That might work great for China and India but for large populations in the Americas, Asia, and Europe they don't have the same access to the sun.
That's great if you have a hill to pump the water up to. Out here on the Great Plains we don't have many hills.
An odd thing happened some time in my youth. We call this area the "wind corridor" now. Before that we called it "tornado alley". I don't think that change in nomenclature was because there was any real change in the weather patterns around here. It's hard to sell windmills in "tornado alley" but they sound great for a place called the "wind corridor". Too bad we don't have any hills so we have a place to pump some water to the top and store that wind energy.
China and India are the biggest markets for just about everything. That includes nuclear power. It seems odd that an article that wants to sing the praises of how wind and solar are going to power the world that they'd not even mention that nuclear power already powers a good sized portion of it, more than what wind and solar do now, and nearly as much as coal.
I see this as just another example of bias in the news. Bloomberg is an organization with a far left bias and nuclear is seen as some sort of threat or something. Like some evil entity that is only alluded to with words like "he who must not be named" or something. If they left out nuclear power in this piece then I have to wonder if it is because wind and solar don't look so great by comparison. They'll mention coal because coal is no real threat, but nuclear cannot even be mentioned once.
What we do see is that China and India are taking a true "all the above" strategy on energy since they have active development of nuclear energy. Unlike the USA which has an "all the above... except nuclear" strategy. I believe this attitude will change in time. But will it be soon enough? Until wind and solar is cheaper than coal we will be burning coal. We know nuclear is cheaper than coal, and as green as solar. Obama and friends held back the industry for a decade. We could have saved a lot of carbon in that time.
There was absolutely no mention of nuclear power in this article. Is not China and India investing in that technology too?
It would be great if solar could in fact be cheaper than coal in 20 years or so but I've already been told for 20 years that solar will be cheaper than coal in 20 years. I stopped believing these claims a long time ago. Solar has a lot of issues that merely lowering the price of the panels will not solve.
I do believe that wind can get their prices down to where it could compete with other energy sources. Like solar though it has problems of being intermittent. I hear claims that batteries and other storage systems can address this but I ask, what stops people from charging these batteries with cheap and reliable coal or nuclear? Batteries can follow load changes better then coal or nuclear can, so use those for peak load and forget about wind or natural gas.
One thing that puts a limit on the costs between wind and nuclear, wind takes ten times the steel and concrete of nuclear per megawatt of installed capacity. People ask, where is all that concrete? All I you are steel towers and a three big blades turning about. The answer is that the concrete is in the anchor that holds up that tower. If we can assume that the concrete anchors fatigue in 50 years or so, just like it would in a nuclear reactor, then we will need a continuous recycling of concrete to keep up with even an unchanging demand for electricity. If you need X tons of concrete for a gigawatt nuclear power plant then you will need 10X tons for a gigawatt of wind power.
Making concrete has a carbon footprint associated with it. That means that nuclear not only can have a smaller carbon footprint than wind but already does. Future nuclear reactors will likely require less concrete and steel than it does now with advancements in technology. So wind is already behind and the competition is not standing still.
So, it's great that we can look forward to cheap wind and solar in a decade or three. What should we do until then? We can keep burning coal. We can shutdown large sectors of our economy, which would likely delay this new wind and solar advancement. Or we can use nuclear power.
I believe that nuclear power is the only logical choice today. When or if wind and solar catch up then we can switch to that.
How can you say that we're ready to colonize Mars when we haven't even colonized all the frontiers on this planet?
We can say this because it may in fact be easier to get to Mars and create a colony there than some places on Earth.
By "easier" that does not mean only technologically or logistically but also politically. Settling some places on Earth can mean getting your house bombed by someone that doesn't want you to live there, that's a political hurdle. Technologically it can mean things like trying to get to the Antarctic interior means battling harsh winds. We can (quite likely) land something on a windless (relatively) Mars a lot easier than on Antarctica. Continuing the Antarctic example there would be political problems of putting a permanent settlement on the ice there, there are stations there now and they took a lot of negotiations to get them there. Creating a settlement with families living there is a different matter.
so why spend large amounts of money on a symbolic gesture ?
Because symbolism is important. Isn't that what we were told about the Paris Accord? That even though it enforced nothing the symbolism of the agreement was important. This is why Greenpeace replaced the diesel ship they used to protest drilling with a sail assisted ship. They were mocked heavily for burning diesel to harass oil rigs. And they should be mocked for this. Not that their new ship is much of an improvement, it still has a 500hp diesel engine for primary propulsion, the sails are really only to give a thin veil over their hypocrisy. They will describe the ship as having a "highly efficient electric hybrid drive" which just means its a bog standard marine drive. Not that they'd like nuclear powered ships either.
Nuclear icebreakers are not just symbolic either, they are highly capable ships. Do you really think that Russia gives a damn about their carbon footprint? I don't. I think they use nuclear powered icebreakers because they can be at sea non-stop for a whole year, break the heaviest of ice, and generally run circles around any diesel counterpart.
What I recall is that some DC Comics guy said Metropolis was New York in the day and Gotham was New York at night. The early comics kept the locations of each city ambiguous but later on they had to put them somewhere.
I remember at least one of the Superman movies showed Metropolis as New York. In the Smallville TV show Metropolis was within sight of Smallville from a water tower or some other high spot, and Smallville was in Kansas. There were scenes in the show in Metropolis at some large body of water. It could have been a large river, one of the Great Lakes, or something. Having that be a seaport would be nonsensical, not that a guy that can shoot lasers from his eyes makes all that much sense.
The Supergirl TV show had Supergirl in California and Superman in Metropolis on the east coast or Midwest, I wasn't sure. The Gotham TV show lived in the same universe, kind of, but I didn't watch enough of that to figure out where it was supposed to be. Pretty sure that Gotham was supposed to be on the east coast.
Best I can tell is that you have it backwards, maybe, with Metropolis as a Chicago analog and Gotham as a New York analog.
You couldn't resist some stupid offtopic charging at windmills and cheering for nukes either - it's all a big one package deal with you blindly following a Party line then isn't it?
You don't see the irony of using diesel powered vessels to investigate the damage fossil fuels are doing to the environment?
It's not like nuclear powered icebreakers are theoretical, they do exist and Russia has been sailing them for 50 years or so. If we are to agree that CAGW is a problem then would it not immediately follow that something should be done about it? Should not that something we do be a something that is inexpensive, exists today, and highly effective? Nuclear power replacing coal means taking one of the dirtiest energy sources we have now and replacing it with the cleanest and cheapest we have now. It's even better than windmills for carbon footprint, and nuclear works when the wind doesn't blow.
Of course it's a "package deal". If CAGW is real then we should do something about it, not just talk about how we're ruining things with the status quo.
I don't believe anyone is claiming that icebreakers have not been stuck in ice before. When it does happen though it is noteworthy because that is not supposed to happen. Icebreakers are supposed to get through ice and when they cannot, either stuck in the ice or even when they have to turn back because the ice got too thick, then that means something unusual or unexpected happened.
Where do you think the lost sea ice on the shore goes? It drifts out to sea and this ship got stuck in an unexpectedly huge amount of it far out to sea.
We're talking about the Akademik getting caught in the ice in 2013, right? They were caught in a snow storm within sight of the shore. They were not "far out at sea" and the ice formed around them, it had not drifted from the shore. They assumed the ice was melting, because that is what they kept telling themselves. The only reason it would have been "unexpected" is because they did not check the weather forecast and/or thought that recreating a historic journey to Antarctica on its anniversary was worth not waiting.
They hoped to prove that man made global warming was a threat and picking this date would make it memorable. People don't remember the historical aspect to this, they remember some global warming "experts" getting stuck in the ice like idiots while trying to prove that the ice was melting. It turned out the ice was not melting and they did far more harm to their cause than they did good.
Can you give some examples of scientists predicting this phenomenon?
I really wouldn't care so much what these global warming alarmists said so long as their suggestions to solve this problem made some sense. Carbon taxes don't solve anything because a tax on one source of energy is a tax on all energy, likewise for subsidies. Do you really think that the utility does not take their windmill subsidies and NOT buy more natural gas plants? That money goes in the same pocket. These government regulations just impoverish us and move some money around to make some senators look good for their next election.
If these people were serious about preventing CAGW then they'd call for more nuclear power. Those that do I have no problems with. Those that think we can avert CAGW, maintain our economy, and not have nuclear power I have a problem with.
I say we kill two birds with one stone here. Build more nuclear powered icebreakers and we'd have our scientific missions in the Arctic while also reducing our carbon footprint. If these people have such a problem with man made CO2 melting the Arctic ice then maybe they shouldn't use diesel engined icebreakers to take ice samples.
If you took a statistics class you should be able to recognize the trend.
I recognize the trend. I also don't like being fed bullshit. If the ice is too thick then the ice is too thick and we can call it an outlier, an unexpected weather event, or whatever the case may be. What this is not is "proof" of global warming. They are twisting themselves in knots so that they don't have to admit the irony of a pair of ships being sent out to study thinning ice only to have to turn back because the ice was too thick.
Reading the comments here and on the linked site I see a pile of mockery. They deserve the mockery.
Why not send the CCGS DES GROSEILLIERS? It's a class 3 vessel.
It's just sitting in Quebec City doing fuck all!
Have you considered the possibility that even that class of ship is not heavy enough?
I have to wonder if they are downplaying the thickness and expanse of the ice. If this is just some local refreezing of ice chunks that stuck together then they should be able to sail around. If the ice is just generally thicker and rougher than expected then, as you suggest, they "need a bigger boat". But if the ice is too thick for even their biggest icebreaker then there is nothing to do but turn around and go back.
Not only that but the ice may be too thick for any ice breaker. It seems to be pretty common for nations to make arrangements to "rent" or "borrow" icebreakers from each other. Would it be all that hard to ask to "borrow" an icebreaker from the USA, UK, or Germany? I understand that they all have some pretty capable icebreakers. Probably the biggest are owned by Canada and Russia. If Canada is not willing to put one out in these ice conditions then Russia is likely to be reluctant too, that is assuming the two nations are on friendly enough terms to do such a thing.
The best description I've seen for this is CAGW, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
If there is no global warming then we have nothing that is man made or catastrophic. If the global warming is not caused by CO2 then it's also not likely man made or catastrophic. If we allow ourselves to call it "climate change" then we are just lying to ourselves that warming can cause cooling. I can understand local and periodic cooling events can happen (like winter) but the issue always was man made gases causing the atmosphere to take in more heat. Calling it "climate change" is nonsense because the climate always changes.
If it is not anthropogenic, man made, then we cannot really do anything about it. Or rather the tactics we have been using are all wrong and in fact may make things worse for us. We had better be certain that the problem is from man made CO2 release or we are just fucking ourselves.
If the effect is not catastrophic then we have nothing to worry about. If it is not catastrophic then it is then merely inconvenient or perhaps even beneficial. Having some inconvenient weather is not something to shift an entire economy over. If it is beneficial then, more please!
Calling this anything other than some variation on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is inaccurate or just plain a lie.
This is why I advocate for nuclear power. If we are in fact experiencing CAGW then an energy source that is carbon free, inexpensive, plentiful, and reliable is a good idea for the future. If we are not in fact experiencing CAGW then an energy source that is inexpensive, plentiful, reliable, and safe is a good idea for the future.
We have three choices, nuclear power, coal, or freezing and starving in the dark. If CAGW is an actual threat then I choose nuclear power. If it isn't then nuclear power is still a choice but then so is coal. Waiting for solar and wind to get cheap enough to replace coal and nuclear is waiting for a ship that may never come to port.
I read the page you linked to and it said nothing about increased ice mobility being a problem in the Arctic. It did mention that being a possible problem in the Antarctic. This was also not because of sea ice breaking up but of land ice calving into the sea and becoming free floating.
Those were not just "ships" they were icebreakers. Granted, they were light to medium duty icebreakers but they were in Antarctic waters in the summer. They had to be freed by one of the largest ice breakers in the world.
Ships getting stuck in frozen seas is not news, as I admit. Icebreakers being unable to free themselves from the ice is news. Having two stuck in the same vicinity is news. Having to bring what may be the heaviest ice breaker in the world to free them is news. Having one of them stuck while studying the "loss of sea ice" is just plain hilarious.
Another thing...
Ship gets stuck in ice in the arctic circle in the depths of winter.
It was the Antarctic and in the summer. January south of the equator means summer.
The ice becoming more mobile to the point of becoming a hazard to navigation was something I've never seen predicted before. It has always been that the ice would get thin and recede which would open the waters to shipping without the need for ice breakers.
Assuming what you say is true, that they simply saw effects from global warming that they could not predict then I have to wonder what else they got wrong.
These global warming alarmists keep making predictions that prove to be wrong later. How many times does this have to happen before they admit that they cannot in fact predict anything with any kind of accuracy?
But that doesn't stop the deniers trying to pretend that this is some problem with the concept of global warming.
I have to ask, does everything have to be "proof" of global warming or not? Can't something just be a random event? They could have called this just a temporary unforeseen weather event, which is probably what it is. Instead they tried to explain this as "evidence" that the ice is melting. If the global warming alarmists want to be believed then every once in a while they will have to admit that some events can in fact be random events that could be contradictory to global warming.
I took statistics in college and one thing they teach is that not everything has to line up to show a trend. There will be outliers. The global warming alarmists need to admit that there will be outliers once in a while or they start to sound like fanatics instead of scientists.
The title "Arctic Climate Change Study Canceled Due to Climate Change" can be read as, "The global warming got so bad we can't even study it safely any more." How it should be read is more like, "Because the ice is not melting as predicted, and heavy ice was encountered, the study into sea ice losses had to be canceled."
The title should then read as, "Study Into Sea Ice Losses Canceled Due to Unexpected Ice Thickness Discovered."
Remind me of a podcast I heard last week, Dennis Prager talked about having to do a speech in New Jersey when the radio and TV news was warning people about an impending severe winter storm. He goes to drive there from New York and finds the weather pleasant and the traffic light. He gets to his destination with plenty of time to spare so he goes to a bookstore to kill some time. The store is empty of other customers so he asks one of the employees why. She told him because people will believe what they hear on the radio above what they see with their own eyes.
This insanity of believing what we are told when our own eyes tell us different has gone so far that people make up nonsense on trying to explain the heavy ice in the Arctic as "evidence" of continued global warming and loss of sea ice. The comments on the linked site are all mocking the "news" article. It's an opinion article that is pretending to give the news. If it was actual news then the title would not be so misleading. If it was a news article then they'd have printed a quote from someone with a dissenting opinion.
Articles like this deserve mockery. People have become very tired of being lied to by news sources. I now have little doubt that the public has been lied to by news sources for a very long time. What has changed now is that people have enough wealth, freedom, and technology that they do not have to rely on major news outlets to know about the world, they can do it themselves. If the Jurassic media cannot learn to stop lying to people then they will become irrelevant.
Another thing, they keep talking about "climate change" as if the climate is not supposed to change. What they are really talking about is global warming but the globe stopped warming 20 years ago. To cover for this they use the term climate change which then gets them caught in this laughable situation of talking about heavy ice stopping a study into ice losses, because of "climate change".
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Wind and Solar power is cheaper than coal all over the world.
I don't live all over the world, I live in the American Midwest. Solar and wind is not cheaper here, therefore it is not cheaper all over the world. If it was cheaper than coal then my electric utility would not have mailed me an offer to increase my electric rate to fund more windmills. Instead they'd be mailing me a letter that they've reduced my rates because of all the windmills they built.
There is nothing to recycle, you simply put them again into a silicon plant, how retarded are you?
Citation needed. I've searched the internet for how PV cells are recycled and all I've found are articles that say that PV cells contain heavy metals and therefore must be disposed of as hazardous waste, and people that claim they can recycle PV cells real soon now.
This has been a problem for electronics for a long time now. No one has figured out how to recycle silicon once it's been doped. After that all they can do is leach out as many heavy metals as they can and dump the remains in a hole.
You forget that building a nuclear is extremely expensive, running it is relatively cheap.
No, I did not. The material expense is nearly identical to that of a coal plant, I've seen an engineering analysis of this. The regulatory expense is high right now but that is merely a matter of politics and politics can change. Other one time costs like design and engineering can be spread over multiple reactors.
Material costs for wind is higher than nuclear, many times higher. They can save on things like assembly line production but nuclear reactors can be built assembly line style too. Finding real world numbers on the costs of solar is nearly impossible. Everyone likes to talk about how much solar will cost in 10 or 20 years but few will give actual numbers for today.
So in order to get the investment back, you need to get revenue for over fifty years. For solar you only need ten to twenty years.
Which will supposedly happen 20 years from now. In that 20 years we could also have small modular reactors built on an assembly line. The engineering and licensing costs would be minimal, a lot like how commercial aircraft are built and licensed. As of right now, today, solar still costs more than nuclear so investing in solar right now, today, is not a good bet.
Wind and solar is cheaper than coal since 5 years or more.
Sure, in places like Hawaii and Arizona. Once all that cheap land in sunny places is "used up" then where can they go? There's a lot of that land so "used up" does not mean covered in solar panels, it means close enough to demand that it is profitable. Running wires to far off places costs money. Wind has a similar problem. It's cheap to put some windmills outside Chicago, St. Louis, and Dallas on some ranch and let the cattle graze underneath but at some point the windy places aren't so close to demand any more.
Solar has a lot of issues
Care to point out such an issue?
Sure. First is the well known issue of being available for about 8 hours per day. I hear people say that solar is cheaper than whatever in cost of new build capacity. This may in fact be true but solar capacity is not the same as coal capacity, or even wind. Solar has a capacity factor of about 30% while coal and nuclear have a capacity factor of 90%. If I build 10 nuclear power plants I can be assured that I'll get something like 80% of that maximum capacity at any time, day or night. To get that same assurance from solar I'd need 3 times the installed capacity with storage, and storage is not free. If I have a mix of wind, solar, and hydro, then maybe I can get away with not needing the storage (hydro is effectively the storage) but I'd still need 3 times the installed capacity over if I had a mix of coal, nuclear, and natural gas. This reliability problem translates into costs for materials, land, and just plain more money.
Second is the fragility of solar. For solar panels (and wind mills too) to work they need to be out in the weather. That means being exposed to things like hail, wind, and lightning. I remember a few hail storms around here and insurance companies had to bring in people from all over to handle the claims of broken windows, dented cars, and damaged roofs. What would a solar farm look like after that? How long would it take to repair? I'm sure with thick enough glass it could take quite a beating but that adds to the cost and reduces efficiency. Coal, nuclear, and natural gas don't have that problem. It's cheap insurance to put them in big concrete bunkers to hold up to even a direct hit by an F4 tornado. A nuclear power plant can likely take an even bigger beating since they've been tested against things like airplane collisions.
Land area. Solar power needs area and there is no way to get around that. Not only a lot of area but area free of obstructions. Solar can be put on rooftops but that adds to maintenance costs since now lifting up the panels involves cranes and more time than if on the ground. This land cannot be used for crops, grazing, hunting, or much of anything really. This land is going to be as lifeless as an asphalt parking lot. So you can park underneath the panels, which is nice I suppose but we need only so many parking lots. Nuclear power can be done anywhere, including under those solar panels, parking lots, and green spaces. We're not there just yet but we're close. The problem isn't so much the technology, we have nuclear power running under water in submarines, but more of the politics and logistics. Ignoring that we still can have a nuclear power plant in the middle of a green space where we can grow trees, crops, or whatever. It can be done on a frozen tundra in the Arctic circle, or in the shadow of a mountain.
Waste. Many people will make a big deal about the waste created by a nuclear or coal power plant. Not many people think of the waste from a solar plant. Those panels will wear out and break but we don't know yet how to recycle that. There's also the concrete pads they sit on and/or the steel and aluminum structures to hold them up. We know how to recycle steel, aluminum, and to some extent concrete too, but that is going to be a lot to handle. To keep up with demand and wear on solar we'd have to
Problem with nuclear is that it is getting too expensive. It can, maybe, do 5 cents per kWh for new installations, but uncertainties are huge. Solar can now, as today, do it at 20 cents, and it is rapidly declining. If it is cheaper than nuclear withing twenty years, building a nuclear plant today is "negative" investment.
That doesn't make sense. If I build a new nuclear power plant and a new solar farm, today, I'll need the loans for those and pay them off for something like that same 20 years it would take for solar to catch up. If the nuclear costs 5 cents per kWh today and the solar costs 20 cents per kWh today then in 20 years those two energy sources will still cost the same, because the cost for both is largely in stable costs like that loan for initial construction, labor, taxes, land, and so on. That same nuclear power plant will still be there in 20 years as will that same solar farm. For that solar farm to be profitable the price of energy would have to be above 20 cents per kWh for the next 20 years. If energy can be sold at that price then that nuclear power plant will make me a pile of money after those 20 years since my costs are 1/4 of what the solar cost.
If the costs of solar is dropping as quickly as you claim then investing in it today is the negative investment. It would be better to invest in nuclear today and then invest in solar when or if it gets cheaper. That rapid decline in solar pricing is in itself an uncertainty, which as you point out is something investors want to avoid.
And there will not be any "future" nuclear reactors, nobody can invest that amount of money to unknwon technology (unknown as "will it be cheap enough").
This next generation solar is also unknown. For new photovoltaic cells no one will know if it can last for 20 years in the weather for precisely 20 years. For new thermal solar technologies like molten salts people will not know the wear life of the piping for 20 years. Solar is as much an unknown as nuclear. You can claim solar will get cheaper all you like but we cannot know for sure until it actually happens. As it is right now nuclear is less of an unknown if we use current designs that are very safe and profitable. Nuclear is cheaper than solar today, you admitted this already. We can make it cheaper in the future just like we can make solar cheaper in the future.
I might have believed you ten years ago that no private entity has the kind of money needed to fund a nuclear power plant. Today we have private companies investing in a lot of huge projects that even governments ten years ago could not afford. The next ten years will be very interesting.
Obama was wrong to weasel us into the Paris shit without actually putting it to congress.
That's putting it mildly. He wrote a check that he new he didn't have to cash. It was the last days of his term and he could not run for office again. It was an agreement to last decades while he had only weeks left in office, but he signed it. People cheered and he got to leave office a "hero". Without putting it to Congress it was an agreement that the next POTUS could discard like a used tissue. Maybe he was betting on Democrats to win the White House and Congress. That did not happen though.
You mean like effectively abandoning nuclear power development?
Nuclear power is as "zero carbon" as wind or solar but the world effectively stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago. Had they not stopped then perhaps we could have shut down a lot of aging nuclear power plants by now because we'd have the electrical capacity to replace them.
As it is now we can expect many nuclear power plants to still be in service 80 years after they were built, triple their intended life span. If we should see another Fukushima style incident then we'll get a bunch of people in a panic, plans for new nuclear reactors will get set back by a decade, and we'll keep burning coal.
Yep, if people had listened 30 years ago it is possible we'd be living in a nuclear powered world. Safe from the nonsense in the Middle East. Safe from nuclear reactors stretched beyond their limits. Safe from global warming.
We lost a lot of experienced nuclear engineers and technicians in that time. They're all retired, senile, or dead now. It's going to take a long time to get that back.
Bloomberg. There's your first hint that it's a load of horseshit.
There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!
Molten salt energy storage? Could we use something else to heat this salt? Something "green"? Molten salt nuclear reactors sound like a great idea to do just that.
I like solar thermal. Not because I think that they'd ever be viable but because they'll do the research in materials and such that would be directly applicable to molten salt reactors. Solar might work for quite a large band of area at the equator, perhaps between 30 or 45 degrees north and south, but outside that area solar does not work so well. Nuclear power would work though.
That might work great for China and India but for large populations in the Americas, Asia, and Europe they don't have the same access to the sun.
That's great if you have a hill to pump the water up to. Out here on the Great Plains we don't have many hills.
An odd thing happened some time in my youth. We call this area the "wind corridor" now. Before that we called it "tornado alley". I don't think that change in nomenclature was because there was any real change in the weather patterns around here. It's hard to sell windmills in "tornado alley" but they sound great for a place called the "wind corridor". Too bad we don't have any hills so we have a place to pump some water to the top and store that wind energy.
China and India are the biggest markets for just about everything. That includes nuclear power. It seems odd that an article that wants to sing the praises of how wind and solar are going to power the world that they'd not even mention that nuclear power already powers a good sized portion of it, more than what wind and solar do now, and nearly as much as coal.
I see this as just another example of bias in the news. Bloomberg is an organization with a far left bias and nuclear is seen as some sort of threat or something. Like some evil entity that is only alluded to with words like "he who must not be named" or something. If they left out nuclear power in this piece then I have to wonder if it is because wind and solar don't look so great by comparison. They'll mention coal because coal is no real threat, but nuclear cannot even be mentioned once.
What we do see is that China and India are taking a true "all the above" strategy on energy since they have active development of nuclear energy. Unlike the USA which has an "all the above... except nuclear" strategy. I believe this attitude will change in time. But will it be soon enough? Until wind and solar is cheaper than coal we will be burning coal. We know nuclear is cheaper than coal, and as green as solar. Obama and friends held back the industry for a decade. We could have saved a lot of carbon in that time.
There was absolutely no mention of nuclear power in this article. Is not China and India investing in that technology too?
It would be great if solar could in fact be cheaper than coal in 20 years or so but I've already been told for 20 years that solar will be cheaper than coal in 20 years. I stopped believing these claims a long time ago. Solar has a lot of issues that merely lowering the price of the panels will not solve.
I do believe that wind can get their prices down to where it could compete with other energy sources. Like solar though it has problems of being intermittent. I hear claims that batteries and other storage systems can address this but I ask, what stops people from charging these batteries with cheap and reliable coal or nuclear? Batteries can follow load changes better then coal or nuclear can, so use those for peak load and forget about wind or natural gas.
One thing that puts a limit on the costs between wind and nuclear, wind takes ten times the steel and concrete of nuclear per megawatt of installed capacity. People ask, where is all that concrete? All I you are steel towers and a three big blades turning about. The answer is that the concrete is in the anchor that holds up that tower. If we can assume that the concrete anchors fatigue in 50 years or so, just like it would in a nuclear reactor, then we will need a continuous recycling of concrete to keep up with even an unchanging demand for electricity. If you need X tons of concrete for a gigawatt nuclear power plant then you will need 10X tons for a gigawatt of wind power.
Making concrete has a carbon footprint associated with it. That means that nuclear not only can have a smaller carbon footprint than wind but already does. Future nuclear reactors will likely require less concrete and steel than it does now with advancements in technology. So wind is already behind and the competition is not standing still.
So, it's great that we can look forward to cheap wind and solar in a decade or three. What should we do until then? We can keep burning coal. We can shutdown large sectors of our economy, which would likely delay this new wind and solar advancement. Or we can use nuclear power.
I believe that nuclear power is the only logical choice today. When or if wind and solar catch up then we can switch to that.
How can you say that we're ready to colonize Mars when we haven't even colonized all the frontiers on this planet?
We can say this because it may in fact be easier to get to Mars and create a colony there than some places on Earth.
By "easier" that does not mean only technologically or logistically but also politically. Settling some places on Earth can mean getting your house bombed by someone that doesn't want you to live there, that's a political hurdle. Technologically it can mean things like trying to get to the Antarctic interior means battling harsh winds. We can (quite likely) land something on a windless (relatively) Mars a lot easier than on Antarctica. Continuing the Antarctic example there would be political problems of putting a permanent settlement on the ice there, there are stations there now and they took a lot of negotiations to get them there. Creating a settlement with families living there is a different matter.
so why spend large amounts of money on a symbolic gesture ?
Because symbolism is important. Isn't that what we were told about the Paris Accord? That even though it enforced nothing the symbolism of the agreement was important. This is why Greenpeace replaced the diesel ship they used to protest drilling with a sail assisted ship. They were mocked heavily for burning diesel to harass oil rigs. And they should be mocked for this. Not that their new ship is much of an improvement, it still has a 500hp diesel engine for primary propulsion, the sails are really only to give a thin veil over their hypocrisy. They will describe the ship as having a "highly efficient electric hybrid drive" which just means its a bog standard marine drive. Not that they'd like nuclear powered ships either.
Nuclear icebreakers are not just symbolic either, they are highly capable ships. Do you really think that Russia gives a damn about their carbon footprint? I don't. I think they use nuclear powered icebreakers because they can be at sea non-stop for a whole year, break the heaviest of ice, and generally run circles around any diesel counterpart.
What I recall is that some DC Comics guy said Metropolis was New York in the day and Gotham was New York at night. The early comics kept the locations of each city ambiguous but later on they had to put them somewhere.
I remember at least one of the Superman movies showed Metropolis as New York. In the Smallville TV show Metropolis was within sight of Smallville from a water tower or some other high spot, and Smallville was in Kansas. There were scenes in the show in Metropolis at some large body of water. It could have been a large river, one of the Great Lakes, or something. Having that be a seaport would be nonsensical, not that a guy that can shoot lasers from his eyes makes all that much sense.
The Supergirl TV show had Supergirl in California and Superman in Metropolis on the east coast or Midwest, I wasn't sure. The Gotham TV show lived in the same universe, kind of, but I didn't watch enough of that to figure out where it was supposed to be. Pretty sure that Gotham was supposed to be on the east coast.
Best I can tell is that you have it backwards, maybe, with Metropolis as a Chicago analog and Gotham as a New York analog.
You couldn't resist some stupid offtopic charging at windmills and cheering for nukes either - it's all a big one package deal with you blindly following a Party line then isn't it?
You don't see the irony of using diesel powered vessels to investigate the damage fossil fuels are doing to the environment?
It's not like nuclear powered icebreakers are theoretical, they do exist and Russia has been sailing them for 50 years or so. If we are to agree that CAGW is a problem then would it not immediately follow that something should be done about it? Should not that something we do be a something that is inexpensive, exists today, and highly effective? Nuclear power replacing coal means taking one of the dirtiest energy sources we have now and replacing it with the cleanest and cheapest we have now. It's even better than windmills for carbon footprint, and nuclear works when the wind doesn't blow.
Of course it's a "package deal". If CAGW is real then we should do something about it, not just talk about how we're ruining things with the status quo.
Ice breakers getting stuck is so not new.
I don't believe anyone is claiming that icebreakers have not been stuck in ice before. When it does happen though it is noteworthy because that is not supposed to happen. Icebreakers are supposed to get through ice and when they cannot, either stuck in the ice or even when they have to turn back because the ice got too thick, then that means something unusual or unexpected happened.
Where do you think the lost sea ice on the shore goes? It drifts out to sea and this ship got stuck in an unexpectedly huge amount of it far out to sea.
We're talking about the Akademik getting caught in the ice in 2013, right? They were caught in a snow storm within sight of the shore. They were not "far out at sea" and the ice formed around them, it had not drifted from the shore. They assumed the ice was melting, because that is what they kept telling themselves. The only reason it would have been "unexpected" is because they did not check the weather forecast and/or thought that recreating a historic journey to Antarctica on its anniversary was worth not waiting.
They hoped to prove that man made global warming was a threat and picking this date would make it memorable. People don't remember the historical aspect to this, they remember some global warming "experts" getting stuck in the ice like idiots while trying to prove that the ice was melting. It turned out the ice was not melting and they did far more harm to their cause than they did good.
Can you give some examples of scientists predicting this phenomenon?
I really wouldn't care so much what these global warming alarmists said so long as their suggestions to solve this problem made some sense. Carbon taxes don't solve anything because a tax on one source of energy is a tax on all energy, likewise for subsidies. Do you really think that the utility does not take their windmill subsidies and NOT buy more natural gas plants? That money goes in the same pocket. These government regulations just impoverish us and move some money around to make some senators look good for their next election.
If these people were serious about preventing CAGW then they'd call for more nuclear power. Those that do I have no problems with. Those that think we can avert CAGW, maintain our economy, and not have nuclear power I have a problem with.
I say we kill two birds with one stone here. Build more nuclear powered icebreakers and we'd have our scientific missions in the Arctic while also reducing our carbon footprint. If these people have such a problem with man made CO2 melting the Arctic ice then maybe they shouldn't use diesel engined icebreakers to take ice samples.
If you took a statistics class you should be able to recognize the trend.
I recognize the trend. I also don't like being fed bullshit. If the ice is too thick then the ice is too thick and we can call it an outlier, an unexpected weather event, or whatever the case may be. What this is not is "proof" of global warming. They are twisting themselves in knots so that they don't have to admit the irony of a pair of ships being sent out to study thinning ice only to have to turn back because the ice was too thick.
Reading the comments here and on the linked site I see a pile of mockery. They deserve the mockery.
Why not send the CCGS DES GROSEILLIERS?
It's a class 3 vessel.
It's just sitting in Quebec City doing fuck all!
Have you considered the possibility that even that class of ship is not heavy enough?
I have to wonder if they are downplaying the thickness and expanse of the ice. If this is just some local refreezing of ice chunks that stuck together then they should be able to sail around. If the ice is just generally thicker and rougher than expected then, as you suggest, they "need a bigger boat". But if the ice is too thick for even their biggest icebreaker then there is nothing to do but turn around and go back.
Not only that but the ice may be too thick for any ice breaker. It seems to be pretty common for nations to make arrangements to "rent" or "borrow" icebreakers from each other. Would it be all that hard to ask to "borrow" an icebreaker from the USA, UK, or Germany? I understand that they all have some pretty capable icebreakers. Probably the biggest are owned by Canada and Russia. If Canada is not willing to put one out in these ice conditions then Russia is likely to be reluctant too, that is assuming the two nations are on friendly enough terms to do such a thing.
The best description I've seen for this is CAGW, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
If there is no global warming then we have nothing that is man made or catastrophic. If the global warming is not caused by CO2 then it's also not likely man made or catastrophic. If we allow ourselves to call it "climate change" then we are just lying to ourselves that warming can cause cooling. I can understand local and periodic cooling events can happen (like winter) but the issue always was man made gases causing the atmosphere to take in more heat. Calling it "climate change" is nonsense because the climate always changes.
If it is not anthropogenic, man made, then we cannot really do anything about it. Or rather the tactics we have been using are all wrong and in fact may make things worse for us. We had better be certain that the problem is from man made CO2 release or we are just fucking ourselves.
If the effect is not catastrophic then we have nothing to worry about. If it is not catastrophic then it is then merely inconvenient or perhaps even beneficial. Having some inconvenient weather is not something to shift an entire economy over. If it is beneficial then, more please!
Calling this anything other than some variation on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is inaccurate or just plain a lie.
This is why I advocate for nuclear power. If we are in fact experiencing CAGW then an energy source that is carbon free, inexpensive, plentiful, and reliable is a good idea for the future. If we are not in fact experiencing CAGW then an energy source that is inexpensive, plentiful, reliable, and safe is a good idea for the future.
We have three choices, nuclear power, coal, or freezing and starving in the dark. If CAGW is an actual threat then I choose nuclear power. If it isn't then nuclear power is still a choice but then so is coal. Waiting for solar and wind to get cheap enough to replace coal and nuclear is waiting for a ship that may never come to port.
I read the page you linked to and it said nothing about increased ice mobility being a problem in the Arctic. It did mention that being a possible problem in the Antarctic. This was also not because of sea ice breaking up but of land ice calving into the sea and becoming free floating.
The IPCC got it wrong.
Ships get stuck in ice in frozen seas.
Those were not just "ships" they were icebreakers. Granted, they were light to medium duty icebreakers but they were in Antarctic waters in the summer. They had to be freed by one of the largest ice breakers in the world.
Ships getting stuck in frozen seas is not news, as I admit. Icebreakers being unable to free themselves from the ice is news. Having two stuck in the same vicinity is news. Having to bring what may be the heaviest ice breaker in the world to free them is news. Having one of them stuck while studying the "loss of sea ice" is just plain hilarious.
Another thing...
Ship gets stuck in ice in the arctic circle in the depths of winter.
It was the Antarctic and in the summer. January south of the equator means summer.
The ice becoming more mobile to the point of becoming a hazard to navigation was something I've never seen predicted before. It has always been that the ice would get thin and recede which would open the waters to shipping without the need for ice breakers.
Assuming what you say is true, that they simply saw effects from global warming that they could not predict then I have to wonder what else they got wrong.
These global warming alarmists keep making predictions that prove to be wrong later. How many times does this have to happen before they admit that they cannot in fact predict anything with any kind of accuracy?
But that doesn't stop the deniers trying to pretend that this is some problem with the concept of global warming.
I have to ask, does everything have to be "proof" of global warming or not? Can't something just be a random event? They could have called this just a temporary unforeseen weather event, which is probably what it is. Instead they tried to explain this as "evidence" that the ice is melting. If the global warming alarmists want to be believed then every once in a while they will have to admit that some events can in fact be random events that could be contradictory to global warming.
I took statistics in college and one thing they teach is that not everything has to line up to show a trend. There will be outliers. The global warming alarmists need to admit that there will be outliers once in a while or they start to sound like fanatics instead of scientists.
The title "Arctic Climate Change Study Canceled Due to Climate Change" can be read as, "The global warming got so bad we can't even study it safely any more." How it should be read is more like, "Because the ice is not melting as predicted, and heavy ice was encountered, the study into sea ice losses had to be canceled."
The title should then read as, "Study Into Sea Ice Losses Canceled Due to Unexpected Ice Thickness Discovered."
Remind me of a podcast I heard last week, Dennis Prager talked about having to do a speech in New Jersey when the radio and TV news was warning people about an impending severe winter storm. He goes to drive there from New York and finds the weather pleasant and the traffic light. He gets to his destination with plenty of time to spare so he goes to a bookstore to kill some time. The store is empty of other customers so he asks one of the employees why. She told him because people will believe what they hear on the radio above what they see with their own eyes.
This insanity of believing what we are told when our own eyes tell us different has gone so far that people make up nonsense on trying to explain the heavy ice in the Arctic as "evidence" of continued global warming and loss of sea ice. The comments on the linked site are all mocking the "news" article. It's an opinion article that is pretending to give the news. If it was actual news then the title would not be so misleading. If it was a news article then they'd have printed a quote from someone with a dissenting opinion.
Articles like this deserve mockery. People have become very tired of being lied to by news sources. I now have little doubt that the public has been lied to by news sources for a very long time. What has changed now is that people have enough wealth, freedom, and technology that they do not have to rely on major news outlets to know about the world, they can do it themselves. If the Jurassic media cannot learn to stop lying to people then they will become irrelevant.
Another thing, they keep talking about "climate change" as if the climate is not supposed to change. What they are really talking about is global warming but the globe stopped warming 20 years ago. To cover for this they use the term climate change which then gets them caught in this laughable situation of talking about heavy ice stopping a study into ice losses, because of "climate change".