The logo on Groklaw is a penguin holding a magnifying glass, presumably peering at some cryptic legal "SCO vs World" text.
I think PJ's goal was to "shine a light" on murky legal dealings that us mere mortals find too boring to try to understand, and put the salient bits under her magnifying glass. She always uses the primary source material (the actual court documents) and then underlines bits which she explains in normal language.
If you find Groklaw too boring or too difficult (because we all only have one life and so many things to do), please remember the following saying for the rest of your life because we're going to need it in this century if/when Western civilization starts to crumble a bit around the edges:
Sunlight is the best disinfectant -- U.S.A. Supreme Court judge Louis Brandeis
Yes, this is what I read here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-15/nokia-board-faces-calls-for-management-change-after-77-billion-lost-value.html
Basically, the large shareholders were unhappy in 2010 about the display of insecurity in spreading the R&D over Maemo, Symbian and then Meego, and jealous of the relatively larger successes of Apple and RIM (quote from the article: "Investors say it's not enough" instead of something like "researchers say it's not enough").
Also they apparently wanted a CEO from the USA instead of another boring Finn.
And now, the've got what they wanted: a CEO from North America who manages by the old tune of
"It's a panic situation! Something must be done!!!!11!
This is something, therefore it must be done! No time to think^Hlose!"
(Sidenote: talking about that management style, I'm glaring at you, Jan Peter Balkenende! Please become CEO of Microsoft. Thank you.)
They need to be breeder plants to phase out the older ones.
I agree with most of your points but this one is not good.
<vague_handwaving>
ISTR reading a (coherent) article decades ago about why nuclear breeder reactors tend to turn the society that builds them into a fascist police state, but unfortunately I don't remember the argumentation well. I think it hinged on terrorism threat and central-point-of-failure. Don't create dependencies on vulnerable central points of failure. Its guardians will gain much power. Sorry I can't say it clearer than this.
</vague_handwaving>
We will never lower our energy use. This will not happen (it might happen, but then civilisation will collapse).
Yes.. I think I understand where you're coming from. I think this is the fundamental issue. Does it sound OK if I rewrite the meaning of your sentence:
We will never lower our energy use because that's just not something we do; it's anathema to how we define ourselves
Jared Diamond wrote about this at the end of his book Collapse, I think he was quoting Tainter (whom I've never read), about how there can be several classes of problems a society can face, and one of them was problems that are recognized in time to act, AND technological measures to prevent or mitigate the problem can be found, BUT the society chooses not to adapt the solutions because it was politically or culturally unacceptable for an evolved society to "debase itself" by adapting that behaviour-changing solution.
It's a matter of choice, therefore politics. But I like my Western civilisation so I'd rather see it change with the times than collapse. But not towards a police state:-)
Thank you for the overview of the disadvantages of renewables.
But I still believe that wind and sunshine won't run out in the next few hundred years:-).
So if we have to switch anyway, why not now that we still have that cheap fossil energy? Why leave it to our grandkids to solve, who will have to do it with A. a much larger and poorer world population and B. much higher energy costs. It's just not responsible.
You demonstrate clearly that a bit of all of those technologies are needed. Baseline power can only be provided by wind or solar if there's a surplus and if there's storage technology in place, agreed.
Although I wouldn't want to live next to one in case of a large earthquake, I'm curious whether Sodium-Sulphur batteries could be deployed more. And when they blow up, it'd at least be a lot less toxic.
I just read that funnily enough, it's TEPCO (the same as the Fukushima plants) that built this technology in Japan.
Before I start on my long rant to try to answer your points, I'd like to say that most of what I write here, I learnt about on the excellent The Oil Drum forum. I especially recommend this overview article.
But the latter will help not at all: more energy will be made available and will be used for other (granted hopefully more productive) purposes.
This is assuming business-as-usual economic growth and population growth, I'm not sure we can expect that this century because energy prices are going to go up.
But the reason you cannot magically build wind turbines is that for mere legal reasons, you will have delays of 2-4 years depending on where you want to build them. Then you need to update your grid, which is a massive undertaking. And in the end you need to provide for the baseline. And take into account that electricity consumption will explode with the coming of electric cars.
Legal reasons depend on a government's priorities so that may change rapidly. Denmark doesn't seem to have such "legal reasons" problems. Updating of the grid is a smart long-term investment anyway so "it is a massive undertaking" is no excuse. A "smart" and decentralized grid is probably also much more disaster- and terrorism- proof, but it removes a chokepoint of power by central government over provincial governments, which could be a political problem in certain countries.
The baseline is a very important problem, but note that the demand side is not evenly-balanced during the day either and somehow that is accounted for without problems. It would just mean that the difference between "peaks" and "troughs" becomes even more pronounced, so more storage is necessary. What kind of storage I don't know, hydro storage is inefficient and you need suitable geography for it, but ideas like cooling frozen food warehouses extra during off-peak hours seem easy enough to implement.
I think we don't have the luxury to wait to do all those large infrastructural investments. One idea I had (I think I must have read it on the theoildrum.com but maybe it's an original idea:-) ) is that, assuming you want to build say a wind turbine, you can do it two ways: build it now, or build it later.
Many people say building it later is better because we'll have better technology. But what about the energy used to build the turbine. It needs a lot of steel for the pylon. All that steel can be either melted now, using today's cheap energy, or "in 50 years" as you say. But assuming population growth continues, the "in 50 years" energy price to build the pylons is much higher than now, so they should start building *right now*.
Renewables are more expensive than fossil fuel (coal) plants which is another reason to build those pylons with cheap fossil fuel energy rather than "in 50 years" with expensive wind energy.
Also, because Peak Oil is coming (maybe it has passed in 2005), many processes that are currently dependent on cheap petroleum products will have to be switched over to fossil-fuel-independent technology because the future more expensive petroleum is needed for airplane kerosene and for the chemical industry (plastic). It is possible this would mean that electricity is used more for e.g. electric cars, which would also drive the price of electricity up "in 50 years".
It may be hideously expensive to switch over to renewables now, but that doesn't imply at all that energy is going to become any cheaper in the future, or at least until after the ITER and DEMO fusion reactors are successful (if we're lucky).
I've seen many posts that talk about energy "needs". But reality doesn't care about our "needs". There's a Dutch saying "de tering naar de nering zetten" which means: you adapt your consumption behaviour to what you can afford. I think most people on our world understand this but maybe the "rich West" has forgotten it in the past 50 years.
Were you bitten by a rabid ecologist as a child?
If the Fukushima reactors had been molten Sodiumfast breeders, we'd have had much more "effect" of the emergency cooling with seawater, and containment would not have been an issue anymore:-(
Doom IV promotional video: Monju nuclear reactor sodium leak accident footage
Hint: the Superphénix Wikipedia article uses the following words for the decommissioning phase:
A public inquiry was launched in April 2004 to consider plans to set up a plant to incorporate the 5,500 tonnes of sodium coolant in 70,000 tonnes of concrete.
Actually it might be a good idea to use it for Carbon Capture and sell the resulting soda for household use;-)
I don't think Americans understand your comment, you have to provide Wikipedia links to show the full horror of the (forgotten) stories.
Let me just say I agree with you that nuclear reactor company management is much less to be trusted than nuclear reactor design, and I totally agree with the S-W-German population in light of the Germans' actual real experiences with nuclear power management in the past 30 years. Also: Kernwasser Wunderland;-)
When is the AVR in Jülich going to be cleaned up? 2080? or somewhere next century when there's (of course) budget for it?
For nuclear there's the initial uranium purification or plutonium production and operating risks.
Silly me, I thought the highest risk and largest cost in the life cycle was demolition after 60 years and vitrificating and looking after the spent fuel for the next umpteen-thousand years!
But maybe you meant, the highest risk for the company operating the scam^H project.
Meat storage warehouses can be used as batteries (refrigerate more than normal at night, then let it warm up during the day).
Maybe Aluminium smelters can be used as batteries (do production runs at off-peak hours).
etc. etc. You make it sound like it's such an insurmountable problem, but all it needs is variable pricing policies for industrial electricity use and hey presto! the industries will find themselves a solution.
The reactors at the Fukushima no.1 complex were hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, THEN a 12m high tsunami, and THEN several explosions.
Hmm.
Let's turn that around a bit:
The reactors at the Fukushima no.1 complex suffered several (chemical) explosions and possibly core meltdown and melting fuel rods in the spent fuel pool because the electricity to the cooling systems was interrupted for more than a few hours.
Remember, reactor # 4 was off-line during the earthquake and tsunami. There were not even any rods in the reactor itself; That's the one with the full spent fuel pool.
Worst-case scenario: if the fuel rods in that pool melt and flow together at the bottom of that pool, which is on the second floor of the building, outside of the actual reactor core.
So, what's the status of that pool since 20 March? The IAEA page says only:
Fukushima Nuclear Accident Update (27 March 2011, 01:15 UTC)
(...)
Unit 4
From March 22 to March 25, 130 to 150 tonnes of seawater was poured into the spent fuel pool each day using a concrete pump. Sea water was also poured in through the spent fuel cooling system from 24 March, 21:05 UTC to 25 March, 01:20.
White "smoke" was still being observed coming from the reactor building as of 25 March, 23:00 UTC.
IIRC, the Soviets responded something like "I dunno, must be your fault, you capitalist pigs" even after the Swedish government complained loudly about the fallout cloud they detected (first).
I remember in the Netherlands (a country which exports milk and cheese) the cows had to be taken inside so they wouldn't absorb Iodine-131 which had rained on the grass and would be accumulated in the cows' milk and afterwards the cheese. That's called a timely government response. I don't think that that quick response also happened in the Ukraine and Belarus SSR although I could be wrong.
Contrast this with the Japanese response: We saw a Japanese spokesperson warn publicly on TV about the levels of radioactive Iodine in spinach in Fukushima and Ibaraki prefecture (see also BBC).
Mr. Oelewapperke (from Brabant?) wrote "Both Iodine and Cesium are only dangerous if you ingest significant quantities of them. Additionally they have halflives measured in hours". That is factually incorrect, and debunked here on Slashdot. Then again, my comment on the seaweed was probably also stupid:-)
I would like to elaborate on your comment on Strontium-90:
Strontium-90 is similar to Magnesium and Calcium and therefore particles of Sr-90 gives you bone cancer and leukemia. Good luck getting it removed from your body again after you've "built it in". I grimly laughed at the Wikipedia quote:
The results of a study of hundreds of thousands of teeth collected by Dr. Louise Reiss and her colleagues as part of the Baby Tooth Survey showed that children born after 1963 had levels of 90Sr in their deciduous teeth that was 50 times higher than that found in children born before the advent of large-scale atomic testing.
The Iodine accumulates in your thyroid, but I think Cesium can be "flushed" after a while. Iodine probably as well, otherwise they wouldn't give people who have trouble with their thyroids, radioactive Iodine-123 (N.B. NOT I-131) to drink. (And then they measure your thyroid's radiation and keep you quarantined until you peed most of it out again, after which it of course gets recycled for the next patient).
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of bucket maybe: Eppendorfer Reaktionsgefäß (always wanted to use that word in a Slashdot discussion!)
Ask the insurance people, I'm sure they've studied it carefully...
I agree. But, apparently, that's "anathema" ("haram"?); people become angry when you mention this logical alternative. I don't get it.
The logo on Groklaw is a penguin holding a magnifying glass, presumably peering at some cryptic legal "SCO vs World" text.
I think PJ's goal was to "shine a light" on murky legal dealings that us mere mortals find too boring to try to understand, and put the salient bits under her magnifying glass. She always uses the primary source material (the actual court documents) and then underlines bits which she explains in normal language.
If you find Groklaw too boring or too difficult (because we all only have one life and so many things to do), please remember the following saying for the rest of your life because we're going to need it in this century if/when Western civilization starts to crumble a bit around the edges:
Sunlight is the best disinfectant -- U.S.A. Supreme Court judge Louis Brandeis
Yes, this is what I read here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-15/nokia-board-faces-calls-for-management-change-after-77-billion-lost-value.html
Basically, the large shareholders were unhappy in 2010 about the display of insecurity in spreading the R&D over Maemo, Symbian and then Meego, and jealous of the relatively larger successes of Apple and RIM (quote from the article: "Investors say it's not enough" instead of something like "researchers say it's not enough").
Also they apparently wanted a CEO from the USA instead of another boring Finn.
And now, the've got what they wanted: a CEO from North America who manages by the old tune of "It's a panic situation! Something must be done!!!!11! This is something, therefore it must be done! No time to think^Hlose!"
(Sidenote: talking about that management style, I'm glaring at you, Jan Peter Balkenende! Please become CEO of Microsoft. Thank you.)
I agree with most of your points but this one is not good.
<vague_handwaving>
ISTR reading a (coherent) article decades ago about why nuclear breeder reactors tend to turn the society that builds them into a fascist police state, but unfortunately I don't remember the argumentation well. I think it hinged on terrorism threat and central-point-of-failure. Don't create dependencies on vulnerable central points of failure. Its guardians will gain much power. Sorry I can't say it clearer than this.
</vague_handwaving>
Yes.. I think I understand where you're coming from. I think this is the fundamental issue. Does it sound OK if I rewrite the meaning of your sentence:
Jared Diamond wrote about this at the end of his book Collapse, I think he was quoting Tainter (whom I've never read), about how there can be several classes of problems a society can face, and one of them was problems that are recognized in time to act, AND technological measures to prevent or mitigate the problem can be found, BUT the society chooses not to adapt the solutions because it was politically or culturally unacceptable for an evolved society to "debase itself" by adapting that behaviour-changing solution. :-)
It's a matter of choice, therefore politics. But I like my Western civilisation so I'd rather see it change with the times than collapse. But not towards a police state
I'm curious, what was the solution?
Thank you for the overview of the disadvantages of renewables. :-).
But I still believe that wind and sunshine won't run out in the next few hundred years
So if we have to switch anyway, why not now that we still have that cheap fossil energy? Why leave it to our grandkids to solve, who will have to do it with A. a much larger and poorer world population and B. much higher energy costs. It's just not responsible.
You demonstrate clearly that a bit of all of those technologies are needed. Baseline power can only be provided by wind or solar if there's a surplus and if there's storage technology in place, agreed.
Although I wouldn't want to live next to one in case of a large earthquake, I'm curious whether Sodium-Sulphur batteries could be deployed more. And when they blow up, it'd at least be a lot less toxic.
I just read that funnily enough, it's TEPCO (the same as the Fukushima plants) that built this technology in Japan.
This is assuming business-as-usual economic growth and population growth, I'm not sure we can expect that this century because energy prices are going to go up.
Legal reasons depend on a government's priorities so that may change rapidly. Denmark doesn't seem to have such "legal reasons" problems. Updating of the grid is a smart long-term investment anyway so "it is a massive undertaking" is no excuse. A "smart" and decentralized grid is probably also much more disaster- and terrorism- proof, but it removes a chokepoint of power by central government over provincial governments, which could be a political problem in certain countries. :-) ) is that, assuming you want to build say a wind turbine, you can do it two ways: build it now, or build it later.
The baseline is a very important problem, but note that the demand side is not evenly-balanced during the day either and somehow that is accounted for without problems. It would just mean that the difference between "peaks" and "troughs" becomes even more pronounced, so more storage is necessary. What kind of storage I don't know, hydro storage is inefficient and you need suitable geography for it, but ideas like cooling frozen food warehouses extra during off-peak hours seem easy enough to implement.
I think we don't have the luxury to wait to do all those large infrastructural investments. One idea I had (I think I must have read it on the theoildrum.com but maybe it's an original idea
Many people say building it later is better because we'll have better technology. But what about the energy used to build the turbine. It needs a lot of steel for the pylon. All that steel can be either melted now, using today's cheap energy, or "in 50 years" as you say. But assuming population growth continues, the "in 50 years" energy price to build the pylons is much higher than now, so they should start building *right now*.
Renewables are more expensive than fossil fuel (coal) plants which is another reason to build those pylons with cheap fossil fuel energy rather than "in 50 years" with expensive wind energy.
Also, because Peak Oil is coming (maybe it has passed in 2005), many processes that are currently dependent on cheap petroleum products will have to be switched over to fossil-fuel-independent technology because the future more expensive petroleum is needed for airplane kerosene and for the chemical industry (plastic). It is possible this would mean that electricity is used more for e.g. electric cars, which would also drive the price of electricity up "in 50 years".
It may be hideously expensive to switch over to renewables now, but that doesn't imply at all that energy is going to become any cheaper in the future, or at least until after the ITER and DEMO fusion reactors are successful (if we're lucky).
I've seen many posts that talk about energy "needs". But reality doesn't care about our "needs". There's a Dutch saying "de tering naar de nering zetten" which means: you adapt your consumption behaviour to what you can afford. I think most people on our world understand this but maybe the "rich West" has forgotten it in the past 50 years.
If the Fukushima reactors had been molten Sodium fast breeders, we'd have had much more "effect" of the emergency cooling with seawater, and containment would not have been an issue anymore
Doom IV promotional video: Monju nuclear reactor sodium leak accident footage
Hint: the Superphénix Wikipedia article uses the following words for the decommissioning phase:
Actually it might be a good idea to use it for Carbon Capture and sell the resulting soda for household use ;-)
Newsflash: algae grow in seawater.
I don't think Americans understand your comment, you have to provide Wikipedia links to show the full horror of the (forgotten) stories. ;-)
Let me just say I agree with you that nuclear reactor company management is much less to be trusted than nuclear reactor design, and I totally agree with the S-W-German population in light of the Germans' actual real experiences with nuclear power management in the past 30 years. Also: Kernwasser Wunderland
When is the AVR in Jülich going to be cleaned up? 2080? or somewhere next century when there's (of course) budget for it?
Silly me, I thought the highest risk and largest cost in the life cycle was demolition after 60 years and vitrificating and looking after the spent fuel for the next umpteen-thousand years!
But maybe you meant, the highest risk for the company operating the scam^H project.
Meat storage warehouses can be used as batteries (refrigerate more than normal at night, then let it warm up during the day).
Maybe Aluminium smelters can be used as batteries (do production runs at off-peak hours).
etc. etc. You make it sound like it's such an insurmountable problem, but all it needs is variable pricing policies for industrial electricity use and hey presto! the industries will find themselves a solution.
Hmm.
Let's turn that around a bit:
The reactors at the Fukushima no.1 complex suffered several (chemical) explosions and possibly core meltdown and melting fuel rods in the spent fuel pool because the electricity to the cooling systems was interrupted for more than a few hours.
Remember, reactor # 4 was off-line during the earthquake and tsunami. There were not even any rods in the reactor itself; That's the one with the full spent fuel pool.
Worst-case scenario: if the fuel rods in that pool melt and flow together at the bottom of that pool, which is on the second floor of the building, outside of the actual reactor core. So, what's the status of that pool since 20 March? The IAEA page says only:
(coal or nuclear or gas)
You left out :
I'd say that wind turbines are much quicker to build (2-3 years?) than nuclear plants, so why on earth would you need
for anyway.
With such a list, I wonder what your previous government's stance was on the ACTA treaty (Or was Canada not a party in that).
Do you mean the bottom of the reactor is shaped more like a "waffle-iron" than a bowl or an "ice-cream-cone"?
That's clever design, actually.
Do you know what kind of people are trained to quantify difficult-to-quantify things like vague risks?
Actuaries.
In that light, I'd like you to read the cold-hard-numbers evaluation of the insurance companies number-crunchers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
The nuclear fission industry has its own special insurance law in the U.S.A. in order to "Privatize the profits, socialize the losses".
Presumably because otherwise, there wouldn't be a nuclear fission industry, because no-one would insure it.
IIRC, the Soviets responded something like "I dunno, must be your fault, you capitalist pigs" even after the Swedish government complained loudly about the fallout cloud they detected (first).
I remember in the Netherlands (a country which exports milk and cheese) the cows had to be taken inside so they wouldn't absorb Iodine-131 which had rained on the grass and would be accumulated in the cows' milk and afterwards the cheese. That's called a timely government response. I don't think that that quick response also happened in the Ukraine and Belarus SSR although I could be wrong.
Contrast this with the Japanese response: We saw a Japanese spokesperson warn publicly on TV about the levels of radioactive Iodine in spinach in Fukushima and Ibaraki prefecture (see also BBC).
Mr. Oelewapperke (from Brabant?) wrote "Both Iodine and Cesium are only dangerous if you ingest significant quantities of them. Additionally they have halflives measured in hours". That is factually incorrect, and debunked here on Slashdot. Then again, my comment on the seaweed was probably also stupid :-)
Maybe those pro-nuclear PR people can go sell novelty glow-in-the-dark Nori-wrapped sushi. Google "bioaccumulation of Iodine".
Strontium-90 is similar to Magnesium and Calcium and therefore particles of Sr-90 gives you bone cancer and leukemia. Good luck getting it removed from your body again after you've "built it in". I grimly laughed at the Wikipedia quote:
The Iodine accumulates in your thyroid, but I think Cesium can be "flushed" after a while. Iodine probably as well, otherwise they wouldn't give people who have trouble with their thyroids, radioactive Iodine-123 (N.B. NOT I-131) to drink. (And then they measure your thyroid's radiation and keep you quarantined until you peed most of it out again, after which it of course gets recycled for the next patient).
In Zimbabwean dollars, for sure!