I don't disagree with what you say. Civilization has a high baseline energy cost. And we all want our civilization to continue.
I don't think we can save the fossil fuels we have. The cheaply available resources will be used up because we need them to even maintain what we have.
Nuclear is the only pragmatic civilization sustaining energy source we currently have other than the sun. Perhaps we could somehow develop a way use earths core for power generation at some point too.
My whole point is conserving energy to maintain our civilization as it is now is a highly under-utilized option we have available to us. Although conservation is taking place, there is a boatload of improvement which could be done rather cost effectively. (Low hanging fruit so to speak). My new house is very poorly insulated and we live in an area with snow on the ground for 6 months out of the year. Most of the houses around me are the same.
Once I get done properly insulating, I fully expect the amount of energy for the household will be cut in 1/2 and that will be a permanent cut for this dwelling. Some houses here are even worse off than mine.
Another big point I always try to make is that simply drilling/pumping more oil or mining more coal at a greater rate doesn't do much more than use up the resources we have more quickly doesn't get us where we need to be. --- No fertilizer other than what we scrapped out of our barns with a shovel and put in a truck we drove over to the gardens. No tractor for the garden, but we did have an Allison Chalmers from the 1930's we used to harvest grass from our fields for the livestock. -- I wasn't trying to say people in Urban centers should grow their own food and such.
"I am not saying don't save. And if we save half, well that is clearly worth it".
That is exactly what I am on about. Saving 1/2 would effectively double the amount of time our civilization has to adjust to a post-oil post coal reality.
"But to solve the problem with saving we need to using more like 1% of what we do now. Its just not going to happen."
Using 1% of what we have is not a real choice and it isn't necessary either. Even now 20% of our power is nuclear so I don't think we would need to run our civilization 1%.
Increasing the amount of energy we use is what most people want to talk about but I think we can't do that until we get away from depending on our free solar battery (fossil fuels) to see what our capabilities will be once it isn't here and we are forced into a new baseline. I want to talk about extending what we are using by more until we can transition to alternatives. Not running us our more quickly.
I just don't hear many people talking about decreasing our usage as being an effective means of helping our energy needs.
Nimby is being against nuclear right on this lovely peninsula I live on where tourism is a mainstay of the local economy. Having a big fat nuclear plant stuck at the end of the pastoral scene would attract less tourists and threaten the current economy.
"NIMBY is being against it. NIMBYs often don't realize that they are arguing against it, but that doesn't change the fact that they are."
Clearly you have ignored what I have actually written and inserted your own biases.Definitionally, Nimby is not equivalent to anti-nuclear. They could be same or they could not be. For one hypothetical example: Donald Trump might be pro-nuclear and yet if you chose to put a plant on an island near his mansion-island he would be a NIMBY. Or in another hypothetical example: The Kennedy's could be Anti-nuclear and NIMBY if one was talking about putting a new plant near their compound. You should hone your own understanding of semantics a bit more.
Nimby also is not equivalent to "It's too dangerous for my back yard, is arguing against it being used anywhere" and I have not argued that nuclear should not be used nowhere. Quite the contrary, I have explicitly said we should use nuclear, but we have to be careful about it. I am unsure as to the danger of the newer technologies since I am not an avid reader on the latest nuclear tech. I do not know whether it would be too dangerous in my backyard. But I still don't want it there based partially on my ignorance of nuclear, but partly because of the economics of the region.
Apparently you haven't understood this rather subtle difference and I understand because some people need to deal in absolutes and blacks and whites to make sense of things. But merely because you don't recognize the distinction doesn't mean that it isn't there. I liken it to the eskimos and their 18 or so words for the character of snow. I personally only can see about 7 or 8 distinctive types of snow, so if an eskimo tried to explain to me another 10 types I might be at a loss. Your errant or limited interpretation of the terminology apparently allows you to read gross generalizations into what I have actually said.
Likewise my statement that nuclear is unsafe is not the same as saying it is the "most dangerous" form of energy.
Unsafe or even Dangerous is not the same as "More Dangerous".I would think you might be able to see this distinction and nowhere did I say that nuclear is the "More Dangerous" form of energy. Nor do I feel nuclear to be the "more dangerous" than all other forms of energy production. Those words are yours. Once more you are putting words on the page which I have not used and attributing them to me.
My assertion is that it is not safe, which it clearly isn't in our current age with one fine example sitting before us now in Japan on the precipice. I also wonder about the future safety of such plants given the history we have seen and longevity of its products and byproducts. Combine that with the relatively tumultuous history of human kind over the last 3000 years and it must give one pause as to how we should best approach the nuclear question. We are not just doing nuclear for our generation or the generation of our grand-kids but for countless generations into the future. Rationality would predispose us to recognize these issues and try and address them if possible.
Who knows what the future of plants and the fuel they contain will be 100 year from now or 1,000 years from now? Certainly neither you nor I have such a crystal ball. So the obvious answer is to be extra extra careful with nuclear because it has such a great potential for rendering a large swath of land useless for a considerable time. As our population increases land is an ever more important resource for the people of this planet and its proper management will be paramount to the type of future we leave to those a millenia or so from now. Installation of nuclear in a region is akin to a long-term land management issue. I don't have a problem with nuclear that is a away from popula
I suppose like everything it is part of the equation. We grow lots of our own food. When I was a kid we rarely ate food that we didn't produce ourselves. We heated our house with solar and wood we harvested from our own forrest.
But I suppose the 1 TV we have had and will have for the next 20 years does cost money as does the computer and monitor I am using here. We only use our car which we will have for the next 15 years at least for about 4.5K miles a year but that is also a high energy item. We use mostly legs and bikes or bike carriers for transport most of the year. We walk to the store, the bank, the coop, the bakery and we buy 1/2 of our stuff from people growing it locally. Still I would like for all of it to be grown locally. But we get our limited amount of clothing thru the usual venues so that is high energy I suppose.
Anyhow I keep trying to do more of my part and encourage others to do what they are capable of. I'm not sure that that reducing the infrastructural energy requirements to 50-75% lower than what they are currently would result in such meager savings. Certainly it would not be a 50% savings of energy by infrastructural upgrades, but I believe it would be more than 10%. We live in a climate with snow on the ground for 6 months of the year and so insulation of homes and business would contribute rather markedly to reducing the energy load needed to maintain our cities up here. In warmer climates it would make sense to me that such savings would not necessarily be seen.
Hey, Americans refuse to face the economic facts that threaten to bring down the United States --- Exactly... only a mere decade ago we had achieved some level of fiscally sane and sound policies before we decided to cut our governments salary without cutting its budget. Now we have perpetual credit card spending with Bush tax cuts 350 billion, wars 200 billion, 500 billion more reduced government revenue from our citizens suffering a 12 trillion dollar beat down by the financial industry , and more tax cuts by Obama from the recovery act to the tune of something like 350 billion.
These seem to be the economic facts which we are plagued with. 18 billion dollar surplus to 1.4 trillion dollar deficits in 10 years. We need to get back to fiscal reality. Our fiscal stupidity more than anything is bringing down the United states. We aren't suffering from some energy calamity currently. Surprisingly, energy is not even close to our main concern right now. Our own decrease taxes in increase spending mantra is what is threatening to bring down the US... maybe....
Once we get away from our fiscal absurdity we will be fine.
Even nuclear power will become feasible once the dust up in Japan settles in. We tend to have short memories.
Nothing wrong with Apple computers... the computer didn't fail. He just need to know what to do with one. It is easy to run Linux or Win7 natively on macs if that is what he needs them to do. Or he should have stuck with the Think Pad if that was too complicated. No VM required! Someone should tell the guy.
I think upgrades would be reasonable for what is already there. If we want to spread more reactors out around the US, then I think the voters need to say so.
I'm a nimby, but I just want more solar, wind and insulation in my house rather than focus on building more power plants. My last house I cut down my energy footprint by 50%. I think with this one I might be able to cut it down by 75%. I like providing lots of jobs for people who make such stuff and install it. I sure wish I had more of those tax incentives which have largely disappeared. I'm bummed.
What about contaminated land for decades. Does that enter into your consideration? What do you think the value of the land lost for productive purposes costs? When one looks at the potential for land contamination in Japan if a full blown disaster had or may ensue, there isn't much land there for the the Japanese to live on. That loss has to have nearly catastrophic effect on the lives of the people who lived there, but for Japans economy potentially as well. They don't really have a place to move to.
I wonder how many die from coal in china? We have 1/3 their population and they rely more heavily on old dirty coal plants than we do, although that is changing. I read somewhere that 400,000 chinese die prematurely from complications caused by their old coal plants each year, but I can't be sure about the numbers even though I may have read them in the NY Times. I don't know where such a number comes from.
Or maybe we would be like Cuba. They have been stuck running and patching up the same American cars from the 40's and 50's since they can import the newest ones from the US.
Basically just a big ol' box that you drop into an existing coal power plant -- remove coal furnace, replace with nuclear furnace, leave existing steam turbines in place
--- Sounds like some cool stuff. Kind of like Toshiba 4S designs which are assembly line made and when they run out of power you ship them back to the factory for refueling. Small 10W ones could make an instant grid for Japan which doesn't have one apparently. Anyhow. Nice to talk about, but I still wouldn't want one in my backyard.
If you remove Banqiao and Chernobyl from the statistics (both were outdated and dangerous designs), both hydro and wind kill about 100x more than nuclear.
Wasn't Chernobyl new? Wasn't Banqiao substandard because it was built by the chinese who to me seem to be infamous for building to low standards and not for successfully building great structures that will last other than the great wall. Most of their homes fall down in minor quakes. There was some high rise that just collapsed recently while still under construction and the largest dam in the world had design flaws and leaking even while they are building it (another more enormous disaster waiting to happen). I wouldn't lump china or russia where power players don't care as much about the individual and their lives with other places in the world where there seems to be more value for people.
I would agree that Coal is indefensible, but mostly because the lobby is so powerful that they are allowed to pump crap into the air which would not be allowed for a nuclear plant. They were kind of grandfathered in from the industrial revolution and most people don't even realize how much shinola is pumped out of the stacks and is raining down on them every day. This is more a reflection of politics and lack of regulation run amok. And we have a sort of mass hypnosis about how they don't do anything to us. Coal is so slow it is like smoking... people are used to it and it doesn't seem to bother them imminently. Nuclear meltdown or even radiation emission is a rather fast paced spectacular thing.
Solar and Wind With every guy that falls off a roof installing solar, or is killed during the installation of a wind turbine how many were killed during the construction of nuclear facilities? That would be a more apt comparison with solar or wind. And how many people are unable to use their land again as a result of solar or windmill installations. None I believe.
Dams can cause big problems with shoddy construction. Once more most people are ignorant. If they thought about dams they would demand more stringent measures as well. But nobody thinks of the big dam which looms upstream since most of them don't break. And many towns don't even notice they are in the path. It seems like most of the ones which occured in the US were earthen dams and construction became better as we learned to build them better. I can think of a few which could need replacement come to think of it. I just don't trust earthen dams and there still are a few.
You are right, radiation is different. I think that the big difference between the other forms of energy (other than coal) and nuclear power is that a nuclear disaster will devastate the land around it and make it unusable for most people. People have an emotional tie to their land, their family, their heritage, their history. And people's land is often what gives them their wealth and livelihood and secures them throughout their lives. When there is a threat which could take that away it seems to be scary. People don't want to have an increased chance of dying young or their kids and grand-kids dying young from some unseen agent. Radiation is hard to understand and terrifying. And people have the imagery of bombs going off and the imagery of the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima dying of radiation exposure. It has been burned into the psyche of the world.
But the fear of radiation has benefited nuclear technology as well. It has much tighter regulation and safety measures than any other form of energy. None of the others are as scary and so there has not been any push to demand greater safety. Nuclear is somewhat safe, but very dangerous in its implications if something were to go wrong.
If anyone thought for a second about what coal is instead of being taught to think that clean coal is already what we do then coal might actually become clean as people would demand it. If people thought about a tsunami of water smashing through their towns for a second, they would demand our dams would be good for 1000 years or more.
What about cutting back our use and being more efficient? Seems like every time this comes up, people just laugh. But we cut our house energy bills in 1/2 on our last house by redoing the insulation in the walls, getting new windows and doors, and a higher efficiency water heater with better insulation on the unit and the pipes.
With some better tax incentives people make changes and the out of pocket cost is little for the government because it puts lots of people to work locally and production of materials increases.
I'm just saying there are other great ways to stretch our energy requirements which most people neglect to mention when talking about energy.
Obviously if a 9.0 quake hit NYC the devastation would be enormous.
But are you saying that because a 9.0 quake would be a disaster, a reactor meltdown near NYC wouldn't be a major concern for you?
You are comparing natual disasters to man-inspired. The 2 are not the same.
Natural disasters always kill more people because they are much bigger disasters, but a true reactor meltdown/radioactive cloud blanketing Manhattan, while not killing as many or destroying as much stuff would render the city and surroundings pretty much unusable for a few decades and make it hard to ever attend a broadway play in mine or my kids lifetimes.
Other than people, the greatest asset folks have is the land they live on. You incapacitate the land people live on and the impact is enormous. Their way of life, their wealth, their history gone forever for them. I think that is what worries folks in addition to the initial loss of life. And people are aware of the effects of radiation on longer term health as well. Dying prematurely certainly will cause considerable consternation among people.
I don't think anyone should lightly disregard such concerns. I have seen a lot of flippant disregard for how many people are affected by various disaster scenarios in this thread but the impact of a nuclear disaster is large too and not always as easily empathized with. After all not many people died right away.
But after a dam breaks, or many of these other disasters people keep bringing up as worse than a nuclear disaster, those who survive can go back and pick up the pieces. Not the same with a nuclear disaster.
And lest we forget, nuclear technology is something which will be with us long after all the coal plants have shut their doors. How will they do for the next millenium? Will there be any disasters over the next several hundred years, where and what will be the impact on the land around those areas? One thing we maybe have learned is don't build on or near fault lines. But some places don't really have an option.
Where exactly did I say to use a system (non-nuclear) that is less safe? Where did I say we should not use nuclear?
That would be here:
The big sticking point with nuclear is always safety. And every disaster reminds us of just how unsafe nuclear can be. A 40 mile diameter section where people can't live in Japan is a major chunk of real estate. If this happened near any of our major cities it would cause significant problems. Renewables could be brought up to date in the matter of a decade with a concerted effort. The right tax incentives could retrofit most every building in America with solar. As to the ignorance of the public including myself, I want NO reactor anywhere near where I live simply because I like to live here and want my kids and grandkids to be able to live here safely. This fear of nuclear contamination is not because of TV and shit websites since my understanding of nuclear issues comes mostly from magazine pieces from the last several decades and predates the internet.
So your assertion is that installing solar on ones house and business is less safe than nuclear? Interesting. How do you get there exactly? A nuclear accident can irradiate a region for decades and make it unuseable. I know of no such risk from putting solar on buildings. And further, nowhere in the above paragraph of mine you quoted did I say nuclear should not be part of fulfilling our energy needs. I am just a NIMBY. I fully believe nuclear will play an increasing role in our power structure. I just worry about its long term consequences so safety is more than paramount. That would seem to be reasonable would it not?
And repeated here:
But I don't want it near my beautiful part of the country.
Again... a NIMBY comment of mine for certain, but it is not equivalent to "We should not use Nuclear". It is important that words you are interpreting do in fact say what you assert. And again, nowhere did I say nuclear should not be used. (NIMBY not equal to No Nuclear.)
The term may not have been media coined, but as it is commenly used, it is a media term.
The word terrorism is commonly used in the media to but that doesn't make it a "media term". It only makes the term one which the media uses. The two are not equivalent. Peak Oil and terrorism are words which the media uses because they have significance for all of us.
Your reference to Hubbert is ONE of the definitions used for "peak oil".
Yes it is "one" of the definitions...the first one. The only reason I referenced him was because you were saying Peak Oil was a media term, which it isn't and his use of the term predates most media usage by 40 or so years, thus supporting my assertion.
It also useless outside of investment.
You mean the term Peak Oil is useless outside of investment? I'm not sure what you mean. Certainly, peak oil has become a term with a more developed and elaborate meaning in the intervening 50 years since Hubbert first used the term. The term Peak Oil today also has other definitional significance which isn't exclusively tied to investment. Some people use the term these days to define the realities of our expectations for extracting oil from various regions of the world knowing the anticipated supply using the data we have had for decades.
The entire world has been mapped for all pockets of oil. Most of it is already under harvest. Some of the more difficult places still are there, but then you get into the weighing the feasibility and expense and the technology we have to get at it. The potential oil field off of Brasil is a nice example. Extremely deep water. Extremely hot oil under extreme pressure. I'm not sure they have figured out how to extract it yet. There are places to get oil, but getting it is ex
Plenty of oil is being drilled for and mined right now. Neither drilling nor mining has stopped.
This idea that we have to get at all of everything right now does a disservice to future generations. By what right do we get to use all of the easily accessible hydrocarbons on the planet? We are terribly greedy in thinking it only belongs to our generation and we need to use it up right in our own generation.
Nuclear fuel is the same way. Perhaps 3 billion years ago nuclear fuel was plentiful on our planet. Not so much now.
One of the biggest solutions to our energy problem is learning to do with less. We could cut our need in 1/2 if we would just work at trying to use less. And it would be a lot easier than trying to drill or mine our way out given limited resources.
So you are comparing a complete lack of following safety protocols in coal mining companies with the lack of deaths of workers at nuclear power plants? Wouldn't it be better to compare coal mines to uranium mines and coal plants with nuclear plants? Perhaps it would also be more relevant to compare what happens to the surrounding environments of coal plants compared with nuclear plants. At least then one would be talking about comparable things. Otherwise it seems like cherry picking.
Of course one can always talk about what happens on an industry wide basis I suppose from a longitudinal standpoint, but then we don't really have any references for what will be the total cost in several hundred or thousand years for each of these industries.
I suppose that is the crux of the issue. Nobody knows the longer term consequences and that means people might be reasonably wary of such things.
"And 75% cite energy efficiency or renewables as their priority for investment, against 9% for nuclear." and "Still, 35% either strongly or slightly support a programme to replace the UK's existing reactors, with 28% either strongly or slightly opposed." and "A separate poll last year showed that 60% of Britons would oppose the building of either a nuclear or coal-fired power station in their neighbourhood - but 73% would support the construction of a wind farm."
"Germany ran a pebble bed reactor at the Nuclear Research Facility at Juelich. The Juelich post-mortem report concluded that pebble bed reactors have severe problems in practice (at least some of them base design flaws), in the specific case of the Julich AVR reactor leading to Strontium-90 contamination of the soil and aquifer beneath the reactor."
"75% cite energy efficiency or renewables as their priority for investment, against 9% for nuclear." "35% either strongly or slightly support a programme to replace the UK's existing reactors, with 28% either strongly or slightly opposed."
Certainly doesn't seem like rousing support to me. Seems like people would prefer alternatives if possible and if not, then they want upgrades to what is currently there.
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I don't disagree with what you say. Civilization has a high baseline energy cost. And we all want our civilization to continue.
I don't think we can save the fossil fuels we have. The cheaply available resources will be used up because we need them to even maintain what we have.
Nuclear is the only pragmatic civilization sustaining energy source we currently have other than the sun. Perhaps we could somehow develop a way use earths core for power generation at some point too.
My whole point is conserving energy to maintain our civilization as it is now is a highly under-utilized option we have available to us. Although conservation is taking place, there is a boatload of improvement which could be done rather cost effectively. (Low hanging fruit so to speak). My new house is very poorly insulated and we live in an area with snow on the ground for 6 months out of the year. Most of the houses around me are the same.
Once I get done properly insulating, I fully expect the amount of energy for the household will be cut in 1/2 and that will be a permanent cut for this dwelling. Some houses here are even worse off than mine.
Another big point I always try to make is that simply drilling/pumping more oil or mining more coal at a greater rate doesn't do much more than use up the resources we have more quickly doesn't get us where we need to be.
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No fertilizer other than what we scrapped out of our barns with a shovel and put in a truck we drove over to the gardens.
No tractor for the garden, but we did have an Allison Chalmers from the 1930's we used to harvest grass from our fields for the livestock.
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I wasn't trying to say people in Urban centers should grow their own food and such.
"I am not saying don't save. And if we save half, well that is clearly worth it".
That is exactly what I am on about. Saving 1/2 would effectively double the amount of time our civilization has to adjust to a post-oil post coal reality.
"But to solve the problem with saving we need to using more like 1% of what we do now. Its just not going to happen."
Using 1% of what we have is not a real choice and it isn't necessary either. Even now 20% of our power is nuclear so I don't think we would need to run our civilization 1%.
Increasing the amount of energy we use is what most people want to talk about but I think we can't do that until we get away from depending on our free solar battery (fossil fuels) to see what our capabilities will be once it isn't here and we are forced into a new baseline. I want to talk about extending what we are using by more until we can transition to alternatives. Not running us our more quickly.
I just don't hear many people talking about decreasing our usage as being an effective means of helping our energy needs.
Nimby is being against nuclear right on this lovely peninsula I live on where tourism is a mainstay of the local economy. Having a big fat nuclear plant stuck at the end of the pastoral scene would attract less tourists and threaten the current economy.
"NIMBY is being against it. NIMBYs often don't realize that they are arguing against it, but that doesn't change the fact that they are."
Clearly you have ignored what I have actually written and inserted your own biases.Definitionally, Nimby is not equivalent to anti-nuclear. They could be same or they could not be. For one hypothetical example: Donald Trump might be pro-nuclear and yet if you chose to put a plant on an island near his mansion-island he would be a NIMBY. Or in another hypothetical example: The Kennedy's could be Anti-nuclear and NIMBY if one was talking about putting a new plant near their compound. You should hone your own understanding of semantics a bit more.
Nimby also is not equivalent to "It's too dangerous for my back yard, is arguing against it being used anywhere" and I have not argued that nuclear should not be used nowhere. Quite the contrary, I have explicitly said we should use nuclear, but we have to be careful about it. I am unsure as to the danger of the newer technologies since I am not an avid reader on the latest nuclear tech. I do not know whether it would be too dangerous in my backyard. But I still don't want it there based partially on my ignorance of nuclear, but partly because of the economics of the region.
Apparently you haven't understood this rather subtle difference and I understand because some people need to deal in absolutes and blacks and whites to make sense of things. But merely because you don't recognize the distinction doesn't mean that it isn't there. I liken it to the eskimos and their 18 or so words for the character of snow. I personally only can see about 7 or 8 distinctive types of snow, so if an eskimo tried to explain to me another 10 types I might be at a loss.
Your errant or limited interpretation of the terminology apparently allows you to read gross generalizations into what I have actually said.
Likewise my statement that nuclear is unsafe is not the same as saying it is the "most dangerous" form of energy.
Unsafe or even Dangerous is not the same as "More Dangerous".I would think you might be able to see this distinction and nowhere did I say that nuclear is the "More Dangerous" form of energy. Nor do I feel nuclear to be the "more dangerous" than all other forms of energy production. Those words are yours. Once more you are putting words on the page which I have not used and attributing them to me.
My assertion is that it is not safe, which it clearly isn't in our current age with one fine example sitting before us now in Japan on the precipice. I also wonder about the future safety of such plants given the history we have seen and longevity of its products and byproducts. Combine that with the relatively tumultuous history of human kind over the last 3000 years and it must give one pause as to how we should best approach the nuclear question. We are not just doing nuclear for our generation or the generation of our grand-kids but for countless generations into the future. Rationality would predispose us to recognize these issues and try and address them if possible.
Who knows what the future of plants and the fuel they contain will be 100 year from now or 1,000 years from now? Certainly neither you nor I have such a crystal ball. So the obvious answer is to be extra extra careful with nuclear because it has such a great potential for rendering a large swath of land useless for a considerable time. As our population increases land is an ever more important resource for the people of this planet and its proper management will be paramount to the type of future we leave to those a millenia or so from now. Installation of nuclear in a region is akin to a long-term land management issue.
I don't have a problem with nuclear that is a away from popula
I suppose like everything it is part of the equation. We grow lots of our own food. When I was a kid we rarely ate food that we didn't produce ourselves. We heated our house with solar and wood we harvested from our own forrest.
But I suppose the 1 TV we have had and will have for the next 20 years does cost money as does the computer and monitor I am using here. We only use our car which we will have for the next 15 years at least for about 4.5K miles a year but that is also a high energy item. We use mostly legs and bikes or bike carriers for transport most of the year. We walk to the store, the bank, the coop, the bakery and we buy 1/2 of our stuff from people growing it locally. Still I would like for all of it to be grown locally. But we get our limited amount of clothing thru the usual venues so that is high energy I suppose.
Anyhow I keep trying to do more of my part and encourage others to do what they are capable of. I'm not sure that that reducing the infrastructural energy requirements to 50-75% lower than what they are currently would result in such meager savings. Certainly it would not be a 50% savings of energy by infrastructural upgrades, but I believe it would be more than 10%. We live in a climate with snow on the ground for 6 months of the year and so insulation of homes and business would contribute rather markedly to reducing the energy load needed to maintain our cities up here. In warmer climates it would make sense to me that such savings would not necessarily be seen.
Does cuba have money? I thought they lived mostly on susbsidies from russia. But again I plead ignorance.
Hey, Americans refuse to face the economic facts that threaten to bring down the United States
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Exactly... only a mere decade ago we had achieved some level of fiscally sane and sound policies before we decided to cut our governments salary without cutting its budget. Now we have perpetual credit card spending with Bush tax cuts 350 billion, wars 200 billion, 500 billion more reduced government revenue from our citizens suffering a 12 trillion dollar beat down by the financial industry , and more tax cuts by Obama from the recovery act to the tune of something like 350 billion.
These seem to be the economic facts which we are plagued with. 18 billion dollar surplus to 1.4 trillion dollar deficits in 10 years. We need to get back to fiscal reality. Our fiscal stupidity more than anything is bringing down the United states. We aren't suffering from some energy calamity currently. Surprisingly, energy is not even close to our main concern right now. Our own decrease taxes in increase spending mantra is what is threatening to bring down the US... maybe....
Once we get away from our fiscal absurdity we will be fine.
Even nuclear power will become feasible once the dust up in Japan settles in. We tend to have short memories.
Nothing wrong with Apple computers... the computer didn't fail. He just need to know what to do with one.
It is easy to run Linux or Win7 natively on macs if that is what he needs them to do.
Or he should have stuck with the Think Pad if that was too complicated.
No VM required!
Someone should tell the guy.
I think upgrades would be reasonable for what is already there. If we want to spread more reactors out around the US, then I think the voters need to say so.
I'm a nimby, but I just want more solar, wind and insulation in my house rather than focus on building more power plants. My last house I cut down my energy footprint by 50%. I think with this one I might be able to cut it down by 75%. I like providing lots of jobs for people who make such stuff and install it.
I sure wish I had more of those tax incentives which have largely disappeared. I'm bummed.
The 9.0 quake was 150 miles away wasn't it?
Shouldn't build on or near fault lines would be a good take-away message.
Interesting.
What about contaminated land for decades. Does that enter into your consideration? What do you think the value of the land lost for productive purposes costs? When one looks at the potential for land contamination in Japan if a full blown disaster had or may ensue, there isn't much land there for the the Japanese to live on. That loss has to have nearly catastrophic effect on the lives of the people who lived there, but for Japans economy potentially as well. They don't really have a place to move to.
I wonder how many die from coal in china? We have 1/3 their population and they rely more heavily on old dirty coal plants than we do, although that is changing. I read somewhere that 400,000 chinese die prematurely from complications caused by their old coal plants each year, but I can't be sure about the numbers even though I may have read them in the NY Times. I don't know where such a number comes from.
Or maybe we would be like Cuba. They have been stuck running and patching up the same American cars from the 40's and 50's since they can import the newest ones from the US.
Basically just a big ol' box that you drop into an existing coal power plant -- remove coal furnace, replace with nuclear furnace, leave existing steam turbines in place
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Sounds like some cool stuff.
Kind of like Toshiba 4S designs which are assembly line made and when they run out of power you ship them back to the factory for refueling. Small 10W ones could make an instant grid for Japan which doesn't have one apparently. Anyhow. Nice to talk about, but I still wouldn't want one in my backyard.
If you remove Banqiao and Chernobyl from the statistics (both were outdated and dangerous designs), both hydro and wind kill about 100x more than nuclear .
Wasn't Chernobyl new?
Wasn't Banqiao substandard because it was built by the chinese who to me seem to be infamous for building to low standards and not for successfully building great structures that will last other than the great wall. Most of their homes fall down in minor quakes. There was some high rise that just collapsed recently while still under construction and the largest dam in the world had design flaws and leaking even while they are building it (another more enormous disaster waiting to happen). I wouldn't lump china or russia where power players don't care as much about the individual and their lives with other places in the world where there seems to be more value for people.
I would agree that Coal is indefensible, but mostly because the lobby is so powerful that they are allowed to pump crap into the air which would not be allowed for a nuclear plant. They were kind of grandfathered in from the industrial revolution and most people don't even realize how much shinola is pumped out of the stacks and is raining down on them every day. This is more a reflection of politics and lack of regulation run amok. And we have a sort of mass hypnosis about how they don't do anything to us. Coal is so slow it is like smoking... people are used to it and it doesn't seem to bother them imminently. Nuclear meltdown or even radiation emission is a rather fast paced spectacular thing.
Solar and Wind
With every guy that falls off a roof installing solar, or is killed during the installation of a wind turbine how many were killed during the construction of nuclear facilities? That would be a more apt comparison with solar or wind. And how many people are unable to use their land again as a result of solar or windmill installations. None I believe.
Dams can cause big problems with shoddy construction. Once more most people are ignorant. If they thought about dams they would demand more stringent measures as well. But nobody thinks of the big dam which looms upstream since most of them don't break. And many towns don't even notice they are in the path. It seems like most of the ones which occured in the US were earthen dams and construction became better as we learned to build them better. I can think of a few which could need replacement come to think of it. I just don't trust earthen dams and there still are a few.
You are right, radiation is different.
I think that the big difference between the other forms of energy (other than coal) and nuclear power is that a nuclear disaster will devastate the land around it and make it unusable for most people. People have an emotional tie to their land, their family, their heritage, their history. And people's land is often what gives them their wealth and livelihood and secures them throughout their lives. When there is a threat which could take that away it seems to be scary. People don't want to have an increased chance of dying young or their kids and grand-kids dying young from some unseen agent. Radiation is hard to understand and terrifying. And people have the imagery of bombs going off and the imagery of the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima dying of radiation exposure. It has been burned into the psyche of the world.
But the fear of radiation has benefited nuclear technology as well. It has much tighter regulation and safety measures than any other form of energy. None of the others are as scary and so there has not been any push to demand greater safety. Nuclear is somewhat safe, but very dangerous in its implications if something were to go wrong.
If anyone thought for a second about what coal is instead of being taught to think that clean coal is already what we do then coal might actually become clean as people would demand it.
If people thought about a tsunami of water smashing through their towns for a second, they would demand our dams would be good for 1000 years or more.
What about cutting back our use and being more efficient? Seems like every time this comes up, people just laugh. But we cut our house energy bills in 1/2 on our last house by redoing the insulation in the walls, getting new windows and doors, and a higher efficiency water heater with better insulation on the unit and the pipes.
With some better tax incentives people make changes and the out of pocket cost is little for the government because it puts lots of people to work locally and production of materials increases.
I'm just saying there are other great ways to stretch our energy requirements which most people neglect to mention when talking about energy.
Obviously if a 9.0 quake hit NYC the devastation would be enormous.
But are you saying that because a 9.0 quake would be a disaster, a reactor meltdown near NYC wouldn't be a major concern for you?
You are comparing natual disasters to man-inspired. The 2 are not the same.
Natural disasters always kill more people because they are much bigger disasters, but a true reactor meltdown/radioactive cloud blanketing Manhattan, while not killing as many or destroying as much stuff would render the city and surroundings pretty much unusable for a few decades and make it hard to ever attend a broadway play in mine or my kids lifetimes.
Other than people, the greatest asset folks have is the land they live on. You incapacitate the land people live on and the impact is enormous. Their way of life, their wealth, their history gone forever for them. I think that is what worries folks in addition to the initial loss of life. And people are aware of the effects of radiation on longer term health as well. Dying prematurely certainly will cause considerable consternation among people.
I don't think anyone should lightly disregard such concerns. I have seen a lot of flippant disregard for how many people are affected by various disaster scenarios in this thread but the impact of a nuclear disaster is large too and not always as easily empathized with. After all not many people died right away.
But after a dam breaks, or many of these other disasters people keep bringing up as worse than a nuclear disaster, those who survive can go back and pick up the pieces. Not the same with a nuclear disaster.
And lest we forget, nuclear technology is something which will be with us long after all the coal plants have shut their doors. How will they do for the next millenium? Will there be any disasters over the next several hundred years, where and what will be the impact on the land around those areas? One thing we maybe have learned is don't build on or near fault lines. But some places don't really have an option.
Where exactly did I say to use a system (non-nuclear) that is less safe? Where did I say we should not use nuclear?
That would be here:
The big sticking point with nuclear is always safety. And every disaster reminds us of just how unsafe nuclear can be. A 40 mile diameter section where people can't live in Japan is a major chunk of real estate. If this happened near any of our major cities it would cause significant problems. Renewables could be brought up to date in the matter of a decade with a concerted effort. The right tax incentives could retrofit most every building in America with solar.
As to the ignorance of the public including myself, I want NO reactor anywhere near where I live simply because I like to live here and want my kids and grandkids to be able to live here safely.
This fear of nuclear contamination is not because of TV and shit websites since my understanding of nuclear issues comes mostly from magazine pieces from the last several decades and predates the internet.
So your assertion is that installing solar on ones house and business is less safe than nuclear? Interesting. How do you get there exactly? A nuclear accident can irradiate a region for decades and make it unuseable. I know of no such risk from putting solar on buildings.
And further, nowhere in the above paragraph of mine you quoted did I say nuclear should not be part of fulfilling our energy needs. I am just a NIMBY. I fully believe nuclear will play an increasing role in our power structure. I just worry about its long term consequences so safety is more than paramount. That would seem to be reasonable would it not?
And repeated here:
But I don't want it near my beautiful part of the country.
Again ... a NIMBY comment of mine for certain, but it is not equivalent to "We should not use Nuclear". It is important that words you are interpreting do in fact say what you assert. And again, nowhere did I say nuclear should not be used. (NIMBY not equal to No Nuclear.)
The term may not have been media coined, but as it is commenly used, it is a media term.
The word terrorism is commonly used in the media to but that doesn't make it a "media term". It only makes the term one which the media uses. The two are not equivalent. Peak Oil and terrorism are words which the media uses because they have significance for all of us.
Your reference to Hubbert is ONE of the definitions used for "peak oil".
Yes it is "one" of the definitions...the first one. The only reason I referenced him was because you were saying Peak Oil was a media term, which it isn't and his use of the term predates most media usage by 40 or so years, thus supporting my assertion.
It also useless outside of investment.
You mean the term Peak Oil is useless outside of investment? I'm not sure what you mean. Certainly, peak oil has become a term with a more developed and elaborate meaning in the intervening 50 years since Hubbert first used the term. The term Peak Oil today also has other definitional significance which isn't exclusively tied to investment. Some people use the term these days to define the realities of our expectations for extracting oil from various regions of the world knowing the anticipated supply using the data we have had for decades.
The entire world has been mapped for all pockets of oil. Most of it is already under harvest. Some of the more difficult places still are there, but then you get into the weighing the feasibility and expense and the technology we have to get at it. The potential oil field off of Brasil is a nice example. Extremely deep water. Extremely hot oil under extreme pressure. I'm not sure they have figured out how to extract it yet. There are places to get oil, but getting it is ex
Plenty of oil is being drilled for and mined right now. Neither drilling nor mining has stopped.
This idea that we have to get at all of everything right now does a disservice to future generations. By what right do we get to use all of the easily accessible hydrocarbons on the planet? We are terribly greedy in thinking it only belongs to our generation and we need to use it up right in our own generation.
Nuclear fuel is the same way. Perhaps 3 billion years ago nuclear fuel was plentiful on our planet. Not so much now.
One of the biggest solutions to our energy problem is learning to do with less. We could cut our need in 1/2 if we would just work at trying to use less. And it would be a lot easier than trying to drill or mine our way out given limited resources.
So you are comparing a complete lack of following safety protocols in coal mining companies with the lack of deaths of workers at nuclear power plants?
Wouldn't it be better to compare coal mines to uranium mines and coal plants with nuclear plants?
Perhaps it would also be more relevant to compare what happens to the surrounding environments of coal plants compared with nuclear plants. At least then one would be talking about comparable things. Otherwise it seems like cherry picking.
Of course one can always talk about what happens on an industry wide basis I suppose from a longitudinal standpoint, but then we don't really have any references for what will be the total cost in several hundred or thousand years for each of these industries.
I suppose that is the crux of the issue. Nobody knows the longer term consequences and that means people might be reasonably wary of such things.
"And 75% cite energy efficiency or renewables as their priority for investment, against 9% for nuclear."
and
"Still, 35% either strongly or slightly support a programme to replace the UK's existing reactors, with 28% either strongly or slightly opposed."
and
"A separate poll last year showed that 60% of Britons would oppose the building of either a nuclear or coal-fired power station in their neighbourhood - but 73% would support the construction of a wind farm."
The plant also didn't suffer a 9.0 quake. That was like 150 miles away or something.
Thorium / Pebble Bed Reactors have had some issues to I believe. Personally, I would have to do some more reading, but some folks on slashdot were talking about that a week ago.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/03/21/2312211/A-New-Class-of-Nuclear-Reactors?from=rss
"Germany ran a pebble bed reactor at the Nuclear Research Facility at Juelich. The Juelich post-mortem report concluded that pebble bed reactors have severe problems in practice (at least some of them base design flaws), in the specific case of the Julich AVR reactor leading to Strontium-90 contamination of the soil and aquifer beneath the reactor."
The post-mortem report is posted here http://www.eskom.co.za/content/AVR-Report-Press.PDF
"75% cite energy efficiency or renewables as their priority for investment, against 9% for nuclear."
"35% either strongly or slightly support a programme to replace the UK's existing reactors, with 28% either strongly or slightly opposed."
Certainly doesn't seem like rousing support to me.
Seems like people would prefer alternatives if possible and if not, then they want upgrades to what is currently there.