My growing (and worrying) conclusion is that we are headed back to the future with coal - either liquified for our cars or simply burning it for electricity. Perhaps somewhat cleaner coal, but even clean coal is more polluting in terms of global warming than most other forms of energy production.
Precisely - and for that we should say `thank you' to the environmentalists.
Thank you for being clueless about relative risk.
Thank you for talking bullshit about the hazards of exposure to low-level ionizing radiation.
Thank you for making false, Cornucopian promises about the potential of renewable energy sources.
Thank you for objectively promoting the growth in fossil fuel consumption.
Thank you for helping to usher in the global warming era.
copelch, your attack on "environmentalists" is cheap and without merit. Sure, some enviros have oversold the promise of renewables and for that, they -- whoever "they" are -- should be critisized. But to blame enviros as a whole for our converging energy and environmental catastrophes is like blaming the anti-war movement of the 1960s for America's failure in Vietnam.
The human species is treading thin ice because it doesn't understand or respect natural limits. It has convinced itself that opposable thumbs annoint us as the crown of creation. The only three words we seem to understand are more, bigger, and faster.
Many enviros have been preaching reduced consumption, reduced population and avoidance of overly-complex and polluting technologies (like "Noo-que-lar" power) for decades -- mostly to an empty house. Now the chickens are about to return to the roost, just as predicted.
When I hear someone blame the environmental community for our current crises, I am reminded of one of my favorite bumper stickers: Plants and animals disappear to make room for your fat ass.
"to blame enviros as a whole for our converging energy and environmental catastrophes is like blaming the anti-war movement of the 1960s for America's failure in Vietnam."
It strikes me that it is more like blaming the anti-war movement for the war.
Except for some influence in Europe, environmentalists have had little to do with the slowdown in nuclear plant construction in recent decades. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did not change the attitudes of environmentalists, but sure put the fear of Satan into a lot of the unread. But like most things, it's mostly about cost and coal and natural gas have been providing electricity at a cost that nuclear has been unable to match, despite an earlier promise of electricity "to cheap to meter". I am reminded of this every month, when as a resident of Ontario I look at a significant premium on my electricity bill that is dedicated to a huge debt that nuclear facilities have imposed on us.
As an anarchist, my main objection to nuclear rests with the repressive political structure it requires: a caste of high priests who hold the knowledge and police/army who maintain security.
That's the problem. Tell someone that they don't need nucler and they use coal instead. The enviros keep thinking that one day they'll say "no nuclear" and the world will hear "don't use air conditioning" and agree. They are still waiting. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and always expect a different result. It is never going to happen. Anti-nuclear is pro-oil and pro-coal, just as passivism on the eve of WWII was pro-facist. If there are only two viable choices (and the world seems hell bent on choosing one of them), then to degrade one is to help the other.
I agree with the grandparent. Thank you green party for being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party and keeping us breathing coal and diesel fumes for well nigh 40 years now. Keep up the good work. And when all the glaciers are melted, then you better believe people will be using their ACs like mad. The world will go nuclear (or solar, or whatever), but it looks like the bashing of new power production techniques guarantees that we'll burn up all the coal and oil first.
You sir don't actually understand natural limits all that well, at leas as they relate to energy. The UN proposes that human population will peak at around 9 billion people and then decline. Lets suppose that it remains at 9 billion people, and each one uses 3KW pretty much continuously. This is fairly close to what the US uses, depending on how you count energy, roughly 3KW (say, between 5 and 2) per person when you add up all the oil, gas, coal, wood, nuclear, hydro, and everything else.
This is (once again, very roughly) 10^11 joules per person, per year. 10 billion people would bring the grand total to 10^21 joules per year for the whole planet. This is actually entirely sustainable. There is more than enough solar, and nuclear could maintain that level far beyond the sort of time horizons we should concern ourselves with now (say, a few thousand years). Beyond that, fusion would render the entire exercise a waste of time, if we manage to get it in the next few thousand years, which I guess we probably will.
There are limits to human growth, but they have NOTHING to do with energy. Food, yes, space, yes, recreational land that isn't paved over, absolutely. Energy, not relevant. We will use all the oil (check), and gas (check), and then either proceed to use solar and nuclear or continue to use all the coal, and then use solar and nuclear. That's pretty much the options, and there's no reason why we will ever be short of energy, given the current state of technology.
Personally, I'd like to just jump the coal step and not completely screw up the planet. It's much harder to do that when the greens are screaming like prissy princesses about nuclear day and night. If you want something to scream about, scream about coal. leave nuclear alone. Maybe one day, in 50 years when all our energy infrastructure is nuclear, then, by all means have this discussion about people living in caves and not using energy. By all means, lets have that discussion then, or even now, but don't spend the days bashing nuclear in order to get there. Bash coal first, nuclear either later or never.
'Thank you green party for being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party and keeping us breathing coal and diesel fumes for well nigh 40 years now'
Wow - living in Germany, where the Green party in the later 1990s proposed a 10 dollar a gallon tax on gasoline, I hadn't realized that it was all a Republican plot to get an oilman elected in the U.S.
Or are we talking about the same Green party?
Because the one I know of played a major role in shutting down not only the domestic German nuclear industry, but East Germany's brown coal industry too. They have also been huge supporters of locally based agriculture, a typically Republican ruse. Let's not even begin to explore Green dedication to reducing consumption at all levels, from packaging on up, another typical Republican concern.
Actually, you get all your information about the Green Party and its politics from the American media, I would hazard to guess. Well, in that case, rest assured that it is a Republican ploy to help the Green party as a favor for the Greens helping the Republicans. Sort of like how feminists and fundamentalists are really just big buddies in the end.
And if you are standing on the opposite side of the planet day IS night. As a historical note - the Greens basically became an organized party ca. 1980 - they haven't even been around for 40 years. Of course, the Republicans and the Democrats have. Now that I think about it, maybe the Catholic Church is responsible for abortion, pacifists cause war, and people who live in America have nothing at all to do with the fact that a quarter of the world's fossil fuel consumption takes place in the United States.
Well, for a while there, I thought I would actually have to resist changing my worldview so as to blame environmentalists for McMansions, SUVs, and obesity. But I stopped myself - it really wasn't that hard.
And of course, the world is not in any sense running out of oil, and this peak talk is just crazy - and home prices always go up, too.
Ignoring reality is so much easier than dealing with it.
The destroyd brown coal industry bought by the Swedish government utility company Vattenfall who then invested in new brown coal powerplants?
Partly bought by government money Vattenfall got as compensation for handling over a large share in the nuclear powerplant Ringhals to the utility Sydkraft now German E-on as compensation for our greens forcing a closure of the Sydkraft nuclear powerplant Barsebäck.
I dont like closing nuclear powerplants in Swedens since it is stupid due to environmental, economical and of course peak oil reasons but it gets realy disgusting when tax money used for this stupid idea ends up financing new brown coal powerplants.
I would for environmental and national selfish reasons very much enjoy a sale of these Vattenfall assets in Germany to finance new nuclear powerplants in Sweden. The official line seems to be that Vattenfall must be one of the largest players on the european market or they will otherwise be destroyed or perhaps loose the pee distance competition. My less advanced insights into such things is that well run and profitable trumphs big but I am of course poor and powerless myself and dont know what makes mega corporations successfull.
Well, I live next door to Germany (Luxembourg) and from my balcony I have a nice view of the wind turbines that grace the Saarland's skyline on the other side of the Moselle. So I am reminded every day of the aesthetically less pleasant aspects of implementation of some of the Green Party's policy proposals - but perhaps that's the price we have to pay. Thanks anyhow - rejecting the nuclear option makes the German countryside a more beautiful place, doesn't it?
Their proposal to raise gasoline taxes was certainly a saving grace, but I remember that in the 1980s they seemed to devote about 90% of their energy to demonstrating against nuclear power plants, which for them embodied evil incarnate - and they spent the remaining 10% on data-dredging-based hysterical scare-mongering about the alleged carcinogenic hazards resulting from exposure to miniscule and barely detectable quantities of chemical insecticides. Never in their literature did I come across any reference to relative risk either in connection with nuclear power or in connection with toxicological issues. Perhaps I didn't read enough.
Well, the point about the aesthetics is an interesting one. Living in Baden-Württemberg, the last CDU minister-president also found windmills ugly - which considering how many transmission towers and power lines criss-cross the mountains, most with large orange, red, or white globes on the power lines (to warn helicopters and jets - especially the low flying military ones) was always a bit of proof that taste is personal.
Personally, I never found the few windmills on the Rhine in Karlsruhe a problem - but then, the coal power plant chimney, and the barges carrying coal into the Rhine harbor tend to be much more noticeable.
As for what the German Greens protested against - I would guess their anti-war stance took at least as much of their energy during the 1980s as any environmental concern. (The Greens are not Greenpeace.) Of course, some Greens tend to be hopelessly hysterical romantics, so I am not disagreeing with any personal observations. And living here in Baden is strange - the joke is that people here think Green, but vote Black (CDU) - this may mean that the Greens don't look or act as extreme here as in other parts of Germany, or that many Green concerns about sustainability are just considered normal.
It always interests me to see how the truly radical Greens of that time tend to get reduced to the most politically palatable level of environmentalism, which all major parties in Germany adopted, without discussing other major concerns which remain quite unacceptable to discuss it seems - such as blood for oil being morally wrong.
But then, gaining power does that to idealists. I tend to be a fan of the Greens to the extent they were true outsiders (they aren't anymore), and in the sense they seemed more capable of seeing a larger picture - again, as outsiders they didn't have to worry about insulting any other power blocs.
I think neither of you give credit where it's due to Germany's Greens.
There are a number of transformational changes that are directly due to them. Waste management, energy conservation, transport, bioclimatic housing, solar and wind energy : these are fields where Germany leads the world.
The Greens didn't invent them, and we can imagine that they would have come anyway, sooner or later (though Germany would probably not have led the world in any of them by then); but they were, in fact, imposed by the Greens through tough political coalition-building, persuasion, compromise and (most of all!) proportional representation, which gave them political clout.
The nuclear issue is a tough one, but shouldn't serve to hide the huge and very positive overall contribution of the German greens.
Actually, I give a lot of credit to the Greens, since as an outsider party, they proved just how vast the potential to gain voters over various issues was. In essence, they shifted the entire political spectrum in Germany in their chosen directions.
But they are no longer an outsider party, and one of the main reasons for their existence seems to have faded into the background of necessary police actions, or peace keeping, or whatever term works for sending soldiers to do something other than defend a nation from direct attack. The Greens had that debate, and the ones in power did what people in power normally do - exercise that power to remove opposition to what those in power feel is necessary and correct.
Sort of like how Green Rezzo Schlauch now sits on the EnBW board - even though the company is majority owned by EdF, the world's largest commercial operator of nuclear reactors (I believe - the U.S. may have more reactors, but they are owned by various companies).
I'm sure he thinks his reasons for being there having nothing to do with the check he receives, or the cover it gives EnBW to keep selling electricity generated in France using nuclear reactors. But then, he is an innocent politician, not a cynical citizen.
I always find this "awww, those wind turbines are so UGleeee!" argument so completely weird.
Come on. You claim to be concerned about peak oil, global warming, and sustainability, but you're going to oppose a key element of the solutions on the grounds of visual aesthetics?
Personally, I find them, without exception, beautiful. That may not be entirely unconnected with the fact that I actually care about these issues.
This last weekend I was driving along I-80 in Wyoming and pulled over to observe, listen to, and photograph the wind generators near the town of Arlington. I found them elegant, beautiful, and very quiet, certainly a helluva lot quieter than the traffic. Bring the wind generators on!! A million more, please.
That is not bullshit. Rick Santorum (coughassholecough) had his staff collect signatures to get the green party candidate on the ballot this year.
Hell, he got his supporters to donate 40 grand to the green party for the ballot drive. Do you really think he is doing this because he is a warm and fuzzy environmentalist?
If you vote for the green party candidate for senator in PA this Nov. you really need to have your head examined. Rick Santorum is the most vile thing that ever came out of PA and really, really needs to lose his job.
Yes, and those greens are so competent and smart!!!!!!
They could challenge Hillary from the left, or Lieberman, or Kennedy, or Kerry, and in any of these cases they would have a significant chance of winning. In addition, they'd significantly advance their cause whether they won or not, and not severely hurt their cause if they lost. Do they do so, no, they do not.
Where do they challenge? Well, lets see, there's Pennsylvania, where without their help Santorum has about a 5% chance of survival, with their help perhaps 30%. In either case, the greens have roughly a 0% chance of winning. Sure looks like that'll help the environment, if they save the nastiest of the republicans from his day of reckoning.
Where else, well, they challenged in the presidntial race, and told everyone that a Gore presidency would be the same as a Bush presidency. Does anyone actually believe that? Do they even actually believe that? Two words, willful, ignorance.
Where else, looks like a challenge against Feingold to soften him up and make absolutely sure that we don't ever get a real liberal running for president, good, good.
In all of these cases, they had massive help from republicans. The campaigns are waged with republican money and republican volunteers. It shows, the corruption seeps through. The chief justice of the pennsylvania supreme court called their 2004 ballot petition (if memory serves) "the most horrendous fraud ever perpetrated upon this court.."
Hmm, seems like they're really saving the environment. Good thing we have them around. Without them there would be no Bush, and god only knows where we'd end up. Probably with very little CO2 emissions and vastly less dependency on foreign oil. At the very least we'd be in good financial shape. Good thing we have greens around fighting for the rights of endangered wingnut republicans everywhere.
The two party system isn't perfect, but it surely does far worse with a third spoiler party hell bent on underminig their own ideals.
A primary challenge within the democratic party can work, just look at Lieberman. Basically, the twoparty system works fine without massive election fraud and willful ignorance on the part of the major players. Even with these handicapps it will work itself out eventually anyway. The US isn't the only country to elect a nasty leader, Italy (twice!), and Germany spring to mind. Neither case can really be blamed on the convenient scapegoat, the two party system.
I have no desire to defend the US greens. In the electoral setup you have, they have little hope of being anything but a spoiler. That's because of the two-party system, which is a travesty of democracy.
Contrast the Green Parties of Germany or New Zealand, where proportional representation gives them an influence, a hugely positive one.
'A short circuit at Forsmark caused an immediate shutdown in one of three reactors. At this point cooling must begin at once but only two of four diesel generators began the automatic process of pumping water to carry this out. Höglund said that "only luck" prevented disaster, as all of the generators shared the same construction error.'
'"It is surprising that this happens in Sweden, which has an extremely strict safety system for their nuclear power plants. I have been to Forsmark myself and there is a large difference between safety thinking there and, for example, in Russian plants," Bøhmer said.'
Of course, the people pointing these things out seem to be opposed to nuclear power. I wonder why that is?
Certainly has nothing to do with any facts, I'm sure, it's all more of that Republican ploy to discredit nuclear power to burn more coal since Greens are ignorant ninnies scared of a few more harmless backyard becquerels. And to think the Swedes just missed an opportunity to show just how harmless a nuclear accident really is.
At some point, the pro-nuclear people just need to prove that mistakes never happen, and we can all rest easy.
A good way to do that is to make sure that such little itsy-bitsy almost meltdowns don't get much attention.
Or build reactors which can't melt down - which is technically possible, by the way. It is just that apparently NO nuclear reactor currently being used commercially to generate electricity is so designed.
Please feel free to contradict that assertion with a list of facilities world wide which do use such designs.
This incident has been covered in earlier threads. More technical information has been released since then but I have only found it in Swedish and translating 50 pages long technical documenation is a little to much for these debates.
My english summary and impressions of them are:
There were large cooling margins to dry boiling any part of the fuel.
Defence in depth and redundance worked and enough automatic systems started to cool the reactor core to keep the no manual actions required within 30 minutes rule. The idea with this rule is to give time for manual analysis so that operators dont make a problem worse by incorrect actions such as happened during the TMI accident.
But too manny things failed from a single source of failure, an overvoltage from the switchyard short circuit, showing that some "defence in depth" systems to allways have power to run the systems depended on each other in bad ways.
From reading reports nothing seems to have broken down inside the plant as in the magic smoke leaving the electronics. The problems were bad values set for overvoltage protection in UPS equipment, bad design decisions in how to feed power to some components and systems and faulty installation of some components.
I will stay with my earlier impression that the nuclear powerplant were not perfect but good enough to handle these faults. I enjoy the open information while they fix these faults and better the design procedures for plant maintainance and upgrades. It is quite like what has happened before in earlier incidents, a learning experince that will make the plant better and the lessons will be distributed in the industry.
I suppose the imperfections can be quite scary for those who are scared by nuclear power. It will never be perfectly safe, only very very safe and it is important to not depend on an illusion of perfect safety since that gets in the way of the work to make the safety better over time.
I was in the U.S. during the incident, without Internet access, in part staying at the home of a retired naval captain who was trained for the nuclear navy.
The problem with nuclear power essentially remains the problems of dealing with the waste and mistakes - and until you can build a system where no mistakes without catastrophic results occur, I remain a sceptic on nuclear power. And please, a nine minute margin for ruining a significant amount of the Swedish landscape for a significant number of years should not be comforting to you - unless you think that the two generators that started to run the pumps represent very very safe. I certainly wouldn't, and that is based on a very rational understanding that the benefits from running the plant do not compare to the results of a no longer exactly theoretical chain of events leading to the slagged core meeting the wider world.
It was the captain's considered opinion during our discussions that the newer, safer designs are unlikely to be built, at least in the U.S., since the risk of a new, hopefully 'safer' design would seem higher than building reactors of a proven design, even if that proven design has known flaws.
Any design that results in a meltdown after power is lost, measured in seconds, minutes, or hours, is a problem.
I do wish that advocates for nuclear power would, at a minimum, insist that new reactors not be so designed or built that a meltdown in a fueled core is the default setting, so to speak.
As for burning brown coal - yep, you can always tell who is the junior partner in a coalition government. The SPD understands coal miners very well, of course.
If more systems had failed and the staff had done the wrong things we could have had another TMI accident. I dont know how long the margin would have been in minutes if that had happened.
If even more things had gone wrong the emergency preassure release filter would have proven adequate or inadequate.
Btw regarding meted cores, melted salt reactors are intresting. It is probably possible to build quite efficient Thorium and Uranium breeders that give high temperatures needed for chemical hydrogen synthesis. Unfortunately I am afraid that I live in too small a country for us to research them on our own. It makes more sense for us to improve the reactors we got and hopefully build a few more, lack of power in a post peak oil world scares me much more then the small risk for nuclear accidents.
Why should lack of power scare you? Our ancestors lived while consuming far less energy. Or is it a matter of fear of loosing the "goodies" of modern civilization?
My major fear is people and nations fighting for dwindling resources if they dont invest in efficiency and creation of more resources.
If that cant be avoided on a global scare I would very much like to live in a country that has lots of energy to export things that are valuble for the rest of the world to get political leverage to keep this courner of the world calm and the ability build up a good military defence if that is needed.
My minor fear is having living conditions far closer to our ancestors then the current ones. People can both kill and die to avoiding such a fate, I hope they also can work and make sensibe politics.
That makes your statement much more understandable. I guess that in my own mind I have already discounted the probabillity for war to such an extent that it is simply a part of the background to these issues. Even in the most optomistic scenarios I can imagine, there will be lots of killing and dieing.
Killing and dieing due to peak oil is fairly likely and some say it already have begun. I would prefer to be on the surviving side with a maximum radius of calm civilization around me, that is I would like to be on the winning side. No victory is better then not having to fight in a bloodied way and more nuclear power is part of that goal.
I'm not as sure as you that nuclear power will be a means to avoid fighting. It appears that the developed nations, lead by the U.S., are going to insist on keeping the technology and the fuel cycle under their control. This is likely to result in more Iran type confrontations. And there will, inevitebly, be a time in the not to distant future when competition for uranium resources will lead to problems.
Nope. There is lots of nuclear fuel around. Don't worry.
Deffeyes plotted uranium on a Hubbert curve once (Deffeyes and Macgregor, 1980, Scientific American). According to him we were only on the first 5 % of the curve. And that's without reprocessing, breeding, sea uranium etc.
Of course, we could always refer you to Iraq where the environment and health of the people are being impacted by spent uranium projectiles.
Or is waste disposal not a problem. I keep hearing the "will figure out something" line. Usually that's said completely innocent of any recognition of the general incompetence of our decision-makers. We've already decided one way to "dispose" of the wastes we have already generated. Makes me wonder what ingenious plans we'll come up with when we have even more.
Consider the problem this way - when you throw something away, where does it go? Few people even consider anything more than getting their trash to the curb or dumpster for pick up by some one else.
What has uranium metal in munitions to do with nuclear power?
That is like complaining about oil and cars due to the existance of tanks.
The local high level waste storage/disposal is in copper cannisters 500 m down in bedrock with a good chance for survining an ice age. About as good schemes are proposed for long term storage of quicksilver, its nice that the nuclear waste research inspires better handling of other kind of wastes. The latest envorinmental news in Swedens is BTW the location of sea dump of quicksilver rich catalytic mass mixed with concrete dumped in the 50:s and 60:s, about 3000 barrels found out of an assumed 20000. :-(
Where do you think that the spent uranium came from?
As for waste disposal, not all places in the world will be as careful as your locale. Here in the U.S. we like the idea of dumping it all down a big hole where it can leach out of rusted steel containers into the aquifer. For most places in the world I fear that it will be a matter of "out of sight, out of mind"
Umm, you left out all the military accidents - or don't they count? Especially Soviet, but check out some of the U.S. incidents as well - a sunk submarine here or there begins to add up after a while.
I am anti-nuclear for roughly the same reason I am anti blasting mountain tops to get coal - it is just so stupid in terms of short term / long term cost/benefit.
I have no problem, once the waste issue is reasonably solved, with nuclear fission as a way to generate steam to power generators (well, apart from the essentially silly application of 18th and 19th century concepts to generate electricity). Of course, saying the future will solve the waste issue is exactly how the problem is handled now - the future will unavoidably be dealing with it.
You write:
My growing (and worrying) conclusion is that we are headed back to the future with coal - either liquified for our cars or simply burning it for electricity. Perhaps somewhat cleaner coal, but even clean coal is more polluting in terms of global warming than most other forms of energy production.
Precisely - and for that we should say `thank you' to the environmentalists.
Thank you for being clueless about relative risk.
Thank you for talking bullshit about the hazards of exposure to low-level ionizing radiation.
Thank you for making false, Cornucopian promises about the potential of renewable energy sources.
Thank you for objectively promoting the growth in fossil fuel consumption.
Thank you for helping to usher in the global warming era.
Of course, we know your intentions were good.
The human species is treading thin ice because it doesn't understand or respect natural limits. It has convinced itself that opposable thumbs annoint us as the crown of creation. The only three words we seem to understand are more, bigger, and faster.
Many enviros have been preaching reduced consumption, reduced population and avoidance of overly-complex and polluting technologies (like "Noo-que-lar" power) for decades -- mostly to an empty house. Now the chickens are about to return to the roost, just as predicted.
When I hear someone blame the environmental community for our current crises, I am reminded of one of my favorite bumper stickers: Plants and animals disappear to make room for your fat ass.
Nothing personal, mind you...
It strikes me that it is more like blaming the anti-war movement for the war.
Except for some influence in Europe, environmentalists have had little to do with the slowdown in nuclear plant construction in recent decades. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did not change the attitudes of environmentalists, but sure put the fear of Satan into a lot of the unread. But like most things, it's mostly about cost and coal and natural gas have been providing electricity at a cost that nuclear has been unable to match, despite an earlier promise of electricity "to cheap to meter". I am reminded of this every month, when as a resident of Ontario I look at a significant premium on my electricity bill that is dedicated to a huge debt that nuclear facilities have imposed on us.
As an anarchist, my main objection to nuclear rests with the repressive political structure it requires: a caste of high priests who hold the knowledge and police/army who maintain security.
That's the problem. Tell someone that they don't need nucler and they use coal instead. The enviros keep thinking that one day they'll say "no nuclear" and the world will hear "don't use air conditioning" and agree. They are still waiting. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and always expect a different result. It is never going to happen. Anti-nuclear is pro-oil and pro-coal, just as passivism on the eve of WWII was pro-facist. If there are only two viable choices (and the world seems hell bent on choosing one of them), then to degrade one is to help the other.
I agree with the grandparent. Thank you green party for being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party and keeping us breathing coal and diesel fumes for well nigh 40 years now. Keep up the good work. And when all the glaciers are melted, then you better believe people will be using their ACs like mad. The world will go nuclear (or solar, or whatever), but it looks like the bashing of new power production techniques guarantees that we'll burn up all the coal and oil first.
You sir don't actually understand natural limits all that well, at leas as they relate to energy. The UN proposes that human population will peak at around 9 billion people and then decline. Lets suppose that it remains at 9 billion people, and each one uses 3KW pretty much continuously. This is fairly close to what the US uses, depending on how you count energy, roughly 3KW (say, between 5 and 2) per person when you add up all the oil, gas, coal, wood, nuclear, hydro, and everything else.
This is (once again, very roughly) 10^11 joules per person, per year. 10 billion people would bring the grand total to 10^21 joules per year for the whole planet. This is actually entirely sustainable. There is more than enough solar, and nuclear could maintain that level far beyond the sort of time horizons we should concern ourselves with now (say, a few thousand years). Beyond that, fusion would render the entire exercise a waste of time, if we manage to get it in the next few thousand years, which I guess we probably will.
There are limits to human growth, but they have NOTHING to do with energy. Food, yes, space, yes, recreational land that isn't paved over, absolutely. Energy, not relevant. We will use all the oil (check), and gas (check), and then either proceed to use solar and nuclear or continue to use all the coal, and then use solar and nuclear. That's pretty much the options, and there's no reason why we will ever be short of energy, given the current state of technology.
Personally, I'd like to just jump the coal step and not completely screw up the planet. It's much harder to do that when the greens are screaming like prissy princesses about nuclear day and night. If you want something to scream about, scream about coal. leave nuclear alone. Maybe one day, in 50 years when all our energy infrastructure is nuclear, then, by all means have this discussion about people living in caves and not using energy. By all means, lets have that discussion then, or even now, but don't spend the days bashing nuclear in order to get there. Bash coal first, nuclear either later or never.
Wow - living in Germany, where the Green party in the later 1990s proposed a 10 dollar a gallon tax on gasoline, I hadn't realized that it was all a Republican plot to get an oilman elected in the U.S.
Or are we talking about the same Green party?
Because the one I know of played a major role in shutting down not only the domestic German nuclear industry, but East Germany's brown coal industry too. They have also been huge supporters of locally based agriculture, a typically Republican ruse. Let's not even begin to explore Green dedication to reducing consumption at all levels, from packaging on up, another typical Republican concern.
Actually, you get all your information about the Green Party and its politics from the American media, I would hazard to guess. Well, in that case, rest assured that it is a Republican ploy to help the Green party as a favor for the Greens helping the Republicans. Sort of like how feminists and fundamentalists are really just big buddies in the end.
And if you are standing on the opposite side of the planet day IS night. As a historical note - the Greens basically became an organized party ca. 1980 - they haven't even been around for 40 years. Of course, the Republicans and the Democrats have. Now that I think about it, maybe the Catholic Church is responsible for abortion, pacifists cause war, and people who live in America have nothing at all to do with the fact that a quarter of the world's fossil fuel consumption takes place in the United States.
Well, for a while there, I thought I would actually have to resist changing my worldview so as to blame environmentalists for McMansions, SUVs, and obesity. But I stopped myself - it really wasn't that hard.
And of course, the world is not in any sense running out of oil, and this peak talk is just crazy - and home prices always go up, too.
Ignoring reality is so much easier than dealing with it.
Partly bought by government money Vattenfall got as compensation for handling over a large share in the nuclear powerplant Ringhals to the utility Sydkraft now German E-on as compensation for our greens forcing a closure of the Sydkraft nuclear powerplant Barsebäck.
I dont like closing nuclear powerplants in Swedens since it is stupid due to environmental, economical and of course peak oil reasons but it gets realy disgusting when tax money used for this stupid idea ends up financing new brown coal powerplants.
I would for environmental and national selfish reasons very much enjoy a sale of these Vattenfall assets in Germany to finance new nuclear powerplants in Sweden. The official line seems to be that Vattenfall must be one of the largest players on the european market or they will otherwise be destroyed or perhaps loose the pee distance competition. My less advanced insights into such things is that well run and profitable trumphs big but I am of course poor and powerless myself and dont know what makes mega corporations successfull.
Well, I live next door to Germany (Luxembourg) and from my balcony I have a nice view of the wind turbines that grace the Saarland's skyline on the other side of the Moselle. So I am reminded every day of the aesthetically less pleasant aspects of implementation of some of the Green Party's policy proposals - but perhaps that's the price we have to pay. Thanks anyhow - rejecting the nuclear option makes the German countryside a more beautiful place, doesn't it?
Their proposal to raise gasoline taxes was certainly a saving grace, but I remember that in the 1980s they seemed to devote about 90% of their energy to demonstrating against nuclear power plants, which for them embodied evil incarnate - and they spent the remaining 10% on data-dredging-based hysterical scare-mongering about the alleged carcinogenic hazards resulting from exposure to miniscule and barely detectable quantities of chemical insecticides. Never in their literature did I come across any reference to relative risk either in connection with nuclear power or in connection with toxicological issues. Perhaps I didn't read enough.
I'm not denying their positive side.
Just saying they were pretty much a mixed bag.
Personally, I never found the few windmills on the Rhine in Karlsruhe a problem - but then, the coal power plant chimney, and the barges carrying coal into the Rhine harbor tend to be much more noticeable.
As for what the German Greens protested against - I would guess their anti-war stance took at least as much of their energy during the 1980s as any environmental concern. (The Greens are not Greenpeace.) Of course, some Greens tend to be hopelessly hysterical romantics, so I am not disagreeing with any personal observations. And living here in Baden is strange - the joke is that people here think Green, but vote Black (CDU) - this may mean that the Greens don't look or act as extreme here as in other parts of Germany, or that many Green concerns about sustainability are just considered normal.
It always interests me to see how the truly radical Greens of that time tend to get reduced to the most politically palatable level of environmentalism, which all major parties in Germany adopted, without discussing other major concerns which remain quite unacceptable to discuss it seems - such as blood for oil being morally wrong.
But then, gaining power does that to idealists. I tend to be a fan of the Greens to the extent they were true outsiders (they aren't anymore), and in the sense they seemed more capable of seeing a larger picture - again, as outsiders they didn't have to worry about insulting any other power blocs.
There are a number of transformational changes that are directly due to them. Waste management, energy conservation, transport, bioclimatic housing, solar and wind energy : these are fields where Germany leads the world.
The Greens didn't invent them, and we can imagine that they would have come anyway, sooner or later (though Germany would probably not have led the world in any of them by then); but they were, in fact, imposed by the Greens through tough political coalition-building, persuasion, compromise and (most of all!) proportional representation, which gave them political clout.
The nuclear issue is a tough one, but shouldn't serve to hide the huge and very positive overall contribution of the German greens.
We should be so lucky in France!
But they are no longer an outsider party, and one of the main reasons for their existence seems to have faded into the background of necessary police actions, or peace keeping, or whatever term works for sending soldiers to do something other than defend a nation from direct attack. The Greens had that debate, and the ones in power did what people in power normally do - exercise that power to remove opposition to what those in power feel is necessary and correct.
Sort of like how Green Rezzo Schlauch now sits on the EnBW board - even though the company is majority owned by EdF, the world's largest commercial operator of nuclear reactors (I believe - the U.S. may have more reactors, but they are owned by various companies).
I'm sure he thinks his reasons for being there having nothing to do with the check he receives, or the cover it gives EnBW to keep selling electricity generated in France using nuclear reactors. But then, he is an innocent politician, not a cynical citizen.
Come on. You claim to be concerned about peak oil, global warming, and sustainability, but you're going to oppose a key element of the solutions on the grounds of visual aesthetics?
Personally, I find them, without exception, beautiful. That may not be entirely unconnected with the fact that I actually care about these issues.
The greens in Germany are not the same as the Greens in PA, for instance, where they are entirely funded and staffed by republicans.
Hell, he got his supporters to donate 40 grand to the green party for the ballot drive. Do you really think he is doing this because he is a warm and fuzzy environmentalist?
If you vote for the green party candidate for senator in PA this Nov. you really need to have your head examined. Rick Santorum is the most vile thing that ever came out of PA and really, really needs to lose his job.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/15167552.htm
The two-party system is really neat!
It's TWICE as democratic as the one-party system!
Yes, and those greens are so competent and smart!!!!!!
They could challenge Hillary from the left, or Lieberman, or Kennedy, or Kerry, and in any of these cases they would have a significant chance of winning. In addition, they'd significantly advance their cause whether they won or not, and not severely hurt their cause if they lost. Do they do so, no, they do not.
Where do they challenge? Well, lets see, there's Pennsylvania, where without their help Santorum has about a 5% chance of survival, with their help perhaps 30%. In either case, the greens have roughly a 0% chance of winning. Sure looks like that'll help the environment, if they save the nastiest of the republicans from his day of reckoning.
Where else, well, they challenged in the presidntial race, and told everyone that a Gore presidency would be the same as a Bush presidency. Does anyone actually believe that? Do they even actually believe that? Two words, willful, ignorance.
Where else, looks like a challenge against Feingold to soften him up and make absolutely sure that we don't ever get a real liberal running for president, good, good.
In all of these cases, they had massive help from republicans. The campaigns are waged with republican money and republican volunteers. It shows, the corruption seeps through. The chief justice of the pennsylvania supreme court called their 2004 ballot petition (if memory serves) "the most horrendous fraud ever perpetrated upon this court.."
Hmm, seems like they're really saving the environment. Good thing we have them around. Without them there would be no Bush, and god only knows where we'd end up. Probably with very little CO2 emissions and vastly less dependency on foreign oil. At the very least we'd be in good financial shape. Good thing we have greens around fighting for the rights of endangered wingnut republicans everywhere.
The two party system isn't perfect, but it surely does far worse with a third spoiler party hell bent on underminig their own ideals.
A primary challenge within the democratic party can work, just look at Lieberman. Basically, the twoparty system works fine without massive election fraud and willful ignorance on the part of the major players. Even with these handicapps it will work itself out eventually anyway. The US isn't the only country to elect a nasty leader, Italy (twice!), and Germany spring to mind. Neither case can really be blamed on the convenient scapegoat, the two party system.
Nice illustration of my thesis.
I have no desire to defend the US greens. In the electoral setup you have, they have little hope of being anything but a spoiler. That's because of the two-party system, which is a travesty of democracy.
Contrast the Green Parties of Germany or New Zealand, where proportional representation gives them an influence, a hugely positive one.
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1409304.ece
Particularly interesting -
'A short circuit at Forsmark caused an immediate shutdown in one of three reactors. At this point cooling must begin at once but only two of four diesel generators began the automatic process of pumping water to carry this out. Höglund said that "only luck" prevented disaster, as all of the generators shared the same construction error.'
'"It is surprising that this happens in Sweden, which has an extremely strict safety system for their nuclear power plants. I have been to Forsmark myself and there is a large difference between safety thinking there and, for example, in Russian plants," Bøhmer said.'
Of course, the people pointing these things out seem to be opposed to nuclear power. I wonder why that is?
Certainly has nothing to do with any facts, I'm sure, it's all more of that Republican ploy to discredit nuclear power to burn more coal since Greens are ignorant ninnies scared of a few more harmless backyard becquerels. And to think the Swedes just missed an opportunity to show just how harmless a nuclear accident really is.
Another link from another utterly biased source -
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,430164,00.html
At some point, the pro-nuclear people just need to prove that mistakes never happen, and we can all rest easy.
A good way to do that is to make sure that such little itsy-bitsy almost meltdowns don't get much attention.
Or build reactors which can't melt down - which is technically possible, by the way. It is just that apparently NO nuclear reactor currently being used commercially to generate electricity is so designed.
Please feel free to contradict that assertion with a list of facilities world wide which do use such designs.
My english summary and impressions of them are:
There were large cooling margins to dry boiling any part of the fuel.
Defence in depth and redundance worked and enough automatic systems started to cool the reactor core to keep the no manual actions required within 30 minutes rule. The idea with this rule is to give time for manual analysis so that operators dont make a problem worse by incorrect actions such as happened during the TMI accident.
But too manny things failed from a single source of failure, an overvoltage from the switchyard short circuit, showing that some "defence in depth" systems to allways have power to run the systems depended on each other in bad ways.
From reading reports nothing seems to have broken down inside the plant as in the magic smoke leaving the electronics. The problems were bad values set for overvoltage protection in UPS equipment, bad design decisions in how to feed power to some components and systems and faulty installation of some components.
I will stay with my earlier impression that the nuclear powerplant were not perfect but good enough to handle these faults. I enjoy the open information while they fix these faults and better the design procedures for plant maintainance and upgrades. It is quite like what has happened before in earlier incidents, a learning experince that will make the plant better and the lessons will be distributed in the industry.
I suppose the imperfections can be quite scary for those who are scared by nuclear power. It will never be perfectly safe, only very very safe and it is important to not depend on an illusion of perfect safety since that gets in the way of the work to make the safety better over time.
The problem with nuclear power essentially remains the problems of dealing with the waste and mistakes - and until you can build a system where no mistakes without catastrophic results occur, I remain a sceptic on nuclear power. And please, a nine minute margin for ruining a significant amount of the Swedish landscape for a significant number of years should not be comforting to you - unless you think that the two generators that started to run the pumps represent very very safe. I certainly wouldn't, and that is based on a very rational understanding that the benefits from running the plant do not compare to the results of a no longer exactly theoretical chain of events leading to the slagged core meeting the wider world.
It was the captain's considered opinion during our discussions that the newer, safer designs are unlikely to be built, at least in the U.S., since the risk of a new, hopefully 'safer' design would seem higher than building reactors of a proven design, even if that proven design has known flaws.
Any design that results in a meltdown after power is lost, measured in seconds, minutes, or hours, is a problem.
I do wish that advocates for nuclear power would, at a minimum, insist that new reactors not be so designed or built that a meltdown in a fueled core is the default setting, so to speak.
As for burning brown coal - yep, you can always tell who is the junior partner in a coalition government. The SPD understands coal miners very well, of course.
If even more things had gone wrong the emergency preassure release filter would have proven adequate or inadequate.
Btw regarding meted cores, melted salt reactors are intresting. It is probably possible to build quite efficient Thorium and Uranium breeders that give high temperatures needed for chemical hydrogen synthesis. Unfortunately I am afraid that I live in too small a country for us to research them on our own. It makes more sense for us to improve the reactors we got and hopefully build a few more, lack of power in a post peak oil world scares me much more then the small risk for nuclear accidents.
If that cant be avoided on a global scare I would very much like to live in a country that has lots of energy to export things that are valuble for the rest of the world to get political leverage to keep this courner of the world calm and the ability build up a good military defence if that is needed.
My minor fear is having living conditions far closer to our ancestors then the current ones. People can both kill and die to avoiding such a fate, I hope they also can work and make sensibe politics.
Deffeyes plotted uranium on a Hubbert curve once (Deffeyes and Macgregor, 1980, Scientific American). According to him we were only on the first 5 % of the curve. And that's without reprocessing, breeding, sea uranium etc.
Forsmark incident
How many died? Answer: zero
Three Mile Island incident
How many died? Answer: zero
Vaiont Hydroelectric Dam failure (Italy, 1963)
How many died? Answer: 2600
Machhu Dam failure (India, 1979)
How many died? Anser: 2000
etc
What would you antinuclear guys do without Chernobyl?
If it hadn't happened, you would have had to invent it.
Or is waste disposal not a problem. I keep hearing the "will figure out something" line. Usually that's said completely innocent of any recognition of the general incompetence of our decision-makers. We've already decided one way to "dispose" of the wastes we have already generated. Makes me wonder what ingenious plans we'll come up with when we have even more.
Consider the problem this way - when you throw something away, where does it go? Few people even consider anything more than getting their trash to the curb or dumpster for pick up by some one else.
That is like complaining about oil and cars due to the existance of tanks.
The local high level waste storage/disposal is in copper cannisters 500 m down in bedrock with a good chance for survining an ice age. About as good schemes are proposed for long term storage of quicksilver, its nice that the nuclear waste research inspires better handling of other kind of wastes. The latest envorinmental news in Swedens is BTW the location of sea dump of quicksilver rich catalytic mass mixed with concrete dumped in the 50:s and 60:s, about 3000 barrels found out of an assumed 20000. :-(
As for waste disposal, not all places in the world will be as careful as your locale. Here in the U.S. we like the idea of dumping it all down a big hole where it can leach out of rusted steel containers into the aquifer. For most places in the world I fear that it will be a matter of "out of sight, out of mind"
I am anti-nuclear for roughly the same reason I am anti blasting mountain tops to get coal - it is just so stupid in terms of short term / long term cost/benefit.
I have no problem, once the waste issue is reasonably solved, with nuclear fission as a way to generate steam to power generators (well, apart from the essentially silly application of 18th and 19th century concepts to generate electricity). Of course, saying the future will solve the waste issue is exactly how the problem is handled now - the future will unavoidably be dealing with it.
And don't forget, the cost for really long term storage (and that includes more than one ice age) hasn't been budgeted, to put it mildly.
Read the article and you'll learn about the financing (it's in the end). :)