I'd have to read up on the arguments against carbon trading; that always struck me as a pretty efficient way to reduce carbon emissions.
But nuclear, yeah, it's a pretty great idea. It will become even more important because we're hitting peak oil quite soon and peak coal is 250 years away. Also I'm a little surprised they didn't tackle ethanol.
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Nuclear is starting up again in the US. It is really the only solution currently available that satisfies most of the old ladies in white tennis shoes.
Nuclear is starting up again in the US. It is really the only solution currently available that satisfies most of the old ladies in white tennis shoes.
Or a carbon-free base load capability?
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Yeah you just have to figure out what to do with the cooling tower emissions and the solid waste.
If you want to look into Carbon markets, I'd suggest you check out the Chicago climate exchange. The Kyoto Protocol has been a huge failure... but the climate exchange functions more like a normal market. Another trading market you could check out (NOx based) is the Mass Emissions Cap and Trade in Houston.
I personally don't like cap programs, I think a tax is a better idea, if we're going to try and force things.
I really don't understand why people are still against nuclear power. Are there valid reasons, or are people just being stupid again?
According to a 1997 study by the german federal department for the environment (Bundesumweltministerium), nuclear power is a "main-barrier" to the development of more efficient energy usage, the main argument being that nuclear power does not replace fossil power, instead it promotes energy wastage.
Don't know if this number has changed since, but in the same study it says that uranium holds only 2,8% of fossil energy reserves and will depleted before coal and oil are.
Nuclear energy is also not very competitive. The journal of the german nuclear industry "atomwirtschaft" (nuclear economy) admits in its 1/2001 issue, that nuclear energy costs more per kWh than oil, gas, coal or wind.
Plus, there's the waste issue and the security one. You can not completely protect a nuclear reactor from harm or failure, and the consequences can be severe.
•Live in cities - beyond the obvious issues of commute to live in suburbia and the waste of resources in general, it points out things like lawn mowers ejecting 11 cars' worth of emissions an hour, and points out that a Manhattan citizen has a 30 percent smaller footprint than the average American. Additionally, from a carbon perspective, the method of mass transportation that emits the least carbon is the counterweight elevator (although I don't know if it takes into account the added cost from a carbon perspective of building the vertical buildings). In short, grow up, not out.
Suburbia does not require one to own a Kentucky blue grass lawn. In fact, using native plants for a 'wild' garden setup is quite beautiful and far easier to maintain than a manicured lawn. Same with the necessities of 1 person per car to get where you're going. Plus, we've become less of a straight commuting culture and more of a daisy chain thanks to technology. If I had my apartment downtown I'd be doing a 'reverse' commute out to suburbia for roughly the same period of time. Hardly saving any environmental damage. Plus exurbs, with a direct mass transit link, don't pollute all that much. Plus it's working under the assumption that we'll continue to use petroleum fuled internal combustion engines. If you drive a pure electric car on a 'green' grid there really isn't a negative in terms of global climate change. Efficiencies would still be improvements, and ensuring greater population density has some pretty good sociological benefits on its own, but the notion that living in a city is inherently better environmentally than living in the 'burbs isn't quite true.
•Air Conditioning is okay. The long and short of it is thus: It takes less energy to cool by 1 degree than to heat by 1 degree, and it's easier to get from 110 degrees to 70 than it is to get from 0 degrees to 70. We obviously can't all get up and move to different climates, and people can afford to put the notch a couple degrees higher and learn to live with it, but heating releases 8x as much carbon as cooling does - (injecting personal thoughts here) rather than focusing on A/C, we need to focus more on updating insulation in older, less efficient buildings. I can only imagine there's been significant progress along those lines, and it would not surprise me if one of the simplest ways to cut on power use is to properly insulate old buildings.
You do realize that insulation keeps homes cool in the summer, right? They don't just keep the heat locked in during winter months, but keeps it at bay providing you don't get solar heat gain from lacking an awning &c.
Regardless, HVAC is extremely inefficient whether you're heating a home or cooling it. The far superior method is in using a geothermal heat sink hooked up to radiant heat flooring. It provides for a more even and natural heat dispersion in a room as well. Improving the seals and insulation on old homes is certainly something that needs to be improved upon, but simply siting new construction to appropriately take into account passive solar techniques would be a much easier and cheaper solution. But it's one that doesn't pay out to the developer, just the occupant, so it isn't likely to happen en masse any time soon.
•Treat forests like farms. In short, rotting trees (and ones lost to forest fires) are releasing all the CO2 which they absorb through their lifetime, and trees decline in the CO2 absorbed past 55 years, so we would be better served cutting all the old trees and planting new ones. Cites a study by the Canadian government from last year that found that many years, Canadian forests actually gave off more CO2 than they absorbed due to decomposing woods. I have to admit that this one I'm not too fond of, although (to a degree) I see where they're coming from. I'm fond of the wilderness, and I hate to start thinking of destroying that in the name of reducing carbon.
...there's more to nature than its carbon footprint. Sustainably harvesting wood ensures biodiversity and ecological sustainabilty. They also help prevent flash floods, excessive winds, enrich the soil around them to provide for future growth, etc. If you want to blind yourself to the complexities of the environment and simply plug it into a carbon equation...well, you really are missing the forest for the trees.
•China is good, not bad. This is less a matter of things we can do and more a matter of attempting to fix a potential misconception. They're the top manufacturer of alternative energy from solar cells to lithium ion batteries and heading into wind energy. The head of the Global Wind Energy Council is quoted as saying that China will be capable of generating 10 gigawatts by 2010, roughly half of what the whole world's capacity was in 2007.
Most people don't hate China for its pollution, they hate it for the criminal human rights record and taking our jerbs. Besides, while they may be advancing some renewables and alternative energies, they've also just put another coal plant online while I typed this post. They're about as good for the environment as most other developing countries. Which is to say, meh.
•Genetic Engineering is good. In short, we use genetic engineering to reduce the carbon output from certain farm crops, and to increase the energy output of biofuels. Cites an example of a California company which has genes for nitrogen-efficient rice which (the company assumes) will save 50 million tons of CO2 a year.
Our farming techniques still leave much to be desired. And what the hell is up with hydroponics? I want to eat an apple that was grown in a tube.
•Give up on carbon trading. Basically calls it a stupid idea from a number of perspective, and points out that all of the clean development mechanisms from Kyoto, designed to keep 175 million tons of CO2 out of the air by 2012, will delay the rise of carbon emissions by 6.5 days.
Most of the inefficiencies of Kyoto came with creating the system out of whole cloth and then feeling as if the market is going to die with the protocol does as Bali didn't really get too far so why bother investing in CDM's and the like. A carbon tax is far more straightforward and cannot be gamed in the same way as cap and trade, so that producing pollution is in no way profitable. That doesn't mean that cap and trade is impossibly flawed nor that it should be abandonned.
•Used cars > Hybrids. They kinda reach on this one, using very extreme scenarios. I'll agree on the sentiment of "reuse, don't buy new" in general, not just cars.
Disassembly lines > driving a 20 year old beater. If Ford would buy back your used car when you get another one every 5-10 years it would subsidise your new purchase by quite a bit, reduce their overall costs for raw materials (do you have any idea how much copper is in a car) and keeps the mpg rate of all cars on the road increasing at a far greater tick than letting people drive something until it rusts in place. Plus it's more likely to keep your brand loyalty since it would provide for more direct incentives at dealerships.
Some 'environmentalists' have been actively harming the planet. That doesn't mean all of them are, nor that their individual pet causes are in no way related to climate change. Having them all abandon their particular niches to focus on carbon counting is just plain stupid. Not just because they aren't all interchangeable and capable of focusing on climatology, but because you're essentially forwarding the notion of fucking over nature in order to save nature.
(I don't have the links to the information any more, so take that as you will)
But it's pretty safe to assume that any topic of science with politicians pouring money into it is going to have skewed data. Science certainly is being exploited in that sense, because people believe numbers.
I honestly don't know why I'm trying to defend humanity here. I'm not particularly fond of us, and I'm not disagreeing with actions taken to improve how we live for both us and our environment. I think at best we're delaying the inevitable and have more important things to worry about like overpopulation, though I guess cheaper energy = cheaper ways to create more room for them.
An obvious trend over the amount of time humans have been using resources that create CO2 as a byproduct to 5 billion years (give or take, due to all the fun reactions and stuff, so a bit more like 4? I'm not really sure what would be good here but my point remains) is a bit inconsequential, but it's really not worth arguing because that's not what this thread is about and I really don't feel like getting infracted for it.
Pick up this month's (or maybe it was last month's, I can't remember) Skeptic Magazine and read the articles on global warming. There's one arguing against human-created warming, and one arguing for it, along with some others. After reading the one in favor of the human-created warming theory, you'll walk away with much the same attitude I did. Correlation isn't causation, but the correlation is very convincing.
Besides, why shouldn't we reduce carbon emission anyway? It has lots of tangible negative effects on the environment on top of the warming problem. The only real issue actual scientists seem to have with the theory is that the projection models don't seem to be too terrible accurate.
I really don't understand why people are still against nuclear power. Are there valid reasons, or are people just being stupid again?
According to a 1997 study by the german federal department for the environment (Bundesumweltministerium), nuclear power is a "main-barrier" to the development of more efficient energy usage, the main argument being that nuclear power does not replace fossil power, instead it promotes energy wastage.
Don't know if this number has changed since, but in the same study it says that uranium holds only 2,8% of fossil energy reserves and will depleted before coal and oil are.
No, we have enough radioactive materials that can produce power to last for more than several centuries at 7 billion people living like Paris Hilton. It'd just take a bit of doing to use thorium instead of one particular kind of plutonium.
Nuclear energy is also not very competitive. The journal of the german nuclear industry "atomwirtschaft" (nuclear economy) admits in its 1/2001 issue, that nuclear energy costs more per kWh than oil, gas, coal or wind.
That's due to the higher capital costs at construction. If you were to simply focus on the cost of power generation they've got oil, gas, and coal beat. Especially with the rising fuel costs. Add on the cost of pollution from oil, gas, and coal and nuclear does become rather competitive. Even with the initial overhead.
Plus, there's the waste issue and the security one. You can not completely protect a nuclear reactor from harm or failure, and the consequences can be severe.
Pebble bed reactors.
Also, if we were to reintroduce breeder reactors into the grid despite Jimmy Carter's protestations our current stockpiles of nuclear 'waste' would be providing us with energy. And by the time they were all spent, the fuel rods would only be harmful for a few centuries. Which is pretty easy to protect, when compared to millenia.
I really don't understand why people are still against nuclear power. Are there valid reasons, or are people just being stupid again?
According to a 1997 study by the german federal department for the environment (Bundesumweltministerium), nuclear power is a "main-barrier" to the development of more efficient energy usage, the main argument being that nuclear power does not replace fossil power, instead it promotes energy wastage.
What? That doesn't even make sense. Energy waste is only a problem because of fossil fuels. But population growth is continuous anyway, so even if we all used 100% efficient systems and wasted no energy we'd still have a net growth in carbon emissions. Without seeing the study, I'm calling complete bullshit on that one.
Don't know if this number has changed since, but in the same study it says that uranium holds only 2,8% of fossil energy reserves and will depleted before coal and oil are.
This is plain wrong - we have hundreds to tens of thousands of years of uranium. The only way people ever come up with these numbers is by assuming we use the most simplistic, inefficient reactor technologies available.
Nuclear energy is also not very competitive. The journal of the german nuclear industry "atomwirtschaft" (nuclear economy) admits in its 1/2001 issue, that nuclear energy costs more per kWh than oil, gas, coal or wind.
Plus, there's the waste issue and the security one. You can not completely protect a nuclear reactor from harm or failure, and the consequences can be severe.
These ones are both true unfortunately. But - wind is a misnomer, it can't service baselevel grid demand effectively and there's an energy cost of replacing broken down turbines. This bothers me from a couple of perspectives, one of which is simply whether renewables will ever be reliable enough to supply the peak energy requirements required to replace their own generators - solar cells for instance need to be baked in a furnace at something like 800oC for 12 hours to make them.
I don't give much stock to the waste and security issues really though - modern reactors can't meltdown, and every other possibility is at worst a local crisis - not a global one.
Current photovoltaics suck. But they're getting a lot better with relatively little time going by. Some are even starting to abandon silicon as the medium. It's got a ways to go, but it is on the right path. Plus, battery banks in the attic would allow for a more consistent and forseeable feeding of energy into the grid regardless of the output at that particular instant.
If you want to go with purely consistent energy sources, look to tidal. The moon isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
This is probably going to be a stupid question, but I'm not an expert on the underlying physics and the importance of albedo on climate change isn't really clear to me. Whenever I read an article about glaciers, I invariably run into "OMG vicious circle: glaciers melt, albedo goes down, climate change speeds up", but just how important this is is never explained and I haven't been able to find a good resource on the interwebs. Which brings me to the question. Some people tout solar power as the ideal solution to global warming, and while it's clear that solar plants don't release significant amounts of carbon dioxide, they do trap solar energy. And isn't that what the whole problem is about, trapping too much solar energy? I know I'm missing something, because otherwise I'm sure this would have been in the press, but what is it? Why is building vast structures for the explicit purpose of trapping solar energy a good thing?
I've looked into batteries time and time again but on any type of large scale they're a pretty poor way to service grid-level type loads.
The best thing we have at the moment that I know of are things like the redox flow cell batteries developed by UNSW (a fuel cell with an easily regenerated electrolyte).
Believe me - I want it to work. I've always dreamed of having a couple of submarine batteries to support a house-level UPS system.
This is probably going to be a stupid question, but I'm not an expert on the underlying physics and the importance of albedo on climate change isn't really clear to me. Whenever I read an article about glaciers, I invariably run into "OMG vicious circle: glaciers melt, albedo goes down, climate change speeds up", but just how important this is is never explained and I haven't been able to find a good resource on the interwebs. Which brings me to the question. Some people tout solar power as the ideal solution to global warming, and while it's clear that solar plants don't release significant amounts of carbon dioxide, they do trap solar energy. And isn't that what the whole problem is about, trapping too much solar energy? I know I'm missing something, because otherwise I'm sure this would have been in the press, but what is it? Why is building vast structures for the explicit purpose of trapping solar energy a good thing?
Albedo is the reflection of light/energy into the atmosphere doubling up on the amount of energy that solar radiation would otherwise have. Plants are better at absorbing it than asphalt, which is why you get urban heat island effect. Green roofs help mitigate this a good bit, but they aren't always practical and you really don't need to be 100% natural anyway.
As far as solar energy is concerned...well, replacing shingles with a photovoltaic array doesn't really change anything as far as the albedo is concerned. Plus it feeds electricity into the grid/reduces the consumption. So it isn't any worse on the one count and is a plus on the other.
Yeah you just have to figure out what to do with the cooling tower emissions and the solid waste.
You stick it underground. And develop breeder reactors to transform the waste into something only radioactive in the short term. And then realize that endangering a few square miles of lifeless desert is worth saving the entire world's climate.
According to a 1997 study by the german federal department for the environment (Bundesumweltministerium), nuclear power is a "main-barrier" to the development of more efficient energy usage, the main argument being that nuclear power does not replace fossil power, instead it promotes energy wastage.
Don't know if this number has changed since, but in the same study it says that uranium holds only 2,8% of fossil energy reserves and will depleted before coal and oil are.
Nuclear energy is also not very competitive. The journal of the german nuclear industry "atomwirtschaft" (nuclear economy) admits in its 1/2001 issue, that nuclear energy costs more per kWh than oil, gas, coal or wind.
Plus, there's the waste issue and the security one. You can not completely protect a nuclear reactor from harm or failure, and the consequences can be severe.
It's generally estimated to be a bit more expensive than coal, but the carbon-free aspect is obviously worth something. As for wind, it cannot sustain base/peak load and there are no methods within sight to feasibly store power for peak hours.
As for Uranium reserves, proven reserves give you about 85 years of power, with the general estimate that peak uranium production is 150 years away. And that doesn't take into effect the drastically lower fuel consumption of breeder reactors. It's certainly going to last longer than oil. If you don't count breeder reactors, there's more coal than uranium left (250 years until peak coal), but I can't imagine the environmental havoc you'd get from burning that much carbon.
As for the "severe consequences for failure," that's bunk. Current reactor technology makes failures very rare, and in light water reactors you're basically immune from meltdowns due to requiring water to moderate. It gets too hot, the water steams off and the reaction stops. The worst accident in history on this type of reactor was Three Mile Island and no one was even injured there.
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that's not so bad, but most proposals here involve plunking them in the desert so people don't freak out...
IRT marshlands and other wetland type ecosystems - they have a huge array of functions that make them pretty essential and their removal A Bad Idea - breeding grounds for fish and other aquatic/marine life, flood control (they act like sponges), to a certain extent sediment stabilisation on deltas thus creation of new land (although there's some debate about the mechanism here).
Most importantly, mosquitos in large numbers aren't a 'normal' part of many marshes - they should have enough predators to keep the larval loads down. Its just that the predators are rather more vulnerable to pollution/disturbance than the mozzies. One of the signs of a wetland with problems is the mozzie overload (that and the smell). Its also important to note that not all mosquitoes carry diseases, and that spraying can handle the problem pretty easily. Also also, there's new fancy ways of spraying scads of parasites everywhere instead of chemicals, which is neat because they're species-specific and cheap. Marshes are rad.
There was a story on NPR a week or so ago about a city in Georgia or something that uses a wetland to treat its water. They just pump used water out, the plants take it in and clean it up.
that's not so bad, but most proposals here involve plunking them in the desert so people don't freak out...
IRT marshlands and other wetland type ecosystems - they have a huge array of functions that make them pretty essential and their removal A Bad Idea - breeding grounds for fish and other aquatic/marine life, flood control (they act like sponges), to a certain extent sediment stabilisation on deltas thus creation of new land (although there's some debate about the mechanism here).
Most importantly, mosquitos in large numbers aren't a 'normal' part of many marshes - they should have enough predators to keep the larval loads down. Its just that the predators are rather more vulnerable to pollution/disturbance than the mozzies. One of the signs of a wetland with problems is the mozzie overload (that and the smell). Its also important to note that not all mosquitoes carry diseases, and that spraying can handle the problem pretty easily. Also also, there's new fancy ways of spraying scads of parasites everywhere instead of chemicals, which is neat because they're species-specific and cheap. Marshes are rad.
There was a story on NPR a week or so ago about a city in Georgia or something that uses a wetland to treat its water. They just pump used water out, the plants take it in and clean it up.
Yeah, living machines are cool. It's just that people freak out about the notion of going toilet to tap. Even though that's what we've been doing since forever if you live down river from someone.
I'm willing to stick it underground. I think there are far more general health issues with regards to Uranium mining operations than there are with the reactors themselves.
I'm willing to stick it underground. I think there are far more general health issues with regards to Uranium mining operations than there are with the reactors themselves.
This page suggests that in places where Uranium mining is properly regulated (for instance Canada and Australia, which contain a whole lot of it), radiation doses are well within safe limits. In fact there have been no known cases of illness from radiation from workers in those mines.
Now, it's possible that mines in other places might suck, but that's an argument for increased regulation, not an argument against nuclear power.
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Properly regulated, sure. Unfortunately you can't win a lawsuit against these companies to force them to come in and remediate or plug all their bore holes and you have uranium and selenium seeping into the groundwater.
I think I'm the biggest fan of moving everyone into gigantic fucking cities, as I think there is a strong argument that there are severe social benefits to population density, so you gill two birds (environmental hazards, backwoods rednecks and other whack subcultures) with one stone.
Thats fine if you like city life, with everyone living in each others pockets, but these days, people are so fcking noisy, I'd much rather live out in the country where I could have some serious distance between me and everyone who wants to watch Die Hard every night on a home cinema system.
So what does everyone think of Concentrated Solar Power, that use mirrors to concentrate solar heat in order to power a turbine? Apparently one of the major problems is the transmission cost, although couldn't they at least use these plants for converting hydrogen for hydrogen based vehicles or something like that?
I really don't understand why people are still against nuclear power. Are there valid reasons, or are people just being stupid again?
According to a 1997 study by the german federal department for the environment (Bundesumweltministerium), nuclear power is a "main-barrier" to the development of more efficient energy usage, the main argument being that nuclear power does not replace fossil power, instead it promotes energy wastage.
What? That doesn't even make sense. Energy waste is only a problem because of fossil fuels. But population growth is continuous anyway, so even if we all used 100% efficient systems and wasted no energy we'd still have a net growth in carbon emissions. Without seeing the study, I'm calling complete bullshit on that one.
Don't know if this number has changed since, but in the same study it says that uranium holds only 2,8% of fossil energy reserves and will depleted before coal and oil are.
This is plain wrong - we have hundreds to tens of thousands of years of uranium. The only way people ever come up with these numbers is by assuming we use the most simplistic, inefficient reactor technologies available.
Nuclear energy is also not very competitive. The journal of the german nuclear industry "atomwirtschaft" (nuclear economy) admits in its 1/2001 issue, that nuclear energy costs more per kWh than oil, gas, coal or wind.
Plus, there's the waste issue and the security one. You can not completely protect a nuclear reactor from harm or failure, and the consequences can be severe.
These ones are both true unfortunately. But - wind is a misnomer, it can't service baselevel grid demand effectively and there's an energy cost of replacing broken down turbines. This bothers me from a couple of perspectives, one of which is simply whether renewables will ever be reliable enough to supply the peak energy requirements required to replace their own generators - solar cells for instance need to be baked in a furnace at something like 800oC for 12 hours to make them.
I don't give much stock to the waste and security issues really though - modern reactors can't meltdown, and every other possibility is at worst a local crisis - not a global one.
EDIT: And I am so beat'd by moniker.
The energy wastage argument does make some sense to me. You make more capacity available encouraging more energy usage, and therefore have no need to save energy - which could lead to closing some coal plants. There is no incentive to invest as much money as might be needed in the research for energy sources which might replace fossil ones. It's not a good argument, that is correct, but it's not so easily dismissable.
As for uranium deposits, my knowledge about that is limited, but it seems that the resources are limited, or aren't they? So we cannot rely on nuclear power for an infinite amount of time.
Wind energy can serve local consumers and therefore help lowering the overall energy needed, it surely cannot be the only renwewable energy source to rely on.
But solar energy, with the current advancements being made (someone mentioned it here) could become a major energy source, and the unused capacities for hydroelectric power are very large still
These arguments are not mine, just some that I came across when I did a paper on the evolution of large hydroelectric powerplants and their abilities to solve complex current and future problems related to energy and developing wordls needs. Simply tried to show that there are rational arguments against using nuclear power. My only objection towards nuclear power are that currently, it is more expensive per kWh, that it is not renewable (there are several studies to this, and it is admitted by nuclear industry officials) and that security standards need to be very high. In the developed world, this is not that much a problem - and I lived happily for 15 years next to a nuclear power plant (there were some minor and major failures that finally led to it's shutdown, but It never hurt me ) - but I don't know 'bout other regions.
Hydroelectric power would be a nice alternative. It's clean (relatively, that is - there are some large greenhouse gas issues from rotting trees in the reservoirs, which in some cases can make a hydro power dam emit more greenhouse gases than a coal plant of equal output), largely available on both large and small scales, and tidal wave power could habe an enormous potential (so much sea to build on ^^)
I think I'm the biggest fan of moving everyone into gigantic fucking cities, as I think there is a strong argument that there are severe social benefits to population density, so you gill two birds (environmental hazards, backwoods rednecks and other whack subcultures) with one stone.
Thats fine if you like city life, with everyone living in each others pockets, but these days, people are so fcking noisy, I'd much rather live out in the country where I could have some serious distance between me and everyone who wants to watch Die Hard every night on a home cinema system.
For one, there's a lot of sound dampening materials and methods that simply doesn't get used in construction which very easily could. For two, most suburban plots don't give you that distance. Hell, some of the new developments by me realistically allow you to reach out and touch your neighbor. I still don't understand how that sells.
Nuclear is not a panacea, but it's one hell of a stopgap until we actually have renewable energy supplies that can take over. Right now nothing will replace our massive power plants. No cocktail of wind, solar, and tidal will manage to produce the amount of energy we consume right now, let alone 10 years from now. Nuclear can meet this and in 50 years when a photovoltaic cell the size of my fist can power a house, they can start to be taken offline. We aren't there yet, but we will be eventually. I'd rather get there from here via nuclear than coal.
Also, we've basically tapped all the hydroelectric power we can. The only possible expansion would be with turbines in the paths of currents or using tidal. Neither of which are advanced enough to be implemented at scale.
It CAN. But it mustn't. That's a big difference. Also, it's a matter of which climate zone you are in that affects the greenhouse gases emitted by rotting. Norway for example, wouldn't have any problem with that (the reservoirs are mostly small, in mountaineous areas without a lot of trees).
It definitely is an issue, but only for very large scale projects in open, woodland terrain.
But then again, I don't think that the future of hydro power lies only in large dams, but in smaller dams, too (Norway is a perfect example for this. There are studies that say that the whole of Norway could theoretically be supplied by small scale hydroelectric plants). Smaller dams means lowering the environmental impact, the risk of dambreak and flooding, decentralized power, thus less energy lost in transit, less risk in case of failure and so on. This was proposed by many experts for the Three Gorges Dam in China, but they obviously chose the huge thing, mostly for prestige reasons, at least that's my opinion.
There are other proposals for the use of hydro power, very small or micro plants that can supply a village or a small town without any big impact on the ecosystem. This is especially interesting for the developing world, where the people can thus gain access to clean energy, infrastructure, know-how and employment (someone has to build and maintain these things).
Of course, small hydroelectric power plants cannot replace our current plants. We need large plans for that (e.g. the proposed Severn Barrage in the U.K.). They will have a large impact on the ecosystem, but that cannot be helped, for there might be no ecosystem left to protect if we do not make more use of renewable energy sources.
Also, we've basically tapped all the hydroelectric power we can. The only possible expansion would be with turbines in the paths of currents or using tidal. Neither of which are advanced enough to be implemented at scale.
This is not true. Maybe for most of the developed world, and there only for the classical hydroelectric power (you're right though, the newer forms are not yet ready for large scale use), but not for Asia and Africa, especially.
The big Kongo dam project was on the news again during the last month or so, shows that there is plenty of potential that we only have to exploit.
Building more tidal power plants causes its own problems, most notably environmental damage to the surrounding area, plus as has been pointed out, you run out of areas. Wind power, whilst nice in some areas, isn't implementable in all areas. It has its own problems, as well as requiring a large amount of physical area to produce any useful amount of power. Solar power still needs to get more advanced, but one of the problems there is that manufacturing will never be able to meet the demands with current technology, or even next gen stuff. To make a solar cell produces lots of bad crap, and relies on the waste materials from computer manufacturing. You won't see large scale production of solar cells anytime soon.
I am biased towards nuclear power for several reasons. The waste issue is easily taken care of with breeder reactors, as long as we are willing. The waste itself can be refined to make it safer. Most people's problems relate to reactors that were poorly designed, or were having tests run on them when they melted down (Chernobyl, cough cough).
As for next generation power, tidal would be a good bet, but it again suffers from needing a supposedly large area to function. Fusion looks promising, if you can get over all of the problems associated with it. Personally, I think that we need to not just look at energy production, but that one of the major problems is the distribution of said electricity.
Actually it's been in large scale production since Germany subsidised the shit out of them. It created a global shortage of silicon and upped the price on it by a good %, IIRC. Which is why most new developments are moving away from silicon as the meduim and are improving other aspects of the substrate. Solar is the future, we just aren't in that future yet. 60 or so years and it should be pulling its weight handily. Thing is, we need to produce power in those 60 years. Which is why nuclear is a great stopgap.
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But nuclear, yeah, it's a pretty great idea. It will become even more important because we're hitting peak oil quite soon and peak coal is 250 years away. Also I'm a little surprised they didn't tackle ethanol.
Or a carbon-free base load capability?
If you want to look into Carbon markets, I'd suggest you check out the Chicago climate exchange. The Kyoto Protocol has been a huge failure... but the climate exchange functions more like a normal market. Another trading market you could check out (NOx based) is the Mass Emissions Cap and Trade in Houston.
I personally don't like cap programs, I think a tax is a better idea, if we're going to try and force things.
According to a 1997 study by the german federal department for the environment (Bundesumweltministerium), nuclear power is a "main-barrier" to the development of more efficient energy usage, the main argument being that nuclear power does not replace fossil power, instead it promotes energy wastage.
Don't know if this number has changed since, but in the same study it says that uranium holds only 2,8% of fossil energy reserves and will depleted before coal and oil are.
Nuclear energy is also not very competitive. The journal of the german nuclear industry "atomwirtschaft" (nuclear economy) admits in its 1/2001 issue, that nuclear energy costs more per kWh than oil, gas, coal or wind.
Plus, there's the waste issue and the security one. You can not completely protect a nuclear reactor from harm or failure, and the consequences can be severe.
Suburbia does not require one to own a Kentucky blue grass lawn. In fact, using native plants for a 'wild' garden setup is quite beautiful and far easier to maintain than a manicured lawn. Same with the necessities of 1 person per car to get where you're going. Plus, we've become less of a straight commuting culture and more of a daisy chain thanks to technology. If I had my apartment downtown I'd be doing a 'reverse' commute out to suburbia for roughly the same period of time. Hardly saving any environmental damage. Plus exurbs, with a direct mass transit link, don't pollute all that much. Plus it's working under the assumption that we'll continue to use petroleum fuled internal combustion engines. If you drive a pure electric car on a 'green' grid there really isn't a negative in terms of global climate change. Efficiencies would still be improvements, and ensuring greater population density has some pretty good sociological benefits on its own, but the notion that living in a city is inherently better environmentally than living in the 'burbs isn't quite true.
You do realize that insulation keeps homes cool in the summer, right? They don't just keep the heat locked in during winter months, but keeps it at bay providing you don't get solar heat gain from lacking an awning &c.
Regardless, HVAC is extremely inefficient whether you're heating a home or cooling it. The far superior method is in using a geothermal heat sink hooked up to radiant heat flooring. It provides for a more even and natural heat dispersion in a room as well. Improving the seals and insulation on old homes is certainly something that needs to be improved upon, but simply siting new construction to appropriately take into account passive solar techniques would be a much easier and cheaper solution. But it's one that doesn't pay out to the developer, just the occupant, so it isn't likely to happen en masse any time soon.
...there's more to nature than its carbon footprint. Sustainably harvesting wood ensures biodiversity and ecological sustainabilty. They also help prevent flash floods, excessive winds, enrich the soil around them to provide for future growth, etc. If you want to blind yourself to the complexities of the environment and simply plug it into a carbon equation...well, you really are missing the forest for the trees.
Most people don't hate China for its pollution, they hate it for the criminal human rights record and taking our jerbs. Besides, while they may be advancing some renewables and alternative energies, they've also just put another coal plant online while I typed this post. They're about as good for the environment as most other developing countries. Which is to say, meh.
Our farming techniques still leave much to be desired. And what the hell is up with hydroponics? I want to eat an apple that was grown in a tube.
Most of the inefficiencies of Kyoto came with creating the system out of whole cloth and then feeling as if the market is going to die with the protocol does as Bali didn't really get too far so why bother investing in CDM's and the like. A carbon tax is far more straightforward and cannot be gamed in the same way as cap and trade, so that producing pollution is in no way profitable. That doesn't mean that cap and trade is impossibly flawed nor that it should be abandonned.
Disassembly lines > driving a 20 year old beater. If Ford would buy back your used car when you get another one every 5-10 years it would subsidise your new purchase by quite a bit, reduce their overall costs for raw materials (do you have any idea how much copper is in a car) and keeps the mpg rate of all cars on the road increasing at a far greater tick than letting people drive something until it rusts in place. Plus it's more likely to keep your brand loyalty since it would provide for more direct incentives at dealerships.
Some 'environmentalists' have been actively harming the planet. That doesn't mean all of them are, nor that their individual pet causes are in no way related to climate change. Having them all abandon their particular niches to focus on carbon counting is just plain stupid. Not just because they aren't all interchangeable and capable of focusing on climatology, but because you're essentially forwarding the notion of fucking over nature in order to save nature.
Pick up this month's (or maybe it was last month's, I can't remember) Skeptic Magazine and read the articles on global warming. There's one arguing against human-created warming, and one arguing for it, along with some others. After reading the one in favor of the human-created warming theory, you'll walk away with much the same attitude I did. Correlation isn't causation, but the correlation is very convincing.
Besides, why shouldn't we reduce carbon emission anyway? It has lots of tangible negative effects on the environment on top of the warming problem. The only real issue actual scientists seem to have with the theory is that the projection models don't seem to be too terrible accurate.
No, we have enough radioactive materials that can produce power to last for more than several centuries at 7 billion people living like Paris Hilton. It'd just take a bit of doing to use thorium instead of one particular kind of plutonium.
That's due to the higher capital costs at construction. If you were to simply focus on the cost of power generation they've got oil, gas, and coal beat. Especially with the rising fuel costs. Add on the cost of pollution from oil, gas, and coal and nuclear does become rather competitive. Even with the initial overhead.
Pebble bed reactors.
Also, if we were to reintroduce breeder reactors into the grid despite Jimmy Carter's protestations our current stockpiles of nuclear 'waste' would be providing us with energy. And by the time they were all spent, the fuel rods would only be harmful for a few centuries. Which is pretty easy to protect, when compared to millenia.
It promises to be incredibly difficult, which you wouldn't think, but there it is.
This is plain wrong - we have hundreds to tens of thousands of years of uranium. The only way people ever come up with these numbers is by assuming we use the most simplistic, inefficient reactor technologies available.
These ones are both true unfortunately. But - wind is a misnomer, it can't service baselevel grid demand effectively and there's an energy cost of replacing broken down turbines. This bothers me from a couple of perspectives, one of which is simply whether renewables will ever be reliable enough to supply the peak energy requirements required to replace their own generators - solar cells for instance need to be baked in a furnace at something like 800oC for 12 hours to make them.
I don't give much stock to the waste and security issues really though - modern reactors can't meltdown, and every other possibility is at worst a local crisis - not a global one.
EDIT: And I am so beat'd by moniker.
If you want to go with purely consistent energy sources, look to tidal. The moon isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
The best thing we have at the moment that I know of are things like the redox flow cell batteries developed by UNSW (a fuel cell with an easily regenerated electrolyte).
Believe me - I want it to work. I've always dreamed of having a couple of submarine batteries to support a house-level UPS system.
Albedo is the reflection of light/energy into the atmosphere doubling up on the amount of energy that solar radiation would otherwise have. Plants are better at absorbing it than asphalt, which is why you get urban heat island effect. Green roofs help mitigate this a good bit, but they aren't always practical and you really don't need to be 100% natural anyway.
As far as solar energy is concerned...well, replacing shingles with a photovoltaic array doesn't really change anything as far as the albedo is concerned. Plus it feeds electricity into the grid/reduces the consumption. So it isn't any worse on the one count and is a plus on the other.
You stick it underground. And develop breeder reactors to transform the waste into something only radioactive in the short term. And then realize that endangering a few square miles of lifeless desert is worth saving the entire world's climate.
It's generally estimated to be a bit more expensive than coal, but the carbon-free aspect is obviously worth something. As for wind, it cannot sustain base/peak load and there are no methods within sight to feasibly store power for peak hours.
As for Uranium reserves, proven reserves give you about 85 years of power, with the general estimate that peak uranium production is 150 years away. And that doesn't take into effect the drastically lower fuel consumption of breeder reactors. It's certainly going to last longer than oil. If you don't count breeder reactors, there's more coal than uranium left (250 years until peak coal), but I can't imagine the environmental havoc you'd get from burning that much carbon.
As for the "severe consequences for failure," that's bunk. Current reactor technology makes failures very rare, and in light water reactors you're basically immune from meltdowns due to requiring water to moderate. It gets too hot, the water steams off and the reaction stops. The worst accident in history on this type of reactor was Three Mile Island and no one was even injured there.
There was a story on NPR a week or so ago about a city in Georgia or something that uses a wetland to treat its water. They just pump used water out, the plants take it in and clean it up.
Yeah, living machines are cool. It's just that people freak out about the notion of going toilet to tap. Even though that's what we've been doing since forever if you live down river from someone.
This page suggests that in places where Uranium mining is properly regulated (for instance Canada and Australia, which contain a whole lot of it), radiation doses are well within safe limits. In fact there have been no known cases of illness from radiation from workers in those mines.
Now, it's possible that mines in other places might suck, but that's an argument for increased regulation, not an argument against nuclear power.
Thats fine if you like city life, with everyone living in each others pockets, but these days, people are so fcking noisy, I'd much rather live out in the country where I could have some serious distance between me and everyone who wants to watch Die Hard every night on a home cinema system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/program.html
The energy wastage argument does make some sense to me. You make more capacity available encouraging more energy usage, and therefore have no need to save energy - which could lead to closing some coal plants. There is no incentive to invest as much money as might be needed in the research for energy sources which might replace fossil ones. It's not a good argument, that is correct, but it's not so easily dismissable.
As for uranium deposits, my knowledge about that is limited, but it seems that the resources are limited, or aren't they? So we cannot rely on nuclear power for an infinite amount of time.
Wind energy can serve local consumers and therefore help lowering the overall energy needed, it surely cannot be the only renwewable energy source to rely on.
But solar energy, with the current advancements being made (someone mentioned it here) could become a major energy source, and the unused capacities for hydroelectric power are very large still
These arguments are not mine, just some that I came across when I did a paper on the evolution of large hydroelectric powerplants and their abilities to solve complex current and future problems related to energy and developing wordls needs. Simply tried to show that there are rational arguments against using nuclear power. My only objection towards nuclear power are that currently, it is more expensive per kWh, that it is not renewable (there are several studies to this, and it is admitted by nuclear industry officials) and that security standards need to be very high. In the developed world, this is not that much a problem - and I lived happily for 15 years next to a nuclear power plant (there were some minor and major failures that finally led to it's shutdown, but It never hurt me
Hydroelectric power would be a nice alternative. It's clean (relatively, that is - there are some large greenhouse gas issues from rotting trees in the reservoirs, which in some cases can make a hydro power dam emit more greenhouse gases than a coal plant of equal output), largely available on both large and small scales, and tidal wave power could habe an enormous potential (so much sea to build on ^^)
For one, there's a lot of sound dampening materials and methods that simply doesn't get used in construction which very easily could. For two, most suburban plots don't give you that distance. Hell, some of the new developments by me realistically allow you to reach out and touch your neighbor. I still don't understand how that sells.
Hydro effectively destroys everything in the reservoir area, and can have major implications for the downstream ecosystem as well.
Also, we've basically tapped all the hydroelectric power we can. The only possible expansion would be with turbines in the paths of currents or using tidal. Neither of which are advanced enough to be implemented at scale.
It definitely is an issue, but only for very large scale projects in open, woodland terrain.
But then again, I don't think that the future of hydro power lies only in large dams, but in smaller dams, too (Norway is a perfect example for this. There are studies that say that the whole of Norway could theoretically be supplied by small scale hydroelectric plants). Smaller dams means lowering the environmental impact, the risk of dambreak and flooding, decentralized power, thus less energy lost in transit, less risk in case of failure and so on. This was proposed by many experts for the Three Gorges Dam in China, but they obviously chose the huge thing, mostly for prestige reasons, at least that's my opinion.
There are other proposals for the use of hydro power, very small or micro plants that can supply a village or a small town without any big impact on the ecosystem. This is especially interesting for the developing world, where the people can thus gain access to clean energy, infrastructure, know-how and employment (someone has to build and maintain these things).
Of course, small hydroelectric power plants cannot replace our current plants. We need large plans for that (e.g. the proposed Severn Barrage in the U.K.). They will have a large impact on the ecosystem, but that cannot be helped, for there might be no ecosystem left to protect if we do not make more use of renewable energy sources.
This is not true. Maybe for most of the developed world, and there only for the classical hydroelectric power (you're right though, the newer forms are not yet ready for large scale use), but not for Asia and Africa, especially.
The big Kongo dam project was on the news again during the last month or so, shows that there is plenty of potential that we only have to exploit.
I am biased towards nuclear power for several reasons. The waste issue is easily taken care of with breeder reactors, as long as we are willing. The waste itself can be refined to make it safer. Most people's problems relate to reactors that were poorly designed, or were having tests run on them when they melted down (Chernobyl, cough cough).
As for next generation power, tidal would be a good bet, but it again suffers from needing a supposedly large area to function. Fusion looks promising, if you can get over all of the problems associated with it. Personally, I think that we need to not just look at energy production, but that one of the major problems is the distribution of said electricity.
Give the good people at Kohler a raise?