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Excerpt: Once operational, the wind turbines will deliver approximately 11-15% of the energy needs of the building, or 1100 to 1300 megawatt-hours per year -- enough to provide light in 300 homes for over a year.
People tend to have a harder time inventing near-magical machines when they are half-starved and gasping for air in a smog-choked landscape with only four choices in vegetable and twenty kinds of urban bushmeat, twelve of which are rat.
The issue is if we'll ruin the environment, majority human health, and the intellectual progress that health tends to allow.
People tend to have a harder time inventing near-magical machines when they are half-starved and gasping for air in a smog-choked landscape with only four choices in vegetable and twenty kinds of urban bushmeat, twelve of which are rat.
We'll get through it in the long run, but things may suck for the next century or so, and we'll lose a lot of living things that we can't get back.
Actually I believe the opposite to be true. When people are healthy, happy, satisfied with life they tend to get lazy and complacent. Now put a gun to their heads or their family and watch how ingenious they become.
When would you expect a magic engine to be made, when everything is rainbows and butterflys or you have a year before your face fucking melts off?
Excerpt: Once operational, the wind turbines will deliver approximately 11-15% of the energy needs of the building, or 1100 to 1300 megawatt-hours per year -- enough to provide light in 300 homes for over a year.
That's the equivalent of 2 million tons of coal.
Woah. Awesome. There are also smaller turbines you can get for your house as well. They're about the same size as a chimney cowl and depending on the amount of wind where you live they can often power your house whilst also dumping excess energy back onto the national grid, putting money in your pocket.
I still assert that they need to work on more efficient solar power.
Step 1: Infect city with zombies.
Step 2: Round up zombies.
Step 3: Burn Zombies for power
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!
I would think you could make a more efficient zombie>Power converter than just burning them. Those guys are powered by supernatural forces. They're like work mules that don't need fed. Build a giant hamster wheel with a brain just out of reach, is what I'm thinking.
I still assert that they need to work on more efficient solar power.
Step 1: Infect city with zombies.
Step 2: Round up zombies.
Step 3: Burn Zombies for power
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!
I would think you could make a more efficient zombie>Power converter than just burning them. Those guys are powered by supernatural forces. They're like work mules that don't need fed. Build a giant hamster wheel with a brain just out of reach, is what I'm thinking.
Or use them for entertainment, like they did in Shaun of the Dead. Reality TV shows starring brain-dead zombies!
Back on topic, I really wish Wind Energy was more... powerful. Sure it's annoying to hear the "whomp whomp whomp" of a windmill, but it's a small price to pay.
Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
edited April 2008
Is running out of cheap energy a bad thing?
Yes, we wont have as much luxury as we need, but what has luxury done to people? Look at American suburbia, everybody stays inside watching T.V. and eating their saturated fat cheesy poofs, and then they come out and drive 50 miles to work 10 hours, just to come back. Suburbia haves no community, it's a huge waste of resources, and it had fail to deliver any of its promises. All because cheap oil made it profitable to commute by automobiles.
Take away easy to get gas and people have to *gasp* cooperate with their neighbors in order to maintain a comfortable level of life. People might look towards each other for entertainment and enlightenment once electricity costs too much to watch T.V. hours on end. Community farms will start once transportation costs makes food expensive. Instead of people calling in a plumber 90 miles away, people will ask the plumber who lives next door for help.
Maybe this oil crisis is for the best? Maybe it will force people out of their corporate-made lives and back into reality?
Or maybe the shit will hit the fan and there will be riots from here to Brooklyn, mass raping, cannibalizing, and cult mass live-sacrifices, Mayan style.
So this looks like another article that assumes our technology will be frozen in time and not adapt in any way to changes in the world. This is what was wrong with previous predictions of this type and is probably what is wrong with this prediction.
"Won't high oil prices motivate us to look for alternatives?"
To a certain degree, yes. Unfortunately, the situation is far too complex to be solved via alternative energy "plug-and-play" as is commonly believed. First, as explained in great depth later on this page, we really don't have any ready-to-scale alternatives that share oil's energy density, energy portability and high energy return on energy invested (EROEI).
Second, and perhaps more importantly, even if we did have alternatives that shared the characteristics of oil, we won't be motivated to invest in them on the massive scale necessary until it's too late. To illustrate this point: as of October 2007 a barrel of oil costs about $75. The amount of energy contained in that barrel of oil would cost between $100-$250* dollars to derive from alternative sources of energy. Thus, the market won't signal energy companies to begin aggressively pursuing alternative sources of energy until oil reaches the $100-$250 range and stays there for several years.
*This does not even account for the amount of money it would take to locate and refine the raw materials necessary for a large scale conversion or the retrofitting of the world's $50 trillion plus economy to run on these alternatives.
Once we do finally begin aggressively pursuing these alternatives, there will be a 25-to-50 year lag time between the initial heavy-duty research into these alternatives and their wide-scale industrial implementation. However, in order to finance an aggressive implementation of alternative energies, we need a tremendous amount of investment capital - in addition to affordable energy and raw materials - that we absolutely will not have once oil prices are permanently lodged in the $200-$300 per barrel neighborhood. Source
While we need 25-to-50 years to retrofit our economy to run on alternative sources of energy, we may only get 12-to-18 months once oil production peaks. Within a short time of global oil production hitting its peak, it will become impossible to dismiss the decline in supply as a merely transitory event. Once this occurs, traders on Wall Street will quickly bid the price up to, and possibly over, the $200 per barrel range as they realize the world is now in an era of permanent oil scarcity.
With oil at or above $200 per barrel, gasoline will reach $10 per gallon, assumming it is even available. This will cause a rapid breakdown of trucking industries and transportation networks which have all been built and financed under the assumption fuel prices would remain low. Importation and distribution of food, medicine, and consumer goods will grind to a halt as trucking and shipping companies go bankrupt en masse.
The effects of this will be frightening. As Jan Lundberg, founder of the Lundberg Survey, aka "the bible of the oil industry" recently pointed out:
The scenario I foresee is that market-based panic will, within a few days, drive prices up skyward. And as supplies can no longer slake daily world demand of over 80 million barrels a day, the market will become paralyzed at prices too high for the wheels of commerce and even daily living in "advanced" societies.
The trucks will no longer pull into Wal-Mart. Or Safeway or other food stores. The freighters bringing packaged techno -toys and goods from China will have no fuel. There will be fuel in many places, but hoarding and uncertainty will trigger outages, violence and chaos. For only a short time will the police and military be able to maintain order, if at all. Source
Although mentioned on the previous page, Oxford trained geologist Jeremy Leggett's analysis of the consequences of Peak Oil bares repeating:
. . . when the truth can no longer be obscured, the price will spike, the economy nosedive, and the underpinnings of our civilization will start tumbling like dominos. "The price of house will collapse. Stock markets will crash. Within a short period, human wealth -- little more than a pile of paper at the best of times, even with the confidence about the future high among traders -- will shrivel.
This website covers all of the alternatives on the second page, it bashes Nuclear for its reliance on plutonium which if implimented as our primary source would last at most 30 more years. That's not even taking into account setting up the power plants.
Someone on the first page also mentioned something about Thermal Depolarization
Thermal Depolymerization:
Thermal depolymerization is an intriguing solution to our landfill problems, but since most of the feedstock (such as tires and turkey guts) requires high-grade oil to make in the first place, it is more "high-tech recycling" than it is a solution to a permanent oil shortage.
While the following analogy is certainly a bit disgusting, it should clearly illustrate why thermal depolymerization won't do much to soften the coming collapse:
"Expecting thermal depolymerization to help solve our long term
energy problems makes as much sense as expecting the
consumption of our own feces to help solve a long-term famine. In
both cases, the energy starved party is simply recycling a small
portion of the energy they had previously consumed."
On a less grotesque note, the technology is besieged by several fundamental shortcomings that those desperately hoping for a techno-messiah tend to overlook:
First, there is the problem of production costs. According to a recent article in Fortune Magazine, a barrel of oil produced via the thermal depolymerization process costs $80 to produce as of January 2005. To put that figure in perspective, consider the fact that oil pulled out of the ground in Saudi Arabia costs less than $2.50 per barrel, while oil pulled out of the ground in Iraq costs only $1.00 per barrel.
This means that with spot oil prices in the $50/barrel range, a barrel of oil produced via thermal depolymerization in January 2005 would have to sell for between $1,600-$4,000 per barrel to have a return on investment comparable to oil produced from Saudi Arabia or Iraq.
Oil prices of $1,600-$4,000 per barrel would put gas prices at roughly $80-$200 per gallon.
If the technology was the miracle many people are desperately hoping for, the company would likely not have needed a grant from the Department of Energy to keep its head above water. Nor would it have been the subject of an April 2005 Kansas City Star article appropriately entitled, "Innovative Turkey-to-Oil Plant Eats Money, Spits Out Fowl Odor."
Sky-high production costs and horrific odor problems aside, a look at the history of thermal depolymerization tends to show it will never amount to more than a tiny drop in the giant barrel that is our oil appetite.The technology was first developed for commercial use in 1996. Here we are, ten years later and there is only one thermal depolymerization plant online and it is producing less than 500 barrels of oil per day, despite record high oil prices. Even if oil production from thermal depolymerization is upscaled by a factor of 1,000, and the cost of production brought down by a factor of 10, it will still only be producing 500,000 barrels of oil per day. While that may make a tremendous amount of money for the company, it won't make much difference in our overall situation as the global need for oil is projected to reach 120,000,000 barrels per day by 2020.
If thermal depolymerization sounded "too good to be true" when you first heard about it, now you know why.
I know it's a huge read but please look it over before you start to critique it. And yes I do realize there are potential huge leaps in technology to be made, it just seems to be putting a lot of faith into an as of yet nonexistent alternative energy that would require huge time and money investments in them to allow for us to transition to them. There might be some 10 year transition period, but it's looking really grim. I don't claim to be an expert and any arguement I could come up with would likely be copy pasted from the original website, or my inexpert interpretation of the presented information.
ZebraDog on
"We require more Vespene Gas"
0
Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
You know I don't know if you've noticed but the ability to be isolated from people is one of the greatest developments of modern living. Small communities get poisoned and judgmental oh so easily.
Same thing happens in modern living too. How many times two Joneses wage war against each other in hopes to force the other ones out?
My personal definition is a family who is forever trying to 'one up' another family with home improvement and what not. Sadly this leads to 'covenant police' who goes around harrasing people about 'that particular lawn gnome is not appropriate lawn decoration under code 9-4859'.
This website covers all of the alternatives on the second page, it bashes Nuclear for its reliance on plutonium which if implimented as our primary source would last at most 30 more years. That's not even taking into account setting up the power plants.
Sure it 'covers alternatives' but all they basically say is "This isn't an alternative because it would take 20 years to implement! lololololol" which is just not true, where are they getting that figure from? Also, I believe '30 years' for nuclear energy figure is a flat out lie, I've heard most estimates far higher than that.
People will continue to bitch and moan about nuclear power until they wake up one day and find it is everywhere and doing perfectly fine. World saved.
You aren't going to have a nuclear reactor in your trunk, powering your car. Transportation requires energy dense, portable fuel. Currently we only have fossils that can fill that role.
Buh...biodiesel?
Biodiesel is horrible for the environment. Worse than oil, really. At least the embodied energy for that came from time and mud.
or even better, hybrid cars running on 50% electricity generated by wind, solar, wave and nuclear power with optional biodiesel.
I don't even see why we wouldn't necessarily have 100% electric cars one day?
One day, yes. Currently our battery technology doesn't allow a feasible all electric car with sufficient range to really be useful. You can get a Tesla for fun, but most family's need more than a 2 seater.
Not that transportation should even be the major focus. Cars, trucks, &c. only account for 25% of our emissions. If you could take a majority of the oil based power plants offline the cost of gas would drop like a stone. Which, if we didn't have such horribly wasteful buildings, you practically could.
This website covers all of the alternatives on the second page, it bashes Nuclear for its reliance on plutonium which if implimented as our primary source would last at most 30 more years. That's not even taking into account setting up the power plants.
Sure it 'covers alternatives' but all they basically say is "This isn't an alternative because it would take 20 years to implement! lololololol" which is just not true, where are they getting that figure from? Also, I believe '30 years' for nuclear energy figure is a flat out lie, I've heard most estimates far higher than that.
The 30 years bit is assuming plants only use plutonium. They don't. In fact, breeder reactors can process nuclear 'waste' that we have sitting in pools freaking out Greenpeace to power homes. With the added benefit of making the spent rods only really dangerous for a couple centuries instead of millenia. Which is much more realistic for safe storage.
The biggest change may be in mobility. Ironically, this decade has connected the world with communication, but is putting up barriers to physical relocation.
The changes in communication can enable me to not need to physically relocate. I can run my job from my house if I need to. The only reason I go into work is because my bosses think they need to get face time out of the employees.
People will continue to bitch and moan about nuclear power until they wake up one day and find it is everywhere and doing perfectly fine. World saved.
You aren't going to have a nuclear reactor in your trunk, powering your car. Transportation requires energy dense, portable fuel. Currently we only have fossils that can fill that role. If cars ran on rainbows and happy thoughts nobody would complain about them near as much.
1) Nuclear power can lessen the burden of oil-fired electric plants.
2) Nuclear power can fuel electric vehicles, electric mass transit.
However, it cannot happen until people start building nuclear plants. Which ain't happening because people still remember Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and think that when a plant "goes up", we'll wake up in the world of Fallout.
When would you expect a magic engine to be made, when everything is rainbows and butterflys or you have a year before your face fucking melts off?
Hmm, so, if anything, we should accelerate environmental destruction, so that we may play a part in the forging of the glorious future ourselves!
Well, I guess when we see things adapt in front of our eyes in order to cope with changing conditions, we can point at the creationists and say, "SEE?!?!"
So this looks like another article that assumes our technology will be frozen in time and not adapt in any way to changes in the world. This is what was wrong with previous predictions of this type and is probably what is wrong with this prediction.
Pretty much. All of the people that assumed we were going to run out of oil a few decades ago didn't envision things like deep water drilling, that we can turn heavy oil into a useful product, or that we can test old reservoirs and find pockets of oil that no one knew was there because the seismic technology was primitive the first time around.
People will continue to bitch and moan about nuclear power until they wake up one day and find it is everywhere and doing perfectly fine. World saved.
You aren't going to have a nuclear reactor in your trunk, powering your car. Transportation requires energy dense, portable fuel. Currently we only have fossils that can fill that role. If cars ran on rainbows and happy thoughts nobody would complain about them near as much.
1) Nuclear power can lessen the burden of oil-fired electric plants.
2) Nuclear power can fuel electric vehicles, electric mass transit.
However, it cannot happen until people start building nuclear plants. Which ain't happening because people still remember Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and think that when a plant "goes up", we'll wake up in the world of Fallout.
1) Yes it can, but
2) Current battery technology isn't advanced enough to replace petroleum for energy density.
Nukes aren't a panacea, nor will they be. They're certaily part of the solution, but not even the biggest one. I'd say cutting the waste in the bulit environment, which accounts for half all emissions, is the major step to take.
Oh, and there are a dozen new reactors in the planning stage.
This is in fact suggested in the IAEA-NEA figures if those covering estimates of all conventional resources are considered - 10 million tonnes (beyond the 4.7 Mt known economic resources), which takes us to over 200 years' supply at today's rate of consumption. This still ignores the technological factor mentioned below. It also omits unconventional resources such as phosphate/ phosphorite deposits (22 Mt U recoverable as by-product) and seawater (up to 4000 Mt), which would be uneconomic to extract in the foreseeable future.
If we were to ramp up the usage of nuclear energy that number would most likely rapidly dwindle from 200 years to what it is estimated at considering that nuclear power is such a small part of the energy grid as is. I couldn't find much info about Thorium other than it is in Development and has yet to be used on a large scale.
Developing a thorium-based fuel cycle
Despite the thorium fuel cycle having a number of attractive features, development even on the scale of India's has always run into difficulties.
The main attractive features are:
- the possibility of utilising a very abundant resource which has hitherto been of so little interest that it has never been quantified properly,
- the production of power with few long-lived transuranic elements in the waste,
- reduced radioactive wastes generally.
The problems include:
the high cost of fuel fabrication, due partly to the high radioactivity of U-233 chemically separated from the irradiated thorium fuel. Separated U-233 is always contaminated with traces of U-232 (69 year half life but whose daughter products such as thallium-208 are strong gamma emitters with very short half lives);
the similar problems in recycling thorium itself due to highly radioactive Th-228 (an alpha emitter with two-year half life) present;
some weapons proliferation risk of U-233 (if it could be separated on its own); and
the technical problems (not yet satisfactorily solved) in reprocessing solid fuels.
However, these are likely to largely disappear if the fuel is used a Molten Salt Reactor.
Much development work is still required before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialised, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available. In this respect international moves to bring India into the ambit of international trade will be critical. If India has ready access to traded uranium and conventional reactor designs, it may not persist with the thorium cycle.
Nevertheless, the thorium fuel cycle, with its potential for breeding fuel without the need for fast-neutron reactors, holds considerable potential long-term. It is a significant factor in the long-term sustainability of nuclear energy.
And converting Mass Transit over to electricity, beyond the hurdles that need to be overcome with the battery, there's the task of converting all of the current vehicles over to electricty as well as producing enough energy to power those vehicles that would be greater than gas in the growing economy. Could some of your responses please include links so I can follow up on your information rather than just take it based on faith.
*edit: Through searching out some if this stuff I stumbled across a few sites talking about fusion, and how it's been achieved. But at the moment it is still in development due to being unable to sustain the process.
And converting Mass Transit over to electricity, beyond the hurdles that need to be overcome with the battery, there's the task of converting all of the current vehicles over to electricty as well as producing enough energy to power those vehicles that would be greater than gas in the growing economy. Could some of your responses please include links so I can follow up on your information rather than just take it based on faith.
Trams are powered by overhead lines. Subways and elevated tracks have a 3rd rail. No issue with batteries there. Busses can be converted to trams without too much heartache. Even easier is promoting grocery stores to move into communities rather than hope the communities get in a car and move to the grocery store. Walking to the store doesn't require oil, and pizza is a renewable resource.
Also, buses/trams/trains have a greater mpg rating per passenger mile than do cars. Not to mention the fuel efficiencies created by removing congestion on the roads. I can't link to where I read that, though.
People will continue to bitch and moan about nuclear power until they wake up one day and find it is everywhere and doing perfectly fine. World saved.
You aren't going to have a nuclear reactor in your trunk, powering your car. Transportation requires energy dense, portable fuel. Currently we only have fossils that can fill that role. If cars ran on rainbows and happy thoughts nobody would complain about them near as much.
1) Nuclear power can lessen the burden of oil-fired electric plants.
2) Nuclear power can fuel electric vehicles, electric mass transit.
However, it cannot happen until people start building nuclear plants. Which ain't happening because people still remember Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and think that when a plant "goes up", we'll wake up in the world of Fallout.
1) Yes it can, but
2) Current battery technology isn't advanced enough to replace petroleum for energy density.
Nukes aren't a panacea, nor will they be. They're certaily part of the solution, but not even the biggest one. I'd say cutting the waste in the bulit environment, which accounts for half all emissions, is the major step to take.
Oh, and there are a dozen new reactors in the planning stage.
Cheap nuclear power means we can generate hydrogen from seawater (through electrolysis) cleanly, instead of generating it from fossil fuels (through hydrocarbon cracking) and causing pollution.
"What About the Hydrogen Economy?"
Astronomical Cost of Fuel Cells: $1,000,000 per fuel cell
Platinum Supply and Cost: Current uses of Platinum are earmarked for other processes
Inability to Store Massive Quantities at Low Cost:
Massive Cost of Hydrogen Infrastructure:
Hydrogen's "Energy Sink" Factor: Use energy to make energy "Perpetual motion machine?" you lose out
Copy Paste from the Website about Hyrdrogen
"What About the Hydrogen Economy?"
As of 2003, the average hydrogen fuel cell costs close to $1,000,000. Unlike other alternatives, hydrogen fuel cells have shown little sign of coming down in price. Source Unfortunately, hydrogen and/or hydrogen fuel cells will never power more than a handful of cars due to the following reasons:
Astronomical Cost of Fuel Cells
With fuel cell powered cars themselves costing $1,000,000 a piece, replacing just 210 million cars -or less than 1/4 of the world's automotive fleet -with fuel cell powered cars would cost $210,000,000,000,000. (That's two-hundred and ten trillion dollars.) Source
Furthermore, as a recent article in EV World points out, the average fuel cell lasts only 200 hours. Source Two hundred hours translates into just 12,000 miles, or about one year’s worth of driving at 60 miles per hour. That's not much of a deal for a car with a million-dollar price tag.
That doesn't even begin to address the cost of replacing a significant portion of the millions upon millions of oil-powered airplanes, boats, trucks, tractors, trailers, etc., with fuel cells nor the construction of a worldwide system to maintain all of these new technologies.
Platinum Supply and Cost
A single hydrogen fuel cell requires approximately 20-50 grams of platinum. Source Let's say we want to replace 1/4 of the world's petroleum powered cars with hydrogen fuel cell powered cars. Twenty-to-fifty grams of platinum per fuel cell x 210 million fuel cells equals between 4.2 billion and 10.5 billion grams of platinum required for the conversion. Unfortunately, world platinum production is currently at only about 240 million grams per year, most of which is already earmarked for thousands of indispensable industrial processes.
If the hydrogen economy was anything other than a total red herring, such issues would eventually arise as 80 percent of the world’s proven platinum reserves are located in that bastion of geopolitical stability, South Africa. Source
Even if an economically affordable and scalable alternative to platinum is immediately located and mined in absolutely massive quantities, the ability of hydrogen to replace even a small portion of our oil consumption is still handicapped by several fundamental limitations, some of which are detailed below. NASA, which fuels the space shuttle with hydrogen, may be able to afford to get around the following challenges, but there is a big difference between launching a single space shuttle and running a $50 trillion global economy with a voracious and constantly growing appetite for energy.
Inability to Store Massive Quantities at Low Cost:
Hydrogen is the smallest element known to man. This makes it virtually impossible to store in the massive quantities and to transport across the incredibly long distances at the low costs required by our vast global transportation networks. In her February 2005 article entitled "Hydrogen Economy: Energy and Economic Blackhole," Alice Friedemann writes:
Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements. As soon as you’ve gotten it
into a container, it wants to get out, and since it’s the lightest of
all gases, it takes a lot of effort to keep it from escaping. Storage
devices need a complex set of seals, gaskets, and valves. Liquid
hydrogen tanks for vehicles boil off at 3-4% per day. Source
While some research into hydrogen storage technologies looks promising, it is still in the experimental stages and decades (at the earliest) from being ready to scale on an industrial level. Source
Massive Cost of Hydrogen Infrastructure:
A hydrogen economy would require massive retrofitting of our entire global transportation and fuel distribution networks. At a million dollars per car, it would cost $350,000,000,000,000 to replace half of our current automotive fleet (700 million cars world wide) with hydrogen fuel cell powered cars.
That doesn't even account for replacing a significant fraction of our oil-powered airplanes or boats with fuel cells.
The numbers don't get any prettier if we scrap the fuel cells and go with straight hydrogen. According to a recent article in Nature, entitled "Hydrogen Economy Looks Out of Reach:"
Converting every vehicle in the United States to hydrogen-power
would demand so much electricity that the country would need
enough wind turbines to cover half of California or 1,000 extra
nuclear power stations. Source
Unfortunately, even if we managed to get this ridiculously high number of wind turbines or nuclear power plants built, we would still need to build the hydrogen powered cars, in addition to a hydrogen distribution network that would be mind-boggingly expensive. The construction of a hydrogen pipeline network comparable to our current natural gas pipeline network, for instance, would cost 200 trillion dollars. That's about fifteen times the size of the US GDP in the year 2006.
How such capital intensive endeavors will be completed in the midst of massive energy shortages is anybody's guess.
Hydrogen's "Energy Sink" Factor:
As mentioned previously, solar, wind, or nuclear energy can be used to "crack" hydrogen from water via a process known as electrolysis. The electrolysis process is a simple one, but unfortunately it consumes more energy than it produces. Source This has nothing to do with the financial costs. Again, Alice Friedemann explains:
The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an
energy sink. Hydrogen’s properties require you to spend more
energy to do the following than you get out of it later: overcome
waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, to move heavy cars, to prevent
leaks and brittle metals, to transport hydrogen to the destination.
It doesn’t matter if all of the problems are solved, or how much
money is spent. You will use more energy to create, store, and
transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.
Even if these problems are ignored or assumed away, you are still faced with jaw-dropping costs of a renewable derived hydrogen economy. In addition to the 200 trillion dollar pipeline network that would be necessary to move the hydrogen around, we would need to deploy about 40 trillion dollars of solar panels. If the hydrogen was derived from wind (which is usually more efficient than solar) the cost might be lowered considerably, but that's not saying much when you are dealing with numbers as large as $40 trillion.
As far as how much you as the consumer would pay for hydrogen fuel derived from renewable resources, Joseph Romm, author of The Hype About Hydrogen, estimates you will have to pay $10-$20 per gallon of gasoline equivalent, assuming you can even find a renewable-hydrogen filling station. Source
For more information, see:
The Hydrogen Economy is a Red Herring
It's there on the site, it can be figured out by running the scenario in your head. Hydrogen is bad and will amount to little or nothing. Novel idea yes, practical solution no.
Edit: Nuclear Energy isn't clean, there's nuclear waste to manage as well as the harvesting process which is currently done through cheap oil vehicles and transportation. Also something to be said for the clean water which would be needed to keep the reactor cool, and water itself is being shown as a rapidly depleting resource as well.
And converting Mass Transit over to electricity, beyond the hurdles that need to be overcome with the battery, there's the task of converting all of the current vehicles over to electricty as well as producing enough energy to power those vehicles that would be greater than gas in the growing economy. Could some of your responses please include links so I can follow up on your information rather than just take it based on faith.
Trams are powered by overhead lines. Subways and elevated tracks have a 3rd rail. No issue with batteries there. Busses can be converted to trams without too much heartache. Even easier is promoting grocery stores to move into communities rather than hope the communities get in a car and move to the grocery store. Walking to the store doesn't require oil, and pizza is a renewable resource.
Also, buses/trams/trains have a greater mpg rating per passenger mile than do cars. Not to mention the fuel efficiencies created by removing congestion on the roads. I can't link to where I read that, though.
Buses in CT have been running on Natural Gas for years, and will probably make the switch to the next best power source whenever it comes readily available. I'm moving to a city that has a train/bus/ferry station, and I intend to make full use of it. More and more people will be looking for alternatives to sitting on I-95 for hours on end in their cars, so hopefully tons of money will come into the system for improvements and more destinations.
"What About the Hydrogen Economy?"
Astronomical Cost of Fuel Cells: $1,000,000 per fuel cell
Platinum Supply and Cost: Current uses of Platinum are earmarked for other processes
Inability to Store Massive Quantities at Low Cost:
Massive Cost of Hydrogen Infrastructure:
Hydrogen's "Energy Sink" Factor: Use energy to make energy "Perpetual motion machine?" you lose out
Copy Paste from the Website about Hyrdrogen
"What About the Hydrogen Economy?"
As of 2003, the average hydrogen fuel cell costs close to $1,000,000. Unlike other alternatives, hydrogen fuel cells have shown little sign of coming down in price. Source Unfortunately, hydrogen and/or hydrogen fuel cells will never power more than a handful of cars due to the following reasons:
Astronomical Cost of Fuel Cells
With fuel cell powered cars themselves costing $1,000,000 a piece, replacing just 210 million cars -or less than 1/4 of the world's automotive fleet -with fuel cell powered cars would cost $210,000,000,000,000. (That's two-hundred and ten trillion dollars.) Source
Furthermore, as a recent article in EV World points out, the average fuel cell lasts only 200 hours. Source Two hundred hours translates into just 12,000 miles, or about one year’s worth of driving at 60 miles per hour. That's not much of a deal for a car with a million-dollar price tag.
That doesn't even begin to address the cost of replacing a significant portion of the millions upon millions of oil-powered airplanes, boats, trucks, tractors, trailers, etc., with fuel cells nor the construction of a worldwide system to maintain all of these new technologies.
Platinum Supply and Cost
A single hydrogen fuel cell requires approximately 20-50 grams of platinum. Source Let's say we want to replace 1/4 of the world's petroleum powered cars with hydrogen fuel cell powered cars. Twenty-to-fifty grams of platinum per fuel cell x 210 million fuel cells equals between 4.2 billion and 10.5 billion grams of platinum required for the conversion. Unfortunately, world platinum production is currently at only about 240 million grams per year, most of which is already earmarked for thousands of indispensable industrial processes.
If the hydrogen economy was anything other than a total red herring, such issues would eventually arise as 80 percent of the world’s proven platinum reserves are located in that bastion of geopolitical stability, South Africa. Source
Even if an economically affordable and scalable alternative to platinum is immediately located and mined in absolutely massive quantities, the ability of hydrogen to replace even a small portion of our oil consumption is still handicapped by several fundamental limitations, some of which are detailed below. NASA, which fuels the space shuttle with hydrogen, may be able to afford to get around the following challenges, but there is a big difference between launching a single space shuttle and running a $50 trillion global economy with a voracious and constantly growing appetite for energy.
Inability to Store Massive Quantities at Low Cost:
Hydrogen is the smallest element known to man. This makes it virtually impossible to store in the massive quantities and to transport across the incredibly long distances at the low costs required by our vast global transportation networks. In her February 2005 article entitled "Hydrogen Economy: Energy and Economic Blackhole," Alice Friedemann writes:
Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements. As soon as you’ve gotten it
into a container, it wants to get out, and since it’s the lightest of
all gases, it takes a lot of effort to keep it from escaping. Storage
devices need a complex set of seals, gaskets, and valves. Liquid
hydrogen tanks for vehicles boil off at 3-4% per day. Source
While some research into hydrogen storage technologies looks promising, it is still in the experimental stages and decades (at the earliest) from being ready to scale on an industrial level. Source
Massive Cost of Hydrogen Infrastructure:
A hydrogen economy would require massive retrofitting of our entire global transportation and fuel distribution networks. At a million dollars per car, it would cost $350,000,000,000,000 to replace half of our current automotive fleet (700 million cars world wide) with hydrogen fuel cell powered cars.
That doesn't even account for replacing a significant fraction of our oil-powered airplanes or boats with fuel cells.
The numbers don't get any prettier if we scrap the fuel cells and go with straight hydrogen. According to a recent article in Nature, entitled "Hydrogen Economy Looks Out of Reach:"
Converting every vehicle in the United States to hydrogen-power
would demand so much electricity that the country would need
enough wind turbines to cover half of California or 1,000 extra
nuclear power stations. Source
Unfortunately, even if we managed to get this ridiculously high number of wind turbines or nuclear power plants built, we would still need to build the hydrogen powered cars, in addition to a hydrogen distribution network that would be mind-boggingly expensive. The construction of a hydrogen pipeline network comparable to our current natural gas pipeline network, for instance, would cost 200 trillion dollars. That's about fifteen times the size of the US GDP in the year 2006.
How such capital intensive endeavors will be completed in the midst of massive energy shortages is anybody's guess.
Hydrogen's "Energy Sink" Factor:
As mentioned previously, solar, wind, or nuclear energy can be used to "crack" hydrogen from water via a process known as electrolysis. The electrolysis process is a simple one, but unfortunately it consumes more energy than it produces. Source This has nothing to do with the financial costs. Again, Alice Friedemann explains:
The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an
energy sink. Hydrogen’s properties require you to spend more
energy to do the following than you get out of it later: overcome
waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, to move heavy cars, to prevent
leaks and brittle metals, to transport hydrogen to the destination.
It doesn’t matter if all of the problems are solved, or how much
money is spent. You will use more energy to create, store, and
transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.
Even if these problems are ignored or assumed away, you are still faced with jaw-dropping costs of a renewable derived hydrogen economy. In addition to the 200 trillion dollar pipeline network that would be necessary to move the hydrogen around, we would need to deploy about 40 trillion dollars of solar panels. If the hydrogen was derived from wind (which is usually more efficient than solar) the cost might be lowered considerably, but that's not saying much when you are dealing with numbers as large as $40 trillion.
As far as how much you as the consumer would pay for hydrogen fuel derived from renewable resources, Joseph Romm, author of The Hype About Hydrogen, estimates you will have to pay $10-$20 per gallon of gasoline equivalent, assuming you can even find a renewable-hydrogen filling station. Source
For more information, see:
The Hydrogen Economy is a Red Herring
It's there on the site, it can be figured out by running the scenario in your head. Hydrogen is bad and will amount to little or nothing. Novel idea yes, practical solution no.
Edit: Nuclear Energy isn't clean, there's nuclear waste to manage as well as the harvesting process which is currently done through cheap oil vehicles and transportation. Also something to be said for the clean water which would be needed to keep the reactor cool, and water itself is being shown as a rapidly depleting resource as well.
That water doesn't just dissapear after it cools the reactor, the vehicles can be powered by the fuel produced by the reactor, and fuel cells will get cheaper as Hydrogen becomes cheaper (because there will be more of it!).
Yeah, the hydrogen economy has problems of its own, which are stated above. As for fusion, it is still in the development stages and has large problems associated with it; it doesn't break even at the moment. There are many problems that confront fusion as opposed to fission that were unforseen. Fusion requires a containment vessel several times more complex than fission, the temperatures are hotter, etc etc.
Nuclear power is a good way to go if people ever get over their phobias associated with it. Today, countries like France, Japan, etc are using nuclear power for their countries, and we haven't had a large scale problem since Chernobyl. Current reactor designs are much safer than previously (the US hasn't built a reactor since the 70s.), run off of different materials, blah blah blah.
Personally, I actually believe that coal use is the way to go, at least for the near future. The world's coal reserves are much larger than its oil reserves by all accounts. Coal, while "dirtier" can be easily used. First off, you can extract the polymers that you need for plastics from it. Second, the technology exists to scrub coal from power plants so that is basically releases only water. Third, you can extract diesel from coal, and if we worked on efficient diesel engines, like europe, we could easily maintain our current level of transportation for years.
Alternative energies still have problems related to their creation, implementation, and use. Take solar. Yes, its a renewable energy source, but the process to create a solar cell results in compounds that are MUCH WORSE than anything put out by an automobile. Also, the market and manufacturing doesn't exist to produce it large scale. I'm not saying we shouldn't look at alternative energies, but they shouldn't be used as a fix all for our problems. Necessity is the mother of invention, so when it comes down to it, we'll find a way to not have society collapse :P.
Edit: Nuclear Energy isn't clean, there's nuclear waste to manage as well as the harvesting process which is currently done through cheap oil vehicles and transportation. Also something to be said for the clean water which would be needed to keep the reactor cool, and water itself is being shown as a rapidly depleting resource as well.
This is like saying my room isn't clean because I need to throw out the vacuum bag. The point is that the dust isn't all over the floor.
Alternative energies still have problems related to their creation, implementation, and use. Take solar. Yes, its a renewable energy source, but the process to create a solar cell results in compounds that are MUCH WORSE than anything put out by an automobile. Also, the market and manufacturing doesn't exist to produce it large scale. I'm not saying we shouldn't look at alternative energies, but they shouldn't be used as a fix all for our problems. Necessity is the mother of invention, so when it comes down to it, we'll find a way to not have society collapse :P.
Photovoltaics aren't the only way to yield solar energy. Hell, it's the worst way, actually. Also, German subsidies created such demand that the price of PV arrays went up thanks to a lack of silicon to meet the manufacturing needs. New models which aren't as reliant on silicon are being developed.
And, again, new reactors are going through the process. We'll have a couple new plants by 2020, and a good deal more afterwards.
Edit: Nuclear Energy isn't clean, there's nuclear waste to manage as well as the harvesting process which is currently done through cheap oil vehicles and transportation. Also something to be said for the clean water which would be needed to keep the reactor cool, and water itself is being shown as a rapidly depleting resource as well.
Breeder reactors reduce the worrisome half life of spent fuel rods down to a couple centuries. Which is easily manageable and competitive with the negative impacts of pollution. As far as the water being used in the turbines, well for one it could potentially be replaced by various solutions if necessary, but, for two, the water isn't consumed. You can recollect it and put it back to use.
Coal can be used to make synthetic oil via a process known as gasification. Unfortunately, synthetic oil will be unable to do all that much to soften the coming energy crash for the following reasons:
Insufficiency of Supply/"Peak Coal":
The coal supply is not as great as many assume. According to a July 2004 article published by the American Institute of Physics:
If demand remains frozen at the current rate of consumption, the
coal reserve will indeed last roughly 250 years. That prediction
assumes equal use of all grades of coal, from anthracite to lignite.
Population growth alone reduces the calculated lifetime to some 100−120 years. Any new uses of coal would further reduce the
supply. . . The use of coal for conversion to other fuels would
quickly reduce the lifetime of the US coal base to less than a
human lifespan. Source
Even a 50-75 year supply of coal is not as much as it sounds because coal production, like oil production, will peak long before the total supply is exhausted. Were we to liquefy a large portion of our coal endowment in order to produce synthetic oil, coal production would likely peak within 2 decades, if not sooner.
Coal's Falling "Energy Profit Ratio":
As John Gever explains in his book, Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in Coming Decades, the production of coal will be in energy-loser within a few decades:
. . . the energy profit ratio for coal slips to 20 in 1977, comparable
to that of domestic petroleum. While an energy profit ratio of 20
means that only 5 percent of coal's gross energy is needed to
obtain it, the sharp decline since 1967 is alarming. If it continues
to drop at this rate, the energy profit ratio of coal will slide to 0.5
by 2040.
In other words, with an EPR of .5, it will take twice as much energy to produce the coal than the coal actually contains. It will thus be of no use to us as an energy source.
Issue of Scale and Environmental Catastrophe:
The environmental consequences of a huge increase in coal production would be truly catastrophic. Caltech physics professor Dr. David Goodstein explains:
We use now about twice as much energy from oil as we do from
coal, so if you wanted to mine enough coal to replace the missing
oil, you’d have to mine it at a much higher rate, not only to
replace the oil, but also because the conversion process to oil is
extremely inefficient. You’d have to mine it at levels at least five
times beyond those we mine now — a coal-mining industry on an
absolutely unimaginable scale.
In his book, Out of Gas:The End of the Oil Age, Dr. Goodstein tells us that a large scale switch to coal could produce such severe global warming that life on planet Earth would cease to exist.
Where and how coal fails as an adequate substitute for oil. Please read the site, my copy paste responses are childish parroting from me.
Please read the site, my copy paste responses are childish parroting from me.
So is my paraphrasing of peer reviewed articles and books.
The issue is simply that our unsustainable practices won't be able to be kept up. Which is a good thing, because most of them actually lower our quality of life in various ways. And this isn't some tree hugger luddism conservation shit. This is putting massive amounts of glazing on the south facing wall of your house without awnings and then being shocked when there's heat gain. This is destroying neighborhoods for functionally pure centers of use separated by great distances. A Jane Jacobs' city, rather than a Moses' one, is a better place to live. That it requires less energy to support itself is a pleasant surprise.
Posts
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/03/bahrain_install.php
Excerpt:
Once operational, the wind turbines will deliver approximately 11-15% of the energy needs of the building, or 1100 to 1300 megawatt-hours per year -- enough to provide light in 300 homes for over a year.
That's the equivalent of 2 million tons of coal.
They managed ok in 18th/19th Century London...
Actually I believe the opposite to be true. When people are healthy, happy, satisfied with life they tend to get lazy and complacent. Now put a gun to their heads or their family and watch how ingenious they become.
When would you expect a magic engine to be made, when everything is rainbows and butterflys or you have a year before your face fucking melts off?
I still assert that they need to work on more efficient solar power.
Hmm, so, if anything, we should accelerate environmental destruction, so that we may play a part in the forging of the glorious future ourselves!
Woah. Awesome. There are also smaller turbines you can get for your house as well. They're about the same size as a chimney cowl and depending on the amount of wind where you live they can often power your house whilst also dumping excess energy back onto the national grid, putting money in your pocket.
Step 1: Infect city with zombies.
Step 2: Round up zombies.
Step 3: Burn Zombies for power
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!
I would think you could make a more efficient zombie>Power converter than just burning them. Those guys are powered by supernatural forces. They're like work mules that don't need fed. Build a giant hamster wheel with a brain just out of reach, is what I'm thinking.
Or use them for entertainment, like they did in Shaun of the Dead. Reality TV shows starring brain-dead zombies!
Back on topic, I really wish Wind Energy was more... powerful. Sure it's annoying to hear the "whomp whomp whomp" of a windmill, but it's a small price to pay.
Yes, we wont have as much luxury as we need, but what has luxury done to people? Look at American suburbia, everybody stays inside watching T.V. and eating their saturated fat cheesy poofs, and then they come out and drive 50 miles to work 10 hours, just to come back. Suburbia haves no community, it's a huge waste of resources, and it had fail to deliver any of its promises. All because cheap oil made it profitable to commute by automobiles.
Take away easy to get gas and people have to *gasp* cooperate with their neighbors in order to maintain a comfortable level of life. People might look towards each other for entertainment and enlightenment once electricity costs too much to watch T.V. hours on end. Community farms will start once transportation costs makes food expensive. Instead of people calling in a plumber 90 miles away, people will ask the plumber who lives next door for help.
Maybe this oil crisis is for the best? Maybe it will force people out of their corporate-made lives and back into reality?
Or maybe the shit will hit the fan and there will be riots from here to Brooklyn, mass raping, cannibalizing, and cult mass live-sacrifices, Mayan style.
Personally I'm hoping for the first choice.
This website covers all of the alternatives on the second page, it bashes Nuclear for its reliance on plutonium which if implimented as our primary source would last at most 30 more years. That's not even taking into account setting up the power plants.
Someone on the first page also mentioned something about Thermal Depolarization
Thermal Depolymerization:
I know it's a huge read but please look it over before you start to critique it. And yes I do realize there are potential huge leaps in technology to be made, it just seems to be putting a lot of faith into an as of yet nonexistent alternative energy that would require huge time and money investments in them to allow for us to transition to them. There might be some 10 year transition period, but it's looking really grim. I don't claim to be an expert and any arguement I could come up with would likely be copy pasted from the original website, or my inexpert interpretation of the presented information.
Same thing happens in modern living too. How many times two Joneses wage war against each other in hopes to force the other ones out?
but mass communication/media allows us to have smalltown prejudice spread over a large area and large number of people, if we really try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses
My personal definition is a family who is forever trying to 'one up' another family with home improvement and what not. Sadly this leads to 'covenant police' who goes around harrasing people about 'that particular lawn gnome is not appropriate lawn decoration under code 9-4859'.
Sure it 'covers alternatives' but all they basically say is "This isn't an alternative because it would take 20 years to implement! lololololol" which is just not true, where are they getting that figure from? Also, I believe '30 years' for nuclear energy figure is a flat out lie, I've heard most estimates far higher than that.
Biodiesel is horrible for the environment. Worse than oil, really. At least the embodied energy for that came from time and mud.
One day, yes. Currently our battery technology doesn't allow a feasible all electric car with sufficient range to really be useful. You can get a Tesla for fun, but most family's need more than a 2 seater.
Not that transportation should even be the major focus. Cars, trucks, &c. only account for 25% of our emissions. If you could take a majority of the oil based power plants offline the cost of gas would drop like a stone. Which, if we didn't have such horribly wasteful buildings, you practically could.
The 30 years bit is assuming plants only use plutonium. They don't. In fact, breeder reactors can process nuclear 'waste' that we have sitting in pools freaking out Greenpeace to power homes. With the added benefit of making the spent rods only really dangerous for a couple centuries instead of millenia. Which is much more realistic for safe storage.
1) Nuclear power can lessen the burden of oil-fired electric plants.
2) Nuclear power can fuel electric vehicles, electric mass transit.
However, it cannot happen until people start building nuclear plants. Which ain't happening because people still remember Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and think that when a plant "goes up", we'll wake up in the world of Fallout.
Well, I guess when we see things adapt in front of our eyes in order to cope with changing conditions, we can point at the creationists and say, "SEE?!?!"
Pretty much. All of the people that assumed we were going to run out of oil a few decades ago didn't envision things like deep water drilling, that we can turn heavy oil into a useful product, or that we can test old reservoirs and find pockets of oil that no one knew was there because the seismic technology was primitive the first time around.
Also, what exactly can we do in the interim? Besides voting for candidates, like hopefully Obama, who are interested in these alternative energies?
1) Yes it can, but
2) Current battery technology isn't advanced enough to replace petroleum for energy density.
Nukes aren't a panacea, nor will they be. They're certaily part of the solution, but not even the biggest one. I'd say cutting the waste in the bulit environment, which accounts for half all emissions, is the major step to take.
Oh, and there are a dozen new reactors in the planning stage.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html
If we were to ramp up the usage of nuclear energy that number would most likely rapidly dwindle from 200 years to what it is estimated at considering that nuclear power is such a small part of the energy grid as is. I couldn't find much info about Thorium other than it is in Development and has yet to be used on a large scale.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
And converting Mass Transit over to electricity, beyond the hurdles that need to be overcome with the battery, there's the task of converting all of the current vehicles over to electricty as well as producing enough energy to power those vehicles that would be greater than gas in the growing economy. Could some of your responses please include links so I can follow up on your information rather than just take it based on faith.
*edit: Through searching out some if this stuff I stumbled across a few sites talking about fusion, and how it's been achieved. But at the moment it is still in development due to being unable to sustain the process.
Trams are powered by overhead lines. Subways and elevated tracks have a 3rd rail. No issue with batteries there. Busses can be converted to trams without too much heartache. Even easier is promoting grocery stores to move into communities rather than hope the communities get in a car and move to the grocery store. Walking to the store doesn't require oil, and pizza is a renewable resource.
Also, buses/trams/trains have a greater mpg rating per passenger mile than do cars. Not to mention the fuel efficiencies created by removing congestion on the roads. I can't link to where I read that, though.
Cheap nuclear power means we can generate hydrogen from seawater (through electrolysis) cleanly, instead of generating it from fossil fuels (through hydrocarbon cracking) and causing pollution.
It's there on the site, it can be figured out by running the scenario in your head. Hydrogen is bad and will amount to little or nothing. Novel idea yes, practical solution no.
Edit: Nuclear Energy isn't clean, there's nuclear waste to manage as well as the harvesting process which is currently done through cheap oil vehicles and transportation. Also something to be said for the clean water which would be needed to keep the reactor cool, and water itself is being shown as a rapidly depleting resource as well.
Buses in CT have been running on Natural Gas for years, and will probably make the switch to the next best power source whenever it comes readily available. I'm moving to a city that has a train/bus/ferry station, and I intend to make full use of it. More and more people will be looking for alternatives to sitting on I-95 for hours on end in their cars, so hopefully tons of money will come into the system for improvements and more destinations.
That water doesn't just dissapear after it cools the reactor, the vehicles can be powered by the fuel produced by the reactor, and fuel cells will get cheaper as Hydrogen becomes cheaper (because there will be more of it!).
Nuclear power is a good way to go if people ever get over their phobias associated with it. Today, countries like France, Japan, etc are using nuclear power for their countries, and we haven't had a large scale problem since Chernobyl. Current reactor designs are much safer than previously (the US hasn't built a reactor since the 70s.), run off of different materials, blah blah blah.
Personally, I actually believe that coal use is the way to go, at least for the near future. The world's coal reserves are much larger than its oil reserves by all accounts. Coal, while "dirtier" can be easily used. First off, you can extract the polymers that you need for plastics from it. Second, the technology exists to scrub coal from power plants so that is basically releases only water. Third, you can extract diesel from coal, and if we worked on efficient diesel engines, like europe, we could easily maintain our current level of transportation for years.
Alternative energies still have problems related to their creation, implementation, and use. Take solar. Yes, its a renewable energy source, but the process to create a solar cell results in compounds that are MUCH WORSE than anything put out by an automobile. Also, the market and manufacturing doesn't exist to produce it large scale. I'm not saying we shouldn't look at alternative energies, but they shouldn't be used as a fix all for our problems. Necessity is the mother of invention, so when it comes down to it, we'll find a way to not have society collapse :P.
This is like saying my room isn't clean because I need to throw out the vacuum bag. The point is that the dust isn't all over the floor.
Photovoltaics aren't the only way to yield solar energy. Hell, it's the worst way, actually. Also, German subsidies created such demand that the price of PV arrays went up thanks to a lack of silicon to meet the manufacturing needs. New models which aren't as reliant on silicon are being developed.
And, again, new reactors are going through the process. We'll have a couple new plants by 2020, and a good deal more afterwards.
Breeder reactors reduce the worrisome half life of spent fuel rods down to a couple centuries. Which is easily manageable and competitive with the negative impacts of pollution. As far as the water being used in the turbines, well for one it could potentially be replaced by various solutions if necessary, but, for two, the water isn't consumed. You can recollect it and put it back to use.
Where and how coal fails as an adequate substitute for oil. Please read the site, my copy paste responses are childish parroting from me.
So is my paraphrasing of peer reviewed articles and books.
The issue is simply that our unsustainable practices won't be able to be kept up. Which is a good thing, because most of them actually lower our quality of life in various ways. And this isn't some tree hugger luddism conservation shit. This is putting massive amounts of glazing on the south facing wall of your house without awnings and then being shocked when there's heat gain. This is destroying neighborhoods for functionally pure centers of use separated by great distances. A Jane Jacobs' city, rather than a Moses' one, is a better place to live. That it requires less energy to support itself is a pleasant surprise.