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Safety of nuclear power and death of the nuclear renaissance
Posted by Euan Mearns on March 15, 2011 - 10:57am
Yesterday, I believe, will go down in history as one of the most significant for mankind. Whilst most citizens of the developed and developing world do not realise this yet, the future of the human global energy system has just changed course with potentially far reaching consequences for human civilisation.
A hydrogen explosion destroys the reactor building of the Fukushima #3 reactor, Japan on 14th March. The wisdom of venting hydrogen into the confines of the reactor building will be one of many questions asked in the weeks and months ahead. Picture courtesy of the BBC
With a breach of the containment system of the Fukushima #2 reactor and release of significant amounts of radiation, we now have the answer to whether or not nuclear power is safe. In the eyes of the public and politicians the answer will be no, even before the final tally of nuclear casualties is counted. Looking to the future, the question should boil down to whether or not the risks of nuclear accidents are outweighed by the benefits to society of nuclear electricity. But in the current environment, and for years to come the risks are going to dominate government thinking and the benefits, all too readily ignored at present will be forgotten completely until we begin to feel the consequences of growing reliance on expensive fossil fuel imports and intermittent renewable energy.
It often takes a disaster to test our systems and to bring into the public domain certain frailties that may exist. The Fukushima catastrophe has brought into the public eye frailties than most were not concerned about until Saturday 12th March 2011 when news of the reactor problems broke following the earthquake and tsunami of the previous day. Fukushima’s fate was sealed on the day the Japanese government gave approval for the reactors to be built on a coastline where there was a high probability of earthquake and tsunami in the plant’s lifetime. The risks were known and understood and the facility was engineered to a high specification to withstand such events. For three days, the fate of the global nuclear industry has hung in the balance. Had the Japanese engineers managed to contain the incident then it was possible that the nuclear industry could emerge strengthened with proof that well designed and maintained American reactors could withstand the worst that nature can throw. But alas, this is not the case.
In granting consent to build these reactors the Japanese government, with little to no supplies of indigenous primary energy such as coal, oil and natural gas, must have decided that benefits to Japan of providing over 30% of electricity from nuclear sources outweighed the risks of building nuclear plant in one of the seismically most active regions of the world. Not only did they consent to build, but they built 4 reactors in close proximity to each other, right on the coast where they would feel the maximum effect of any tsunami. The coastal location proves beneficial now since this provides ready access to cooling water, much of the radiation released will fall on the sea and not on land, and there is reduced risk of pollution of ground water. But had they been built on higher ground a short way inland then they would not have been hit by the tsunami in the first place. How such risks have been weighed will go under the microscope in the weeks and months ahead. Building a cluster like this is no doubt based on a shared defence system, but it has been surprising to watch hydrogen explosions in one reactor compromise neighbouring reactor buildings. Were these risks properly weighed?
It has also been instructive to learn that steel and concrete containment systems alone are not sufficient to guarantee safety. Maintaining the engineering ability to pump water through the core after emergency shutdown means that pumps, pipes and valves located outside of the armoured core defence systems must also continue to function, and as is the case with many disasters, damage inflicted by the disaster itself may compromise the safety systems and their backup. In the case of Fukushima, the plant survived the initial onslaught of earthquake and tsunami. Damage inflicted at that stage set in motion a sequence of events, starting with the venting of hydrogen gas and the explosions they caused, and further degraded the capability to contain an escalating crisis. In terms of reactor design, it strikes me as odd that hydrogen should be vented into the confines of the reactor building, effectively creating a bomb. Have these eventualities been anticipated by the engineers who designed the plant?
And so what will become of Fukushima and the future of the global nuclear industry? As I write the reactor site is being rendered uninhabitable by the release of radiation and I imagine in the days ahead we will see heroic Japanese engineers risking their lives in an extreme hostile environment as they continue to try and contain the situation. With three out of the four reactors at varying stages of disintegration it is difficult to predict the outcome. This is already the worst civil nuclear power accident in recorded history - Chernobyl was a military reactor and the Windscale reactor fire in England in 1957 was never properly recorded. The social and economic costs I believe will already exceed Chernobyl given the location of this event close to the heart of the world’s third largest economy. There is still ample scope for this event to get considerably worse.
It is very telling that the German government acted yesterday to cancel license extensions for aging reactors even before the containment system of the Fukushima #2 reactor was breached. The nuclear renaissance in the west has always been lukewarm. In the UK for example, pro-nuclear Conservatives are in coalition government with Liberal Democrats who are instinctively anti-nuclear and who had to compromise on this long held policy stance to enter government. The Scottish minority government lead by The Scottish National Party (SNP) has adopted a no nuclear policy that is supported by Liberal Democrats and The Greens. The Conservatives alone are pro-nuclear with Scottish Labour hedging their bets on territory between the anti and pro camp. Most democracies will have tenuous alliances such as this and I think it is safe to now say that the nuclear renaissance is stone dead. I would anticipate a mass of safety audits to ensue with accelerated closure of aging nuclear plants and cancellation of plans to build new. A quick look at the stock prices of uranium miners and nuclear plant builders suggests I am not alone in holding this view.
OECD politicians believe their pro-nuclear stance was driven by a need to reduce CO2 emissions and still seem to be sublimely unaware that the real driving force is to replace supplies of cheap natural gas and coal that are likely now to become even more scarce on the international markets as countries scramble to replace lost nuclear capacity. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reported as saying:
"Merkel added that she was not worried about Germany's electricity supply as the country was a net exporter of energy."
Presumably what is meant is a net exporter of electricity. What will become of countries dependent upon these German electricity exports?
It is time for cool heads in the OECD but, unfortunately with the energy debate driven by emotion, this will not happen. Decisions made now in the wake of an emergency in Japan may sow the seed of energy poverty in countries like the UK for decades to come. I have for a long while been pro-nuclear but must admit that my faith in nuclear planners is shaken by this sequence of events. Now is not the time for knee-jerk decisions. Governments must carefully weigh the benefits of stable supplies of nuclear electricity to society against the risks posed by nuclear power plants. This is not an easy task.
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I grew in Alabama and we had a hippie neighbor we called Hippie John. He drove a '69 VW MicroBUS and I will never forget he had a Carter bumper sticker and a Split Wood Not Atoms sticker. Hippie John died two years later and it was not until his funeral that my drill sargeant dad found out Hippie John used to a Master Chief in the Navy, worked on nuke subs, and knew the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. They gave him a 21 gun salute at his funeral. Apparently, some knew the whole time. When it comes down to the hippies tellling us, we should at least listened and remembered how bad things get when we do not listen. Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming.......
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the hippies were right. ARE right. I am completely conviced that whoever is left after all of this comes down will use the word "hippie" to mean "seer".
We must live within our environment. Too long we've assumed that we could control nature and tame the earth. I doesn't work that way. The hippies saw that. A corporation-consumption-destruction society is not viable.
Bad news TFHG,
The Hippie/drug culture phenomenon was a complete CIA scam that was born in Laurel Canyon in the 60's. Research LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN LABORATORY. And for the rest of you who feel "guilty" about your carbon footprint, your being scammed yet again and by the same people.
Meanwhile, pray for Japan.
It might be more accurate to say that the things you describe were an effort
to derail the hippy movement, but they were certainly not the source or even
a major force behind it.
A much more important source of the hippy movement was a set of conditions present at the time: on the one side, you had a huge wave of affluence (of the most unsustainable sort, but at that moment, it was affluence) which gave a
lot of people the luxury of introspection, the luxury of thinking beyond the
next paycheck, the luxury of trying to grasp the bigger picture.
A lot more people than historically had that luxury.. and even more important,
those people were _not members of the elites_ who usually were the only ones to have the luxury of being philosophers. They were the children of the middle class or even worse of uneducated laborers!
Now add into that, a collision between the residual forces of a socially conservative culture and the yet-new efforts by mass-marketers to drive people into mindless dependence on consumer goods, efforts by new empire builders trying to erase the memory of the empires they sought to replace (and a whole lot of other emerging super-structures which were evolving and needed to kind of break the old order to crack into some space themselves). During a short window while a whole pile of interests were hammering away at the stodgy and strict social norms, and before they managed to replace them with brainless consumerism, you had a lot more people than usual questioning things.
so you had a convergence of many forces all of which were for their own'
reasons turning the established stuffy rigid social norms on their heads. an
atmosphere that can catch on, of questioning things.
Add to this that the previous century was unusually socially rigid- victorian attitudes and their prudish successors- giving people something
easy and obvious to question right in their own personal spheres of experience.
Now add into the mix a general crisis of conscience emerging in the 60s
hand in hand with a very real phenomenon.
Industrial civilization had conquered the whole world. The great mission
of mankind, conquer the earth, had been accomplished. now what? and on top
of that, the juggernaut of progress , of that great mission, turned out
to be making a miserable mess of everything.
Not only were we still stuck with all the problems we had before, but
conquering the whole world didnt turn out to be anything great either.
instead we had two empires threatening each other with atomic weapons, you
had the first really impossible to ignore evidence that our brilliant industrial advance is actually destroying the earth that we also live on,
etc, and what do you get? you get people who are questioning if the great
mission of mankind wasn't actually a nightmare or some kind of insanity.
Now in a time when, these things and others are all whirling around,
you get a whole hell of a lot of mostly young people waking up to the fact
that the civilization they were born into was _full of shit_.
How they reacted to it was not the same everywhere. Only one small part of that reaction is the drug culture you mention, and indeed there is ample evidence that there were attempts to divert or hijack that culture, by organized powers (the 'establishment', to use period-apropos lingo)
Zurisee,
I agree with just everything you wrote concerning the birth of the Hippie movement. What you missed though in your flight of literary eloquence was that the true awakening that was happening in America concerning the military industrial complex and their involvement in the colonial occupation of Vietnam was that the Truth movement was indeed hijacked by a Satanic CIA program of injecting LSD, PCP (drugs used in the MK-ULTRA mind control programs) into American culture via Laurel Canyon. If you're in an investigative mood, Google up David McGowan/ Laurel Canyon and start reading. Also Tavistock Institute.
Believe it or not, this all ties in directly to what's happening right now in our country.
Those wacky Satanic CIA agents. My grandfather was CIA, he never told me they started the hippie movement! And with me a loyal Grateful Dead follower. I just hope Jerry Garcia was not in on it...
I hadn't realized that Leary was CIA.
My thoughts for three days have been "here comes the biggest environmental disaster ever: coal."
Always with the false dichotomies.
As a poster on another thread pointed out, can you say for certain that any nuke plant has kept any coal anywhere from being mined and burned?
Powerdown means reducing drastically power from all sources.
The US, in particular, can do this now and do it quickly with relatively little pain, since we are so much more profligate in our use than any nearly any other nation.
The laser-like focus must be on conservation and curtailment. We get that right, and the source issues will be minor.
Always with the false optimism...
But sure, let's sing it: "stay on the sunny side, always on the sunny side...."
Optimism--that's a laugh.
For the record, I think it quite likely that the methane emissions Shakhova et al. have recently been reporting as coming out of the ESAS in steadily increasing, and occasionally abrupt, levels mean that irreversible runaway gw has now begun and there are no exits till we reach something like Venus status.
It is strangely pleasant, though, to be accused of optimism since most who know me refer to me as Dr. Doom.
Well all in good fun of course, but Power Down is an optimistic vision. My conclusion about human nature and politics is that we lack the political capacity and collective wisdom to move toward that sunny delightful scenario (in which global warming / climate change is averted.)
No, we have sufficient coal reserves to end at least mammalian life on Planet Earth, and I'm fairly certain we will use them and do so in the next few hundred years.
At any given point in the climate change process energy is likely to become more valuable for individuals and small groups, and in fact as global warming positive feedback loops (arctic methane release, etc.) set in, the incentive to burn coal to fuel for, for example, environmental control systems (aka air conditioning) will only grow. Given the lag between carbon release and ultimate climate impact, human political societies lack the ability to behave rationally in this domain.
Power Down is the epitome of rationality and hope - I don't think we can do it.
I think it was Chomsky who characterized the last national election as a final guarantee of human extinction. Likely right. Gotta keep dreamin', though.
Obama? I suppose, in the sense that it demonstrated that both sides of the American political space are controlled by corporate interests with mandates to increase profits and ignore social responsibilities of any kind. Or we can point to Citizen's United which ensured a fully corporate owned election process. The trend, at least is clear enough, but it extends across elections and institutions and even nations.
Small groups in boats and small communities on islands, etc., have the capacity to look each other in the eye and make collective sacrifices.
If trapped in a cold elevator with 5 people I could convince the others not to light a fire. If trapped in a cold basketball stadium with 50,000 people it would be much harder to convince people not to look after their personal interests and ignore the interests of others.
A population of billions, although it too floats on an island in space, seems to block that human capacity for considering the whole.
Most people on the planet are people you will never know, never be able to feel a personal relationship with, and ultimately perhaps we are evobiologically constrained to treat them as potential enemies and competitors.
Religion and spirituality try to help us to imagine their humanity... but based on human behavior (building coal plants, driving cars) it seems clear that these systems don't really enable us to act as if the whole, and all of the individuals who are part of the whole, are our equals.
The justice and balance that is possible in small groups doesn't seem achievable at the planetary scale. I suppose it's interesting to try to imagine how it might be, but so far we haven't found a solution.
People cannot deal with the any problem of the earth’s population – as you state, many people will have to live their lives dealing with their local situations, because situations across town or over the ocean are not rightly their concern. Since it will never happen, it should be considered a moot point.
For example, we can tell China that they have the wrong energy policy, but they have no real obligation to listen. The control that might deal with the world as a unit is too frightful to imagine, because it is a worldwide police state that one imagines. The current situation, with each individual and group working within their local sphere to manage what they can manage seems to be the best we can have. And in addition to dealing with the interfaces that are local, every so often a disaster occurs and lives are irreparably altered.
The reality of the world is that we cannot control people out of our sphere and nature will continue to insert new problems not anticipated. But we do not have to give up in the face of this reality, we also have the choice to make the best of it.
I disagree: "situations across town or over the ocean are not rightly their concern. "
It seems to me that China's decision to burn coal, or the US decision to burn 25% of the world's oil production to fuel a car based transport system, is rightly the concern of every human being on the planet.
A bureaucrat building a new coal plant in China has a hard time thinking about agriculture in Africa when he makes that decision. He would be fired if he DID think about it.
I drive to work. I feel bad about it and what I'm doing to the planet, but this month I need to earn a salary so my children can eat.
Don't feel bad. The farmer in Africa is probably thinking about where to get some wood or charcoal to heat her dinner, or some diesel to fill her generator. Concern about coal being burned in China or oil being burned in the US is likely far down on her list. It is only the rich who can afford such Weltschmerz.
We should all feel bad about the inability of people to take the needs of the planet and all of humanity into account when they make individual choices related to their own personal well-being.
Or, if you don't believe in feeling bad about anything, then we should all just enjoy thinking about that dilemma, because in it lies the fate of human kind.
Our ability to take into account the needs and interests of others falls off precipitously beyond our family, tribe, or circle of friends.
Sounds like a bunch of....self-serving stereotypes and ill-founded assumptions to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai
Right, we should avoid stereotyping in this discussion; it gets us off the track. The fact is that if I curtail my energy use (wear a sweater in the winter, take the train to work,--things that I have done) I still see people the world over who have not cut their use of fossil fuels and have made it clear by their commercial activities that they have no intention of so doing. Thus, it seems like my consideration for the world’s condition will do little unless the world joins me. But this is never going to happen. We are not wired to care about the people outside our tribe. In fact our internal wiring is much more akin to killing the people of the nearby tribes and taking their stuff and their women. (A check of the history of mankind will bear this out.) So we better find choices that lead to our actions helping each other’s tribes and this has been shown to involve the free market. If we cannot trade our way into a future, then our future will be a fall back to more primitive and violent times.
Trade is the language that the world understands. What can we trade for a reduction in the worlds energy use? Nothing, only hardship and very high energy costs will accomplish this, and the risk of primitive actions is very high with this approach.
On the other hand, if we develop safe and even clean forms of energy, (and deal appropriately with the risks) we might be able to trade goods that forge a better society and lead to this human experiment running into the next century. BTW, this seems to be the approach that China will take. Unlike Germany, China is proceeding with their nuclear and coal energy future. Maybe they are the leaders and we should take note?
Ken
We are not wired to care about the people outside our tribe.
No, but we can redefine who's in our tribe. A neighborhood, a city, a state, a nation, a race...anything with warm blood.......anything with a face....anything that breathes...anything that moves of it's own accord...
Those who do so are a small minority, but it's very doable. Takes time, education, a change in culture, healing of ancient emotional injuries, new emotional memes....
Experience suggests that we are not able to redefine our tribe to include all of humanity. Those who do so are the very rare exception.
Some people think that it seems that we should be able to do that. I see no evidence of it.
I find many of the things associated with the 'New Age Movement' as evidence that not only can we redefine our tribe to include all things great and small, the rate at which individuals are awakening to this truth is accelerating.
I submit http://spiritualnewearth.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-age-movement.html as evidence
(Now, I must point out that "One World Government" as identified in the post as a principle of 'New Age Philosophy' really misses the point. If one completely and fully integrated the idea that the tribe includes all things, then there is no need for any sort of government. This is Anarchy in the highest ideal sense of the word, in which individuals do the right thing out of respect for the interconnectedness of all things, not because some authority prompted them to)
The number of people who do so is small, but it's much larger than zero. For instance, there's Jainism.
Unless you argue that these people are genetically different from the rest of us (you wouldn't, right?) then this is definitive evidence that it's possible.
Now, the next question is: is it likely for much large numbers?
Sadly, I don't think it's likely any time soon. OTOH, I personally think it's inevitable someday, in the far future.
What I see here are a bunch of assumptions that I'm not sure are appropriate.
1) "We are not wired to care about..."
Assumption that our behavior is somehow predetermined. The metaphor (wired) comes from a technology that post dates our development as human beings and is based on a form of logic that may or may not be indicative of what we are.
2) "our internal wiring is much more akin to killing the people"
Assumption that Hobbes ( a misinformed theoretician who had no first hand knowledge of primal peoples and based his argument on what happened during a period of breakdown of civilized behavior rather than on pre-civilizational behavior) was correct. In fact, the archeological record does not support this vision of a violent pre-history.
3) "... this has been shown to involve the free market."
Assumption that a very brief period in human history (that of supposed free markets) defines all of our experience further adulterated by a mistaken assumption that we have ever seen a "free market."
4)"Trade is the language that the world understands"
Assumption that current socio-cultural beliefs are the only ones possible.
Assumptions can be correct or incorrect when individual tribes are taken into consideration; the disagreement among philosophers over the years shows that there is no agreement on the way we interact. I know your position is that each of these assumptions is wrong based on terms and specifics. I am being much more general than you suppose. For example, I believe that there are incidents of tribal conflict with no justification other than the combatants come from different tribes and the belief that resorces and working together will not work. As to free markets, I don't need a total free market, (although I submit that it has never really been tried), but a partial free market will suffice to settle the lot of mankind-- when compared to a totalitarian form of government, even a fettered free market provides a better lifestyle -- I know, another assumption, but show a counter example that would be accepted amoung the worlds tribes.
The admonitions in religion tell us that civilization requires certain behaviors but the evidence of warfare and greed throughout history tells us that human behavior is highly varied. I will agree that not all human activity is as I described, and there are people who legitimately care about people all over the world. But the assumption that any group will change their behavior in order that some other group gets a break is hard to accept.
I am reminded of the student who is asked to give up some of their GPA so that other students will have the grades to continue at the school even though they may not be interested in working harder themselves.
Likewise is the Jewish parable about the man, whose wagon breaks down, spilling the load at your doorstep. Should you help him reload his wagon? Of course; When are you released from this obligation to help a stranger? When he stops working himself. What if the spilled wagon happens out of your sphere of control? How much do people give to charity? How much taxation is too much?
Your statement that you are not sure they are appropriate assumptions is OK. I simply state that my understanding (based on these assumptions) is that we are not going to all power down without one or another kind of incentive. One way this could be accomplished is with a totalitarian state. Of course a totalitarian state would lead to universal behavior – of most people—and if the leadership made the right decisions we could have worldwide conservation in this manner. My preference would be for market incentives (the other approach that I see with a chance to avoid the crash of civilization) to drive and direct our behavior (working within our individual tribes) to achieve a worldwide lifestyle that would be free of totalitarian controls.
Let me suggest another assumption that the world is in trouble and needs to find a solution that is free of major violence and loss of life. What assumption would you start with?
If you are talking about small bands bartering with their neighbors, then perhaps 'the free market' leads to 'helping each other'. But wrt the current meaning of free market, it works instead like this - I exploit you, you exploit him, he exploits the other guy, we all exploit each other, kumbaya.
As for 'falling back to more primitive and violent times' - seems to me no times are more violent than modern times.
Finally - what Shaman said...
Africa's burning charcoal problem
I think "government" is a first approximation to a solution.
Is it not the job we really require of our politicians to take the lead on these matters and regulate economic parameters such that the behaviour of all citizens is massaged towards the common good?
Is it not the corporate/profit/short-term motives that shape our current political system that are to blame? Perhaps (as Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest would have it) there is a growing groundswell of public opinion which does demand a political system that reflects the values of the common good, a sustainable path?
Until recently, this undercurrent was flowing beneath the spotlight of mainstream media and many "consumers" nurtured by the "system" were unaware of the arguments for change. I sense this is starting to permeate upwards...
As a similarly accused doom merchant, I have at least one small glimmer of hope. You say"
Fortunately, the limit will be the capacity of said coal plants, they are already running 24 hours a day so they can't use any MORE coal than they do now.
And meanwhile the economic meltdown will be taking away the ability, and the ened to build more.
Seems like we could end up looking to North Korea for the model, without China to prop it up.
All hail the financial meltdown! You are such an optimist. Not only that, some rich selfish bastard who has exploited the world will figure out the only thing that will store wealth long-term are wind turbines and concentrating solar power plants.
I agree. Even though we are sentient, we still seem to behave no different than any other animal: we use resources until we deplete them.
Sure, we discuss, but the 'actions speak louder than words' mean the Maya, Aztecs, Easter Island, Chernobyl, and now Japan... will continue to occur.
(Yeah, I muddled a lot of concepts together, but that is just how I feel right now.)
Pardon my nitpicking, but I would say orderly Power Down is an optimistic vision. Power Down will happen, sooner or later, and could get really nasty. "Power Down" as defined by Richard Heinberg truly is an optimistic vision and I'm afraid it's too late for that. But if we talk about "power down" as using fraction of energy we do today, then... It will happen and it remains to be seen how messy it will get. :-/
I agree that we have some coal reserves, but they aren't what they were thought to be. Hundreds of years are just pure fantasy and based on outdated [wishful] estimates. I think those numbers like "America has coal reserves for 200+ years" have been revised, at least by people not living the we-have-plenty-of-coal dream. :P
Resume: I don't think coal will save our collective butts. Aaaand I didn't even mention yet how climate change will cause flooding of coal mines as it happened in Australia... So no, coal might "help" a bit, but won't save the day and sooner or later we will drop it, too. I would give it max. 20 years, and this is my mega maxi overly optimistic WAG. :)
I prefer Monty Python's 'Always look on the bright side of life'.
Realistically, it can be said that Nuclear power replaced the burning of fuel oil for electricity from the mid-1970s onwards.
Had the planned developments (from the 1970s) gone ahead, then it would probably have replaced coal by now, and we'd have far fewer concerns around global warming. In my techno-perfect world, we'd have also retired the older designs now and replaced them with an assortment of breeders, IFRs, and thorium-based designs all with the maximum possible passive safety..
As far as reducing energy usage goes.. if, as another poster proposed, everyone reduced their usage to half European levels (one quarter US levels), we'd still need to use more fossil fuels than we do now. I think that source issues are far from minor.
Unfortunately, dreams of techno-perfect worlds rarely pan out.
That was me proposing those levels of reduction, and I was saying that this was just a start--the easy part that required little sacrifice. But sacrifice we must.
Why reducing to under 20% of current energy usage would require an increase in ff is beyond me.
Source issues are not minor, but alternatives become possible important players only when you do absolutely everything you can to reduce waste and unnecessary use. This is as true on the individual level as on the societal level. Only someone with a very large amount of cash to spend could produce all their electricity with solar panels on their roof without first greatly reducing their load.
The priorities for reduction are: coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas, large hydro; though we might want to speed up the decommissioning of the older nuke plants a bit given recent events.
Nuclear is under 10% of current energy use, coal a bit over 20.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_historical_energy_consumption.PNG
I don't see how you can say that ending nuclear power would require more ff use if we reduced energy use to 25% of current use or less. Perhaps I'm missing something?
"Unfortunately, dreams of
techno-perfect worlds rarely pan out."Fixed that for you.
I don't think dreams of post-techno or power-down hippie paradises are going to pan out either.
Don't worry. The post-techno naight mares will pan out. Some dreams do come true.
Maybe what he meant to say was that we need to reduce our fossil fuel use by a factor of 8. (can't remember the source for this, maybe 350.org.) So reducing energy use by 75% would still leave us using twice as much as we need to get down to.
He's using the universal 'we'; if each of the seven billion humans used 25% of the energy used by a current average American, and no nuclear power is used, then it would still require more fossil fuel than Earth uses now.
Chu said that U.S. reactors, which generate about 20% of the nation's electricity.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-steven-chu-20110316...
I was referring to a global context.
Whatever your plan is, you have to apply it to a world of 9 billion people as a sanity check. Which, as far as back of the envelope goes, you can -
(a) Take US oil consumption (20 mb/d) and divide by 4 (5 mb/d)
(b) Divide 9 billion by the us pop (9000 mil / 360 mil = 25)
(c) Multiply the results. 5 x 25 = 125 mb/day for the entire world to use oil at one quarter of US levels.
You can do the same with coal or natural gas to get equally implausable results. If arguing with a mad conucopian, just scale US levels to world population directly (=500 million barrels of oil per day).
But if your argument is 'reduce to 25% and then replace with alternative sources..' then fair enough, but first you need to show how it can be done. Especially without nuclear baseload electric..
We (the USA) could easily save oil and energy usage by simply running the public transit
we already have in major Metropolitan areas and restoring the transit services
cut in over 150 cities:
http://t4america.org/resources/transitfundingcrisis/
We could stop endless expansion of highways and seriously expand Hi speed rail.
Instead Republicans in New Jersey, Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin have axed major
Rail projects even though the Federal government was providing the majority of the
funds.
Moreover the US Congress supported by Obama is wasting $7500 for subsidies for
electric cars after they earlier wasted billions on "cash for clunkers" even while
public transit all over the US was decimated by the financial meltdown.
Many of these transit systems got caught up in the Wall Street "money for nothing"
schemes of borrowing against their future revenues to pay for current investments.
Then, as always, when they needed the money Wall Street demanded their tribute.
It is not an either/or situation between public transport and EVs. We must support public transport because we need to change the way we build our cities & towns.
That said, we are still stuck with the geography that we have built out. It is not energy efficient to bulldoze homes. So having an electrified way to use our existing suburbs is needed.
Suburbia is a mega-tragedy that keeps giving.
But you don't have to 'bulldoze homes' to move people into much denser configurations. Because this was not planned, the economy (and the mortgage fiasco) is doing much of this for us right now. Lots of houses are empty in the suburbs. People are moving in with friends and relatives.
Even more than public transit, we have to start living in situations where we can walk and bike to most places we need to get to. That means cities and towns become more dense, while suburbs stop gobbling up good farm land and start to resort back to the same.
It is possible that Republicans are responsible for every possible bad policy decision ever made with regard to energy and pollution in the United States.
And I know many who have made and continue to make horrible policy errors, but in the US the top of the list is not a Republican in my mind it
would be a Democrat from Michigan, Representative Dingell who chaired both the Commerce and Energy committees and exercised so much power
protecting the auto industry and all its allies from highway construction, oil companies to the power companies for so many years that it beggars the mind. Supported
by every democrat executive for decades.
Thankfully, the O'bama administration arranged his removal two years ago, unwinding his legacy will take decades, and it will take Democrats
to give up their "shovel ready" projects and Republicans. I felt truly blessed when my democratic governor, Ed Rendell spent 5% of of the shovel
ready money on mass transit, the man was a virtual Moses leading us out of bondage from the automobile, in 8 years, I don't believe he ever
used Amtrak between Philly and Harrisburg, despite a great line, a great philly station, and a harrisburg station 4 blocks from his office.
And here's a logical extension of your point, with a riff on Gail the Actuary:
http://www.deathbycar.info/2011/03/nuclear-cars/
"even while public transit all over the US was decimated by the financial meltdown."
If public transit was feasible, as in able to pay its operating costs, it would not have been decimated. Now that there are so few huge factories left, there are even fewer mass destinations to run hundreds or thousands of people to and from.
It just occurred to me that were I work the shift operator's start at 6:30, the maintenance staff at 7, and admin/professionals at 7:30. Operator's work 12 hour rotating shifts, maintenance is on 4/10's with OT on Friday if they are behind (and they always are) and admin is on 5-8's and are forbidden to even mention 4-10s.
We can't even get one chemical plant organized.
You really don't seem to live in the current political realities. Go ahead and run on that platform . . . you'll be lucky if you get close to 1% of the vote.
And I agree that we need to be much more energy efficient.
I agree that politics are not going the right direction, by a long shot.
But political 'realities' can change quite drastically and suddenly, as we see now with most countries re-evaluating their use of nuclear.
What do not change suddenly are real realities--CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the half-life of cesium, ocean acidification, destabilization of seabed methane in the ESAS...
Eventually the real realities will make our puny political 'realities' either take notice or vanish completely.
The point I was making was that nukes are not need to have a working society and that in theory the US could drastically reduce energy use while maintaining survivable and even healthier lifestyles.
Again, I agree with much you say. But I think the public is just won't see the same reality that you do. When I think about climate change, I can just turn to evolution as an example of how irrational the public is. We have 200 years of good science, literally tons of fossil evidence, and mind-blowing molecular biology genetic evidence . . . but the majority of the USA still doesn't believe in evolution. And that is something that happened in the PAST . . . you want people to believe you inconvenient scientific projection.
I think it may take a foot of seawater rise before we take climate change seriously . . . and by then it may be too late. :-(
Call me a pessimist if you will but I think I'm just being a realist. I'm very discouraged and I think we are set of decades of struggle. And I think the declining empire of the USA will be a dangerous agent.
Why should I be concerned with this water that's up around my knees? It's all just a part of the natural warming and cooling of the planet. Next year the sun will dim some (sorry) and it will all go back to normal.
I would "third" that, and add that any set of representatives will inherently serve BAU, unless moved by dire circumstances. There's no such thing as dire circumstances while the grocery store shelves are still stocked and the banks are all open for business.
Its worth adding that no social movement or cultural paradigm shift ever began with a political platform. Darwin still rules on the culture front, on whatever scale you want, and anyone looking for DC to give us survivable or healthy lifestyles is just waiting to get "replaced", as history tends to do to cultures that have run their course and exhausted their resources.
You couldn't ever realistically expect to get even one tenth of one percent, overall.
It would be impossible to even get on the ballot in most jurisdictions.
I have supported, and will continue to support nuclear ppower generation, for two reasons, as a realist.
One is that it has been politically feasible to have it.
Arguments about public policy are only of academic interest unless the options under discussion have at least a very slim chance of actually being put into effect.
Talking about powering down our society, voluntarily, to a quarter of current energy usage, is tantamount to a pipe dream; absolutely nothing, other than an utter lack of anything left to burn or to split , will suffice to accomplish such a goal.
The other reason I will continue to support nukes is that as dangerous as they obviously are, they in my estimation are still safer by a long shot than any politically feasible real world alternative.
Over the last few years I have devoted a great deal of time and energy to the studuy of the overshoot problem; I believe I have put more than enough into this effort to have earned a masters at most universities.
My conclusion is that we have a slim but significant real world shot at avoiding an outright collapse of modern industrial civilization in the not so distant future.
Success will depend on threading the maze of physically possible solutions, picking out the ones that are ALSO politically possible.
Nuclear energy is obviously physically possible on the grand scale; and until the last few days , it has been politically possible.
That unfortunately may have changed, if not permanently, then at least for a decade or more in the West.
( I don't expect the Chinese or the Indians or anybody else with thier back to the energy wall and the ability to construct nukes to give them up.)
My thoughts are that nukes are a necessary but dangerous bridge technology that might just turn out to be the difference between skinnying thru the coming energy bottleneck and emerging more or less as a whole, coherent, viable society, rather than descending into the utter chaos of unrestricted energy wars and social collapse.
A fleet of nukes, properly constructed, located, and regulated, could keep the lights and water on in most cities after the fossil fuel sxxt hits the fan, for a decade or more, maybe for three decades or even four.
That might be the difference between powering down gradually9 once reality has smacked Joe and Suzy Sixplack upside the head with a brick or two each) and powering down catastrophically.
I don't want Joe looking for me with a baseball bat or a pistol trying to get some food for his kids; and I don't want his wife standing on a street corner in skimpy clothes for the same reason.
We have learned a whole hell of a lot about engineering and political shortcuts in the last week.
I have often said here that the tendency of people to go along to get along is a force at least as powerful, in its own way, as the exponential function.
Obviously many thousands of people who knew better, if they were minimally professionally competent, kept thier mouths shut and went along when the plants in Japan were built right on the edge of the water.
All of them should have thier professional liscences lifted if they are still working, and thier assets siezed, in the interests of justice and better behaved industrial management in the future.
Let us make useful hay out of these expensive lessons, not forgetting the overall costs of more coal, which I expect will within a very few years start climbing in price in a fashion similar to the price of oil over the last decade.
A country with plenty of nukes but no fossil fuels has a much reduced reason to go to war in search of energy resources.
In the last analysis, safety is a relative , rather than an absolute concept.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_km0u64OLng
But really, political 'reality' is what you make of it, and it can change drastically and very quickly.
It was politically unrealistic to expect the iron curtain to crumble without a major war, but it did.
It was politically unrealistic to expect that SA apartheid would ever fall, but it did.
It was politically unrealistic to expect that non-violent protest would overturn Mubarak, but it did.
...
Nothing can change more quickly than politics. I don't pretend to know for sure what the future holds. Others seem to think that they do have a clear view of what is and what is not politically possible. That is where we have to agree to disagree. (And of course you and everyone reading these posts are part of the 'politics' we are speaking of--politics is you and I.)
Politics is the critical lever for change. With regard to "power-down", we shouldn't think of power as energy, but of political power.
If we can power down big government, on a state level every state can redefine its own priorities and follow its own leads, e.g. on energy, education.
A first step would be for the states to re-claim their sovereignty, bring down federal structures, mitigate the power of a suffocating federal bureaucracy.
As things stand now, power is too concentrated and too easily influenced by predatory lobbyists, leading to bad decisions that impact everybody in the nation.
Diminish the reaches of political incompetence, grow some variety, loosen the ties that suffocate diversity, end the fed.
Of course politics can change quickly. The problem is that by the time they change it will be too late.
Was it Churchill who said, "Americans always do the right thing, after every other avenue is exhausted." or some such thing.
Yes, if we ever come remotely to our senses, it will almost certainly be too late. It is likely too late already.
Very much with you on this one. Nuclear could be the mitigating factor on depletion.
It's possible that Fukushima will make nuclear politically unacceptable until it is far to late to do any good, which I think brings the doomer scenario very much closer to reality. It's possible Fukushima will cause billions of deaths as the resource wars kick off in earnest.
I didn't go quite that far.
My personal rule of thumb is that every death as a consequence of the japanese reactor problems will result in a million extra deaths as mitigation/transformation from fossil fuel decline is reduced.
I'd say policies and the lack of progress to date have locked in a few hundred million deaths in the medium term. To this could add a few tens more for this event; then depending on how we actually address the FF decline issue, once everyone realises the reality, will make the difference between a few hundred million long-term deaths, and a few billion.
Yair...OFM I normaly wouldn't comment on this one as I am completely out of my depth but but your paragraph below makes perfect sense to me...with accent on PROPERLY CONSTRUCTED
In my ignorance I had always thought reactors, their ancilliary piping and controls were housed within a steel and concrete structure that was pretty much impervious to attack.
It seems that a 206 loaded up with half a ton ampho could be dived down through the roof of those structures causing similar problems to what is happening in Japan at the moment...worse probably as the reactor would be up and running. Is that fair comment...anyone?
Seems fair to me.
Mostly, we don't need more energy. We have made a mess of the place with the jackpot of energy that fell into our lap with ff and nukes.
It is time to scale the human project way, way back, and perhaps let some of the rest of creation have a little breathing room.
That's it. Thanks doh for being an ongoing presence in these threads.
And yes, attacking reactors is unfortunately do-able by adversaries in a number of plausible futures, and it wouldn't take a jet strike like Israel did. (I idly wonder if, having made the strike, Ilian Ramon broadcast Torah! Torah! Torah!, but that's so insensitive on so many levels).
I don't disagree with OFM's point, I'm just focusing more on the longer term & other species, per usual. In most likely futures, it will be a lot better to live near a nuke plant - until is isn't. For the first 50 years, it might be an island of comparitive wonderfulness; but after the rods boil away in place, the following hundreds of years, less so.
Again, the real victims aren't the Japanese, or our economy, or anyone visible. It's the billions - trillions? - of future people whose chance at existence we're foreclosing now, in real time.
Thanks, green.
Maybe you can take it from here, since other responsibilities call me hence?
The untold suffering and snuffing out of so much life, human and non, by the empty and unblessed rapaciousness of our heavy-footedness is truly beyond imagining.
Be well and do good work.
We do need more energy, especially electricity. Abundant cheap, clean energy, which nuclear provides, allows us to act in a much more environmentally friendly way.
An American's lifetime of energy consumption, including his parts of all the energy consumption of the US society, can be extracted from about half a cup of thorium. That would be bad why, exactly?
Don't we need to do calculations on available quantities of Thorium, EROI, roll-out time, embodied energy, finance etc. to answer that? I don't think the answer would be brief.
The available quantities of thorium and the EROI of the fuel is no problem. The energy density is a 100 times higher than that of uranium as used in traditional reactors, and the abundance of thorium in the Earth's crust is four times that of uranium.
The roll-out time is long since the thorium fuel cycle needs a bit more R&D to produce a marketable plant, and when there is such a plant, we may need a few generations to get it optimized.
The embodied energy of imports may add to the US citizens energy requirements, so let's say a full cup of thorium per lifetime then. It doesn't matter. It's nothing.
Finance - well, I'll never agree with some of the debt-doomers here, so I think I won't dwell on that. Anyhow, liquid thorium reactors seems very promising in a cost perspective. There are many reasons why this tech should be cheaper than the conventional reactors.
Low paying jobs, high unemployment, stagflation and unnecessary wars brought about by outsourcing jobs to foreign countries, high energy prices and financial shenanigans will do the job. I submit there is an effective plan in action to destroy the American way-of-life. The words written on the pink slip in invisible ink: you have been selected by the capitalist system for elimination.
What we need are leaders who say what is right and live with the consequences good and bad. We need someone to play the parent role and tell us to eat our vegetables and not just ice cream. I am a Democrat, so I tend to look to the Democrats to take on this role. Unfortunately, as I see it, the Republicans have no scruples ( in general ) and the Democrats have no balls ( in general ). Clinton had approval-needing issues and Obama is a rational, conciliatory, slow change, kind of guy. We need someone with some balls to stand up and tell us forcefully that we need to wake up. What's the worse that could happen? They might lose the next election. Big deal. At least they tried.
Hmmm, what's the worst that could happen?
A orporation hires an assassin who successfully kills the president and vice-president placing the opposite party in power (think Sarah Palin) and causing the country to descend into civil war controlled by a corrupt military dictatorship. Intellectuals, scientists, engineers, atheists, environmentalists and peak oilers are rounded up and placed into forced labor camps or killed.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is next in line after the VP.
The death of the president and VP would make Republican John Boehner President of the U.S.
Dave
We had one: Jimmy Carter. Think where this country would be now if following Presidents had followed his policies of energy conservation and energy independence.
The American people refused to re-elect him and following Presidents have gone in opposite directions.
As has been pointed out here many times, the basic structure of the U.S., both physically and economically, means that reducing this so-called "waste" will cut into the economic activity early on and thus will further exacerbate unemployment. So I for one don't think your assertion holds water ("relatively little pain").
We are in a buffer zone right now. The system is still mostly "working" — checks are still being cut so the 20% unemployment that is somewhat cushioned by the various safety nets hasn't ripped through the nets quite yet.
That is yet to come.
The economy will not, in my view, gradually become simpler. It will become simpler in a sort of phase-change. It may still take five years before the unravelling slows and new stasis is reached but looking back that will look very "sudden."
In other words, we are some amount of time before October 1929 — we just don't know by how much.
Here are some fundamental facts to consider for the USA to quickly reduce our oil and
energy usage via public transit and Rail:
1)Transportation is 70% of US oil usage primarily for cars and trucks
2)When gas prices passed $4 per gallon in 2008 public transit ridership increased
by 10% UNTIL ironically public transit buses and trains were cut due to demands to
pay off Wall Street, declining local taxes and increased diesel prices
3)According to the Federal Highway Administration itself 79% of the US currently lives
in urbanized areas
Major public transit systems which already exist and already paid for only run regular transit services solely for commuters. Weekend service is abysmal to non-existent, non-peak hour service is abysmal to non-existent, bus schedules versus rail schedules frequently
run with no coordination, there are no connections to the last mile.
For example the suburban Corporate office park where I work is within 3.5 miles of
one train line and 4 miles from another in New Jersey.
Just running a shuttle to the Corporate offices between these train stations would
enable hundreds of people to take public transit to work.
But there is no shuttle, instead I get rides from coworkers to the train station.
If I miss the 5:06 PM train the next train is not until 8:30 PM!!
This in a major wealthy enclave, historically a home to wealthy Wall Street and NYC
paragons who would probably love to take the train to New York City for plays, shows,
concerts and probably also to work with decent service.
But they simply refuse to run the trains...
In those major metropolitan areas which have transit, services have been cut
while road expansion and auto subsidies via "cash for clunkers" and the $7500 electric
car subsidy continue...
The US has the resources IF we decide to use them...
Perhaps we don't know exactly, but by now I think you can move your arrow a bit closer tot he next step down. We may be in the early phases of it right now.
But really, I was talking about how Americans could be living--have you ever been to Europe or Costa Rica. People lead quite comfortable lives there generally. We could too, live comfortable lives on a fraction of the energy we use now, that is. I will grant you that getting there could be a bit of a bumpy ride. But a bumpy ride is in the cards no matter what path we take, at this point.
I live quite close to the 'one earth' level from www.myfootprint.org.
If I can do it, most others can, too. As to work, people can be put to work doing all manner of relatively low-energy, important work. And much more work can be made into part time work so it can be spread further through the population. There are all sorts of simple strategies for easing into a powerdown (not perhaps 'so soft it is like falling into a big downy pillow,' perhaps, but not North Korea, either).
But, yes, we seem to be going the opposite direction right now politically.
So, yes, contraction is most likely to come the painful way, through economic dislocation with lots of pain and gnashing of teeth. But it needn't have been that way.
dohboi - you beat me to the move the arrow bit...
And I agree with the rest of your post, too. All too sadly.
Ok Ghandi dohboi. I used 30 gallons of Satan's gas, 180 KwH of devil power, and 1900 gallons of fresh aquifer depleting water last month. Granted there is much hidden in there but that is easy to get to. I ask you, do you know what YOU used?
We are all tightly in the grip of the dark one, but quantification is a bit tricky for me since I live with others who use different quantities of the above. I can say that I walk almost everywhere, take very short showers, and keep the house below 60 when I'm here alone.
But all of us living in the US benefit from all sorts of infrastructure that takes enormous quantities of ff to build and maintain. There's no getting around that.
Your family totals may beat mine. You are allowed to total and divide for an average.
aangel - time to update that graphic. Seems more to me that we are now on the edge of that second step down. That arrow needs some adjustment...
And I say that even though I disagree somewhat that reducing waste will cut into economic activity. Building & retrofitting to PassivHaus and just plain ol' passive solar (as I've done twice now), building out mass transit, maxing out distributed wind/solar etc... would not only offset the loss of jobs in the FF, auto and related industries, but keep the $$ in the US, instead of exporting them to where ever.
But no, we won't do those things. And here's another prediction. The anti-nuke knee jerk reaction to Fukushima will wear off all too quickly, and we will be back to where we are today soon enough - which is at least considering the plans for the plants that provide the electricity we 'need' to power our dryers so we don't have to hang our clothes out in the sun; to run our dishwashers which we could not possibly do ourselves; to heat our f&%$ing water 'cuz lord knows, the sun don't shine often enough to do it for us; to run our GD electronic toys and gizmos, iPODS, iPADS, iPIDs whatever the F they all are. We are an insane culture to do what we do. And we'll keep on doing it for just that reason.
Sorry /rant.
Agreed. But do I put it near the big step down or just the little one before it...
I believe any powering down we do will/would be counter balanced by India and/or China. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but I have no illusions of it slowing demand in general.
Sadly and tragically, Chindia is about to crash.
Both have severe problems with water and food that is far more serious than (though not completely unrelated to) their energy problems.
These countries have lived for millennia on non-ff, non-nuclear sources of energy and the practices that make this possible are still deeply ingrained in their cultures. They will simply revert to traditional patterns and won't miss all the bright lights much.
But they will feel deeply the crunch of the end of food and water. The ~2.55 billion people they have between them, depletion of aquifers and gw driven droughts and floods are about to make life very difficult.
One of the upsides to the forthcoming downward trajectory in levels of human consumption is the ease with which the "developing" world will adapt, by comparison to the profligate west. Another is the possibility of planetary salvation.
Just to throw a little more cold water on our energy future in the USA, I live in Wyoming, the "Energy State." A couple of years back an energy futures conference was held at Jackson Hole, attended by a large herd of fossil fuel shills as well as luminaries from the global warming scientific community. The Keynote speech was given by Wyoming's governor Frudenthal, a Democrat in a neanderthal reactionary state. I asked from the audience, "Governor, If the 12 billion dollar Apollo-equivalent program to develop coal carbon capture that you have called for were funded tomorrow, how long would it take to bring on line the capacity to capture 50% of the present emissions from coal plants?" His answer---"I have no Idea." How about that-- an honest politician!
So what we are going to do is continue to burn Wyoming brown coal in 1940's pulverized wigwam burners until the open pit mines become too deep to economically mine it.
The real growth industry will be NG, largely extracted from shale deposits through horizontal drilling enhanced by fracking. There are a whole array of problems associated with this choice, discussed at length in this site and elsewhere. What is often ignored is the questionable validity of the claim that a NG energy system will result in reduced greenhouse emissions. Consider the differences in the distribution chain of a transportation system based upon centralized power plants (be they coal or nuclear) electric transmission lines, and electric vehicles vs a NG- internal combustion engine transportation system. NG may burn cleaner than coal or oil, but in its unburned form it is a potent greenhouse gas. From the wellhead to the engine there are millions of points of potential leakage starting with the drilling process and proceeding down the pipelines to the connect and disconnect operation every time a vehicle is re-fueled. But of course this is the kind of analysis that will never be taken into account when the decision to adopt NG as the national road to supposed energy independence is taken.
Geez. I was born and raised in Wyoming. I love my great state! It was sad to see Dave leave office. He is a good man.He is now on the board of Arch Coal, I believe. I've seen large herds of wildlife and cattle, but never observed herds of shills or scientific luminaries.Interesting.Over the course of my 56 years here, I was born and raised in Goshen county, I've met and worked with my fair share of curmudgeons, hard-nosed, mostly hard working people. Some quite brilliant, some not so much.While there are exceptions, most were quite independent yet reasonable. My experience tells me we are not inhabited by neanderthals and reactionaries, but mostly unassuming hard working people.I like my state with its neanderthals and all. I will do nothing to dispel that rumor!
I can't say that I am pro nuclear as that leaves a bad taste in my mouth as I used to be part of a group which opposed nuclear power. Nuclear priesthood and all that. Well, as it turns out we can't trust the nuclear priests any more than the catholic priests.
All that aside, I have seen nuclear as a necessary evil in the last several years and have concluded that the foregone CO2 justifies the risks. There is damage to human beings and the ecology either way but on balance the consequences of nuclear seem less severe even assuming that there will be nuclear accidents.
I still think that the situation in Japan has to be put in the obvious context that they chose to build multiple reactors in an extreme earthquake/tsunami zone. Obviously, the miscalculated. It would also be worth knowing whether they they took calculated risks or simply ignored certain risks.
Clearly, we don't want to build any more reactors in high earthquake/tsunami zones. Beyond that, a thorough review of backup procedures are in order. Whether or not that is sufficient for politicians and the public seems doubtful at this point.
This will be an opportunity for the coal companies to tell people to shut the hell up about CO2. They will ratchet up their campaign to tell us it is safe. They will probably be successful which makes me sick.
I agree that we should not put nuclear reactors anywhere near places that have had or are likely to have earthquakes/shift in tectonic plates.
Now please help me find such places in the US or Europe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_plate_motion_2008-04-17.jpg
The Canadian Shield is a very old, very stable core of the North American continent. There is an earthquake zone just to the south along the St Lawrence river. North of that you have a very stable continental platform of billion year-old rocks.
Great, so put all the nukes up in Canada. Right next to the tar sands moonscape.
Note, though, that quakes are only one of any number of unexpected (or barely suspected) surprises that can befall a nuclear plant.
The larger point is not that if you find a place with no probable quakes you are safe. Every place has surprises. And those surprises will increase as the climate destabilizes.
my 2 cents given a 1000 years and a 1000 plants with human error alone I bet something bad will happen... heck we didn't even make 50 years.. and we had 2... and maybe the ones in japan will be partially human error or more... wind will look cheap... tmi cost nearly a billion to clean... tmi-2 is a permanent storage facility now... who picks up the tab to watch it forever... how cheap is that... odds are something is going to go wrong... given enough time and enough of them..
p
Of course the Fukushima problems are human.
1) Decision to build to codes for an 8.2 magnitude quake rather than a 9.0 was human; (but as it turns out, the structures actually survived)
2) Decision to build on the coast where a tsunami could impact the plant was human;
3) Decision to place the backup generators at a level where they would be impacted by a tsunami was a human decision;
4) Decision to store spent fuel rods awaiting transport in a building right next to the reactors was a human decision
And that's just before the quake occurs. Who knows what will come out in the wash about responses post quake. But all of these decisions were made based on a jumble of human reason and emotion, things including risk management, cost benefits, politics, cost-cutting, corruption, and more.
This is the single strongest argument against nuclear energy. Not matter how theoretically safe the technology, humans have to run it and we are far from "theoretically safe."
methodology...walk and carry what we can on our backs, any other decision is a risk and strong argument not to proceed?
there are no references to support the opinion
living required human decisions; but human decisions must take into account every possibility even the unknown! [perfect safety, no possible risk of any kind whatsoever for evermore into the future!]
is this possible?
the argument is defective and untenable
Not sure where you're going with this tack.
My argument was simply against centralized complexity, not against any human decisions.
The 9.0 quake was offshore but would IMHO probably have been less at Fukushima, so maybe even within the 8.2 limit?
I have read that the electrical switchgear was in the basement, so not a good location for equipment anywhere there can be lots of water.
Building close together not good, but often done (e.g. see Buncefield oil storage depot) so damage from first impacts others.
The power station is cut into "cliffs" some 30m high, so it does not seem impossible to have situated the backup diesel generating equipment on top of these cliffs together with lots of water.
Aeroplanes crash once in a while too. Is that the "single strongest argument against flight"?
Why should nuclear be 100% safe? It's totally worth a meltdown or two per generation. All alternatives are worse.
You've hit on an important point which is often missed, or at least conveniently forgotten, by the pro-nuclear lobby. As the number of nuclear reactors increases, so does the likelihood of a serious accident. In fact, given that we have already had a few serious incidents, it is fair to say that increasing the number of reactors will increase the number of serious nuclear incidents. It's a matter of statistics.
Nuclear safety requires so many things to go right, including a stable non-collapsing society, that it seems sheer madness to advocate new nuclear build. However, most people don't acknowledge that societal collapse is a significant risk, so I doubt we'll see sensible decisions on this though, hopefully, the fear of a public backlash will delay new build long enough to allow societies to collapse without that additional risk.
Increasing the number of reactors will increase the rate of debugging, and also may speed the replacement of older designs.
Nuclear decrease the risk of societal collapse. With real societal collapse, all is lost and nothing matters anyway.
Societal collapse with disintegrating nuclear plants will be much worse than societal collapse without.
I don't agree. The suffering from disintegrating nukes will hardly be noticable among all the other suffering in the collapse.
Wiki is not the most reliable source. Try a peer reviewed journal articles or reliable web sites like the NRC, or IAEA.
Sorry, just grabbing something fast to give a ballpark figure. Are you saying that these figures are way off? Please do post better info, if you have it.
Three Mile Island isn't near any highly tectonically active zones.
That didn't make it meltdown proof.
These things have to be human error proof.
Exackatickly HOW does one accomplish THAT?
Counting the one remaining operational reactor at TMI, I've got nine operational reactors within about a 65 mile radius of my home.
Jab,
There are ways to make things human error proof. The problem is that costs soar when this is done, and sooner or later somewone questions the expense and we end up in a negotiation where safety and risk are matched against reliabile production and benefit.
If we continue to learn when we encounter issues and concerns such as this then better systems will be developed. Note that the automobile did not spring from H. Ford's assembly line with energy absorbing structural elements, air bags, and seat belts. They were added in the course of time. I expect the same thing to happen with other human activities. What level hurricane is New Orleans being designed for today? How high a sea barrier will Japan place around the remaining reactors built near the coast? Will Diablo Canyon (on the California coastline) be provided with a tidal wave proof sea wall? How should back up systems for power and cooling be site located? Just a few things that will be applied in the coming months to further reduce risk to other reactors.
Will human greed and human error be problems in the future? Of course. Humans can be reliably expected to make a critical mistake in one out of one-hundred critical tasks. This means that back up systems must be available, and some of them must be non human controlled. But we can do this, and we have done it in countless modern high risk situations. (Ask how many hydraulic systems are available to the pilot of a commercial airliner?)
The answer is not to give up on a technology, but to upgrade and correct faulty analysis when it is discovered. We do it with everything, why not potential sources of radiation as well?
Ken
"There are ways to make things human error proof."
Other than human procreation (and some might even argue that one) what do you know of that has been made error proof?
That is relative, no? My parents lived and died with error proof airplane and transportation systems for example. Nature got them. Nature trumps even error.
Error free is not the same as error proof.
Who's is the proven?
You make things proof against human error by continuous improvement: the fire-safety codes are written in ashes, best practice at work is written in blood, and the codes for running nuclear reactors safely are written in cesium.
They will probably say CCS is safe. At least in the EU.
Good point. Also not in places that have dicey governments, because some of the by products of fission can be given to terrorists or used to make bombs. Also not in places where there may be a civil war. And please not in a country that may become a target of terrorist attacks by men piloting an Airbus A380 or a giant Antonov. And not in a country that may make bad decisions about the nuke plant, you know, like locating it stupidly, or not maintaining it.
I'm sure if we adhere to those caveats, we'll be fine.
Really, this comment could go in anywhere, so don't take this personally T, but why oh why is nuclear (or coal) a necessary evil? We get by quite well on less than 3kWh/day, which is about an order of magnitude less than the average American, and we have plans to halve that within the year. We live in central VA, and our three neighbors here in the Blue Ridge live by choice - golly - without electricity. They use a tiny bit off neighbors for a shared freezer and some battery charging to run radios & the like. It is NOT NECESSARY to have every electronic doo-dad, gadget and applicance to live a comfortable life. So it is not necessary to choose between nuclear meltdown and CO2 meltdown of a different sort. I realize that the capitalist/corporatist/consumer meme has so swallowed this global culture that we will completely pursue the use of those gadgets at exactly those costs, and we will doom the planet to the consequences. But it is NOT necessary.
Reading a web board on a computer "isn't necessary" either. Strangely, some people would rather not regress back to such a time before electronics and technology made the world around us more accessible and smaller.
Well said. It's depressing that so many forums, populated by people who appear to understand limits, are littered with comments that are clearly from minds entrenched in the modern consumer high tech world, with little thought that there are other ways of getting along on this planet.
Well done with the 3kWh (soon to be 1.5 kWh) per day home. I wish I had a family more on board with limits that could support an effort to get down to those levels (at about 14kWh per day, at the moment).
It's a practical/political question.
It will be much easier to persuade people to build a whole mess of wind turbines than it will be to get them to dramatically reduce consumption.
In the long run, building the wind turbines will work just as well.
Humans cannot make any decisions without some emotional involvement--what would motivate you to bother deciding?
Emotions are not our enemy. Pretense of 'rationality' that is really just a cover for doing whatever serves the powerful is much more dangerous.
Emotional revulsion in the face of what we are witnessing is not necessarily non-rational.
How much emotion do you feel on a daily basis regarding the almost one million casualties per year from automobile accidents?
The problem is that we are not rational in our assessment of risks. We react emotionally to point-source incidents (plane crashes, industrial disasters) but do not react emotionally to much more dangerous risks that are spread out over time (auto accidents, air pollution fatalities, climate change).
The probable reaction to this disaster will be to replace nuclear, which produces rare but emotionally charged incidents, with coal, which produces a constant stream of pollution and fatalities spread over time.
"Over time" is precisely the problem!
(1) In 50, 500, 5,000, 50,000 years, future humans (assuming there are any) won't have to worry about our coal dust, but they WILL still have spent fuel rods around emitting hazardous levels of radioactivity.
(2) If we extrapolate the past century's proliferation of nuclear power forward 500, 1000, 5000 years, how much is too much? Too often 'temporary' measures become entrenched.
Funny; I think the exact opposite: In 100 000 years, our used nuke rods will no longer be a problem, but it will take 10 000 000 years or more for evolution to replace all species we make extinct by burning carbon.
"Over time" is precisely the problem!
(1) In 50, 500, 5,000, 50,000 years, future humans (assuming there are any) won't have to worry about our coal dust, but they WILL still have spent fuel rods around emitting hazardous levels of radioactivity.
You are assuming we will only build new nuclear plants based on 40-50 year-old obsolete designs. Gen-IV plants can actually *burn* long-lived radioactive waste produced by Gen-I & II plants, resulting in far less waste with a much shorter half-life (1-2 centuries).
Doing our best to not leave a the earth a desolate, polluted moonscape and driving other species to extinction is really the bigger problem, not what to do with spent fuel rods. Too bad we're not doing anything about that either.
Gen IV (so called) nuclear reactors would still have uranium fission.
Uranium fission creates hundreds of radioactive isotopes regardless of the design of the cooling systems and reactor configuration.
Some radioisotopes are short lived, some are not. All fissioning creates strontium-90 and cesium-137, which are incompatible with life.
To date, Chernobyl was the worst industrial accident ever, with conservative estimates of a million fatalities in the subsequent years, if you look at the health literature and not pronouncements of nuclear industry promoters. But the real damage is genetic since all future generations of all species will be descended from the individuals alive today.
Entropy is not a good idea, it is the law. How will the future "nuclear babysitters" guard the nuclear war's worth of high level nuke waste after the oil, coal and gas are all gone? Madness.
Nuclear power looks likely to accelerate collapse in Japan if the reactor cores are not covered up before they leak much more.
There's never before been multiple meltdowns plus an exposed high level nuclear waste fuel pool. We are in uncharted territory.
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http://www.tmia.com/taxonomy/term/12
Three Mile Island Alert
Several studies found elevated cancer rates near Three Mile Island
A Chronology of Health Problems Related to Three Mile Island
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO14.html
People Died at Three Mile Island
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO13.html
Animals Died at Three Mile Island
http://www.ratical.com/radiation/Chernobyl/
Chernobyl:
Understanding Some of the True Costs of Nuclear Technology
We list here a set of files pertaining to Chernobyl, a town's name that, like Bhopal, has come to represent the epidome of man's inappropriate behavior based only on the intellect's capacity to ask, "Is it possible?" If we are to survive as a species, and be the true conservators of this place as our response abilities endow us with, we MUSTtemper the intellect's youthful inexperience with the age-old instinctual and intuitive wisdom that always asks "Is it appropriate?" when considering any activity. Chernobyl is the clearest single message to humanity that Nuclear Technology is not an appropriate exercise of human intelligence. It is omnicidal.
Chernobyl's Accident: Path and Extension of the Radioactive Cloud
This is a graphic reconstruction of the path of the first 14 days of the 1986 Chernobyl radioactive plume. It was created by the French Government's official agency on radiation and nuclear matters, the INSTITUT DE RADIOPROTECTION ET SÛRETÉ NUCLÉAIRE (IRSN). (Only the entry point - Path and extension of the radioactive cloud - is in English. At present (14 Mar 2011), the text content and details are available only in French. IRSN is currently working on a new international website.)
What Next for the WHO and IAEA? Chernobyl, 25 Years Later
By Dr. Janette D. Sherman, MD, Counterpunch, 4 March 2011
Immediately after the catastrophe, release of information was limited, and there was a delay in collecting data. WHO, supported by governments worldwide could have been pro-active and led the way to provide readily accessible information, but did not. These omissions resulted in several effects: limited monitoring of fallout levels, delays in getting stable potassium iodide to people, lack of care for many, and delay in prevention of contamination of the food supply. . . .
Given that thyroid diseases caused such a toll, Chernobyl has shown that nuclear societies – notable Japan, France, India, China, the United States, and Germany – must distribute stable potassium iodide (KI) before an accident, because it must be used within the first 24 hours.
Key to understanding effects from nuclear fallout is the difference between external and internal radiation. While external radiation, as from x-rays, neutron, gamma and cosmic rays can harm and kill, internal radiation (alpha and beta particles) when absorbed by ingestion and inhalation become embedded in tissues and releases damaging energy in direct contact with tissues and cells, often for the lifetime of the person, animal or plant.
Book Review: Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment,
by Dr. Rosalie Bertell, February 12, 2010
The authors systematically explain the secrecy conditions imposed by the government, the failure of technocrats to collect data on the number and distribution of all of the radionuclides of major concern, and the restrictions placed on physicians against calling any medical findings radiation related unless the patient had been a certified “acute radiation sickness” patient during the disaster, thus assuring that only 1% of injuries would be so reported.
Chernobyl Radiation Killed Nearly One Million People: New Book,
by Environmental News Service, April 26, 2010
Drawing upon extensive data, the authors estimate the number of deaths worldwide due to Chernobyl fallout from 1986 through 2004 was 985,000, a number that has since increased. . . .
Yablokov and his co-authors find that radioactive emissions from the stricken reactor, once believed to be 50 million curies, may have been as great as 10 billion curies, or 200 times greater than the initial estimate, and hundreds of times larger than the fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . .
About 550 million Europeans, and 150 to 230 million others in the Northern Hemisphere received notable contamination. Fallout reached the United States and Canada nine days after the disaster. . . .
The authors of the study say not enough attention has been paid to Eastern European research studies on the effects of Chernobyl at a time when corporations in several nations, including the United States, are attempting to build more nuclear reactors and to extend the years of operation of aging reactors.
The authors said in a statement, "Official discussions from the International Atomic Energy Agency and associated United Nations' agencies (e.g. the Chernobyl Forum reports) have largely downplayed or ignored many of the findings reported in the Eastern European scientific literature and consequently have erred by not including these assessments."
Belarus brought to its knees by `invisible enemy', April 26, 2001
Fifteen years after Chernobyl, the world has moved on. But for Belarus the problems are only beginning. Thyroid cancer rates have risen by 2,400 per cent since the explosion . . . It is the country of Belarus which has suffered, and continues to suffer, most from the disaster: 70 per cent of the radiation has fallen on its land and people. . . . Medical research has shown that radioactive elements (primarily caesium 137 and iodine 131) cross the placental barrier from mother to foetus, contaminating each new generation. Faced with soaring levels of infertility and genetic changes, the gene pool of the Belarussian people is now under threat.
Fortunately, the gen4 waste is compact and easy to keep separated from the biosphere. The isotopes you mention has a half-life of 30 years.
Actually, your claim is false. Bhopal was the worst - wikipedia says so in the first sentence, so it has to be true. Well, jokes aside, Chernobyl may cause at most 10,000 excess deaths - which corresponds to about three days of global traffic accidents. Your extreme figures may well be from "health literature", but in that case from less reputable outliers. Your TMI links are hogwash. It has been established there were no health effects.
First, we have always been radioactive and have always lived in radioactive environments. Second, genetic damage tend to disappear eventually due to a thing called "evolution". Third, claims of radiation related genetic damage is typically false or extremely overblown.
Your view on this is as well founded and reasonable as those of proponents of mobile and electric "allergies", vaccination scares, 9/11 conspiracy theories and such.
LOL - stop being reasonable, jeppen!
The coal will be burned. Nuclear power allows the developing world to burn coal instead of the OECD. Sorry everyone but the coal will be burned.
Coal will be burned until the climate grows unstable causing a human-scale catastrophe. I would frame it that way instead.
So why bother with nuclear when we are headed for full scale climate change anyway. No way around it. China will destroy the planet even if the US stopped all coal use tomorrow. We are going to burn as much carbon as possible until we starve from large-scale food system disruptions due to either carbon depletion and/or climate change (Mother nature wrecking grade A farmland).
We are in that age today. It is a matter of decades not centuries imho.
Don't know about time frames, but I agree that we may lack the ability to not burn every last bit of coal.
This is why I consider Peak Oil not to be a problem, but a sulotion.
Well, peak coal is a lot further out there... that solution won't come nearly soon enough to solve global climate change.
Yeah, it's my worry to. But; we can do many things withoutcoal,we can't do anything without oil. So when oil ends, everything ends. Hopefully. Bad for us,but the planet need a break.
So when oil ends, everything ends
Jedi, that is my hope as well. It is crazy to hope for collapse, but I honestly feel it is best hope for humanity and certainly the earth long term. I do think that a lack of cheap transport fuels may destroy our economy to the extent that we can’t finish destroying the world.
Why? Until the early stages of the 20s century the whole economy was coal-based, using various types of (pressurized) steam engines. I may be a little bit less comfortable and much more polluting but of course we can theoretically switch to a coal-electricity (with coal fired trucks and small electric cars + coal fired trains) based nightmare!
Yes but check out what our lives looked like before oil. Without oil, no air planes. No rockets so no sattelites so no tv. No mechanized farming so less food so less people.
Everything we do now is many times larger than the pre-petroleum era. This much larger "machine" requieres oil to work. It CAN NOT WORK WITHOUT OIL. We can make a smaller machine work without oil, but it will not provide for 7 billion people. It may provide for 1 billion though.
So let me rephrase for you: Withoutoil, we can not do 6 out of 7 of everything we do. The rest will be without.
There are endless scenarios how it could play out, but I think that’s roughly in the ball park.
Don't agree. Nuclear power allows Japan and France to import less coal, and Sweden to hold on to energy intensive industry. Germany and UK who has drawn down coal use (replacing with NG, unfortunately) mostly leave it in the ground.
"Nuclear power allows Japan and France to import less coal, and Sweden to hold on to energy intensive industry. Germany and UK who has drawn down coal use (replacing with NG, unfortunately) mostly leave it in the ground".
Those are OECD countries. They third world is developing. They burn coal to do it. Check out the exports from the U.S.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterly/html/t7p01p1.html
That's just a percent of global production. If the third world ramped nuclear fast, they'd likely ramp coal slower or not at all. However, nuclear is a bit difficult, so only big third worlders currently take a stab at it. The glimmer of hope is that China will likely start selling nukes in a few years, and they'll likely do it very aggressively all over the world, even to smaller countries.
A delicious irony is that Thatcher - along with Reagan, the main proponent of the neoliberal assault which leads to the levels of consumption and ignorance we see today - once her crusade to smash the NUM (coalminers union) was complete, concreted over the mines so her nemesis could never reappear. Otherwise, I'm not sure our present government would leave coal in the ground much longer.
Much has been said here about our irrationality, and yes it can be frustrating to us "rational" types. (LOL, as if)
I no longer see it as a problem, any more than entropy is a problem. It simply is.
By means of a much abridged joke:
Humans are not rational and chickens are not spherical (yet), so can we get past this and deal with the realities instead of "if only's"?
Maybe we should check and see if maybe the oval office is really spherical?
The accident aside, I have always seen nuclear as the largest unfunded mandate in the history of humanity. To place the burden of containing waste on countless future generations--who may be living in energy poverty themselves--is arrogant. It is irresponsible to rely on some "future technology" to be there for our descendants. It is the ultimate "black box" approach to planning. That said, our memories are short and we are not likely to learn much from this disaster. It will not be long before we are believing again in our superiority, ignoring the lessons of history.
Good point. The whole notion seems to come out of some scifi fantasy vision of techno-cornucopian future where they will be so much more advanced than we are that all the problems we throw at them will be easily solvable.
We are dumping not only all our debt but also all our toxic wastes on future generations.
You get at the underlying mindset that is the problem of modern industrial civilizations. It is a point missed and sidestepped by posing the problem as a (false) dichotomy between coal and nukes.
Getting off cigarettes by taking up a crack cocaine habit is no kind of great solution. Really getting clean and sober is a much more painful prospect, one that most in our addictive society cannot even begin to contemplate. But it is the only way forward.
It is unrealistic to imagine that there will be "countless future generations" or a very large number of "descendants". The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that a steady state won't happen.
There would probably be more generations and more descendants with nuclear energy than without it. The unavailability of nuclear energy will hasten the next period of global war and likely increase the death toll. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_cycles
And the widespread availability of nuclear plants will mean that many of those wars will be nuclear and will target nuclear facilities.
The rest of your post boils down to 'it's my way or the highway' completely unsupported by evidence or argumentation.
I have always seen nuclear as the largest unfunded mandate in the history of humanity
Why single out Nuclear Power? is it because it is dangerous?
http://www.worldcarfree.net/resources/stats.php#death
In that case why not start with the biggest killer humans have created, the car!
Are you ever a passenger in, or a driver of a car, perhaps you think arrogantly that you will never have an accident.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_incidents#Aircraft_C...
How about grounding all planes afterall there were 130 accidents in 2010 alone killing 1115 people.
When compared to these things nuclear power is positively safe, hopefully hysterical types will not be deciding these issues.
How long, my friend, does plutonium last?
Therein lies your answer.
Vehicles cause 500,000 deaths per year and we are talking about nuclear power being dangerous, perhaps people should get their ducks in the right order.
Sorry, no ducks left. Half were just run over on the highway, and the other half are now being irradiated near Fukushima.
Really, I am wondering what non-sequiturs are going to come up next around here?
"Millions of people die from heart attacks, and we are talking about some potential problems from a few measly meltdowns--perhaps people should get their chickens in the right pecking order"
Or how about emphysema. Or Osgood-Shlatters disease?
Look over there--its a flying tea cup!
Look at anything but the horror unfolding before us and the obvious lessons we must learn from it.
Maybe if the poster said transportation accidents cause 500,000 deaths. No one wants to stop moving. So yes, then we work on both earnestly. Maybe we can get energy as low as possible too. I just answer, ok we multitask then. Even better maybe we fix both. A new car that is twice as safe and gets twice the mileage. That works even better, no?
dohboi
:-) and the irradiated ducks will be preserved longer.
It amuses me when people get so upset about something happening ten thousand miles away yet are oblivious to things on the doorstep. You know the type, going into a bank to donate money to some disaster then walking past the homeless person who lost he job and home though mental illness. I guess problems far away are easier to deal with, especially when you do not have to give up anything.
http://www.driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/statistics/stats-usa_ind...
FORTY TWO THOUSAND died last year in the US alone, how much time have you spent campaigning to get rid of cars?
No one dies secondarily from a car wreck. Yes, often people drive drunk. People drive using cell phones. People speed into concrete walls. People are dumb.
What on earth is your point?
When a car accident happens it is a singular event with no consequences.
When a nuke pops or 4-6 of them in a cascade of failed systems, then an entire area is sprayed with radiation and the land is no longer able to be used. Large amounts of land is now worthless. LOL.
Please do fair accounting of the lost resources. The false argument about car accidents is lame at best. A failed argument.
Look at natural resource destruction. Look at capital investment losses.
Nuclear is a waste. Heck they dump the electrons at night anyway right into a resistive sink. A tremendous waste of resources.
When a car accident happens it is a singular event with no consequences.
What a stupid statement.
http://www.brake.org.uk/corrine-thomas-farewell
Excuse me. You keep harping that car accidents are special. There is no lasting environmental costs at all.
A nuclear accident has tremendous lasting costs.
Do some careful accounting of all the damage and insults for either instance and you will see you are simply name calling here.
Can you quantify "tremendous lasting costs" and show how it is more important than e.g. 45000 deaths and dunno how many maimed _every year_ in the US alone?
Can you is the question? It is your argument.
BTW. The 500,000 number is bogus according to the CDC. Can you elaborate on your false traffic accident fatality rate for me?
People die of many things. They die of eating bad food, to much food, cancer from industrial pollution and bad diets, lack of exercise, cars, cigarettes, etc.
Leading Causes of Death
(Data are for the U.S.)
Number of deaths for leading causes of death
Heart disease: 616,067
Cancer: 562,875
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 135,952
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 127,924
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 123,706
Alzheimer's disease: 74,632
Diabetes: 71,382
Influenza and Pneumonia: 52,717
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 46,448
Septicemia: 34,828
Our inundation of cheap energy kills people actually. You are correct. So what is your point then. People should use less energy and get exercise and grow up. ;-) So yes nuclear power is killing lots of people indirectly with overloads of surplus power.
Nuclear also costs more in terms of capital expenses because it houses a very lethal and very dangerous energy source. It would be cheap if it was safer. LOL.
Many people are exposed to environmental radiation from these things. Hard to track the true costs in terms of capital to maintain spent fuel pools, security, pollution, and so on.
Then you have the big nuclear disaster. Well that destroys tons of farmland, water supplies, and industrial capabilities.
None of that happens with PV, solar thermal, wind or geothermal.
THAT IS my point.
Estimates of Costs of Nuclear Power Waste and Decommissioning
Costs Related to Waste Management
Funds Committed for the Nuclear Waste Fund
$35.8 billion (1/10th of a cent per kWh of electricity generated at nuclear power plants plus interest since 1983). Of the $35.8 billion, $10.8 billion has been spent. Payments to the Nuclear Waste Fund are included in the fuel costs.
Estimated Cost of Decommissioning
Per plant $300-500 million—includes estimated radiological, used fuel and site restoration costs—about $300 million, $100-150 million and $50 million, respectively.
Industry $31.9 billion—about $300 million per reactor. Decommissioning costs are not included in production costs.
Of the total $31.9 billion estimated to decommission all eligible nuclear plants at an average cost of $300 million, $22.5 billion or about two-thirds have already been funded. The remaining $9.4 billion will be funded over the next 20 years (the average nuclear plant is licensed for 40 years).
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So my comments. Do the costs of clean-up include the higher costs of fossil fuels, cement and other materials?
Also notice that the clean-up fund assumes market growth but that seems to not be possible since the market is not actually growing really much.
Costs go up.
Now why dont we have a coal and oil tax to pay for the CO2 clean-up costs?
LOL.
None of that happens with PV, solar thermal, wind or geothermal.
THAT IS my point.
What percentage of electricity do your solar panels produce? How much hot water does your solar hot water panel produce? How do your heat your home?
For someone so against Nuclear and coal, the answers to those questions will be interesting.
BTW. The 500,000 number is bogus according to the CDC. Can you elaborate on your false traffic accident fatality rate for me?
http://www.photius.com/rankings/road_traffic_deaths_country_rankings_200...
You can check these against individual government stats. So prove these are false.
The global sum is 661000.
The point with car accidents is what again?
I fail to see your actual point. It is a talking point but there is no actually meaningful point.
In the US 45,000 die from car accidents actually.
But many of those folks choose to drive the way they do. They use cell phones while they drive. They drive drunk. They speed. The rapidly change lanes and cut people off. They are morons. Sure some die innocently.
OUr surplus power though prevents people from exercising thereby increasing the rate of heart disease. So surplus nuclear power in fact increases the risk of heart disease. LMAO.
But the toll from a nuclear disaster is to wipe out a land area for a long long long time. Then the long term health costs. Cancers. Etc Etc.
Sounds like fun. Build a Nuke next to my house. Please. I want one.
Still, rationally, nukes is the best option for the environment. It's understandable that you may think otherwise, the big headlines and all.
$2 / kW·hr for the retail price of electricity generated by nuclear power. 95% of the amount shall be used to compensate all those and their descendants who have been screwed by nuclear power over the last century. There, it is quantified. Photovoltaic panels and lead acid batteries are cheaper, even if more people are killed by fires, electrocution and acid spills than nuclear radiation.
This whole thing of restricting the dialog about the danger of nuke power to 'number of deaths' is a straw man that seems to be endemic to the nuclear
business for decades. Bring up the discussion with almost anyone in the field,
and the only metric he will likely be willing to discuss will be 'number of deaths'. Perhaps 40 or 50 years ago when so much of the field was more
closely related to weapons research, the mentality entered. however it did,
the mentality seems to remain. i remember this clearly from my undergrad days,
when profs who were more on the nuclear side of the department would all stick
to this metric, which seemed to me to be bizarre.
Maybe because it is a conveniently quantifyable thing, and these people dont like trying to think about the bigger picture. maybe because when narrowly interpreted, the numbers make them and their product look better.
The single biggest argument against nukes is the long long tail of stewardship
required _long after the investment has ceased to pay a return_.
This is a broken economic model, pushing costs onto unknown players in the
future, who will have an unknown ability to pay for it (not just money, but broadly resources or economic ability). If you are honest with yourself, you
cannot predict that people 50 years from now, much less a hundred or a thousand, will be able to bear the costs of your present day profits.
The only way someone can then justify doing it is by massively discounting
the importance of the future (a common thing, but with nukes, just a far more glaringly harsh example)- by deciding that our future is simply not
important enough to care about- by planning for no future at all.
It's quite obvious that when that kind of planning for no future takes over,
when it becomes the dominant or only strategy (we have lots of excuses for ourselves about why we do it).. well then we make it come true- we have no future.
I agree with the other comments here about the end of oil not being a problem, but the thing which will impose a solution. the world, and those
who live through the end of oil, will have a chance to breathe again for
the first time in some centuries. That particular people of particular cultures will no longer be able to live as they are expecting to, well, sorry, the world doesn't care one bit.
zurisee, any discussion by a pro nuke person MUST avoid the core issues of future stewardship, it is precisely because this issue must be avoided that they raise a non-stop stream of straw men, each more ludicrous from a logical point of view than the last, and each almost trivially easy to see through with just beginner level logic, and the facts you can find at TOD.
However, consider this benefit: by for example trying to say coal makes CO2 which is worse, you have in fact gotten them to admit that coal power generation is also unsafe and bad, and it's actually quite difficult to get corporations or entrenched government bureaucracies to admit that anything is bad in their sphere, so that's actually substantial, but it points to how weak their arguments are, if they had stronger arguments, they wouldn't need to admit all the negatives of the options. I take some comfort in noting this fact.
Cars are of course major CO2 emitters as well, and are very new, we do not 'need' cars at all to thrive and have a great life, yet the example is tossed out of all the car deaths. I totally agree with this concern, dump all the cars now, that would be a great way to start fixing the problem. Cars are toxic on every level, including the disposal of their toxic wastes, which we tend to send offshore, or to Mexico. So I'm glad to see pro nuke people agreeing that our society is filled with dangerous, toxic things, which we need to also correct and eliminate.
The end of oil is of course the solution, since mankind decided to ignore the real solutions, now man has to wait for the solution to be imposed top down, non-negotiably.
I am glad to see this mention of the discounting of the future, which takes on a nearly pathological character in such discussions. No, strike that, it's not nearly pathological, it's fully pathological.
The growth based system we have generated has no answers, so of course it will flail desperately and pollute, destroy, and devastate to its maximum potential before it loses its ability to do so.
When you consider that we maintain that we 'need' nuclear power only to generate a small fraction of the energy we waste daily it is painfully obvious that we do not in fact need it at all, though it is possible that the system it depends on needs it, I'm not sure what the breaking points are when the growth fuel of energy the industrial system depends on is reduced on absolute terms, not raised. My guess is they are unable to even conceptualize this reality, and so are frantically trying to negotiate the non-negotiable, at each step of the process making the long term outcome that much worse. I am impressed however by how weak the arguments are, it leads me to believe that their actual political situation may be correspondingly weak.
I am not really interested in watching such types flounder around trying to paint themselves a picture where growth and ecosystem destruction are the price of progress, so called (perversely), to be honest, what interests me more is seeing how the actual people who will solve these issues begin to evolve the understandings and world views that will help take us out of this pit we have dug ourselves.
I'm interested in the person who has already scoped out the sides of the pit, has found some possible trails, and has assembled what they need to try to make their way out, which will have to be a group effort, since humans are social animals, that's a strength. Not loner survivalist types, who just seem set on building a compound at the pits floor, stocking it with provisions, then trying to hold against the earthquakes and landslides that are bound to come and bury them in the end.
How many people is the infamous Chernobyl killing right now? I'm sure a few cancer victims are still dying occasionally. But so are victims from coal-plant pollution.
Chernobyl did lay waste to a lot of land but I doubt this Japanese plant will.
This is why we need electric cars. They are a perfect match . . . they can soak up all that excess energy at night.
Everyone is obsessed with lives lost as the ultimate metric.
People die -- indeed -- except of course Dick Cheney ;-)
Most people die due their own risk taking in terms of accidents, heart disease, and lung cancer. They drive too fast, they eat too much, and they smoke cigarettes. Well that is their choice generally, no?
Nuclear does not reduce coal or oil use one milligram. Nuclear kills plenty of money -- money that is better spent on lower tech power supplies imho. The waste is left for future folks with no fossil energy to figure out. Not a great idea.
We will fry in a blanket of CO2, and nuclear will not save us even if implemented on a massive and dangerous scale.
----
Yes, electric cars are great, but they are so maligned by the media, oil companies, and most auto makers (historically maybe changing recently). They are unlikely to happen due to the religious anti-electric car hysteria promoted in our country imho. Too many people are culturally against electric cars. Let them eat cake I guess. LOL
I would love them but the cost is like 4x what you actually need to move yourself to work or the market. You need a lower cost fiberglass body -- about 1500 lbs of car. That is all mainly. But again we have safety and the need to drive 80 MPH holding us back from that benchmark.
Electric cars have had incredibly stiff competition in the form of the internal combustion engine. That's the primary reason they haven't won in the marketplace.
If the economy were to continue chugging along, it would still take at least another decade before electric vehicles would be able to replace more than 10% of the way cars are used now. Sure, if people were to modify their behavior and expectations that number would go up.
However, right now they don't have to: they just go buy a car that can travel thousands of miles at a time with the occasional very short fuel stop, that moves at high speed, that keeps them warm or cold with no sacrifices, that starts and operates well in both high and low temperatures, that can tow heavy loads, climb tall mountains and so on.
There is a reason everyone is maligning them: they have never come even close to the performance, flexibility or cost of the internal combustion engine.
I agree - hybrids, PHEVs and EREVs will dominate the market for a long time.
Of course, they're pretty good - a Chevy Volt eliminates 90% of fuel consumption, gives much better performance than the average ICE vehicle, and meets all of the specifications you mentioned.
Such as the market will be. In a conversation yesterday I explained my view that the current crop of car companies would mostly fold in the financial crash coming and would be replaced by new entrants that would make much less advanced vehicles that would mostly be incapable of highway driving.
Right.
I know you feel that PO will cause a financial crash. It still doesn't make sense to me.
Stoneleigh is perhaps the most articulate advocate of this idea. Of course, she predicted this crash would unfold two years ago, and that the Dow would be at 1,000 at the end of 2010. She didn't qualify that, or hedge - she was quite sure of it..
It's really quite simple to see especially since we've just gone through a rehearsal of what's going to happen (Sep. 2008, crashing auto and financial companies, etc).
If you haven't understood our financial future by now I'm quite sure there is something blocking your understanding that I have no power to take away.
If you haven't understood our financial future by now I'm quite sure there is something blocking your understanding that I have no power to take away.
So close to not being ad hominem, and yet...not quite there. I could say the same thing you know - I could even suggest that the fact that you've made a career of preparation for catastrophe makes you over-committed to catastrophe.
Should I? I don't know. I don't really want to say something that might be offensive, and yet...you and George keep making ad hominem remarks, instead of admitting there might be something that you, or I, don't know. Or, heck, just using the common form in a situation like this: " I don't think I can convince you.". Of course, that gives up the slightly indirect suggestion that you're right, and I'm in denial.
How can I get through to you on this?
Sigh.
Don't give up - in my experience this kind of disagreement comes from hidden assumptions, that can be identified. We really can figure out why we disagree.
--------------------------------------
It's really quite simple to see especially since we've just gone through a rehearsal of what's going to happen (Sep. 2008, crashing auto and financial companies, etc).
You haven't addressed the fact that Stoneleigh's model of the world predicted, with no room for error, that the Dow would be at 1,000 by now.
Let me address this dress rehearsal idea directly: we've had plenty of recessions and depressions before. We've gone through changes of forms of energy, and transitions from major forms of economic activity.
-The Long Depression after the US Civil War was one of them - we were moving to railroads, and away from farming.
-Farming switched from horses to tractors during the Great Depression (1929) - that switch was accelerated by the recession, not slowed down. Tractors were better (as are renewables and PHEV/EREVs), but the point is that investment continued.
-We had a dress rehearsal for a reduction in oil consumption: 19% over 4 years from 1978 to 1982, and yet GDP grew.
So, we've had many dress rehearsals, and they all point to the idea that we'll get through this...ok. Not great, but ok.
We've been through this before, Nick, with me or other people pointing out all the differences in this situation. You minimize or dismiss them.
Plus you want me to defend Nicole's failed prediction — ask her, not me. The two specific public predictions I give are:
50% probability the world stock markets crash before 2015, 100% chance they crash before 2020.
Come talk to me in 2020 about my predictions.
We've been through this before, Nick, with me or other people pointing out all the differences in this situation. You minimize or dismiss them.
I disagree with most of them, with evidence and logic. Some people reply specifically, and we have good conversations. Others..don't.
you want me to defend Nicole's failed prediction — ask her, not me.
Well, she's the closest thing I can find to an "authority" for the idea of economic TEOTWAWKI. Who are you relying on?
50% probability the world stock markets crash before 2015, 100% chance they crash before 2020. Come talk to me in 2020 about my predictions.
What do you mean by "crash", quantitatively? Which index, how much, for how long, etc.
I rely on my own brain. I have extreme confidence in it and my ability to think through the evidence. I did not do it quickly and I did it with care and diligence.
I do not have confidence in yours, on the other hand, because I see how many things you keep missing in your arguments. Everything from your outrageously optimistic EV car sale projections to your inability to see the interplay between the financial and energy systems...not to mention all the other systems that are stressed and breaking now in the human experiment.
I've concluded that there will always be people like you who will say there is no trouble or nothing that a bit of adjustment can't handle. All evidence to me indicates that you authentically believe what you say. I just think things haven't clicked for you yet.
And yes I realize you think the same of me...that's fine by me. Mine is definitely a minority point of view and I fully realize that the challenge is mine to have people see what I see.
I rely on my own brain. I have extreme confidence in it and my ability to think through the evidence. I did not do it quickly and I did it with care and diligence.
Ah. So you've developed your own branch of economics, all by yourself? Have you published in any peer-reviewed journals, per chance? Seriously. You suggest that your own analysis proves that the world economy is going to completely collapse due to PO, and this analysis is unsupported by any other serious peer-reviewed writing or analysis?
Big claims require big evidence.
I do not have confidence in yours
Well, there are a lot of very serious analysts, economists, engineers, physicists, etc who agree with me. I don't have the burden of proof.
there will always be people like you who will say there is no trouble or nothing that a bit of adjustment can't handle.
I don't say that (ok, perhaps a little, occasionally, for humor or to get the discussion going). I agree that we have a very large challenge ahead, and that Climate Change will be a massive problem. I've said this many, many times.
I fully realize that the challenge is mine to have people see what I see.
Ah. ok. hmmm. Maybe you agree with what I said above. Ah, well...I'll leave it there, as it seems to phrase things reasonably well.
----------------------------------------------
Well, where do we go from here?
Well, perhaps I could make a suggestion. So far, on your website you've relied on others for analysis - Hirsch, Ayres, etc. I think we've seen that they don't really provide the support needed for such a theory.
So, the next step might be for you to flesh out your analysis.
Create a quantitative model for what you expect to happen, with a trajectory from here to 2030. Explain the economic changes, and their causes. Detail the feedback links, with numbers, so we can see how decreased imports, increased debt, declining BTUs for transportation, etc, etc affect the economy.
Here's an example of what I mean by feedback links: Hamilton suggests that the psychological impact of an oil shock can reduce car sales. That's a positive destabilizing feedback, albeit one that can be expected to be temporary.
He quantifies the impact of an oil shock on an economy. You could do the same, and compare your analysis to his.
You still don't get it. What happened in Sep. 2008 will happen again — this isn't difficult to see, Nick, and it certainly doesn't need what you are suggesting by way of modeling.
What happened in Sep. 2008 will happen again — this isn't difficult to see
1st, the general consensus in the world of economics, and even (IMO) on TOD, is that oil wasn't the primary cause of the 2008 recession.
You'd agree that this is the general consensus in the world of economics, right?
We had an enormous real estate bubble that had to pop somewhere around that time, regardless of what oil prices did. That pop was going to put enormous stress on the world financial system, regardless of what oil prices did.
Right?
Hamilton ascribes more importance to it than most, and he thinks that the oil shock shaved perhaps, what, 2% off of US GDP? That's not TEOTWAWKI.
Right?
You are still playing in the completely wrong ballpark, that's why you can't see what I'm pointing to. And to appeal to a group of people who, as a whole, missed predicting the crash, is very strange. I don't trust many people's thinking of how the future is going to unfold, least of all the economists to whom you seem to give misplaced credit to.
Read more Steve Keen.
"Economics desperately needs econophysics" -- Steve Keen
Can't have it both ways. Econophysics is serious modeling of the kind that Nick is pointing out.
More importantly, Keen models debt properly, in my view.
Yet you said:
Like I said, can't have it both ways, disparaging Nick for wanting quantitative modeling yet lauding Keen for doing the same thing.
Ok, I should have been more precise: in this case I was referring to Keen's work on debt, not his reference to the physical economists.
that's why you can't see what I'm pointing to
I know what you're pointing to - I just disagree.
to appeal to a group of people who, as a whole, missed predicting the crash, is very strange.
Do you feel that you can predict the economy better? Did you predict the crash of 2008? If so, how many millions did you make with your investments?
It's easy to always predict that a crash is around the corner - you'll be right eventually...and then you'll be wrong later, when it recovers. In the meantime, you'll consistently lose money, enriching other investors who are not so rigid in their forecasts.
Just like Stoneleigh, who's investment advice over the last two years has been disastrously bad.
Stuart Saniford had an interesting discussion of the difficulty of forecasting - he pointed out that there's feedback between the economic community and the investing community, so if any economist finds a model that allows better forecasting, it will immediately become useless, as investors incorporate it into their investing strategies, and the stock market returns to a random walk.
Read more Steve Keen.
Ah, thank you - an authority for your thinking. ok, I'll take a look.
As a matter of fact, I did predict a housing crash and made every attempt to sell my house. My wife did not agree and we are now suffering the consequences of underwater real estate.
There are a group of people who have a better handle on things than the general economist. I am confident I have an excellent grasp of how how future is going to unfold. I am careful with my predictions about timing, however, because it's all probabilities.
That the current system is going to crash in this decade I have no doubt. When exactly is very hard to tell so it's important to be ready well ahead of time. If I am wrong, I don't expect to be wrong by more than plus five years or so (2025).
As a matter of fact, I did predict a housing crash and made every attempt to sell my house. My wife did not agree and we are now suffering the consequences of underwater real estate.
That sounds mighty frustrating and painful. You must feel very much like a under appreciated Cassandra.
There are a group of people who have a better handle on things than the general economist.
We should note that a fair number of people identified the housing bubble before hand. There was national discussion. For instance, Greenspan is on record saying that the US had regional housing bubbles, but not a national bubble. California, where I believe you live, was one of the biggest regional bubbles.
What people didn't foresee was the effect of the housing bubble's collapse on credit markets. No one understood how badly CDO's were designed, and how a lack of regulation had created structural problems in the mortgage market (e.g., companies like Lehman actively hid their mortgage related liabilities).
I am careful with my predictions about timing, however, because it's all probabilities.
All you have to do is finetune your predictions so that you can do slightly better than Wall Street, and you can make millions.
That the current system is going to crash in this decade I have no doubt. When exactly is very hard to tell so it's important to be ready well ahead of time. If I am wrong, I don't expect to be wrong by more than plus five years or so (2025).
There's a big difference between your first sentence and your second.
Ok, so you feel comfortable making a forecast for 2025. Care to make it specific, in terms of specific measurement (GDP, GINI, Dow-Jones, etc)?
As I have said repeatedly, I don't believe in single causes. Oil, housing and the top-heavy financial system all worked together to create the crash. As many people have noted, not much has changed so another crash is inevitable.
No, I have no interest in doing that. For the vast majority of people, that kind of quantification adds no benefit. They will be struggling to bring in hard currency and that's what I am preparing them for.
another crash is inevitable.
Ah, so your definition of crash includes a 40% decline (IIRC) in the Dow-Jones which is mostly reversed within two years? Most people would call that only a business cycle, if a severe one.
The 2008 crash caused world GDP to decline by about -1%, and US GDP to decline by -3.8% from the peak in the 2nd quarter of 2008 to the bottom of the crash in the 2d quarter of 2009.
So, a decline of -3.8% qualifies as a crash??
specific measurement - No, I have no interest in doing that.
So, you're predicting another crash of -3.8% within 15 years. I'd say that's a little unlikely, maybe in the range of a 20% probability. OTOH, that suggests that there's not that much difference between us.
ahem.
I'm pretty sure that's not really what you mean to say. So....let's be more specific.
Blah blah blah - please get off the idea of money markets - they really doesn't matter to most people.
The money markets mean a great deal to anyone who's dealing with the "health" of the economy.
Yes, if income equality has declined, and there is poverty alongside affluence, that's bad. But, that's really not what "Aangel" is talking about.
One of the upcoming crashes the central banks are unable to recover from. There I said it one more time for you.
How many times have I written that? I could repeat practically every one of your talking points and you can't seem to remember any of mine. You pretend you don't know what I'm saying or that I haven't already said it, oh, a dozen times already.
This indicates to me that you're just being argumentative.
There I said it one more time for you
You haven't used that phrase with me before. Yes, that seems to begin to roughly fit with my impression of what you were arguing, but.....I'm trying to get to a specific definition.
you're just being argumentative.
No, not at all. I'm trying to be specific. What the heck does "a crash that central banks are unable to recover from" mean?
Does that include Japan's long stagnation?? Japan clearly hasn't grown in the way it would like for some years now. That's a crash that that the Japanese central bank has been unable to recover from. Ask anyone in Japan - they're feeling pretty miserable about it, and feel that their government has, in some sense, lost control of the economy.
But, I don't think that's what you mean.
Japans "stagnation" is mostly a myth.
Compare growth in the time period from 1990 to 2008: US growth was almost twice as high.
Plus, I suspect the chart is slightly skewed by changes in exchange rates.
I talk about that all the time, and I'm sure in the past I've spoken to you about it. I'm not going to dig up all my comments where I've referenced that but it's only been the major theme I've discussed here since I became a member, much like how Jeffrey talks about the Export Land Model.
There will be a cascading stock market failure that will lead to or be the result of a credit freeze — exactly what happened in 2008 that I and several others said would occur. The central banks stepped in to provide liquidity and reassure the market but the system has been "designed" so poorly that in a future crash there will be no redemption. Is it the next one or the one after that? I don't know but it will happen before 2020, in my view.
This happens quite regularly throughout history. See This Time It's Different: Eight Centuries of Folly by Reinhart and Rogoff. And it will happen again to us. Only a delusional person would believe we are immune to crashes. And don't make yourself sound smart-alecky saying what you did earlier "a 40% decline that we recover from." I'm clearly not talking about a short term, quickly recovered crash. Again, you'd have to be willfully thick-headed to miss that in all my commenting.
I'm dropping this thread now. We've beaten it to death.
I talk about that all the time
Maybe just different phrasing.
Only a delusional person would believe we are immune to crashes.
Sure. The question is the depth and length of the crash.
don't make yourself sound smart-alecky saying what you did earlier "a 40% decline that we recover from."
My intent was to point out that suggesting that what happened in 2008 would happen again didn't support the idea that a terminal crash would happen. I suppose I could have been more direct.
--------------------------------------------
the system has been "designed" so poorly that in a future crash there will be no redemption
I'd say that's the step in your logic that needs support. We all know that there are fragilities and vulnerabilities in our economic system. We know that there's risk of positive feedbacks that destabilize things. But, how do we know that these are fatal?
Clearly things got out of control in the Great Depression. On the other hand, we did eventually recover from it. You seem to be arguing for something much deeper and longer.
So, what's your evidence and logic for that?
You fall into the trap of equating the health of an economy with the level of the stockmarket. Perhaps the number of visits to soup-kitchens would be a better metric?
I've used the percentage of the population under the poverty line in demographic analyses - that would work. GDP per capita would also be good, but of course that doesn't capture income inequality.
The stock market is widely known, and is generally accepted as just about the best leading indicator of the economy around. That's why Stoneleigh used it for her predictions.
If you could do a better job than the stock index, you could make a lot of money...
Aangel
If the economy were to continue chugging along, it would still take at least another decade before electric vehicles would be able to replace more than 10% of the way cars are used now. Sure, if people were to modify their behavior and expectations that number would go up.
You seem to be convinced that oil availability is going to rapidly decline in next decade, but you cannot accept that EV and PHEV's will have a major competitive advantage if gasoline prices rise $10 to $20/gallon or if gasoline rationing is introduced.
The 2005 Hirsh report is well out of date
In the 1990s electric automobiles were introduced to the market, spurred by a California clean vehicle requirement. The effort was a failure because existing batteries did not provide the vehicle range and performance that customers
demanded. In the future, electricity storage may improve enough to win consumer acceptance of electric automobiles. In addition, extremely high gasoline prices may cause some consumers to find electric automobiles more
acceptable, especially for around-town use. Such a shift in public preferences is unpredictable, so electric vehicles cannot now be projected as a significant offset
to future gasoline use.
The issue is how quickly presently manufactured EV and PHEV's can be ramped up to account for most vehicle sales(if demand increases beyond the present 20,000 back-orders) and how quickly most VMT can be performed under electric power rather than gasoline power. Since about half the VMT occur in vehicles less than 7years old, it would not be a stretch to expect about 50% of VMT could be by EV and PHEV's with another 25% of VMT by high mpg ICE and hydrid ICE vehicles within 10 years of a severe oil shortage. I think its probable that people stuck with low mpg vehicles would modify their behavior, using these vehicles for essential travel only until they are able to replace them with an EV or PHEV. It is also probable that EV and PHEV electric only range will improve as battery costs and performance improve.
Neil, I accept that they will have a competitive advantage — never said otherwise. I have, afterall, put my name down for a plug-in Prius.
What I do point out is that the sales projections many people are making depend on enough BAU continuing that the credit that currently buys 90% of the vehicles will still be available.
I don't believe that credit will be available so I think the sales projections are completely bogus, as bogus as the airline industry's projections till 2030 of further growth. We are headed for a inflection point such that both industries will be completely shocked at how quickly their world's can fall apart.
ok, so we're clear:
You're not arguing the physics. You're not arguing that PHEV/EREV/EVs won't work, or that there won't be enough electricity to power them, or enough oil for essential transportation.
You're arguing that humanity isn't smart enough or flexible enough to deal with the transition from oil/FF to renewables. That our economic structures are fragile and unstable, and that they'll collapse under the stress and strain.
Right?
I think that in the offices of academia your transition might be modelled as some sort of evolutionary process. In the real world, I'm with aangel. The scale, timing, and sheer multiplicity of converging crises is so acute, I'm very skeptical it can be achieved except by massive, unplanned simplification of western lifestyles.
What he said.
Ok, so the answer is yes: you're not relying on the idea that PHEV/EREV/EVs won't work, or that there won't be enough electricity to power them, or enough oil for essential transportation.
You're arguing that humanity isn't smart enough or flexible enough to deal with the transition from oil/FF to renewables. That our economic structures are fragile and unstable, and that they'll collapse under the stress and strain.
You're also not arguing that we won't have the physical resources to deal with climate change, water scarcity, food problems, etc. Instead you're arguing that we won't have the social ability to use the resources available to us.
So, this is really a political, social and economic analysis, not a physics based analysis.
Ok.
Finally!
But the social, economic and political effects will very soon translate into real problems with maintaining infrastructure and of course there are the hundreds of millions of people who will be unemployed, thus disrupting our democracies.
If we could magically decide to use the remaining energy wisely (and before the financial system crashes), things would be much much different. But we won't. So get ready.
Well, I certainly agree that there's a risk of what you predict. I suspect the risk is much lower than you suggest....
So, how do we decide how large the risk is?
Well, perhaps Keen will help - I'll take a look.
"..how much time have you spent campaigning to get rid of cars?"
Well, how much time did we spend on The Oil Drum, looking at our addiction to Oil and Gas and all the harm it does?
Besides, the accident rate of Traffic Deaths is far more particular than just 'Autos', it is highly weighted towards what people are doing that causes Traffic Accidents, Alcohol, Texting, Lack of Sleep, High Speed Chases, Aggressive Behavior. These are things we all target as sources of pain and loss in many venues of our lives, including on the Road, so considering that this high-risk activity is really a sliding scale of risk depending on specific lifestyle choices, it's quite clear that there are people who are very actively working to thwart the traffic safety demon every time they get behind the wheel, and their ability to NOT be part of those traffic statistics bears out that effort.
Meanwhile, some people who live very clean and responsible lives, but are now downwind of Fukushima may not see the same statistical advantages sprouting from their choices, because someone else's choices were the sole deciding factor in that fate. (And their cancer mighht well be attributed to any number of environmental causes, so the cesium contribution may never even get its day in court. Alas.
Nice points. And I actually spend a good bit of time campaigning to get rid of cars--and trucks and airplanes, too.
There seems to be a sneering assumption among some here that all those who have concerns about nuclear power are completely witless wonders. Rather insulting, really.
Thank you for a series of cogent and coherent posts and responses.
--Gaianne
!Ich! Comment nesting!
Thank you, Dohboi, for a series of cogent and coherent posts and responses.
Thanks for the thanks, Gaianne (you wouldn't happen to be any relation to THE Gaia?? '-)
Feel free to join in the fray. We could use all the ideas and perspectives we can get!
It certainly does look like nuclear power is going to become much less popular.
What surprises me is how much the price of oil dropped overnight: Brent is down nearly $3.
I would think the nuclear problems in Japan would be creating a run on oil, natural gas, and coal. In the immediate future I imagine Japan will greatly increase imports of diesel (to supply emergency generators and construction equipment) with a reduction in crude imports until ports and refineries are back in operation. Behind that would be an increase in LNG imports to replace nuclear power. I don't know what spare gas-fired generating capacity Japan has, but gas generating equipment is relatively cheap, lightweight, and easily installed. Relative to coal or nuclear power that is. A quick scan of advertised equipment suggests relatively small (a few megawatts) natural gas power plants can be delivered in about four months.
As many existing power plants can burn either coal or natural gas, significantly increased natural gas prices driven by increased LNG demand from Japan would push some power stations towards coal rather than gas, pushing coal prices higher. And with the present low price for natural gas in many markets, gas is being used in place of oil wherever possible, so an increase in gas prices will tend to increase oil demand, and oil prices, as some users switch back to oil. At the same time increased costs for natural gas used in oil production (think oil sands, but also some enhanced recovery projects) will increase the cost of some oil production. That would reduce production unless the selling price increased, as marginal producers suspend operations.
So while the immediate effect of Japan's nuclear problems has been a drop in the price of oil it seems this must be very temporary.
I think this reflects the different role oil is playing in the the world's economy. Oil is mainly about transport (both goods and people) and logistics, and to a lesser extent chemical feedstock. Transport and logistics are relatively flexible markets; oil demand is strongly related to short term shifts in the world economy. Lower oil prices reflect analyst's expectation of a short term economic downturn of he world economy following the tsunami. Oil is currently hardly used to generate basline electricity and I think most analysts will agree that it will not be used to replace nuclear in Japan. Baseline electricty needs will be met in the short term by natural gas as promised by Russia. It remains to be seen what Japan will be looking at in middle to long term replacement for baseline but that is not the focus of current oil markets.
The price of oil is also dependent on the value of the dollar, not just demand. Look at how much value was lost in the stockmarket over the last few days. That's why oil is down.
I noticed this too. First I was surpriced, given that the Libyan situation shows no sign of sorting up. But thinking about it I cahnged my mind. One japanese oil refinery is in flames. Roads and airports destroyed. Millions sleaps on military folding beds in school halls. When this happens to the worlds 3:rd economy, someone will by a lot less oil. Bringing down prices.
In Sweden we have a saying; "The death of the one is the bread of the other". It rimes in swedish.
From one persons death, yet another has breath.
When Japan begins rebuilding, their demand for diesel will increase.
That doesn't rhyme.
Same saying in Dutch, maybe even related! Sadly this doesn't mean that there will be more "bread" for us. Rebuilding/cleaning the salt from farmland/clearing fallout or whatever will cost a lot more oil than if everything were standing upright. The price might drop right now, but when relief money comes pouring in a lot more NG/oil will be needed. On the short run we might win a few bucks/supply may increase, but soon enough the drawbacks will be felt.
Classic nuclear is economically addictive even though we know the fuel source is finite, and the problem is that too much loose radiation can be deadly.
Fossil fuels are economically addictive even though we know the fuel source is finite, and the problem is that too much emitted carbon can be deadly.
Renewable is the unwanted child, yet it is sustainable, and its "problem" is .... merely that it is intermittent, as Euan put it.
I submit that the intermittency problem of renewables is much easier to solve than either the deadliness of fossil fuels or nuclear, or the dangers of economic addiction to finite energy-dense substances.
Where there is a will, there is a way. There is no will, because the world is ran by kleptocrats and greasy-pole-climbing mediocrities. And that is because the silent majority lets them get away with it.
This is a wonderfully clear statement. It points to the ultimate necessity of renewable energy. We need to use the disposable sources sparingly to help us reach long term sustainability.
Not likely, IMHO.
Renewable energy is to me used far too broadly. Big wind and solar PV are not renewable in any real sense. They are an offshoot of the fossil fuel system, and can only exist as part of the fossil fuel system. As soon as fossil fuels decline, the systems within which they operate will run into unexpected (because we never think things through) operational difficulties, and the wind and solar PV won't be of use any more as part of those systems. It is possible that other uses can be made of them (making ammonia for the wind turbine; operating apart from the grid for the solar panel), but there is no way they will make any replacement wind turbines or solar PV panels. So they are at best temporary band aids. They are not renewable solutions.
Big wind and solar PV are not renewable in any real sense. They are an offshoot of the fossil fuel system, and can only exist as part of the fossil fuel system.
That's highly unrealistic. You can build and maintain wind turbines without fossil fuel.
Sure, our human systems (economies, social systems) will be stressed by the transition away from FF. Will there be recessions or wars?
Maybe.
But wind and solar really, really don't need fossil fuels to run.
How do you build and maintain a wind turbine without fossil fuels?
Wind turbines are manufactured, and then installed on site. They aren't "built" in the sense of a residential stick-built home.
Factories run on electricity, not oil, right? Their inputs and outputs can be transported by electric transportation.
Maintenance can be done with electric vehicles. Utilities are moving to them ASAP.
What the heck, here's general info:
People who are pessimistic about dealing with Peak Oil wonder: which processes happen to use oil today, because of historical accident, and which truly have to do so? What part of manufacturing, transportation etc, is specifically reliant only on oil?
So many things run on oil - can we possible replace oil in all of these applications?
The answer is yes, primarily through electrification of surface transportation and building heating. Aviation and long-haul trucking can be replaced with electric rail and water shipping, and aviation will transition to substitutes.
This will proceed through several phases. The first is greater efficiency. The second phase is hybrid liquid fuel-electric operation, where the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is dominant - examples include the Prius and, at a lower price point about $20K, the Honda Insight. The 3rd phase is hybrid liquid fuel-electric operation, where electric operation is dominant. Good examples here are diesel locomotives, hybrid locomotives, and the Chevy Volt. The Volt will reduce fuel consumption by close to 90% over the average ICE light vehicle. This phase will last a very long time, with batteries and all-electric range getting larger, and fuel consumption falling.
The last phase is, of course, all electric vehicles, which are are slowly expanding, and being implemented widely (Here's the Tesla, here's the Nissan Leaf). Electric bicycles have been around for a long time, but they're getting better. China is pursuing plug-ins and EV's aggressively. Here's an OEM Ford Ranger EV Pickup, and a EREV light truck (F-150).
Here are electric UPS trucks. Here is a hybrid bus. Here is an electric bus. An electric dump truck. Electric trucks have much less maintenance.
Kenworth Truck Company, a division of PACCAR, already offers a T270 Class 6 hybrid-electric truck. Kenworth has introduced a new Kenworth T370 Class 7 diesel-electric hybrid tractor for local haul applications, including beverage, general freight, and grocery distribution. Daimler Trucks and Walmart developed a Class 8 tractor-trailer which reduces fuel consumption about 6%.
Volvo is moving toward hybrid heavy vehicles, including garbage trucks and buses. Here is the heaviest-duty EV so far. Here's a recent order for hybrid trucks, and here's expanding production of an eight ton electric delivery truck, with many customers. Here are electric local delivery vehicles, and short range heavy trucks. Here are electric UPS trucks, and EREV UPS trucks. Here's a good general article and discussion of heavy-duty electric vehicles.
Diesel will be around for decades for essential uses, and in a transitional period commercial consumption will out-bid personal transportation consumers for fuel.
Mining is a common concern. Much mining, especially underground, has been electric for some time - here's a source of electrical mining equipment. Caterpillar manufactures 200-ton and above mining trucks with both drives. Caterpillar will produce mining trucks for every application—uphill, downhill, flat or extreme conditions — with electric as well as mechanical drive. Here's an electric earth moving truck. Here's an electric mobile strip mining machine, the largest tracked vehicle in the world at 13,500 tons.
Water shipping and aviation can also eliminate oil: see my separate post on that topic.
Here's a terminal tractor that reduces fuel consumption by 60%.
Farm tractors can be electric, or hybrid . Here's a light electric tractor . Farm tractors are a fleet application, so they're not subject to the same limitations as cars and other light road vehicles(i.e., the need for small, light batteries and a charging network). Providing swap-in batteries is much easier and more practical: batteries can be trucked to the field in swappable packs, and swapping would be automated, a la Better Place. Zinc-air fuel cells can just be refuelled. Many sources of power are within the weight parameters to power modern farm tractors, including lithium-ion, Zebra batteries, ZAFC's and the latest lead-acid from Firefly Energy, and others.
It's very likely that an electric combine would be an Extended Range EV: it would have a small onboard generator, like the the Chevy Volt. Such a design would be 50-100% more efficient than a traditional diesel only combine, and would allow extended operation in a weather emergency.
Most farmers are small and suffering, but most farm acreage is being managed by large organizations, and is much more profitable. Those organizations will just raise their food prices, and out-bid personal transportation (commuters and leisure travel) for fuel, so they'll do just fine. As farm commodities are only a small %of the final price of food, it won't make much difference to food prices. The distribution system, too, will outbid personal transportation for fuel. Given that overall liquid fuel supplies are likely to only decline 20% in the next 20 years, that gives plenty of time for a transition.
Even hydrogen fuel cells could be used, though they're not likely to be cost-competitive soon with the alternatives. PV roofs certainly could be used to extend battery life, though the cost effectiveness of that will depend on how much of the year the tractor is in the field. Electric drive trains are likely to be much more cost-effective than liquid fuels, but locally produced bio-fuels would certainly work. Also, fuels synthesized from renewable electricity, seawater and atmospheric CO2 would certainly work, though it would be rather more expensive than any of the above.
Any and all of these is several orders of magnitude cheaper and more powerful than animal-pulled equipment. One sees occasionally the idea that we'll go back to horses or mules - this is entirely unrealistic.
The easiest transitional solution may be running diesel farm tractors on vegetable oil, with minor modifications. Ultimately, farmers are net energy exporters (whether it's food, oil or ethanol), and will actually do better in an environment of energy scarcity.
Iron smelting currently uses a lot of coal, which isn't oil, but is a fossil fuel which we'd like to eliminate. Iron used to be made with charcoal, and iron oxide can be reduced with hydrogen from any source. Most of the steel used in the USA is reclaimed from scrap (and when industries mature, essentially all of their steel can be recycled) ; all it takes is an electric furnace to re-melt it, and the electricity can come from anything.
The US Navy plans to go reduce it's 50,000 vehicle fleet's oil consumption by 50% by 2015. They plan by 2020 to produce at least half of its shore-based energy requirements on its bases from alternative sources ( solar, wind, ocean, or geothermal sources - they're already doing this at China Lake, where on-base systems generate 20 times the load of the base), and it's overall fossil fuel consumption by 50% by 2020 with EVs and biofuel.
Some question the stability of the electrical grid, in an environment of expensive fuel. Utilities like the idea of "eating their own cooking". Here's an electric utility boom lift. Here's a consortium of utilities considering a bulk purchase of plug-ins (and a good article). Here's an individual utility buying electric cars. Similarly, utilities are buying hybrid bucket trucks and digger derricks. Here's a large commitment by two major utilities .
Here's a good quote from the Governor of Michigan: "For automakers, replacing the internal-combustion engine with an electric powertrain is both revolutionary and daunting. In a world where economic Darwinism threatens slow adapters with extinction, U.S. automakers know that they can either lead this historic transformation or become history themselves. Even today, as they engage in a struggle to survive, the Big Three are leading the way: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are scheduled to introduce electrified vehicles next year."
France is planning for a market share for EV's of 7% by 2015, rising to 27% in 2025.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/10/france-20091002.html#more
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What if our current system is less like a train running out of power, where it will just slow down and stop, and more like a jetliner running out of power, energy which it crucially needs to have a safe landing? Do we really have the resources to build out an alternate energy infrastructure?
Well, at least in the US, there's so much energy used for things with very marginal value that we have a very big cushion. We have an enormous surplus of energy (used for single-commuter SUVs, for example) , so we have quite a lot of flexibility.
EVs don't require significantly more energy than ICEs to manufacture. Wind turbines have a very high E-ROI.
Even if PO reduces the energy we have available, we currently have such a large surplus that we have plenty of leeway to reduce consumption in some places to free up the oil needed for such an investment.
Isn't this a tricky transition, with fragile balances between politics, communications, labor, logistics, public-calm, etc?
It's true - a transition away from oil will put stress on a lot of institutions. On the other hand, this isn't any bigger than similar transitions, like going from coal to oil, or from mules to tractors. And, isn't it good to know that there technical solutions?
Where will the needed electricity come from?
From wind, mostly. Wind has a very high E-ROI, and is plentiful. Solar, nuclear, geothermal, etc will also be important. Coal is extremely abundant, but we have to hope that we don't use it.
Aren't we going to have to live within the limits of our environment?
Sure. Fortunately, energy isn't one of those limits. I'd say that climate change and species extinctions are much larger problems.
What about the invested-in infra-structure for our oil-based life style and what it will take to tear down the old infra structure and replace it with an entirely different one? Won't we have to tear down the suburbs, and similiar infrastructure?
Yes, we'll have to toss out some ICE trucks and cars before the end of their natural lifetime. On the other hand, we do that all of the time: the average US car/SUV/pickup gets 50% of it's lifetime mileage by the time it's 7 years old. They could last 25+ years, if we wanted them to, but we throw them away. The premature retirement of commercial trucks will hurt investors in some trucking companies, but that's a sunk cost.
The real question is, can we afford to build new infrastructure, and the answer is clearly yes: new rail tracks and rolling stock aren't that expensive, and EVs are no more expensive than ICEs.
We won't have to toss out housing - Kunstler is just wrong, completely wrong. A Nissan Leaf will allow a 50 mile commute, or 100 miles with workplace charging.
EVs can be built with the same factories - for instance, the Volt shares a factory with 2 other cars. They drive on the same roads.
Nick, well I asked for that one. I know that you are smart guy, but there are a couple of things missing from your explanation. Economic realities are against the transition you speak of. Right now the global economy is in dire shape, with the CHEAPEST possible energy sources just beginning to run out. Industrial civilization was designed for ultra cheap energy, without thought to the future. As cheap energy ends, the global economy will be hard pressed not to collapse. It is true that an electric society is technically possible, but would take a redesign of our global economic systems on the fly. There is little hope of the WILL to change, and less hope of pulling that change off on the fly. I must say however that is ridiculous for me to explain this when you could go to George Mobus. I would suggest that you go back through the whole blog, if that does not convince you, we will just have to disagree. I hope you are right by the way, but I just can’t see us pulling it off.
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/
Industrial civilization was designed for ultra cheap energy, without thought to the future.
Not really.
First, both the US and other developed countries got that way with "moderately expensive" energy, not cheap energy. Oil and electricity have been cheap in the US in the post-WWII period, but it was rather higher in years before that: oil and electricity cost much more, adjusted for inflation. The US, and other countries, succeeded quite well in growing strongly even when energy was much more expensive, whether it was coal or oil.
Wind power is quite affordable (if perhaps not quite as dirt cheap as US post-WWI oil and electricity prices), scalable, high-E-ROI, etc, etc. So are nuclear, and solar even if they aren't quite as cheap at the moment (coal is also plentiful and cheap, unfortunately), so I see no reason to expect energy to ever be more than "moderately expensive".
Second, fossil fuels aren't nearly as cheap as they seem. Pollution is an unrecognized, external cost. So are the military costs we're seeing currently of roughly $500M per year. Those pollution costs aren't sustainable (especially CO2), but unfortunately the military costs probably are (in fact, many corporate interests are quite comfortable with them...). Moving away from oil and other fossil fuels will actually be much cheaper in the long-run than BAU.
Finally, let's assume that Business As Usual involved spending about 5% of our economic activity (perhaps measured by GDP) acquiring energy. If the cost of acquiring energy doubles, then we have to dedicate another 5% to that activity. GDP might go down by 5% quickly, in case we'd have a deep recession. Or, it might happen over time - if it took 10 years, then we'd see a reduction in economic growth of .5% per year, for 10 years. After that transition was complete, economic growth would continue. So, a reduction in "net energy" has a significant impact, but it's not TEOTWAWKI.
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I would suggest that you go back through the whole blog, if that does not convince you, we will just have to disagree.
I'm sorry, but it just doesn't make sense to me to wade through that blog looking for the key elements. Most of the material is very familiar to me.
Could I ask you to identify the individual blog post that seems most helpful?
Good point on the cheap energy, but the US was awash in oil, like KSA is today. European countries had older cities and did not build such oil dependent infrastructure. They are still completely hooked on oil though. I guess we are going to keep disagreeing on the fact that industrial countries can quit burning millions of barrels of oil a day, and replace it with electricity. In the US there are already rolling black outs sometimes from air conditioners on hot summer days.
Nick you should look under catagories, then Systems Science. You have your ideas down pat, why not read through a few post for an educated opinion of one who sees things differently?
the US was awash in oil
We're talking about E-ROI: that's reflected in prices.
In the US there are already rolling black outs sometimes from air conditioners on hot summer days.
Rarely.
you should look under catagories, then Systems Science. You have your ideas down pat, why not read through a few post for an educated opinion of one who sees things differently?
I'll take a look. Systems? I've been using systems approaches for quite a long time - linear programming, deterministic control-system simulation (like LTG), queuing theory, monte carlo simulation, etc, etc.
I suspect we need to nail down the behavior of the sub-systems, first. If we don't agree on the E-ROI of wind, or how the Fed handles deflation.....well, a system-level approach won't help.
“We're talking about E-ROI: that's reflected in prices”
Then why does wind need subsidies with a supposed EROI of 1to 50?
If wind had an EROI of 50, you would hear the coal companies complaining about the unfair conspiracy of “big wind” holding back poor little coal. I worked for a biodiesel start up and believe me the corporate energy giants would be making millions of wind, solar, and bio-fuels if it were profitable to do so. But it is not profitable so that means that renewable can’t compete on the open market with fossil fuels. So when you quote all your EROI numbers, it is with cheap fossil fuels in the equation. That is the disconect.
The fact that air conditioners have caused black outs at all is scary dude. It means the grid is pushing all it can, and someone turns on one more of something and the grid crashes. How do sweep this away so easily? And then you want to replace fossil fuels with electricity. You seem to assume that the OECD countries are in their prime, ready for a monumental challenge. This is not the case. The EU is scraping by, hoping for no more defaults, and everyone knows the USA is pretty much broke. Debt to GDP ratios are bleak, and they are limiting factors that you just can’t sweep away because they don’t support your vision of the future. I do not know how the future will play out, and I am not locked into any particular outcome for sure. I think we disagree about the state of the world as a starting point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/americas-crumbling-infrastru...
why does wind need subsidies with a supposed EROI of 1to 50?
1) Because E-ROI isn't the only thing that's important. Labor is the primary cost, not energy costs, and
2) Much of coal's costs are external, and not included in the price: CO2, mercury, sulfur, occupational hazards, mountain top removal, etc, etc, etc.
The fact that air conditioners have caused black outs at all is scary dude.
Not really. Sometimes the people who run the grid don't plan investment, or run it's daily operations properly. That has little to do with resource scarcity.
Still, the US grid is extremely reliable, and that reliability isn't declining.
Is the US underinvesting in infrastructure? Sure - the US often prefers to encourage the wealthy to install granite kitchen countertops, rather than invest in better bridges and transformers. Still, infrastructure investment is continuing, even if it's a bit slower than we'd like.
Nick, I realize that coal has many underreported downsides; it may destroy humanity’s ability to survive on this planet (AGW). I personally hope we use renewable energy, not fossil fuels. My whole point is to see if I could help you realize that there is a CHANCE that Gail and George are right. I have no idea how the future will unfold, your confidence in your vision of the future seems religious to me. That is not meant as an insult, just an honest observation.
What do you mean about the labor cost on wind? If labor cost enough to make an EROI of 50 unable to compete with not so cheap fossil fuels we are headed for a low energy future. I agree it might not be doomsday, but it is too complicated to know for sure.
Best hopes for a sustainable civilization
Mark
My whole point is to see if I could help you realize that there is a CHANCE that Gail and George are right. I have no idea how the future will unfold, your confidence in your vision of the future seems religious to me. That is not meant as an insult, just an honest observation.
I appreciate that you're puzzled as to why I express things assertively.
Let me reassure you - I'm very, very open to new ideas. It's just that I've been involved with this stuff for decades, personally and professionally, and when I'm confident something is correct I express it that way.
If labor cost enough to make an EROI of 50 unable to compete with not so cheap fossil fuels we are headed for a low energy future.
There is a basic paradigm that's useful here: "viability" vs "competitiveness". In most industries a very small cost difference can make you uncompetitive. That means that slightly higher cost solutions will be avoided, which can give the impression that those solutions are higher cost than they are. OTOH, if changes in the business environment (or natural environment!) change the costs of alternatives for everyone, suddenly alternatives can become acceptable in that industry.
There is an analogy in sports: "winner takes all". Tiger Woods and Pete Sampras get all of the publicity and a lion's share of the prize money. The 200th best player in either sport gets no publicity or prize money. On the other hand, the 200th best player will mop the field/court with you or me just as fast as would Tiger or Pete.
So, for instance, recycled materials are in general slightly more expensive than virgin materials, plastic included. But, if oil becomes more expensive then recycled materials could suddenly become the standard. If something could be recycled with only 10% loss at each generation, that would reduce the consumption of virgin materials by 90%, with only a very small additional cost for the industry.
As another example, high sulfur Illinois Basin coal costs perhaps 2 cents per kWh to scrub. That's an enormous margin to power plant consumers, who are willing to pay for long-distance transport of lower-quality Powder-River coal. The net difference in cost might be only half of one penny per kWh, which is still an enormous margin to power plant consumers. On the other hand, let's assume power prices rise by one half penny around the globe (to eliminate questions of regional competition) - how much difference would it make to consumers to add a half penny per kWh? Sure, they'd notice it, but would the difference cause any factories to close their doors, or homeowners to not be able to pay their mortgages? No.
Interesting points Nick, I have gained perspective talking with you. I hope you have it right because fossil fuels are just about done being cheap. I still think that is nearly impossible to predict how the future will play out. But I will say this, I hope in the future energy will mainly come from hydro, wind, tidal, and solar energy.
Interesting points Nick, I have gained perspective talking with you.
Thanks! I'm very glad.
fossil fuels are just about done being cheap.
The terrible thing: FFs haven't been cheap in quite a while - we just didn't know it.
I still think that is nearly impossible to predict how the future will play out.
I agree. All we can hope to do is understand what's going now reasonably well, and identify broad trends and possibilities.
I hope in the future energy will mainly come from hydro, wind, tidal, and solar energy.
I agree - ASAP.
What insights have you learnt?
That by intimating endless growth is possible we can continue BAU for as long as we can delude the gullible and naive.
intimating endless growth is possible
Not in resource growth. That's not what I'm saying.
we can continue BAU
FFs are BAU. Renewables aren't BAU.
OTOH, saying renewables and EVs won't help definitely helps the powers that be to continue BAU.
"Only oil can sustain our way of life" - that sounds just like Exxon-Mobil, doesn't it??
This just makes me laugh. The most highbrow BBC radio station has correspondents wetting their pants when 2010/Q4 GDP was downgraded from -0.5% to -0.6%. I'd be very happy to learn from someone who can enlighten me on the impact of your growth scenario on the financial sector - perhaps you are an economist who is willing to entertain the idea that current financial structures are doomed to fail by structural dependence on growth? And seeks to overhaul them? - or ruminate on the relationship between economics and finance.
”Wind turbines are manufactured, and then installed on site”
Wind turbines are made of tubular steel, I don’t think you manufacture those out in some field. So you are probably forgetting the coal used in steel mills, and the fossil fuels to mine coal.
“Factories run on electricity, not oil, right? Their inputs and outputs can be transported by electric transportation”
Have you done the math to see how much energy is left from all the energy you are losing by replacing fossil fuels? The falling EROI level from fossil fuels are already starting to kill economic growth. If you do the math right, and find there is plenty of left over energy, I bet you can convert George Mobus to your camp.
“Maintenance can be done with electric vehicles. Utilities are moving to them ASAP”
You will also need electric helicopters to maintain the three phase transmission lines. The electric truck infrastructure better get built quick, before the economy gives out. I do not think any utility companies are moving to electric vehicles any time soon.
the coal used in steel mills, and the fossil fuels to mine coal.
Yes, metallurgical coal is very useful. On the one hand, have you seen indications that it will run out very soon? On the other, it's not necessary: iron smelting currently uses a lot of coal, which isn't oil, but is a fossil fuel which we'd like to eliminate. Iron used to be made with charcoal, and iron oxide can be reduced with hydrogen from any source. Most of the steel used in the USA is reclaimed from scrap (and when industries mature, essentially all of their steel can be recycled) ; all it takes is an electric furnace to re-melt it, and the electricity can come from anything.
Have you done the math to see how much energy is left from all the energy you are losing by replacing fossil fuels?
Sure. Wind has an E-ROI of about 50.
If you do the math right, and find there is plenty of left over energy, I bet you can convert George Mobus to your camp.
I thought the same thing. Oddly, he doesn't seem to want to talk about it.
You will also need electric helicopters to maintain the three phase transmission lines.
Helicopter fuel consumption is a very, very small % of overall liquid fuel consumption. It will outbid other uses for a very long time, and biofuels and synthetics can replace them later.
I do not think any utility companies are moving to electric vehicles any time soon.
Utilities love EVs. They're using them, and buying them as fast as they can. Here's an electric utility boom lift. Here's a consortium of utilities considering a bulk purchase of plug-ins (and a good article). Here's an individual utility buying electric cars. Similarly, utilities are buying hybrid bucket trucks and digger derricks. Here's a large commitment by two major utilities .
Nick I think we've had this chat before. Gail doesn't mean they necessarily need FFs to RUN. They currently, and probably always would, need FFs to be built, delivered, installed, and maintained. The real issue isn't that real-time solar energy (PV, thermal, and wind) aren't renewable per se. It is that they are not self-sustaining or even mutually sustaining. You cannot, at present, use the energy output from these sources to rebuild the next generation or maintain the current generation of equipment and still be producing sufficient net energy for the economy to run on. At today's levels of energy production (and EROI) from alternative sources you can't even come close to society's needs let alone produce the energy needed to grow alternatives and transition into self-sustaining mode before the FFs run out.
To take advantage of solar's renewable qualities would take regenerating capture and conversion capital equipment. It doesn't pencil in I'm afraid.
Question Everything
George
"At today's levels of energy production (and EROI) from alternative sources you can't even come close to society's needs"
Taking an EROI chart from an article on the oil drum from 2008
It shows that wind has an EROI that is higher than (US) domestic oil and about equal to imported oil today.
PV is also in the range of nuclear EROI wise and has (and is continuing to) improved since 2008.
Both have big problems with intermittency and cost, but otherwise have many advantages over other power sources.
So we could use the currently still available FF to scale up renewables, which then are perfectly capable to sustain them selves.
Gail doesn't mean they necessarily need FFs to RUN.
Unfortunately, I believe she does. I can't imagine why electric maintenance trucks don't make sense to her.
They currently, and probably always would, need FFs to be built, delivered, installed, and maintained.
They really, really wouldn't. Factories don't need oil. Rail doesn't need oil. Short-range trucking doesn't need oil.
You cannot, at present, use the energy output from these sources to rebuild the next generation or maintain the current generation of equipment and still be producing sufficient net energy for the economy to run on.
Sure you can. Wind has an E-ROI of about 50.
1st, Wind is likely to be the most important renewable, and even Hall shows 18:1. 2nd, Hall's data is very old: wind is around 50:1, and solar (CSP and PV) is at least 20:1.
Once EROEI is above, say 10:1, it really becomes irrelevant - it's just not the basis for competitive decisions. It's useful for analyzing bio-fuels, which are below 5:1, but not for wind and solar vs coal or NG.
Cutler Cleveland's summary of the literature:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy
which showed that wind's E-ROI was around 19. If you study his sources, you'll see that that most of the studies are quite old. If you look at the turbines used in those studies, you'll see that the turbines studied were much smaller than those in use today - look at Figure 2, and read the discussion. If you study that chart, you'll see a very clear correlation between turbine size and E-ROI. It's perfectly clear that Vesta's claim for a current E-ROI of around 50 is perfectly credible.
Again, an E-ROI of 19 is more than enough. There isn't an important difference between an E-ROI of 20 and an E-ROI of 50. It's like miles per gallon: we're confused by the fact that we're dividing output into input, when we should be doing the reverse, and thinking in terms of net energy. An E-ROI of 20 means a net energy of 95%, while an E-ROI of 50 means a net energy of 98%: there really isn't a significant difference.
I'd swear that I've had this discussion recently too!
"You cannot, at present use the energy output from these sources to rebuild the next generation or maintain the current generation of equipment and still be producing sufficient net energy for the economy to run on"
And you shouldn't expect a small child to complete a marathon! But give it roughly a decade and solar and wind (and other renewables) will be able to build a new generation and produce excess energy for the economy, and do so for much cheaper than fossil fuels! [even using our currently fubar financial metrics where ff inflation is generally ignored and at least half the operating life of the panels counts for zilch because it happens in the post 20yr timeframe discounted at or above 5%/yr]
That said, I can't prove this--because the future isn't here yet--but the trends are there for all to see.
I don't expect gorillas to run in marathons at all.
I agree with Gail, so let's try a thought experiment about building a photovoltaic factory system out of the sun and the wind:
(1) we need to mine some minerals out of the ground, and at multiple sites, aluminum at A, silicon at B, Cadmium at C, pick your easiest set, you should probably give up on large wind turbines, the rare earths take too much energy
(2) now we need to refine, or smelt, etc. the mined materials into the actual substances we need, sometimes they are local, sometimes that are not, but i'll let you use sailboats and electric trucks to move them
(3) now you need to move the refined materials to a factory, right now they are not beside the refineries, more sailboats and electric trucks
(4) at the "PV factory" in the case of silicon I need to do fab and then assembly, and then i need to ship it to your house by electric truck
** feel free to take alternative paths, with a solar furnace, molten salts, copper, iron, etc... the great thing about sun calculations is that it is everywhere and the numbers are available
Now, 1,2,4 need energy, a LOT of energy, you can look them up, but by comparison the largest solar plant is 50MW in Spain, it's in a really great location so let's give it a duty cycle of say 1/3, since the Sun isn't up all the time. But oops,
there's a problem, 2,4 can't really be run in stop and start mode. those refineries and fab lines really need to be run continuously for various reasons of chemistry and physics. so now we need another 1,2,3,4 for storage.
Any of the transportation steps are going to cost you a lot of energy except if you use sailboats, which is probably a good idea. My Polaris 4x4 LSV charges on 1kw of power over 24 hours I believe, it carries about 500 lbs over 40 miles at 10 mph. not to bad. a nissan leaf platform for a small truck will have a different set of parameters that you can look it up.
All of these considerations about co-locating large pv,wind near or beside mining, refining, or manufacturing plants (distance means transmission losses) at this moment would be economicly inefficient to do, which means outside of
places like China they probably won't happen. When they have to happen, will the $ and energy to be there to make them happen? And they will have to happen over multiple jurisdictions, countries that have mines might not have
refineries, which might not have factories. That supply chain with sailboats will be fun, but make sure they have cannons, because you might just have pirates.
Give yourself some additional efficiencies in the futre, some increased sizing etc. borrow some dystopia scenarios where you get to melt down 90% of the cars, and kitchen pots for steel and aluminum, it doesn't really matter, this "system"
is very hard to build.
PV and Wind are wonderful "Descent" means, to buy (someone) 10 years of preparation in building wooden wagons, and breeding clysedales, or building islands of 1960s living with small scale wind (no rare earths, simple magnets), and small scale hydro (same), and maybe an ability to make/refurbish lead acid batteries for the PV sites which die in the 5-15 year timeframe depending on what battery tech they chose.
Happy thoughts today for watching the death of nuclear power.
Schoff
I think you mistake how things are currently done, for how they MUST be done. And secondly, I don't believe we will be full out of fossil fuels in a decade. Use fossils where they make the most sense and we could have them for a rather long time.
a)"give up on large wind turbines the rare earths take too much energy"--rare earths are useful, efficient and cheap which is how they got put in turbines in the first place, they are NOT necessary to build a large turbine...although until very recently they have been rather cheap.
b)"Now, 1,2,4 need energy, a LOT of energy"--making anything the way we do it today takes a lot of energy. To begin with you don't need semiconductor purity silicon for average solar cells--but that is the industry the current infrastructure was built for,
Renewables already produce 18% of global electricity supply--if I'm allowed to count hydro as a renewable--and are growing quickly (2009 http://www.i-sis.org.uk/worldRenewableEnergyCapacity.php)
c)PV sites don't "die" in 15 years, try 40-50.
Storage technology: batteries are great, but they are not the only way to store energy, air (compressed) water (pumped/gravity) and salt (molten for solar thermal) work too.
d)"When they have to happen, will the $ and energy to be there to make them happen?" IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING! With worse economics (by and large) than they will have in the future. Although admittedly not on the scale necessary yet and not on the scale it will be in ten years.
I follow solar PV closely and that industry has grown 100x in 11 years (from 200MW/yr in 2000 to ~20GW/yr in 2011). And that was before PV was even remotely "cost effective". In that time PV has reduced the "nominal $ cost" of panels and installations by ~50% (so even greater reduction in "real $ terms").
Schoff,
A reasonable approach.
I will not go any further with trying to argue with believers. I will just note that those who work with numbers in this field have come to the same conclusion as has been voiced here by Schoff, Gail, aangle, and myself (and others). Those who work with advertisements, MSM stories, and wishes continue to argue that it is possible to generate enough exergy without FFs (even if for a much reduced lifestyle). [I know this is an appeal to authority but you can't have it both ways -- either you buy into science or you don't.] "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts."
A reminder to all that Euan put together a very good post here not too long ago addressing the scale issue: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6602 Perhaps the believers would do well to review that and then work some real numbers (not just claims) themselves. Also I would remind readers that the work cited by apmom above is that of Charles Hall at SUNY-ESF, et al. and he comes to a quite different conclusion about the efficacy of alternatives than apmom suggests.
I will not go any further with trying to argue with believers.
That's insulting. I'm perfectly happy to argue the evidence and the logic. I've tried for 5.5 years on TOD to deal with this. Some people reply with sensible questions, and we have a good conversation. Other disagree more strongly (faith-based ideas?), and when it gets down to nitty-gritty they beg off, and refuse to take the debate to a good conclusion.
George - I've offered this discussion to you before, and you've begged off. You really have to try to take the conversation to a conclusion at least once.
those who work with numbers in this field have come to the same conclusion as has been voiced here by Schoff, Gail, aangle, and myself (and others)....that the work cited by apmom above is that of Charles Hall at SUNY-ESF, et al. and he comes to a quite different conclusion about the efficacy of alternatives than apmom suggests.
They haven't published it. Hall may have voiced a pessimistic personal opinion to you, but I haven't seen that in his published works.
A reminder to all that Euan put together a very good post here not too long ago addressing the scale issue
This is the extent of what Euan said with regard to wind, solar, nuclear, etc: "Nuclear and hydro both make significant contributions to the global energy mix but it is fossil fuels that dominate. When their production begins to decline it is difficult to see alternatives (nuclear, wind solar etc) filling the gap."
How is that a complete, reasoned, evidence-based argument???
Impressive argument Nick, certainly worth reading over. You're certainly covering the 'what can we observe around us NOW in the real world' aspect of understanding the real world very well, and laying it out well.
I'm not all that interested in the actual condition of argument or arguing, more interested to see the views expressed, if they can be expressed coherently it's worth a second look, and a second thought, as yours are, and as are the people who are skeptical, don't worry I suggest, each side of this debate, about yourself being right or wrong, you are talking to the readers, so all you have to do is present your points as convincingly as you can and then let the readers see what they can pull out.
Re a few things, in my view a certain doomer notion has possessed some people in these circles, and led them to believe that the decline that will follow from industrial energy use probably declining about 90% means the end of all life, rather than just being a really big change, which we have gone through before all over the world. I suspect a bit bigger than you yourself believe, but that's a fine point that only time will truly tell. Since life worked fine at lower energy consumption levels of the past that doesn't strike me as a particularly strong argument in terms of wind not being able to supply anywhere close to current levels. Re people seeing one depression come and not seeing the past ones, that's also a valid point, though you did slightly skip over the fact that at each level we pulled ourselves out by going to higher yielding energy sources, not lower ones, until we maxed them all out and had to go to nuclear, so I think you're underestimating a bit the importance of the sheer quantities and concentrations of raw energy oil and coal and uranium provide, although the true costs of all if calculated would make them all instantly non viable so I'm not arguing that line, though from a crude live here and now only perspective, ie, the fox news way of seeing the world, as far as we are concerned, the full costs don't matter, only the present enjoyment and luxury we can derive, now, ignore the future.
By the way, I really need to stop that mental tick of using terms like peak, decline, when we step back from non-renewable forms of life, we aren't declining or retreating, we are advancing and progressing, and are in fact in my opinion basically ascending, or as I like to think of it, trying to get out of the pit we have excavated for ourselves.
I like your views on wind power, wikipedia, a bad source, says 3% current for USA in 2010. Assuming 90% excess consumption here, which I think is reasonable, and assuming a scale up of solar/wind, and a reduction in the always on requirements, though that's hard on a grid based system for sure, probably not just hard, impossible, but we don't have to have a grid system that's so large in the future, anyway, assuming all that, and assuming a fairly rational allocation of resources (again, the US isn't showing itself to be a leader in this area, hardly at all), I can see the point for some countries. It's not hard to see a 10% of current from wind/solar here with a heavy commitment, but that's going to need political changes on the top, and there are few if no signs of those changes happening at this point. I'd say the biggest thing ignored here in this discussion re US is politics in fact.
I've started thinking more and more that just because we hit globalism heavily some decades ago doesn't mean we need to stay with it, and we won't, ships are run by oil, and it's costing them more and more. Not economical at some point, we'll replace some core stuff with more efficient/slower ways, etc, but we won't run a global system when the main fuel is removed, nor should we try. So this makes me again think that really what we are going to see is regional adaptation, iceland, norway, will have few problems, other countries who can cut and add renewables, they can do it, but other places that can't, will have big problems, and will not do well. Same goes I think for regions in larger countries, some will do ok, some that just are set on losing, will lose, as they desire.
Don't want to enter into specialist debates about eroi etc, I'm sure both sides of this have good points, but you certainly did a good job laying out yours in my opinion. Personally I hope your vision of an electrified industrial future fails, because I think we need to terminate the industrial project asap, but what I think won't change what people do, I'm more interested in seeing what they do anyway, since it's always going to be driven in the end by what mother nature is going to let us get away with over the decades, then centuries.
Thanks.
I guess an important point here would be that scaling wind power up by 30x wouldn't really be that hard, or expensive. Here are my thoughts about the task of replacing coal with wind power:
The US generates about 50% of our electricity from coal, which amounts to an average of 220 gigawatts. Wind, on average, produces power at 30% of it's nameplate rating, so we'd need about 733GW of wind. Wind costs about $2/W, so that would cost about $1,466 billion. Transmission might raise that about 10%, to about $1,613 billion.
Now, roughly 50% of coal plants need to be replaced in the next 20 years, so about 50% of the $1.6T coal replacement investment is needed anyway; new coal plants are just as expensive per KWH as wind, so that half, or $800B of the investment can be eliminated from our considerations.
Coal plants cost about $.035/KWH to fuel and operate, which is about 50% of the cost of wind. That's an expense that we'll have either way, so we can eliminate 50% of the remainder, which is about $400B: all told, we can discount the wind investment by 75%!
Wind's intermittency is often raised as another source of cost: I address that here.
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So, that gives us a cost of roughly $400B, or $40B per year for 10 years. That's a small % of US manufacturing, and a very small % of GDP.
A bargain.
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I think we need to terminate the industrial project asap
Better we use 20% of our GDP to eliminate our harm to the earth, than reduce it by 90% and leave the damage unfixed, while humanity is still miserable. Now, using 20% of our GDP to eliminate our harm to the earth isn't likely to happen real soon, but it's more likely than a voluntary 90% reduction. Finally, if we become poor because we hit a "peak everything" wall, I think we can expect that humanity will strip the planet bare, and leave it as dead as a cueball. The planet's best hope is that humanity succeeds.
Please see my comments elsewhere on Maslow's hierarchy - poverty will not make us better people...
Re poverty, that is a relative term with little meaning in our economic system. I grew up with seeing life that was far more meaningful, less empty and void of value, based on simpler technologies, most of them pretty much renewable though not totally sustainable, and I don't buy that any part of modern industrialism is required to be happy. That way of life represented a tiny fraction our current per capita gdp, I don't even want to guess at how low it was. Quite the contrary, modern industrialism in the US puts something like 30% of the population on anti-depressants, and they are totally right to be depressed, this is a bad, unhealthy way to live. I suspect modern Americans have simply never seen this type of life so they cannot understand how rich and life filled it is. I am really sorry for those who were denied this, and I understand why they think they have to have what we grow up with here, never having really seen anything else.
I saw the reality of maslow's hierarchy when I lived in Spain. Poor people had social status as shopkeepers, sometimes keepers of incredibly tiny shops. This status is greater than almost all hourly employees, since these people were respected contributors to their direct local communities, recognized by everyone as such. Other poor people were the gate keepers in buildings, they also had a nice solid respectable position, with life time employment guarantees, by law. I'm a fan of Maslow in some ways, though he does err slightly in assuming all have the same needs, that's not true, some really don't need to go to the top at all, it would make them unhappy and annoyed, others are unhappy and annoyed if they can't get there. The top is you should recall, the spiritual fulfillment some people require to feel whole. At least I think it is, I have that book lying around somewhere or other, one of them.
I believe however I do detect a very core and key error you are making re social allocation of resources. The US is not showing a single sign of any such rational policy, quite the opposite in fact, and I think you are seriously understating current political reality in your views re the US. Re other nations, possibly, not here, not now, not until people stop being told what to think by TV, that's the people who need to be told what to think no matter what, seems about 30% of the population based on who votes for who, and who keeps supporting who no matter how bad the record, the trick is getting the right notions into their heads in the first place, that's a tricky proposition at this point. Assuming rational policies when viewing the future really isn't a good idea, there's no example of it in our past, there are some examples among people's who like to live that way, not so much among ones who don't. Check out the current status of some real world locations like Somaliland, Punteland, and Somalia, all parts of a failed network of states with exactly zero political control or allocation of resources. These failed states, today, now, are seriously destabilizing global shipping, raising costs, in a majorly unexpected way. Navies have to patrol massive areas of ocean, all at high costs. This is just one single social breakdown in one single place, today, here, now. And that breakdown ripples out and influences many other systems. There is no ideal at all in this situation, and it won't end, and it can't be fixed.
So it's important to not idealize processes that history doesn't support such an idealization for. Ie, just as you are very well noting what industry is now developing re electric vehicles etc, which is interesting, so too you have to note what our direct history, say last 200 years, shows, and not exclude that evidence either when deciding what is reasonable to expect any social grouping to do.
We will see on these issues sooner than later I think in the USA, and probably China is my guess, these are probably going to be in the too big to not fail category in my opinion, empires don't last, they shrink, break, expand, realign, etc, and it's not a very rational process. No reason to expect anything different here. Just saying...
I also think you'd do your argument a lot of benefit by not trying to postulate wind replacing our ridiculously bloated fossil fuel consumption levels, that's really not necessary, and to me makes your point harder to accept, given current realities, spain, max wind roll out, current levels, wind covered only less than the rate of increase over I believe last 10 or 20 years. Ie, baseline is unchanged, as with uranium, expansion covered by wind, net cut, zero. Don't know the numbers for Denmark, the only other country I know that actually gets decent percentages from wind.
I'd argue if I were you for something like 30% absolute max, we waste massive monstrous huge amounts of energy here, and there is zero advantage to trying to promote a continuation of the absolutely unsustainable. Not sure if you've lived in Europe, if not, you should spend a year in the country of your choice, you'll really see, excess does not provide happiness, it really doesn't, believe me, it makes people miserable, isolated, alienated, lonely, and afraid. Horrible world to promote imo. Europe is more interesting, they do it with what, I think about 40% of what we use? Is that right? That's a decent baseline for looking at slowly winding down industrial methods over decades. I don't see much positive on the consumption front here, I do see a lot positive on the less is more front though, the NorthWest here is neat.
You'll note I'm not focusing on the parts of your discussion I thought and think are strong, just the parts I think are weak and inadequately thought out.
that is a relative term with little meaning in our economic system.
I've seen 2 pretty good definitions: there's the US poverty level, which is about $22,000 for a family of 4 (IIRC), and there are numerous "happiness" studies which say that money makes a real difference up to about $5k per person.
modern industrialism in the US puts something like 30% of the population on anti-depressants, and they are totally right to be depressed, this is a bad, unhealthy way to live.
"industrialism" doesn't do it. You could argue that our society could be re-organized along socialist lines, but that's different from "industrialism".
Other poor people were the gate keepers in buildings, they also had a nice solid respectable position, with life time employment guarantees, by law.
That's precisely what Maslow is talking about - basic economic security.
The US is not showing a single sign of any such rational policy
That's way, way overstating it. OTOH, I agree that the US could be a whole heck of a lot better. No question.
I also think you'd do your argument a lot of benefit by not trying to postulate wind replacing our ridiculously bloated fossil fuel consumption levels
My point isn't that it's necessary, just that it's possible, affordable, etc.
current realities, spain
You're thinking of the excessive subsidies. Wind is actually working pretty well in Spain, at the technical level.
The maximum deployment for wind is a long discussion. Here's a start:
There are many solutions to wind & solar intermittency, each of which is very expensive if taken to an extreme, including pumped storage, CAES, or a planet girdling HVDC system. If you combine the best of each, you're likely to get a much lower cost system.
More importantly, Demand Side Management is very, very cheap, and extremely effective. It's overlooked because it's not "incented" by utility rate regulation.
220M plug-in's and EV's could provide all of the demand buffering that wind could every want. Add V2G (see here for a UK-oriented discussion), which is a bit more expensive but very practical, and you get all of the capacity you need for handling system variance on an hourly or daily basis.
All you'd need is to retain large fossil fuel plants for the 5-10% of the time when wind was calm for a week or more.
The obstacles to a renewable grid aren't technical, they're social: up to 20% of the workforce would be made obsolete. They have an enormous incentive to fight change.
Do you have references for this?
Here's a discussion by Amory Lovins's RMI: http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Transportation/RMIPHEV_decouple_AESP.pdf.
On the other hand, it's very easy to analyze - no experts or peer-reviewed papers are needed.
Take 220M vehicles, with 25KWH effective capacity battery (3x that of the Volt), for a total of 5.5 Terawatt hours. Charging them using 220 volt, 30 amp connections will take about 4 hours, but create peak demand of more than the grid's current capacity, so vehicle charging would be spread out over several days, giving lots of leeway for dynamic scheduling.
If you want, say, 50% of KWH from wind then you need an average of 225 gigawatts from wind. At 30% capacity factor, that's about 750GW of nameplate capacity. An individual wind turbine can hit 100% of capacity, but a windfarm rarely goes above 85%, and a nationwide network would very rarely go above 50%, just based on the laws of large numbers (variance rises more slowly than the mean), and the fact that many windfarms would be negatively correlated to each other (one part of the country is windy, and another is calm).
That means peak wind generation might be 375GW. Night time demand might be 200GW, so we need to soak up 175GW. Our 5.5Twhr plug-in/EV fleet could draw that for 10 hours, using less than 1/3 of it's capacity.
Similar calculations apply for V2G.
Solar appears to have more short-term intermittency, which suggests that PHEV/EV buffering, with it's very fast response time, would be especially valuable for solar.
You are clearly ignoring almost all current economic and corporate / political reality in the USA. This makes it somewhat difficult to continue this part of the discussion, which I can see is definitely your weakest area.
The USA denies virtually all economic stability to people precisely due to the increasing, not decreasing, political power of corporate capital in our system. Failure to see this fact, which is a fact, and is really not disputable, ask anyone who lost their real job and is now working as a low wage, low Mazlow hierarchy value, employee of some corporate franchise, with zero job security, and in some areas, almost no worker rights or protections. You are doing your otherwise excellent points a huge disservice by not speaking the truth of the US as it is currently developing and evolving both economically and politically. If you are unable to do the same type of reasoning you do with current facts here on the ground as you do with electrical vehicles, then you should probably let that part of the discussion go.
The overall distribution of wealth in this country has for decades now been pouring towards the top 1%, which means less goes into the economy, and less is available to the state, because magically once wealth accumulates, so too does political power, which then is used to block off all attempts to rectify this problem politically. Ignoring this fact does you no credit. Poverty in our country is increasingly a direct result of this ongoing problem. The solution is not renewables, it's political change, which makes any notion of expecting the state to step in to promote the greater social good a somewhat unrealistic premise, which is why I repeatedly noted that the possibilities you outline have hopes in countries that are not in the political situation we find ourselves in here. Accepting this is I realize hard for americans to do, we have been brainwashed for decades that any form of socialism is bad, extreme wealth power and greed is good.
Spain / Denmark seem to have reached a relative plateau with their wind generation. Wind power needs wind, and it needs to be reasonably close to its sources geographically speaking. Denmark, which is basically all coast, facing constant North winds, which I have had the displeasure of cycling against for days, is maxing at I believe 20%. Any discussion of renewables that tries to whitewash the total capacities we can actually realistically add I find suspect, so I would suggest you not state things like: we can theoretically replace all.., which is a total unknown in terms of grid distribution of loads, which as you know, must be essentially instant in terms of overall grid demand. So I see why people are arguing with you on this point, you're painting a fairly unrealistic, as of yet not achievable picture, a common practice I find among most people who are trying to get this system to exit its current course, the promise of: no need to really change or reduce consumption. Even Jim Hansen does this re nukes because he can't really try to sell to the US population the reality that our way of life is non-negotiably non-sustainable. This part of your efforts are not nearly as good as the picture you paint of the current real world roll out of electric vehicles, which I find to be an excellent argument.
I am not overstating the current US political climate, I am understating it. Congress just voted to block the only halfway reasonable news source, NPR, from funding. Union busting of state workers was just successfully carried out in Wisconsin, and is being attempted now in Michigan. You are consistently glossing over points you do not like or prefer to ignore, as do nuclear apologists, and I suggest you stop that, it weakens your points. We have a far right group funded by hugely wealthy individuals and business entities that would like nothing better than to fully take control of political power here while removing all possible avenues of dissent. This should be familiar to you since a similar group supported by a similar set of interests in a similarly declined super power used similar methods in the 30s. So no, I'm not at all overstating, I am understating.
Likewise you glossed over the actual facts re Spain's Mazlow needs realities. These needs are met, or were met, I should say, by strongly socialized systems, in place at every level of daily life in that country, a thing so wonderful to experience there is simply no way I can communicate it to someone who has never seen how great this can be for normal people who are treated with respect and dignity by a polis. Once they entered the euro zone they suffered the same fate as most other countries, destruction of small scale business, extension of corporate control over more social resources, fewer rewarding jobs, more drone jobs. It appears you have never held a job out here in the real world, the type that provides zero needs except economic, and since unions have been actively crushed here, with great success, another political reality, the financial security is now largely non-existent in the US, which causes a lot of stress. Again, I suggest you give up on this slant, your facts are not good, nor do they correspond to the reality you can see just looking out your door or reading the news today, here. Spain has high satisfaction levels precisely because it is a socialist responsible, to some degrees, country, that does not put the needs of industry and business above human existence, that's why it's not a rich country. This has all changed since they entered the EU, which has devasted many of these positives as corporations took over more and more of daily life.
Photovoltaics are highly complex systems that require massively expensive plants, chip fabs basically, these plants are and always have been hugely toxic, and often have barely paid their startup costs before they have to be decommissioned to make way for the next level. Clearly this will improve if they can simplify the methods to not require ultra high technology to develop them, but I do not see complexity of this type being anything more than a stopgap, but a real one, towards reducing overall consumption. Wind however I agree, it's a much simpler technology, which is the strongest argument, with hydro, in its long term favor. We can build and fix wind plants even with a seriously compromised infrastructure, that is not the case for PV, but it is the case for concentrated solar, which is another thing I'd like to see looked at far more aggressively globally.
Raw unfettered industrialism does do it re creating alienations grief and misery, it does it all over the planet, whereever it appears, as does raw unfettered capitalism, which has a face so ugly we have to export it to the second and third world then pretend we are actually creating our own wealth rather than offsetting the costs too other, more poor parts of the world, and has been doing it in its crude forms now for some centuries. Clearly history is not a strong point for you, neither is economics, nor real world politics. I can see why you are encountering some resistance here, you are mixing things you know very very well with things you have barely any working knowledge or understanding of. Not a wise move in my opinion.
Now your comment that there will be huge resistance, that is absolutely true, and totally accurate. The level of that resistance can see here clearly, where some 30 to 40% of the total population actually repeat and believe verbatim the propaganda relentlessly distributed via Fox and other sources to willing absorbers of that propaganda.
The stability of the economic system in Spain was largely due to strong socially responsible views that denied the rights of individuals to destroy the larger social body in pursuit of reckless and excessive personal or corporate gain. That applies to Norway and most of Scandinavia as well. Anytime I am discussing this with someone and they use the word 'socialism' as if it's a single thing, and then an unacceptable thing, I know that person knows nothing about the mixes you find in the real world that simply do not allow pathological individual behaviors to corrupt their societies. So you aren't really showing much here I'm sad to say beyond some fairly stereotypical American business biases, which tend to be largely uninformed.
However, typing the words it's possible I don't really agree with, I'll type these words: it's not possible to replace our current energy load with renewables, because nobody has yet achieved anywhere close to this. I do agree and believe we can replace a reasonable percentage of them. No question there. I'm guessing, here, about 25% in the real world.
One problem however with doing so, due to the intermittency issues, is you then need to increase overall system complexity via smart grids, internalized social consumption expectations, and so on. This is all unproven and theoretical.
I continue to note your strong points, but your weak points are not just slightly weak, they aren't supportable.
By the way, Stoneleigh in my opinion just doesn't get how economics really works, she only sees this blip, but there are others out there who do, when people make predictions that are consistently wrong, and very wrong at that, about core movements of economic systems and prices, I stop paying much attention to their ideas about economics. This doesn't mean the underlying tendencies are not moving towards a very large and for most people negative change, they are, it means that the wrong model is being used to understand economic man, this is a socially constructed set of relations, and it doesn't follow scientific principles like the hard sciences.
Good luck on your efforts here, your good stuff I find convinncing, your weak stuff I think you should reflect on more, it doesn't sound like you have studied very much politics, economics, or history to me, your perspectives are hugely US-centric.
Not at all. I just don't see good reason to believe that our inadequate political system is going to cause TEOTWAWKI.What do I mean by that? I don't believe that we're going to suffer massive blackouts or massive transportation disruptions due to inadequate energy supplies.
Our inadequate political system is obviously causing a great deal of unnecessary suffering.
Poverty in our country is increasingly a direct result of this ongoing problem. The solution is not renewables, it's political change
I agree.
we have been brainwashed for decades that any form of socialism is bad...
Look back - I didn't say anything negative about socialism.
Spain / Denmark seem to have reached a relative plateau with their wind generation.
Denmark is planning expansion. As far as I know, Spain has reduced it's solar program due to bad planning (excessively high subsidies) and it's current economic problems. Do you have good info on Spain's plans?
. Any discussion of renewables that tries to whitewash the total capacities we can actually realistically add I find suspect
This is a very long discussion. I've reviewed a lot of planning studies and analyses. Is there one specifically you're relying on? We'll do better with specifics, rather then general objections.
Likewise you glossed over the actual facts re Spain's Mazlow needs realities.
Not at all. I actually agreed with you. My point: economic security needs (Maslow's lowest level) are important. I think we agree.
Photovoltaics are highly complex systems that require massively expensive plants, chip fabs basically, these plants are and always have been hugely toxic, and often have barely paid their startup costs before they have to be decommissioned to make way for the next level.
I don't think this realy provides an accurate picture for PV, overall. Could you provide specifics for this?
Raw unfettered industrialism does do it re creating alienations grief and misery
What the heck do you mean by "industrialism"? Do you really mean "capitalism"? I asked once already - please be more specific, before you start criticizing.
Anytime I am discussing this with someone and they use the word 'socialism' as if it's a single thing, and then an unacceptable thing...
Again, I didn't do that. Let me say it again - I didn't do that. You're assuming a certain mind-set.
it's not possible to replace our current energy load with renewables, because nobody has yet achieved anywhere close to this.
No one used coal, before they did. That's not an argument. Please, re-read what I said about intermittency, and reply specifically to it.
your perspectives are hugely US-centric
Not at all. We've just had a mis-communication, that's all.
As you did, I've mostly focused on where we disagree. But...I like, and agree with a great deal (probably most) of what you have to say.
Just a few points, thanks for clarifying the others. You are right re a mindset assumption, because it's so common, and your points leaned toward that, but if it's not there, that's great.
I do not differentiate industrialism and capitalism in general because I do not care if the state controls and distributes capital or if Wall street does, the long term outcome is similar although when done with social responsibility and the political will and power of entities other than corporate and pathological, it can be more oriented to the long term. In both cases the production of industrial manufacturing requires some type of embodied stored allocation of social assets and resources. It's like left and right hand on the same body, I don't really care how it's identified, you can't currently have one without the other. The short term banker type aberration of capital generating capital is a shell game so I ignore that, it's simply a siphoning off from the stream, not production or wealth generation.
In the past, early raw capitalism did exist with mercantilism, without a corresponding direct industrialism, but I would actually note that large scale production of ships, coupled with large scale deforestation, for metal smelting and ship building, in fact really did directly go hand in hand with the process, in the form generally of colonialism, but I tend to agree with Marx on this point, that simply allowed capital accumulation to occur which then enabled industrial production to occur, forming more of a continuum than two actual different things.
I believe capitalism is a necessary condition for industrialism to exist, since no sane society would ever allow industrialism if it could actually freely choose between it and the real long term option of sustainable life. One can note that the reverse is not necessarily true, but that example isn't really relevant to our current reality, in which the products of colonial raw material production feed directly into the industrial system, and capital is an intrinsic part of that process, like blood carrying oxygen, it's irrelevant if we talk about blood in any other context really.
In the US we like to offshore the industrial part of our economic system and leave the capital part, which doesn't work long term but does make a few people rich, but does let us pretend to ourselves that the two parts are separate and non related.
I don't believe capitalism can exist in its present form without industrialism. In some socially advanced countries you might find a small variation between the two because the needs of the social body are enforced aggressively.
Thus, what I mean by industrialism is the construction of toxic, ecosystem damaging, and totally non-sustainable extraction industries that waste and pollute (metal mining and processing, EV plants, which as you note are not that different from IC plants, battery raw materials extraction industries, and so on), and this is supporting/supported by capital based economic systems. The relative short term efficiency of the systems varies, USSR's attempt didn't do well, China's is doing very well currently but will not do well in the near future. No form of industrial production is sustainable, and no form of profit would exist if all the externalized costs were included in the final price of the product. Profit is simply slicing off short term gains and ignoring long term costs. Sustainable means sustainable, everything that is not sustainable cannot be sustained, it's a useful tautology because it's self demonstrating.
Lithium has what now, 10, 20 years supply? I read the recent analysis whitepaper pdf on it, and the situation there is the same as with all other options, check and checkmate in 4 moves.
You weaken your point re coal because we went from burning less dense material: wood, then used the same machines, roughly, to burn coal, only with greater heat output per pound of material, to using even denser and easier to transport material, like oil. Our nuclear attempt as a next step was an economic failure, and has been disguised ever since.
It is not a quantitative difference with moving from wood to coal to oil. This is a continuum that embeds us in its trap the greater the energy being used by burning becomes globally and across each culture and economic system. It is a qualitative difference when you move away from the human raw burning project to an unknown project. This is why I am questioning you, and I believe it is why others are questioning your logic. So your if A then B (if move to coal, then move to wind) is not correct, it's speculative. I fully agree that out of the set of available renewables, only wind and concentrated solar can achieve any lasting results.
PV production and chip fab plants I can't source because my understanding comes from researching in another context the actual engineering documents tons of them) of chip fab plant construction, followed by a decade of following the costs of chip fab methods because I work in the computer field but am not a blinded fanboy of technology. I do not look at high tech devices like lay people do, ie, magic boxes, I see the embedded toxins/raw materials, capital, and disposal issues. High technology is toxic and non-sustainable, as any one of a number of reasonably well researched books shows time and time again, and besides, it is a tiny blip that appeared on humanity's absolute maxima of consumption, along with globalized systems, in fact, it was required to run those systems. I view it simply as a last gasp hail marry pass, not anything with a future. I do not like the rule that says any time we introduce any technology that is then the new baseline and cannot be discussed, I'm sorry, I reject that rule.
High tech methods are too complicated and require too large an infrastructure to generate the necessary capital to develop and produce. I don't consider that infrastructure to have a future, and in another posting on this page, I say why: expanding debt levels show that our economy cannot handle increasing commodity prices and decreasing supplies today, and in the decades preceding. This cannot be argued because you can look up all debt levels, note their expansion since the 60s, and it cannot be excused away as not important or critically key. This is hard core limits, and the expansion of debt globally is the proof. I don't need more proof since that's a macro event, and is occurring almost at every level of the globe that is involved in capital.
http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/02/do-wind-solar-need-storage.html
for those who can't find the link re intermittency and who are reading this.
I read it quickly. You aren't saying the same thing as here there, so it's hard to actually discuss it. You are talking about a real world 20% renewable there, and that's realistic. Here you are talking about a full rollout replacement, which is not realistic. You are also not talking about the needs to maintain that baseline as other fuel sources go into decline, happening basically now. In other words, you aren't discussing the need to start aggressive conservation now, with zero allowed new consumption growth, now, followed by a reduction to reach levels that can be handled with renewables. As you add EV, you boost demand over the system, that demand boost must then be met by demand destruction elsewhere, to maintain an equal level baseline that is realistic as a goal for renewables. Wind is going to totally empirical, region to region, I will not engage in speculation on it, I will watch what Denmark does, and I will watch what Spain does as it reels under increasingly unstable economic conditions.
I do however give you huge credit for your persistence and serious attempts to discuss this, it's rare and it's very welcome. Keep up the great work, who gives a crap if you convince me, you're writing to the thousands who read these, you do a good job, one of the best I've seen. I yield as a matter of practice all points that are coherently, consistently, and completely laid out. Not yield, that's the wrong word, I see and try to not reject on ideological grounds.
(You write at an impressive pace.) Each statement above requires some form of proof, as they are a bit, well, strange. Why couldn't industrial production be sustainable? Why couldn't profit exist if external costs were internalized? In my view, profit is sort of an accumulated trade surplus, and trade is about win-win-exchanges which in turn typically happen when each party is doing something more efficiently than the other could. This often conserve resources - doing more with less.
quickly: the proof is in the lack of evidence, in this world, here, our world, not another one. It is you, not I that have to demonstrate the assumption that profit can exist without excluding, outsourcing, pushing to the future, the true costs, at all levels, social, environmental, etc. No example of this can be shown, thus it is not up to me to prove what reality shows, it is up to you to disprove it. I laugh out loud every time, for example, I see a picture of a smiling fishing boat captain, chugging off to sea in his metal diesel fueled boat, with the caption: captain x is proud of his sustainable fisheries certification...
Apparently you have been confused by the 'green' garbage spewed out continuously by those who don't understand that the word sustainable means sustainable, not slowing down of non-sustainable practices.
I have zero interest in science fiction, those days for me ended many decades ago, when I was a teenager. In sci-fi you can make up realities to your heart's content, you can ignore all of history, physics, whatever. Magical devices can be brought to life out of thin air and put to the page.
If all external costs and future costs were internalized, no grounds for extraction exist. The only societies that have done this in the real world were non industrial and fully sustainable within the limits of their regional ecosystem. Sustainable means sustainable, not slowing consumption rates. All raw material use is non-sustainable when it is an extracted item like a mineral, coal, oil, metal, galium, lithium, etc. The full costs cannot be calculated because they cannot be known until they are exposed, such as Japan now with it's now clearly insane notion of putting not one, but 6 plants next to each other on the beach behind a little wall in a massive earthquake zone. The entire notion of economics depends on ignoring this fact, that's why we use it in our system. If it didn't ignore it, we wouldn't use it.
Human artificing can and does happen in sustainable ways, but it doesn't happen in ways that extract non-renewable resources in the process as a key step. Britain leveled its oak forests to build its fleet of military vessels to build and maintain its empire.
Trade of sustainably produced items has existed I would guess for several hundred thousands of years. But that trade has nothing to do with your idea of trade, it's a guy walking with some arrows to the next tribe, trading them for something else his tribe doesn't have, then walking, or whatever he uses to get around sustainably, back.
Again, your questions are not for me to answer, they are for you to demonstrate, and you cannot demonstrate them because it's impossible to know the costs before they appear. Nobody really understood CO2 before 1900, and nobody listened before about 1950, and nobody really paid attention until the 80s, and nobody acted until the 90s. All the past costs are now not paid, and we pay them in our future. This is how externalized costs works, and it's why capitalist production cannot exist sustainably. I don't personally think it can even exist renewably to be honest, but that's harder to show. Norway for example has hydro, but that cost money to build out, and a lot of that money comes from industry or extraction of resources.
Profit is accumulated everything, externalized costs, trade surplus, social and labor costs, unpaid almost always. Profit in this sense is a very new concept for humans, it has really no past before about 8000 years ago, and then only in a very few locations on the planet.
Up to about 400 years ago, it, profit, was almost unheard of in most parts of the planet, it certainly came as a very very rude awakening to our Native Americans when they were exposed to such a toxic concept, though they should have recognized it in a way from their own failed Mayan experiments, and others of that scale that would fail if given time. Just kidding there, obviously if you live locally and deal with your region sustainably, you aren't getting news or history reports from areas thousands of miles from you, though you probably do get rumours and myths etc.
I find this question interesting, and nick is not incoherent like most promoters of some ideology or industry tend to be when faced with larger views.
And if I don't agree that this is what reality shows and think it is up to you to prove it? That something is unsustainable doesn't mean it cannot become sustainable when the need arises. Perhaps complex systems will always have unsustainable parts, but those parts shift from time to time so that the system as a whole can go on forever?
Why not? Finding a gold nugget isn't "sustainable" extraction - there is a finite amount of gold. But you can do a nice ring and recycle it for millennia, and perhaps that's good enough? What are the external costs? We don't know, you say. But how do you know there are any?
So you agree that there is or have been sustainable societies? Then how is "sustainable" defined? That what you do is within the regenerative capacity of the environment? How does industry make that impossible? It doesn't - not in theory anyway. The Earth is quite large and its regenerative ability is quite big. The energy provided by the Sun, by geothermal sources and by nuclear materials are simply astounding. They can last us until the Earth is swallowed by the Sun going nova.
Perhaps, but does it matter? It would be stupid of us to not pick up a gold nugget just because we can't expect to find one tomorrow too. Tomorrow, we do something else. Btw, most metals are so abundant and so easy to recycle that we simply won't run out. Especially not since we could, if we need to, harness extreme amounts of energy with little effort. Thorium, for instance.
Have you considered that coal and oil may have extreme positive externalities that may be bigger than the negative ones? (A nice example of a positive externality is education.)
Sometimes, novelty is good, you know.
industrialism is the construction of toxic, ecosystem damaging, and totally non-sustainable extraction industries that waste and pollute (metal mining and processing, EV plants, which as you note are not that different from IC plants, battery raw materials extraction industries, and so on)
So, you mostly are referring to mining, and secondarily to large-scale, centralized manufacturing?
Hypothetically, what if you could do manufacturing without mining? What if everything was 99.9% recycled, and the remaining .1% of mining was done with complete restoration afterwards?
In the US we like to offshore the industrial part of our economic system
The US manufactures 50% more now than it did in 1978. People are misled by the fact that US manufacturing employment has dropped substantially in that period. But, that was caused by sharply rising manufacturing labor productivity, rather than by a decline in absolute levels of manufacturing output. See nice charts at http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2010/10/03/increases-in-u-s-worker-p... and data at http://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/index.html, including http://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/historical_data/index.html , Historic Timeseries - SIC (1958-2001), "Shipments" http://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/historical_data/index.html.
Lithium has what now, 10, 20 years supply? I read the recent analysis whitepaper pdf on it...
What are you referring to, specifically? There has been quite a lot of writing about lithium. It's not at all rare. The only question is how quickly mining and processing can be ramped up. See http://energyfaq.blogspot.com/2009/02/could-we-run-out-of-lithium-for-ev...
You weaken your point re coal
I could choose many other examples. The point: saying that something new is impossible because it hasn't been done before is a non-argument. Of course it hasn't been done before...it's new.
High technology is toxic and non-sustainable, as any one of a number of reasonably well researched books shows time and time again
Could you give a reference? regarding PV, have you looked at CGSI?
expanding debt levels show that our economy cannot handle increasing commodity prices and decreasing supplies today, and in the decades preceding.
Debt is a virtual thing. The fact that it's increasing tells us very little about the physics of energy, or other commodities. That's why E-ROI anslysis is useful - it cuts through such things to the physical reality. Wind has very good E-ROI. Solar's is good enough, and increasing.
Yes, debt is rising. It rose in the 1920's - so, the question can be asked - was that a resource issue as well?
Perhaps this debt is simply a sign that the US needs to import a little less (oil, maybe?), and export a little more. The trade deficit is only about 5% of the US GDP, but over time the cumulative deficit builds up.
Or, perhaps the US government needs to tax a little more, and borrow a little less.
Or, maybe it's just a symptom of the fact that the dollar is a reserve currency, and so other countries have been stocking up on t-bills.
Peak Oil makes oil importing countries borrow from oil exporters, so they owe more and more. Of course, that means that oil importing countries are lending, and are owed more and more.
If you live in an oil importing country, you have the illusion that PO causes debt to rise. Oil exporters know that the net isn't growing, at least as a direct result of PO.
Of course, the great recession has meant greater debt, but again, for every borrower there is a lender - net debt doesn't rise. Leverage can rise, but net debt is always zero.
Is rising leverage always bad? Consider the change from a landlord-renter relationship to a owner-lender relationship. The owner may have exactly the same cost of living, but now they have a mortgage payment rather than a rent payment. Are they worse off? No, they're better off, because they have the benefits of ownership: capture of capital gains, control over their lives, etc. Of course, they take more risks (overborrowing, casualty loss, responsibility for maintenance, etc), but that's ok - it's better to own than rent.
More later...
By the way, I want to make clear, I also do not agree that the decline is going to cause teotwawki in the way doomers believe.
I do however believe it will in fact cause the end of this world as we now know it, because this world is so radically non sustainable that it is impossible to visualize any way it can sustain. I do not however see that adjustment in a negative light, I think it's required and a great thing that all resources should be directed towards, it is our present methods that are the catastrophic disaster to our ecosystem, not the failure of those methods. The failure is the solution, not the problem. I disagree totally with the doomer perspective in this regard. I follow all positive signs out there of such developments, including what you are talking about here.
Let's review however why BAU is going to fail no matter what we use to power the systems:
Food: Ogalla reservoir depletion, most of midwest: unsolvable.
This one is a show stopper for corn in the Midwest. Status: depletion now, ongoing, non-renewable. Checkmate for current food production levels, lower levels relying on renewable water and fertilizers, possible. Impact of EV, zero.
Climate heating increasingly wiping out crops and farm areas as heat increases: present, Russia this year, Australia, which also has to deal with salt in the soil, not fixable, from irrigation. This will get worse in dry zones, not better, so the midwest is going to be producing less grain, EV is irrelevant to this.
Climate heating will not be stopped because I've repeatedly noted, global carbon fuels are being consumed now at maximum extraction rates. This will not stop in the near future, which is the future it has to stop in to stop global heating. Global heating and water trump EV and electricity when you are viewing social failure.
Saudi Arabia, and most other dry overpopulated desert countries: no food, or not enough food, too large population, water and food obtained by selling or extracting declining raw material resources. Dreams of some income from electric power generation I hope happen but will not replace the hundreds of billions of free dollars that flow in daily.
Mexico, our southern neighbor, destabilizing today. Not enough capital to do any of the stuff you are talking about, drying climate, overpopulation. Expected outcome, increasing flight to USA, hunger, starvation, system failure.
Chinese supported Jungle clearing in Brazil for soy: non sustainable, it's the wrong soil, checkmate. Impact of EV, zero.
Last year, an 85% reduction in irrigation water to California central valley: no negotiation, food production drops. Population and water use rises, outcome: no more irrigated farming in dry central and northern california climates: food totals, checkmate, lowered. Same issue there with depleting aquifers but I think the California one might be renewing. Impact or relevance of EV, zero.
Top soil depletion, possibly remediable via stopping industrial extractive farming and returning to lower yield but more sustainable farming. Impact of EV, zero.
Basically using more renewable power has no affect on water use or farming when you are discussing inputs and extraction of non renewables. No replacement for water.
You are right though, wind may be a way to make our way out of this mess, or help push up back out of the pit we are digging. I admire your attempts to push this point, positives need to be studied and examined and tested, now. Industrial production should be seen as no more than the historical aberration it is given the overall span of human history, and all notions that levels of technology that are not sustainable must still be sustained because we have them now I really would like to remove from the discussion in favor of serious examinations of how to wind down more gracefully to help get us out of this mess.
India, water, fuel, food, not happening, they went over the limit of population, so has China. My present working hypothesis, all countries that must import food are now are over the edge, no matter why or what political system they have, because they have that system, not some other one, so that has to be included in the reality report.
So you have: water: not helped or hindered by EV to a large extent, except I guess for the water used to cool heat based generation, which is substantial, but I don't think it's that substantial relative to totals of ag and other.
Food, not helped or hindered when it comes to inputs, slightly helped by some of the methods you note re EV vehicles. Inputs are carbon fuel based increasingly, and water is not something we can make so that's an absolute.
US: looks not so bad re other countries, not nearly as good as say Norway or Iceland. China, a disaster unfolding in real time when you talk ecosystems and not theory. They will certainly see a true eotwatki scenario. Too much desert, too much bad farming, too little water, checkmate. Attempts to outsource production/farming will fail as they fail, and as those countries decide to take the land back, which they can do with a stroke of a pen.
Brazil: interesting. South America, interesting.
Southern US, fail. Southern states already are at capacity or over re water demands.
I see this as unrolling regionally, not nationally, except when regions are countries, like Norway or Denmark.
Most of you arguments is about fresh water, right? With abundant energy, you could simply make it from sea water and transport it to wherever it is needed. Specific problems have specific solutions. We have fixed a big number of environmental problems - polluted rivers and lakes, PCB, DDT, dioxins, acid rain, poisoned animal populations, the ozone layer... Many solutions may have been seen as quite impossible just before they were implemented, but now we think so little of them that we barely recognize they happened.
wrong.
Research sea water to fresh.
All costs: massively higher than estimated. Negatives: extreme salinity in output into sea/ocean. The ocean is not a garbage can, it is stressed to maximum levels now and doesn't need its systems further destroyed by the salt we'd pump back into it.
It's the same as your other examples: today water costs basically zero, it just rains down, comes from aquifers. When you then use the energy you will recall is not as easy to produce or generate, to create that water, it's a huge waste, and it's totally impractical except on small scale filters that work without power.
When you have to start building your resources and raw materials, and generating them, you are not winning, you are very very close to full on failure, because complexities are increasing, costs increase, and eventually, not event the abstracted and false profits from industry can pay these and still maintain the system. There are numerous fine writings on failed fresh water systems, not so many on successful ones here, if you have free oil like saudis, fine, burn some, until you don't, then you are even more deeply screwed re population support. Pushing back makes it worse, yielding makes it better.
You apparently haven't been to or read about the second or third world, none of the problems you talk about are solved, except maybe to some degree fluorocarbons.
animal species are dying off at cataclysmic rates, no end in sight for them. Are we occupying the same planet here?
I suggest you open your eyes to the condition of the third world, toxic waste dumping, outsourcing of pollution, etc, and I think you will find your ideas unfortunately have nothing to do with reality. We haven't fixed any problems except ozone that I know of, and that was only because we found a way while we had resources to use freely to replace them with something else. DDT use was somewhat legendarily shipped to the third world, with lethal results.
Our ecosystem, the ocean systems, are failing now, your words are not relevant to that failure since the failure is real. Debt levels are rising precisely because this system is in active failure mode, and is losing its ability to handle new events as they appear. Optimism is fine when it has something to do with the world.
Ocean acidification, from CO2 from carbon fuel burning: full speed on. Larger failures coming now. Major ecosystem failures as a result. Unavoidable if I understand the science there.
I understand that the status quo will not understand these points until the status quo has changed, it does not lead, it follows.
Feedback loops are kicking into high gear now, methane in the arctic, a huge one, no solution, zero. Total annihilation of the entire arctic type ecosystem. That's happening now in many areas. Spreading rapidly.
Species extinction you can learn about if you spend a few seconds in google.
All problems you say were 'solved' were not solved, they were altered into new forms which then manifest their problems to us now. Toxic wastes at every level are ignored, and they are ignored precisely for the reason I list: to pay for proper permanent disposal of long term toxic wastes of all types removes profit, which is already failing globally now anyway due to increasing raw materials prices.
We drive more cars today, we put out more CO2, we fail to recycle something as relatively simple as tires due to costs etc, we scrape at depleting ores to get lower and lower grades. It's checkmate but bau is insisting on playing their hand out to the end, and it will result in the end, so I guess that's what we want?
Why is it impossible to understand that a brief 100 or 200 year blip in human history, that will end, is not a permanent scenario, nor is it in any way a norm or even realistic long term? Now you know why the Easter Islanders didn't do that well even though they could have done pretty nicely had they recognized the limits earlier. No need to speculate on that anymore, you can see it in your own words.
Not everyone is blinding themselves to these issues, but the ones who have most to lose are.
I'll guess we just have to wait and see. I have a vastly more positive outlook - I see improving environmental regulation, improving technology, improving efficiency, rapid slowdown of population growth, continuous but uneven poverty reduction, spreading democracy, abundant energy in the form of nuclear power and so on. The issues you present, to me, are not there or are not acute or very significant.
This is something which I wonder about. An earlier poster quoted $14Tn US national debt I think. Just who is that money owed to?
Water is the problem?
Change how farmers irrigate in the midwest (or anywhere) with drip irrigation rather than sprinklers...better for the soil, need less herbicides, use 1/10th the water. Why is this not being done? b/c water is free (or darn near it).
Once there is a realistic price for water, you can use solar thermal to distill salt water. You can even locate plants offshore if you are worried about land use.
why is the same fallacy appearing here in every posting?
I'm going to have to stop now, it's getting tiresome.
When you raise prices on the generation of raw materials you previously got for free, your society is weaker, and so is this current economic system, that's the one we are in.
You and most others here seem to have a fantasy that higher costs means higher income, I'm tired of that point because it's childish and boring. Higher costs means higher costs.
Our system is based on cheap exploitation of resources. Nothing I have said re debt expansion or resource supply/cost issues has been addressed at all, because of course it cannot be addressed, so I guess that's good.
Farmers are already irrigating with less water, from NON SUSTAINABLE FOSSIL AQUIFERS. I refuse to spend more time on this point. Slowing down extraction rates simply slows them down. The Saudis do the same thing. It appears that serious magical thinking is going here, but it's not even interesting magic, it's just stuff that will be shown to not work in the coming years because it doesn't allow for the required profit levels our system needs
Drip irrigation is more complex, it needs the pipes tubes etc, all non sustainable. Why don't you guys see you are arguing precisely the point raised by those who have looked at collapse? Every single method is higher cost for lower results. Many can work at much lower levels, but none of these levels will support life as we know it, which is great.
Solar thermal will distill some tiny amounts of water, we will use everything in the process of learning what fools we are, no doubts there.
this discussion is devolving into pure science fiction, sorry I have to check out now, I am not interested in science fiction.
I give up now, this is getting repetitious, I am convinced, the USA does not currently possess the mindset to solve its problems, all it can do is see more, other consumption, other waste, everything in order to avoid cutting overall consumption now. But I knew this before I started the discussion, now I am convinced. I have never thought the US would do well in our coming future, and I still do not.
"When you raise prices on the generation of raw materials you previously got for free, your society is weaker"
Is that what you see happened in the south after slavery was abolished? Prices rose on labor that had previously been free. I believe they invented ways to use less labor since the cost of labor went up.
"You and most others here seem to have a fantasy higher costs means higher income"
No No No. You mistake what I'm saying entirely. I never said, thought, or implied what you say. What I am saying is that higher costs means you use less of whatever it is whose price went up. Society will conserve, switch to complimentary goods , create new alternatives etc.
"Slowing down extraction rates simply slows them down."
Well...yes. Isn't that point?
"Solar thermal will distill some tiny amounts of water"
Considering that "solar thermal" drives the hydrological cycle, I would say the potential is much greater than "tiny".
"this discussion is devolving into pure science fiction"
What have I suggested that is "science fiction"?
By the way you never did answer my question: Do you think power from renewables is "the same thing" as power from fossil fuels?
"I give up now, this is getting repetitious"
Godspeed...maybe you will feel better after a nap.
...And then you list a catalogue of regions where water, soil and climate impacts will cause massive problems. How are the billions of people affected by these problems going to survive, let alone thrive?
"we pulled ourselves out by going to higher yielding energy sources"
Did we move to them b/c of higher yield, or better economics? You can argue the one leads to the other, but my point is that what matters is the better "economics"--realizing how flawed our current system of accounting is. Still as long as you have a choice between two roughly equivalent things/outputs, you will go with the cheaper.
Why am I banging on about this? Because "peak fossil energy" means the cost of all power goes up, making renewables (relatively) more affordable. There is no shortage of renewable sources of energy (almost by definition) and within the forseeable future there never will be. Therefore switching to renewables is simply a matter of economics. The inevitable rise in the cost of fossil fuels (will be painful and will force us to use less--and I'm sure it will get ugly) and the fact that renewables are presently such small scale, means that they will get cheaper (again relatively) as they achieve greater scale.
Just as PEVs probably don't "make a lot of sense" economically at $3/gal gas (max fuel savings is ~$1.5/10k miles/yr), they start to good interesting at $5/gal ($2.5k/10k), and are almost a no-brainer at $8/gal (~$4k/10k).
Only one key logic error in your point, and I see it all the time: the cost of energy does not create profit, it is a fixed cost, it's expensive. Filling a tank for $80 rather than $20 means you spent $60 more, period. Simplistic explanation but it's true.
When energy gets more expensive it is more expensive, it's not creating some value out of nothing, it's a higher cost for the same thing we paid less for previously. So renewables don't get more reasonable, power gets more expensive, so there's less surplus to use for other things.
Some places prove your point re renewables, Norway, Iceland, but these are very unique due to accidents of geology, and hydro is not really renewable, it's just not as bad, the dams silt up, you have to blow them up and start over again, it's just slow enough so we don't have to pay attention, not to mention that damming kills natural ecosystems dead, river flow, fish migrations, all that. At best we try to mitigate, at worst we ignore totally.
The bounty nature provides is is the genuine source of all sustainable wealth, everything else is just a pipe dream, as we will learn as time goes on I am virtually certain. Shepherding that bounty is the real key, in whatever way we find to do that, it's the only actual realistic outcome that I can see. Shepherding means it is sustaining, not degrading. Most if not all so called sustainable fishing today, for example, is not.
There's a frequent error economists of a lower grade make, and that's thinking that money/market is reality. It's not. A higher price for the same thing is really just a higher price, and a system built based on the lower price isn't going to be same in any way when the higher price kicks in. Countries that can level out the markets and restrain and support raw material and energy prices, ie, countries that subsidize, tax, and allocate resources more rationally than we do, may do better in the short term, but I don't see capital being able to function without growth, it's simply not a part of its essence, and growth is. Debt/repay debt with interest, there's no way around it. The free market is the worst possible choice imo for the future, nothing could promise a worse outcome, the Chinese know this, they are exchanging state assets, like US dollars, for raw material assets, these aren't private market transactions, but these materials are now off the private market. This is going to be a very hard reality for Americans to deal with, I just don't see how wasting money on pointless wars really equals spending / investing those same amounts on long term raw material asset acquisition. Going to get ugly I think, history shows few cases where losers with large militaries take losing kindly.
"Going to get ugly"
A clear point of agreement!
"A higher price for the same thing is really just a higher price"
Ahhh, now we are getting somewhere...is power from renewables "the same thing" as power from fossil fuels?
Here you need to consider not just the electrical potential generated--because clearly fossils and renewables generate the same net charge--but also the emissions/outputs of the generating process. You only pay for the power, but you will get both. Of course the "emissions" of renewables are at least an order of magnitude less. And if we can agree that all emissions are bad, the power you get from renewables is not the same thing as power from fossils.
emissions costs are exactly the same as the other example I gave. They contribute nothing beyond costs to the system that put them in place. This is why they are violently opposed by the entire US industrial system pretty much. Because of this political opposition, these are currently not implemented in any meaningful way anyway in the US, due to the political issues I mention above, and which I won't repeat. Ignoring political reality is not ignoring a small irrelevance or side issue, it's ignoring all reality, since these are fully political issues, that will be determined by who influences the US political system and the voters' minds, and how.
I find this line of reasoning kind of bizarre to be honest.
So we have first: raw burning, low costs per watt/calorie.
Then we have, raw burning, higher costs per watt/calorie
Then we take that, add on another cost, emissions charges, which then yields a higher cost.
Since we are here dealing with simple arithmetic, I am somewhat puzzled, you appear to believe that higher total costs for the same energy output somehow magically generates greater income. 2 + 1 + 1 = 4, not 2.
The economic system then has to absorb these costs.
Of course emissions are bad, so is excessive consumption, and it appears that people are really desperate to avoid facing the reality that consumption must drop back down many notches in order for the economics of renewables to work. This is a sales pitch, nuclear energy uses the same type of reasoning. Anything to avoid cuts in non-sustainable consumption.
I am somewhat surprised however that you fail to recognize the true benefit of renewables, I was expecting to see it as soon as I read your first word: the true benefit is so obvious it shouldn't need to be stated.
When you consume fossil or nuclear fuels, you are paying for a product you are going to burn. That money leaves the economic system, and is gone. It may be filtered in via investment groups and so on, but it's basically lost money.
This is the real advantage to doing locally produced wind and solar, you create jobs, good ones, you create local industry, a good one, and the raw sucking sound you see in the US as say, 400 billion a year goes to oil companies and oil producing nations, begins to diminish as the money is returned in productive form to the country. It is this that forms the true fundamental economic benefit, not some abstraction of invented numbers where 2 > 4 thus x or y is now meaningful.
I continue to be fascinated by how desperate our system is to avoid certain discussions and realities. One reason Europe correctly added about 100% tax to motor fuels is that they understood that it is critical to return some of the money used directly to the society, rather than seeing it all exit as it does in the US. So when people filled up in say, France, they were thus funding the development and advancement of strong corrective measures at the same time, like TGV, for example. The US notion of just throwing the money to large interests who then have it, with zero benefit to us, I find weird.
You create product A, exchange it for B and burn B, yes. B is gone, A remains. Money simply reflect that.
Yes, you create product B directly, although you were better at doing A, so you can only make 0.5B for the same effort. You burn the 0.5B, it is gone, while A has never come into existence. Money will reflect this too. But who is better off here?
No argument from me about your core point. It's my view we are entering into a stalemate situation which is leading towards checkmate, because I can see that every possible avenue is being explored, and none yields growth. I am unable to see anyway a system that requires growth can continue to exist once growth ceases. I believe this may be historically unprecedented.
Again, I will follow current realities: since the 1970s global debt levels have steadily increased. These debt levels are tracking roughly raw materials limits occurring.
As of the 2000s, debt levels have skyrocketed. These debt levels are tracking commodity prices very accurately. The clear and logical conclusion I come to is that growth is in fact dependent on a certain price/availability of a wide range of Bs, raw materials, and that growth hits a huge wall once this price/availability combination begins to fall out of sync, ie, prices up, availability down.
Since Nick did such a great job with his real facts on current electric vehicle production and development, using data from our present, I think such methods are the way to go. Fantasies, not so much.
And the real data on current capital is massively increasing instability, debt loads, inability to even sell more debt in many cases, for example here in the US, QE 1, 2, maybe 3. Required because nobody wants our debt, which we have to sell because our system is not generating growth. Corporate debt is also extremely high, all debt is.
It is high because growth has faltered, and growth has faltered because the underlying economic tendencies must take supply of raw materials into account no matter how irrational the rest of the system truly is.
So I see no endgame in sight here than checkmate for our current economic system, and once one factors in the problems with producing A when B, C, D and all the rest are rising in cost and decreasing in supply, the standard economic models fail. They are in fact failing now as we sit here.
Who is better off? The ones who are sucking off their share, not the ones who will have to clean up and fix the problem in the coming generations. Read Bloomberg, every issue they have articles catering to the ultra rich, global high end yacht sales were UP during the depths of the last big dip recession. No need for rocket science here.
Interesting. What share of global consumption is luxury consumption of the ultra rich? I need this figure to understand if this is a real problem. Intuitively, the share is very small. Also, I think ultra-rich consumption goes way down in recessions. I need more evidence to accept a contrary view.
The share is totally irrelevant, it's small as you note, the point is that more wealth is being extracted, stolen, embezzled, by a shrinking group of individuals, as the system destabilizes, and the levels of that extraction are reflected in the increasing sales of ultra high end consumption items like mega yachts, private jets, exotic baubles like 1 million dollar cars etc. Intelligent investors and speculators understand perfectly well how to profit from booms and busts, using different methods in each case, but in both cases, pulling out more wealth.
It's not an economically significant category is my guess, it's a revelation of the degree of capital accumulation and inequity, while citizens are bailing out billionaires and mortgaging their futures to pay off the gambling debts. It's also a deep reflection of the increasing separation between rich and poor in the minds of the rich, and the increasing cynicism of the wealthy, who have lost a sense of shame and social responsibility.
The point here was that it was precisely during the recession that one of the only industries showing growth was mega yacht building. You know, the stuff Larry Ellison uses to outdo the Russian oligarchs when it comes time to show whose is bigger? You can google it I assume, it was in most serious business sources, bloomberg for certain if I remember right.
These types of luxury things are reported all the time on bloomberg.com just add it to your daily tab reading and you'll see what I mean, usually they talk about them in the culture section, that's where they discuss their toys.
http://noir.bloomberg.com/?b=0
bookmark that, it's the old style daily updating leading news section.
The distribution of wealth upwards needs zero demonstration since the only way you can't know about it is you are willfully refusing to see it. Can you say: tax break for the ultra wealthy in the US as debt levels skyrocket forced as direct political blackmail to enable extension of long term unemployment benefits?
Even the richest of the rich recently, Bill Gross, Warren Buffet, and George Soros, have called that an insane policy that is suicidal for the health of the system and nation, while calling for higher, much higher, taxes on the rich, since lowered taxes concentrates even more wealth in the hands of the few, which gives them thus greater personal influence and power. See the Coal loving Koch brothers as a clear example.
Wealth disparity is largely irrelevant. We live off consumption, not off heaps of money. Somebody has to run big companies, and that means either big wealth or big government, and I'll take the former any time.
You agree that the consumption disparity is not very significant, and then I think we have no big picture problem either, although you seem to be quite upset. You may have a right to - I agree the crisis hasn't been handled very well. But to me, that's more a reason to be angry with politicians than to complain about the rich. It isn't the cat's fault that he's fat - he just eats what's given to him.
I cannot continue this discussion, I"m sorry.
Massive control and centralization of wealth yields greater power of the holders of that wealth.
Once wealth is centralized, the nonsensical trickle down theory fails, and what we end up with is the dregs. Thus, as you see now, here, in the real world, the economy begins to fail, since money is not longer flowing properly, it is being held in fewer and fewer hands, rather than being distributed, where it would then have increased consumption. You do not appear to be able to do math at all, so I'm giving up now.
The politicians and the rich are intertwined, it's a revolving door, funded and fueled by the rich. I'm upset because you are not exhibiting any attempt to carry out logic, but are rather just repeating things without a thought.
Until the money flow into politics here is fixed, and permanently altered, politicians can generally only gain power if they work in the interests of the wealthy. This is obvious and clear, and I'm not interested in hearing excuses from those who would like to remove even more government controls and hand it to the wealthy, making the system even worse.
Maybe it is time to leave this country, I've been thinking about it. But there are large areas where people refuse to follow your type of logics and are really working to try to fix things, and those I deeply respect. You seem to have some very simplistic view of economics and politics which I just can't get further into re wasting my time here, sorry.
Not every discussion requires a conclusion, I am giving up on this one now.
Yet you do.
How is that power manifest and used? The power of big telecom to either make phones and services the 14-year-olds like, or not? The power of Hollywood to make films we go see or to make films we ignore? What is you are afraid of?
When will that happen? And who has talked about trickle down? I have just pointed out that the share of consumption that is siphoned off for extreme luxury is very small. The rest is either ordinary consumption or working money, which needs to be there and to be managed by someone.
That's simply fantasy. We have no real problem here.
I'm actually asking some questions to try to get you to think a bit. Alas, you seem much more interested in writing than in thinking.
Standard U.S. complaint. As a Swede, looking at it from the outside, I think you don't give your system credit where credit is due. It is much less corrupt and much more guided by common sense than you seem to think. However, in the US as in Sweden, voters and politicians are in a way trapped by inertia, by ingrained culture and by somewhat ignorant voters. That's a price we pay for democracy.
It is as usual in discussions like this - I think the same of you. However, I also happen to have the experience and education to know that I'm the advanced guy in this argument. That's not to say that you couldn't be right in some aspects, but then it's more because of luck on your part than anything else.
This is not nitpicking - I think it's crucial to separate finance from economics. The financial system is screwed by the end of growth but the economic system will adapt to something new. The challenge is to question the financial system (isn't there a history of politicians who get too close to the reality of the banking elite being quietly eliminated?) but this sort of paradigm shift is a massive undertaking...
Answer the darn question: Do you think power from renewables is "the same thing" as power from fossil fuels?
"The economic system then has to absorb these costs"
YES, my point is that the economic system (society) ALREADY absorbs these (emissions) costs. But with fossil fuels the costs are absorbed separately from the consumption of energy.
Renewables aren't more expensive. New coal plants cost just as much to build and operate as wind farms, even including the cost of dealing with intermittency.
Wind is a little more expensive than old, dirty coal plants, or natural gas plants, but only a little. The extra cost won't make a significant difference to our economy.
Solar is somewhat more expensive, but it's cost is falling rapidly - by the time we need it to provide a large % of our energy, it won't be signficantly more expensive than new coal.
Nuclear is similar: it's a touch more expensive than coal, right now, but if we were to decide to ramp it up enormously, it would gain economies of scale it doesn't have now.
You are ignoring reality in your statements, I think I'm now going to give up on you in areas that outside your field of specialty, however, within that field I find your views persuasive and well thought out.
Nuclear is heavily subsidized by the tax payer, on the front end. It is totally funded by the tax payer on the toxic storage backend, and as you can see now in Japan, also on the liability end during operations. None of these costs are considered by apologists, or even admitted. I leave aside the vast tracts of radioactive tailings, which have in some cases forced the overthrow of the locals by larger political forces in order to gain permission to do the mining. Since this reality is known and understandable to anyone who bothers looking into it, I have to assume you can't be bothered, and would rather type words than talk reality, I am sad to say, in this area anyway. You clearly cannot bring yourself to question the US economic or political system, probably because you are too dependent/entrenched in it. This leads you to non stop errors in your discussion, and I think I can't really get around your mental blocks and blinders here.
I am going to follow our much maligned x here (who I am fond of to be honest for his persistence), always on power is not the same power as intermittent power. The system it runs, and I do take your points that it can run a system, will not be this present system.
A single point source of power, with what basically amounts to an on/off switch is not the same as an intermittent distributed source.
Now I see why you are getting flack, you are saying things that are untrue.
I think you should focus on the excellent points you have control over and understanding of, and pull back on the points that seem to be far outside of your field of specialization.
The reality of an altered system run by more electrical vehicles I think you are doing a good job demonstrating, but pretending that will be a plugin replacement for this reality I think you should stop arguing when it's clearly going to be a very different one.
Since material consumption and manufacture is the heart of our systems, it's obvious when core components change, as they would in the model you are putting forth, the system will not be the same. The question if easy to burn oil, coal, and gas can be replaced by complicated to distribute and store electricity is I believe really answered already, it can't be.
The thing I find somewhat puzzling in your method is that you can actually demonstrate the point you want to make very well, but then you largely destroy your success by some fairly idealized non real world scenarios, and I think it's this which is making people respond negatively to you.
If you laser in your focus more on what you know and push that, and stop talking about things you don't know, like history, politics, and economics, I think you will do your cause a lot of good, you have great data for the areas you are strong in, almost none for the areas you aren't.
You sold me on the possibilities I had discounted, but then unsold me by trying to argue things you simply do not know at all.
Power levels are not theoretical, we can look at the successes, not many, now. Those are I believe two: Iceland and Norway. Both have always on, largely storable power, via geothermal and hydro.
These are the only successes I know. Both were created by the way by fully socialist systems, both Norsk Hydro and Icelandic geothermal were until recently government run, and they were government built. So the only realworld successes occurred in seriously socialized systems.
The next two on the list, Spain and Denmark, are also very socialized, although not as much as Iceland and Norway. You cannot ignore reality in the way you are doing and expect anyone to take you seriously, I'm sorry.
China rollout is also fully state funded and run. All successful outcomes will involve heavy government filtering and subsidizing, and will require resource allocation based on rational, not market principles. I say this for the precise, exact, identical reason you point to current industrial electriv/hybrid vehicle realities, and that is because this is how it is happening now, here, on this planet. Somalia, for example, has zero such rollout, because it has zero government. I realize grasping the facts of advanced socialized systems is hard for US centric business people, but that's a bias that is going to harm us, not help us, long and short term, and the Chinese, the Brazilians, are going to be laughing at us as we flounder in our mythologies while they move forward in their realities.
Some suggestions:
1) Don't leap to conclusions about what you think others are saying. As you saw, you spent quite a bit of time refuting something I hadn't said about socialism. Now, you appear to be doing the same about other things.
2) Don't get personal. Just because someone says something you disagree with doesn't mean it's time to criticize them personally. I realize these are important, emotional things, but....it doesn't help.
3) We can probably make better progress dealing with smaller "chunks" of information. One thing at a time - we don't have to fix all of the problems of the world in one afternoon.
--------------------------------------------------------------
On to specifics:
I've been dealing primarily with energy. I agree that we have other problems. In fact, I think Climate Change is a much bigger problem than PO, or any other resource limitation one might consider.
I don't think we're going to deal properly with Climate Change. That's not (primarily) the fault of the US. The US is a little worse, no question, but neither Europe nor China or the rest of Asia are dealing with it in anything like the proper manner. Sweden is doing a little better, but they have a lot of hydropower, so it's not like they're really a lot more virtuous than the rest of the world.
Timeframes are the key. The later we wait to deal with PO, the more painful it will be, but if we have to we can deal with PO as it happens. The timeframes for implementing solutions to PO are much shorter (e.g., carpooling (weeks) in parallel with emergency ramping up of EV production (less than 10 years)), and the hidden positive feedbacks much smaller and primarily social in nature (i.e., under our control).
On the other hand, we need to deal with CC before it happens, and that appears very unlikely. CC is a physical phenomenon, and will probably accelerate even if we stop CO2 emissions right now. The timeframe is decades, and the hidden positive feedbacks are outside of our control, and may be enormous and unstoppable even now.
Still, it's useful to be clear where the problems are. We have all of the technical tools we need to deal with PO and Climate Change (though cost reductions would certainly help, via better science, engineering and manufacturing techniques). What remains is the social problem.
More later...
You have views worth considering, that's all that interests me. I am unable to understand the agendas of the others in this discussion, so I'm not going go any further.
I responded largely from what I read you write, that's all I have to go on, nothing is perfect, and this is a fully disposable online thread that is gone from here in about a week. If you want me to very carefully read and follow, you have to write a book, it's too hard to focus seriously online in serious discussions. I can barely read Soros now as it is, too little time, and he's talking about some very serious issues which I'd love to cover. If you have a book I can get at the library I'd read it for sure, and will if it appears.
It's important to understand this when discussing issues in streaming threads on sites that have streaming content, like TOD.
So I never consider the requirement for perfection on anything I write here, if I want high end stuff I will work on professional material for professional publication. Time is an issue, I've already spent a week here, but a rewarding one, and my time is finite. I do not get paid to promote anything, I do have to work for a living.
You are good at what you do, I hope you get paid for it, you deserve to be.
For example, you will NEVER see anything I write seriously here, I promise you that. But you will see me try to learn, understand, and learn more, and discuss when I am confused, so I can learn some more. Because I'm familiar with how things work, I have learned that the quickest shortcut to reach the meat online is push the person. I pushed you, you responded excellently, I pushed some more, things clarified quickly, and now we've to some degree communicated. This is a shorthand cheat method, and sometimes I use it when I'm tired of writing and reading, usually it exposes people, like getting them drunk, in your case, you impress with clarity and logic and reason. What more can I say? Nice work.
You are an excellent poster, period. I don't need to argue with you, I see where you are strong and weak, probably as you can see where I am strong and weak, and that's all one can ask. You are also honest and try to communicate and take the time to consider views, and to respond. Nothing more can be asked. Well, lol, a whole lot more can be asked, but I won't ask it here, it doesn't fit in.
I always respect serious people who aren't stupid, and you will change my views, and already have. But don't get too caught up in the impermanent discussions in these threads, very few people will read them after this week, and few except some serious types who blog etc, are probably reading this one.
I'm working out my ideas for other uses, but it's not a game for me, but my uses aren't yours, and won't ever appear here in any form, but they will be flavored and moved by them.
Keep up the great work, I wish proponents of various systems would be as careful and consistent as you are trying to be.
Thanks!
I'm glad I helped.
One thought about nuclear: I agree that it has many external costs. On the other hand, so does coal. I'd argue that coal's externalities are larger, especially CO2, but...
That may be a pointless discussion. I don't really like nuclear very much, because it does indeed have very large external costs, like weapons proliferation. That's why I prefer wind, solar, hydro, wave, biomass, etc.
If you want to discuss the feasibility of a 100% renewable grid sometime, I'd be delighted.
I would like to discuss that, or at least see you lay out your best case for it.
Feel free to send me a private message, or whatever else required to grab my attention if you write one up and post it. I'll probably add a link to your blog from mine because at some point we do need to start looking for the future and finding in real world tests how we can get there, even if it's not beautiful or perfect.
Sounds great.
You might want to put your email address and blog on your TOD account, so people can reach you.
Done, added blog/contact urls to profile.
George
I will just note that those who work with numbers in this field have come to the same conclusion as has been voiced here by Schoff, Gail, aangle, and myself (and others).. By training I like to work with numbers, and I have come to the conclusion that renewable energy is scalable.
Let me give one example of why the post by Euan that you cited is very misleading.
Generally we don't use oil or coal directly but as a fuel in an ICE vehicle or train or ship to provide propulsion or coal to provide electricity. Most renewables (wind, hydro, solar, geothermal) provide electricity, so its not the BTU content of oil or coal that has to be replaced its the kWh needed to do the same job. So to replace 24QUADS of coal we only need to replace the kWh produced(about 9QUADS), presently in US, renewables generate about 20% as much electricity as coal. To replace the 37QUADS of oil used mainly for transport(after refining and distribution), we would need about 7QUADS of electrical energy.
So today renewables only account for about 10% of the work performed by burning oil and coal, but there seems to be no limitation of sites or materials needed to greatly expand this X10 or even X100 fold in time.
The time limitation to replace oil will be the time to replace the existing vehicle fleet(10-20 years) with electric propulsion or PHEV. The US already has sufficient electrical generating capacity, and coal and NG to last another 20 years.
The other major FF is natural gas, this has an important role in providing peak electricity and will be harder to replace by pumped hydro storage,and will take a longer time to build, but the US and Canada are blessed with many excellent potential sites capable to supplying several weeks of peak electrical demand.
Can you be more precise where you see the dependence of Solar and Wind of fossil fuels?
From a sustainability question with regard to fossil fuels, all that matters is that they have positive EROI. Both wind and PV have quite decent EROIs so I can't see why they wouldn't be sustainable with respect to fossil fuels. Sustainable with respect to raw materials might be a different issue, but both should be reasonably well recyclable.
Overhead question for the assertion/line of though brought up by Gail:
Given: Oil is greatly depleted at some point. Coal-to-Liquids etc. will not scale to mitigate this much.
Is there a 'critical mass' of solar (PV/CSP) and Wind at and above which they would produce enough energy to allow humans maintain said infrastructure, as well as provide a Minimum Operating Level of energy for a greatly powered-down, but sustainable lifestyle?
And is this question somewhat analogous to the discussion of how much (what percentage) of food must be dedicated from a farm to feed draft animals or alternative be turned into bio fuels to run farm machinery?
More succinctly: Can farming and solar&Wind energy be self-sustaining without significant FF inputs? If so, what number of people can be supported at what level/lifestyle?
The more 'succinctly' you put it, the more you are forced to oversimplify the proposal, making the challenge unmeetable.
No silver bullets, right?
Solar Heat, Solar Electric and Wind are some of the better BB's, as are Massive Negawatts that we have to employ.. if PV requires a 24/7 powersource to keep the Silicon Molten and Delicate Processes on their steady path.. then build plants near Niagara and other consistent Hydro/Hydro-Wind resources.. these exist, and might only promise a slower build-rate, but that's what we're looking at, Tortoise/Hare approaches to the race.
But the answers you challenge others to provide in order to have 'proof' that this will work may not exist, they may be hanging on too many variables to bother with such predictions/promises.
Renewables have long term, but slow and subtle growth curves, while Fossil Fuels, Coal and Nuclear have quick riches, but slow and steady poisons that creep into our lands.
I'm with Gail on this. Right now everything depends on fossil fuels.
From an energy standpoint there may be a point in the future when fossil fuels aren't required to mine, manufacture, transport and install these renewable energy machines but that day is still a long way off.
Or you can look from the point of view of the financial system. As oil declines, in my view the financial system will crack. Creating anything, including renewable energy machines, requires a functioning financial system. When we are in the midst of a depression deeper than the Great Depression because of oil's decline (some call it "petrocollapse") very, very few renewable energy machines will be built. Over time with some effort we may cobble together some sort of system that provides a fraction of the energy we use now but it will be by judiciously using whatever fossil fuels we have available.
Either way you look at it, renewable energy is critically dependent on oil at the moment and will remain that way for almost any timeframe you care to examine.
We needed to be on the new system by the time oil declined. Now it's too late. We lost that game.
I just lost the game, nice use of meme there :).
Right now everything depends on fossil fuels.
That's not what Gail said - she thinks it's impossible to transition away from FFs.
there may be a point in the future when fossil fuels aren't required to mine, manufacture, transport and install these renewable energy machines but that day is still a long way off.
Almost all manufacturing is electric. Much mining, especially underground, has been electric for some time - here's a source of electrical mining equipment. Caterpillar manufactures 200-ton and above mining trucks with both drives. Caterpillar will produce mining trucks for every application—uphill, downhill, flat or extreme conditions — with electric as well as mechanical drive. Here's an electric earth moving truck. Here's an electric mobile strip mining machine, the largest tracked vehicle in the world at 13,500 tons.
whoops, didn't see the overhead lines
Here in Australia, many of the mines are hundreds of km from grid power. For each one of your mines they are either going to build transmission lines hundreds of km, or have their own generating power plant.
Currently they use big Diesel generators, put them in the back of the semi, take a fuel tanker and go anywhere quickly. Your method is slower, takes more energy and will limit the mines that can operate. As a result costs of many minerals go up, making the costs of the energy infrastructure go up (made from the finished minerals).
Your concept of electrical everything only works in a utopian world of unlimited resources to make it happen in the first place, not just FF. It occurs to me that electrical everything may require a bit more copper than is possible, apart from all the rarer minerals.
Here's an outrageous notion for remote Australian Mining..
I wonder what kinds of tools you could operate with Solar Generated Steam? It would require water, certainly, but reclamation levels should be pretty high. Of course there's probably higher efficiency moving the steam into turbines and carrying the electric power down the holes, but there are a few ways to play those sources.. and the equipment could be train or truck based.
How do you build your infrastructure remotely in the first place?? When your batteries run out you are stranded.
I think it would likely be portable equipment that is built in factories and yes, Trucked to a destination. (I'm assuming NG and Diesel aren't altogether gone, but just much more expensive) Solar Heat can easily be modular, and the needs of the job could dictate how many sq. feet of collectors would be needed at various stages of the project.
What batteries? This proposal would be solar-steam, direct power, or possibly to direct electric. 'Capacitors' of storage using heat or pressure containment could help maintain flow rates, but also the tools would be set up to also provide some level of demand control.. if there's lower power available, you drill slower, run fewer trains or crews, etc.. have alternative processes available for the spare hands that is not dependent on the external power supply.
Creative business owners can be very good at improvising.
'But OK, When your steam runs down you are stranded..' - Good enough. And when the sun comes back out, you have to get to work again. I'm just saying there is a significant power source out there, and we know some good tools for accessing it now. It might make mining operations look a lot different than they do today, probably a lot smaller.. but still possible.
My original reply was in regard to Nick who was looking at all electrical mining.
Think of how big an array of solar would have to be for a mining operation. 2000 hp excavators ~1500kw, 1200 hp dump trucks ~900kw, processing equipment to concentrate the ore etc, yet you have to get the solar array out into the field first. With 4 or 5 trucks running 10 hours a day you're talking 70,000kwh power. At 100% efficient solar power giving sun an average of 6 hours a day, you still need a couple of hectares of your solar array. Very prone to down days, time consuming to set up, more expensive to run. It means the price yoyu have to get must be much higher than if you took current diesel equipment in. Higher prices for minerals (remember we have got all the easy stuff first), means higher price for the start up equipment, vicious cycle. It just wont happen.
Far more likely we have to rely on biofuels when FF get scarce/not available. This of course has its own set of problems.
Actually, PV power is cheaper than diesel.
Diesel contains maybe 10kWh of useful power per gallon, in the field. If diesel is at $3, that's $.30 per kWh. PV can beat that when it goes below $6/Wp, and installed systems are below $4/Wp even now.
Don't forget, much mining, especially underground, has been electric for some time - here's a source of electrical mining equipment. Caterpillar manufactures 200-ton and above mining trucks with both drives. Caterpillar will produce mining trucks for every application—uphill, downhill, flat or extreme conditions — with electric as well as mechanical drive. Here's an electric earth moving truck. Here's an electric mobile strip mining machine, the largest tracked vehicle in the world at 13,500 tons.
What are these diesel genset powered mobile miners going to do when Oil is increasingly expensive or unavailable?
Electrify?
Nick you seem to miss some vital points. How do you electrify remotely without FF? How do you do it cheaply enough to make the mining profitable?
My argument is that the cost to do things remotely becomes so great that it does not happen, which leads to higher prices for the diminishing minerals that are available, which leads to higher costs for the new electrics, etc. It is a spiral of increasing cost and less efficiency, vs the changes we have had up to now of increasing efficiency because of increased intensity of fuel, wood>coal>oil.
First, most mining operations are large and long-term, and are already connected to the grid.
2nd, PV is already cheaper than diesel in most mining locations, and PV keeps getting cheaper, and diesel keeps getting more expensive.
By focusing on a very small piece of the puzzle, you can convince yourself that this is possible. It's only when you look at the bigger picture and specifically the financial system that one grasps the difficulty of what you are asserting.
I've been using systems approaches for quite a long time - linear programming, deterministic control-system simulation (like LTG), queuing theory, monte carlo simulation, etc, etc.
I suspect we need to nail down the behavior of the sub-systems, first. If we don't agree on the E-ROI of wind, or how the Fed handles deflation.....well, a system-level approach won't help.
Again, two years ago Stoneleigh predicted a crash in 2 months, with the Dow at 1,000 by the end of 2010. You were confidently saying that we were in long-term decline, and yet the great recession hit a bottom, and the world has been and is growing.
I'm bored with going round and round with you.
I predict a global financial crash, you seem to think this system can grow forever. I don't feel the need to convince you: you are completely entitled to your point of view. I write responses to your notes only as a service to others who can see what I'm pointing to.
And I dispute that growth has returned but I have no desire to get into that with you again.
I'm bored with going round and round with you.
Me too. I wish you'd come up with something new. I address your points with appropriate evidence and reasoning. You don't respond specifically to these points, so we don't make progress.
I predict a global financial crash, you seem to think this system can grow forever.
There's a heck of wide difference between these poles!
I'm not suggesting that growth in resource consumption can continue forever - "this system" doesn't require it. I'm not even suggesting that economic growth will continue forever - I would imagine it would level off at some point.
I write responses to your notes only as a service to others who can see what I'm pointing to.
That's too bad. OTOH, that is part of why I write too. I hate to see people make terrible decisions with their lives, like hard-scrabble farming.
I dispute that growth has returned
The generally accepted measure is GDP. We can use simpler things, like car sales, which are also growing.
I have to disagree here with one point, one can in no way discuss growth returning when the government is borrowing, mostly from itself, about 2 trillion dollars this year, I think, or was it 1.5? That shell game is getting unstable and may tip over and fail at any point.
So this is not a meaningful point in history re any conclusions about economic growth. The US stats are so ridiculously skewed on this anyway that you can't really even use them in any meaningful way. I ignore them now because with these debt levels yearly, it's simply irrelevant if you pump in a few hundred billion, then some more, then more, of course you'll see some result, not seeing this weakens this part of your discussion since this is not rocket science at all.
Make conclusions about the US economy once the world stops buying our bonds, and once the market starts to charge the proper risk penalties for our QE efforts. Note that Bill Gross just pulled all his funds out of US Bonds, for example. When a big rat leaves the ship it's time to pay attention.
I do agree however, you are responding very coherently, and I'm certainly going to pay more attention to your points in the future. However, I don't believe you will find that a system run on growth based on cheap and easy carbon fuel burning is really going to do well, and capitalism requires growth to function. Which again is going to give a huge boost to all countries who are not held hostage by free market lunatics like the US currently is, that's a growing and long list now by the way, expanding yearly almost as most countries realize the US is getting more and more toxic economically and then stop falling for those methods. China uses a lot of government involvement in resource allocation, for example, we'll see what happens here, and in countries like here. My guess is we'll do not just slightly badly, but horribly, since instead of adapting we're resisting change, congress here was just grabbed by neo-con tea party types, and you're not going to see a single positive thing come out that at all. Another set of years lost here, we can't get them back.
On the bright side, individual states and cities are trying to do the right thing here, it's sort of a tug of war between large entrenched interests who really really want to see a return to serious second world status feudalism and a widely diverse and barely connected group of people who really don't like that reality at all as a future. But until we stop voting for it over and over, it's not going to change. Which requires large changes in our political system, campaign finance reform, banning of corporate lobbying, many other things, that's the only way to get democracy working again here.
Keep up the good work though, the more clear you are, the easier it is to get what is right wrong and maybe slightly off in your points, that's how it should work.
one can in no way discuss growth returning when the government is borrowing, mostly from itself, about 2 trillion dollars this year, I think, or was it 1.5? That shell game is getting unstable and may tip over and fail at any point.
1st, growth is here already. 2nd, that borrowing certainly does create more problems, but could you point me to a good discussion of why it's not sustainable? I've seen plenty of charts showing levels of leverage and credit, but I haven't seen any good, analytical discussions of why a certain level is "too high".
The US stats are so ridiculously skewed on this
Economic activity is economic activity, whatever the debt levels are. If more wheat is being grown and delivered, and more cars are being manufactured and sold, economic activity is rising.
Make conclusions about the US economy
1st, Bill Gross is an interesting guy, but he's far from infallible. I noticed that Warren buffet, another investing icon, lost a bundle betting against the dollar in the last few years.
I'll have to take a look at Gross's latest comments about this - I don't remember him predicting TEOTWAWKI, but I could be wrong...
I do agree however, you are responding very coherently, and I'm certainly going to pay more attention to your points in the future.
Thanks!
I don't believe you will find that a system run on growth based on cheap and easy carbon fuel burning is really going to do well...
First, both the US and other developed countries got that way with "moderately expensive" energy, not cheap energy. Oil and electricity have been cheap in the US in the post-WWII period, but it was rather higher in years before that: oil and electricity cost much more, adjusted for inflation. The US, and other countries, succeeded quite well in growing strongly even when energy was much more expensive, whether it was coal or oil.
Wind power is quite affordable (if perhaps not quite as dirt cheap as US post-WWII oil and electricity prices), scalable, high-E-ROI, etc, etc. So are nuclear, and solar even if they aren't quite as cheap at the moment (coal is also plentiful and cheap, unfortunately), so I see no reason to expect energy to ever be more than "moderately expensive".
Second, fossil fuels aren't nearly as cheap as they seem. Pollution is an unrecognized, external cost. So are the military costs we're seeing currently of roughly $500B per year. Those pollution costs aren't sustainable (especially CO2), but unfortunately the military costs probably are (in fact, many corporate interests are quite comfortable with them...). Moving away from oil and other fossil fuels will actually be much cheaper in the long-run than BAU.
Finally, let's assume that Business As Usual involved spending about 5% of our economic activity (perhaps measured by GDP) acquiring energy. If the cost of acquiring energy doubles, then we have to dedicate another 5% to that activity. GDP might go down by 5% quickly, in case we'd have a deep recession. Or, it might happen over time - if it took 10 years, then we'd see a reduction in economic growth of .5% per year, for 10 years. After that transition was complete, economic growth would continue. So, a reduction in "net energy" has a significant impact, but it's not TEOTWAWKI.
capitalism requires growth to function
Where the heck does this idea come from? What serious school of economics?
It would seem to confuse growth in resource consumption with economic activity. We could certainly keep growing with stable or falling resource consumption (here are examples: compare an iPod to a 70's stereo; US vehicle production has been stable for decades; US vehicles use much less material than they did 50 years ago - they're now 95% recycled).
I haven't seen a convincing demonstration that economic growth is necessary to our system - look at 90's Japan, which didn't have economic growth for 10 years. How did they repay loans? Well, interest rates were zero or very close to that.
In a steady-state economy, relatively very low interest rates are simply the cost of maintaining a (much smaller) financial sector, and consist of a modest and consistent income to the financial sector to pay for that service.
The finance sector would constitute a minor bit of overhead, for which society would pay just as it pays for police and meteorologists. You could call the cost of that overhead interest, or money-management fees, or whatever.
instead of adapting we're resisting change, congress here was just grabbed by neo-con tea party types...
I agree.
you're not going to see a single positive thing come out that at all. Another set of years lost here, we can't get them back.
That's badly overstating things. The US CAFE is rising sharply, PHEVs/EREVs/EVs are ramping up, wind and solar are still building...
large changes in our political system, campaign finance reform, banning of corporate lobbying, many other things, that's the only way to get democracy working again here.
That would be great!!
Then you haven't looked very hard.
Actually, I have. I've looked, and I've asked this question on TOD a number of times. I haven't been able to find any rigorous backup for the idea.
The principal + interest (ever-increasing money supply) you referred to, and I replied speculatively that the example of Japan in the 1990s reinforces the theory [that capitalism, financed by banks lending money into existence with usury, depends on growth] rather than disproves it.
There is also an argument in Tim Jackson's book "Prosperity without Growth" to do with labour productivity which supports it but I am unable to recount in detail.
The whining and worrying that surrounds economic growth in politics and media suggests that something very bad happens if they don't get the right numbers, but that is anecdotal evidence I guess.
the example of Japan in the 1990s reinforces the theory
I must have missed that. Could you repeat it?
There is also an argument in Tim Jackson's book "Prosperity without Growth" to do with labour productivity
An economy with no growth would have no growth in labor productivity. OTOH, if you have growth in labor productivity, you either need growth in the overal economy, or you need to shorten work hours. That's what France, and most of Europe, did for a while.
The whining and worrying that surrounds economic growth in politics and media
People want growth because they want more and better goods and services, as well as more jobs. I'd say that people in the OECD mostly have all the goods they need, but they sure need more and better services.
Interestingly this post stumbles across an opportunity to compare the handling of the Fukushima crisis (as has been addressed by some terrific insights) with the (1990s) Japanese economic stagnation.
Just as it has been suggested that cultural factors were at least partly responsible for problems in the former, perhaps those same factors helped towards stability in the latter (the stoicism of the Japanese personality has been widely admired in the aftermath of the tsunami)
No, this is politics and media I'm talking about doing all the worrying - not Joe Public who has no idea what it really means. It's like there's this propaganda stream to support BAU with the financial system - the same one which has led our climate, energy supply and global ecosystem to their knees - seemingly calling the shots.
The very idea that economic growth is destructive in this way is only just, in the last year or two, beginning to creep into their outpourings. So I guess the shroud of denial and ignorance is wearing thin.
Me too.
Base rate 0% Bank rate 5% 10 years of no growth, result is deflation and bad debt I guess.
Base rate 0% Bank rate 5%
I'm not sure what you mean.
You've stated that the capitalist requirement to always be producing new money to repay interest can be countered by reducing interest rates to zero. But this doesn't work in practice because banks always charge way over base-rate on their commercial loans.
Capitalists and workers alike produce new money to pay interest without growth, just by doing the same as last year for the same pay. The capitalist system does not depend on growth.
banks always charge way over base-rate on their commercial loans.
That's a risk premium.
1st, that risk premium pays for losses - the net income (in theory!) from the risk premium is zero. 2nd, in a no-growth world, where there's very little change, risk would be much lower.
I wish I believed you are operating in the real world with these suggestions. Can you outline a process by which the financial sector will become "much smaller" in time to finance this FF-renewables conversion? Do you think banks will relinquish power so easily?
a process by which the financial sector will become "much smaller" in time to finance this FF-renewables conversion?
The shrinkage of the financial sector isn't necessary to finance the transition away from FF. It would be nice, but it's not necessary.
No, it would simply be desirable to have it shrink in a no-growth economy, because such a non-dynamic economy would get little value from it.
And stay there forever, never to decline? In your world there is simply no set of circumstances that will ever lead to contraction. Your position is unfalsifiable and thus is, as Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos have pointed out, unscientific.
For this reason you live in a fantasy world (i.e. "unscientific" == not reality-based aka fantasy), despite the veneer of science you bring to your argumentation.
It's far more scientific to acknowledge that decline will happen, like every species experiences on this planet when it runs through its resources, and to plan for it and create the green line instead of the orange line below:
In your world there is simply no set of circumstances that will ever lead to contraction. Your position is unfalsifiable
I never said that. I just haven't seen good evidence for an unpreventable decline any time soon.
you live in a fantasy world
No.
Sigh. Have we descended to the level of 2 year olds? "You're in fantasy". "No, you are!".
I provide detailed evidence and logic. A lot of it. Anyone who disagrees can say so, reply with their own evidence and logic, and we can have a good discussion.
It's far more scientific to acknowledge that decline will happen, like every species experiences on this planet when it runs through its resources, and to plan for it and create the green line instead of the orange line below:
1st, that chart is a complete fantasy. A creation straight out of someone's imagination. It's not even as fact-based as the Club of Rome LTG model, which of course was a set of "scenarios" based on unrealistic assumptions, not a fact-based forecast.
2nd, I consistently advocate a very aggressive set of strategies to deal with resource problems, esp FF. People who say that renewables and EVs are hopeless strategies are the best friend of FF industries.
Renewables doesn't seem to cut it. Too expensive, too intermittent, too polluting. Nuclear however, is likely the future. Watch the Chinese LFTR program.
Surely you jest jeppen. Show your numbers...
Let's start with some life cycle assesments. If you object to any of those numbers, we can go deeper and extend the discussion on any renewable or combination of renewables you think can provide the bulk of our 15 TW and growing global energy needs.
Well my favorite technology is Solar PV, although I think Solar Thermal (CSP) and wind and hydro and geothermal and wave/tide is necessary to provide most of our power needs going forward (use whatever resource is best for the location).
And I can tell you that is one skewed analysis of solar PV.
Maybe it is because it is using outdated figures? It is very hard to tell because none of the numbers are sourced. Plus it is a rather small installation (which while appropriate for an individual's house is not typical for the industry.) Just spending a few minutes on google and I found this LCA which is more recent: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es071763q
When it comes to PV, I don't need more than pure economics. The 5-10 times higher cost tells a story, and that story is: much higher resource requirements. Also, intermittent sources are unworkable.
Again, what you propose doesn't cut it. Too little (hydro), too expensive (solar, geothermal, wave/tide and to some extent wind), too intermittent (solar, wind, wave), too polluting (PV, wave/tide). We, humanity, has great challenges in front of us. We don't have the time to keep burning fossils with a renewable green future as an alibi for very much longer. We need to start ramping conventional nuclear for real, and push the gen4 research really hard. (Start by diverting all tokamak research to gen4.)
"The 5-10 times higher cost tells a story"
Ahhh the higher cost myth! Higher cost than what? (i.e. what costs are you counting in coal, nat.gas and nuke? certainly not the true cost of emissions/waste. Let alone safety!)
And anyway you are off by a factor of ~3.
"Also, intermittent sources are unworkable"
All sources are intermittent, depending on your timescale, and yet all sources still work--depending on what you need them for.
"We need to start ramping conventional nuclear for real"
I can see that this is going nowhere fast...
If you want to continue this discussion send me an email or "jump on me" in a newer thread...wading thru all these old posts is
I don't know your email. Referring to the pdf I provided earlier, coal/ng is 7-9 eurocents/kWh including external costs. Nuclear is 4-5. PV is at 44. However, PV has become cheaper since then, as German PV feed-in tariff for free-standing facilities was around 28 eurocents/kWh in 2010.
Intermittency becomes an issue if you try to scale for real. If PV and wind are scaled to provide 30% together, which is optimistic due to intermittency, what should the rest be? Especially if the total electricity needs to be doubled or more...
PV has become even cheaper since 2010...
German PV feed-in tariff is around 21-24 eurocents/kWh in 2011 for large scale PV depending on location. Small scale currently gets 28 eurocents/kWh.
http://www.pv-tech.org/tariff_watch/germany
The cost of nuclear power really has nothing to do with the price of PV power. As you/we just discussed, PV does not provide baseload. Peak power by definition (?) costs more.
I seriously doubt the current grid can be scaled up 2x. Nor do I think it should be. We need a more flexible and resiliant grid, storage would help.
English is not my native tounge, so I may be off here, but PV isn't peaking power to me. It generates power during peak hours, however. At low penetrations, this may fetch PV a good price. At high penetrations, the opposite will be inevitable. Wind already fetch a significantly lower spot price than average in locations with significant shares of wind, and the reason is obvious (I guess?). Each new wind plant in such a place impacts the economic viability of already existing wind much more than it impacts the viability of other sources. Actually, wind power is it's own worst enemy, and the best friend of natural gas. Wind saves some gas, but also cements it.
"It generates power during peak hours"
Yes...in utility speak PV is "peak-shaving" not "peaking power".
Natural gas (or the dirtiest coal in the portfolio) is what you ramp up to meet forcast peak in demand. If you have say 1GW of PV on the grid, the height of your peak demand will be some large fraction of 1GW lower (the top of your peak is shaved down) than if there is no PV.
I would appologise for the sloppy terminology but it is the utilities that charge customers "peak" and "off-peak" electric rates. Peak rates (& which hours) vary from utility to utility for a number of reasons. But generally peak hours/peak rates occur during the day & often in the summer especially for A/C driven loads...which is when PV provides power!
Bingo. The very fact that you cannot see the value of either Holmgren's graph or the LTG scenarios gets to the core of why we disagree. There is something missing in how you process the world that has you unable to see their value. It might be a certain capacity for abstraction, I don't know exactly.
But whatever it is, you are reminding me of the fellow that wrote some months back something like "Your graph doesn't have units. It's worthless." Clearly that fellow wouldn't have recognized an abstraction if it came up and bit him.
I wrote back asking if he was serious but didn't get a reply. There are some very literal minds here and yours might be one of them. That literalness is very powerful — but also has very large blind spots, which you routinely demonstrate in your argumentation.
There is something missing in how you process the world that has you unable to see their value. It might be a certain capacity for abstraction, I don't know exactly.
Do you not see how insulting that is?? It suggests that I disagree with you because...I'm stupid.
I'm perfectly aware of the value of a general abstraction. I just disagree with the underlying ideas.
The Limits to Growth scenarios were designed not to prove that there were limits to growth. Instead, they were designed to show the behavior of a system that contained limits (overshoot). The limits were assumed by the model.
I would agree that the LTG model was useful - it showed what overshoot looked like, and showed that overshoot was possible in a model of limited resources.
It did not demonstrate that it was a model of the real world. The model was extremely simple. For instance, resources were unitary: they weren't broken down into minerals, energy, food, or anything like that: just "resources". That's a mighty simple model.
This simplicity, and the exclusion of substitution of non-limited resources for limited resource made the model very, very far from anything that might be expected to model the real world. As the authors said repeatedly, these were scenarios, not forecasts. It was treated as such by the economics community, much to the puzzlement of environmentalists who didn't understand just how limited the model was.
I assume you want your model to be considered something more than an academic exercise intended to test a few very narrow hypotheses. I assume you would like it to, like mainstream econometrics models, be able to make credible forecasts about the real world. If so, it has to include substitution effects. Otherwise, it will gain acceptance here, perhaps, but it will be ignored by the wider community of economics, and justifiably so. And, ultimately, it will be unable to make good forecasts, which is the bottom line.
No, you are just not used to viewing the world as pieces of a puzzle or skills that can be obtained via training or observation. You are making "missing the capacity for abstraction" equate to "stupid." I didn't say that — you made it mean that, not me.
I reject the model most economists use and the worldview upon which they are based. Of course they will reject what I'm saying: I deal with that all the time. I've been saying that for years — repeatedly — yet you keep going back to your worldview and trying to get me to work within it.
But I'll say it again.
The economists that you so admire, just like you, are missing critical pieces in their understanding of how the systems all work together.
you are just not used to viewing the world as pieces of a puzzle or skills that can be obtained via training or observation.
I really, really am. I've been dealing with "big picture" systems analysis for 30 years.
You are making "missing the capacity for abstraction" equate to "stupid." I didn't say that — you made it mean that, not me.
Maybe. But what you said was: "you disagree with me because you don't have my ability to think at a high level."
Again, if you want to indulge in endless rounds of "I'm right, you're not", it's not constructive. If you respond specifically to my arguments, both evidence and logic, we'll actually make progress.
The economists that you so admire, just like you, are missing critical pieces in their understanding of how the systems all work together.
So, tell us what those pieces are. Give us detail of your assumptions, and then provide evidence for it. Charts that show the economy declining, either in a step fashion or in a curve, don't tell us anything.
Actually, if you were to investigate the matter, you might find they've dealt with resource limitations, industrial transitions, and crisis management a little more than you think....
Again, I did not say that — you did. But now that you mention it, perhaps you don't have that ability. You seem to be very concerned about the specifics of EVs and such and miss the big trends, like mentioning Aleklett's 75mb/d and neglecting to mention the little problem with net exports. You consistently omit financial effects. You say that the German military report was "half baked" when the final report was largely the same one that was finally published. You denigrate evidence you don't like instead of incorporating it into your worldview. It's a very common action by people — I see it all the time. It's what prevents them from "getting" the big picture.
I have, tens of times to you and possibly a hundred times on TOD.
I'm tired of repeating myself to you. You have even acknowledged that you disagree with what I am saying so if you can't by now tell me what my arguments are you are clearly not paying enough attention or you just like being argumentative.
Again, I did not say that — you did.
When you suggest someone has difficulty seeing large abstract concepts, that what you're saying.
But now that you mention it, perhaps you don't have that ability.
hmmm. A direct ad hominem. How do I communicate to you that's a bad idea? hmmm.....
You seem to be very concerned about the specifics of EVs and such and miss the big trends, like mentioning Aleklett's 75mb/d
And again, if we're going to make progress on the big picture, we have to deal with the components one by one.
and neglecting to mention the little problem with net exports.
I addressed that elsewhere today, and, which I have discussed repeatedly on other threads. To summarize: ELM is useful in the short term and for individual countries, but the overall world balance of supply and demand is what matters in the long run. We can discuss that further, if you like.
You say that the German military report was "half baked" when the final report was largely the same one that was finally published.
Ah, I haven't seen the final. Do you happen to have a link?
You denigrate evidence you don't like instead of incorporating it into your worldview.
Oh, come now. You evaluate evidence for it's strength or weakness. If you don't, then why don't you just agree with Yergin? I think you'd agree that he's considered an authority by many, and yet you completely reject some of his assertions. Does that mean you're in denial?
Actually, I read these sources very carefully, and absorb what makes sense, and disagree with that which doesn't. If a source is unrealistic, I explain why I disagree, in detail. As much detail as you want...
I have, tens of times to you and possibly a hundred times on TOD.
I'm just trying to make progress here, and identify the key areas of disagreement. Actually, I'd say we did so elsewhere: the idea that our economic structure is too fragile to deal with change.
I have to say, to suggest that economists haven't dealt with resource limitations, industrial transitions, and crisis management is to indicate that you haven't read that much in the economics literature. But, what the heck, maybe Keen has something new - I'll take a look.
Let's say we could model the world perfectly and observe its future behaviour. Isn't it the case that the real world is that perfect model, and our differences of opinion might simply rest on assessment of (probability of) future states? If you rely on academic modelling you can never do better than a poor estimate. The power of a single human brain can be a much better tool. I'm with aangel - hunker down, grow some food in the yard, make friends of your neighbours and try to help others to help themselves.
Isn't it the case that the real world is that perfect model, and our differences of opinion might simply rest on assessment of (probability of) future states?
I'm not sure what you mean.
If you rely on academic modelling you can never do better than a poor estimate. The power of a single human brain can be a much better tool.
Yes, going by your intuitive, seat of the pants reckoning does work sometimes. Of course, most people are using that system to come to very different conclusions than you are.
hunker down, grow some food in the yard, make friends of your neighbours and try to help others to help themselves.
Gardening, making friends, helping....always good.
Well, out of the 80-85 million barrels of fossil fuel liquids per day in 2010, a small fraction is all that would be needed to bootstrap and sustain a full buildout of renewables to 100%. So eventually (several decades from now) you can replace the fossil fuel liquids consumed in production and maintenance of renewable capital equipment with systems based on renewable liquid fuels.
It is only a matter of time before "everyone" gets the simple fact that renewable energy is not only this century's greatest opportunity, but also its greatest necessity. The Chinese - for all their mistakes and malinvestments in ghost cities etc. - already appear to have gotten this memo, by the way.
So, once the peak oil emergency becomes clearer to more decision makers as this century trundles along, that small fraction of fossil liquids needed for renewables would be ringfenced and enough fossil fuel supply would be reserved for the renewables buildout. Here's a big clue: in the last couple of days when stock markets fell across the board, it was pointed out that only a wind power company's shares rose.
If we had started the serious buildout to 100% renewables back in 1972 when LTG was written, the project would have been completed by now. We were busy having a party instead. So now, on the other side of the peak, we will eventually - and by definition - build out 100% renewables. Only we will suffer incredible and untold hardships, powerdowns, downsizings and societal unravelling until we get there.
Your last paragraph to me is meaningless.
This needs to be tattooed on a few foreheads..................The Age Of Growth Is Over.
When the motor vehicle was invented and later mass produced it was because someone saw an opportunity to make a buck.
The same with radios, televisions, iphones, PC's, lavish hotel accommodation, coal fired power stations, steam ships, Viagra, universities, hybrid corn, wheat and hogs, car tires and yo yo's.
Ask a manufacturer or retailer of bicycles if he does it "for the environment". Same for wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles or nuclear power stations. They are invented built and sold because someone sees a buck in it.
The reason we did not "buildout" 100% renewables is because there was no money in it. There will be even less money in it as the consumer base shrinks due to "No More Growth". Oil provided the means to quickly grow everything. What goes up must come down is a truism in this case which must be understood.
Electric, hybrid, gas or whatever vehicles will not be produced if there is no money in it. So when you see posters like "Nick" telling you what we "can" do and what is "doable" you know they are true believers in BAU and a world population growing past eight billion, because that is the only future scenario that will lend credence to their claims of a world full of electric cars and wind farms. They are the high priests telling us to build bigger and better stone heads.
What you will see in the future is more people finding new ways to make a buck. Those "new ways" will be extracting all they can from the misery of others. Charlatans will exploit the clutching at straws as people see hopes for the future disintegrating. Offers and declarations of (false) hope.........I see it in politics and on the pages of TOD. What we do need is luck, we can hope for that I suppose.
The Age Of Growth Is Over.
Nah. PO is not Peak Energy.
Oil provided the means to quickly grow everything.
Then why did things grow so quickly before 1900? Oil wasn't important before then.
Electric, hybrid, gas or whatever vehicles will not be produced if there is no money in it.
What if something can't compete? "viability" vs "competitiveness"
There is a basic paradigm that's useful here: "viability" vs "competitiveness". In most industries a very small cost difference can make you uncompetitive. That means that slightly higher cost solutions will be avoided, which can give the impression that those solutions are higher cost than they are. OTOH, if changes in the business environment (or natural environment!) change the costs of alternatives for everyone, suddenly alternatives can become acceptable in that industry.
There is an analogy in sports: "winner takes all". Tiger Woods and Pete Sampras get all of the publicity and a lion's share of the prize money. The 200th best player in either sport gets no publicity or prize money. On the other hand, the 200th best player will mop the field/court with you or me just as fast as would Tiger or Pete.
So, for instance, recycled materials are in general slightly more expensive than virgin materials, plastic included. But, if oil becomes more expensive then recycled materials could suddenly become the standard. If something could be recycled with only 10% loss at each generation, that would reduce the consumption of virgin materials by 90%, with only a very small additional cost for the industry.
As another example, high sulfur Illinois Basin coal costs perhaps 2 cents per kWh to scrub. That's an enormous margin to power plant consumers, who are willing to pay for long-distance transport of lower-quality Powder-River coal. The net difference in cost might be only half of one penny per kWh, which is still an enormous margin to power plant consumers. On the other hand, let's assume power prices rise by one half penny around the globe (to eliminate questions of regional competition) - how much difference would it make to consumers to add a half penny per kWh? Sure, they'd notice it, but would the difference cause any factories to close their doors, or homeowners to not be able to pay their mortgages? No.
That's a key point that many people miss. The Industrial Revolution occurred because of cheap supplies of coal, not oil. There were countries in the 19th century which had very high growth rates (e.g. Britain) because they had a cheap source of energy, but it was not based on oil because oil production was insignificant at that time.
For people who generalize it to "fossil fuels", there is also the example of places like Norway whose economy grew very fast after 1900 on the basis of cheap hydroelectricity, despite the fact it had little or no coal and North Sea oil wasn't discovered until the 1960s. Southern Ontario also turned into an industrial region on the basis of cheap power from Niagara Falls, despite the fact it had limited supplies of oil and almost no coal.
The end of oil does not necessarily mean the end of growth. Countries just have to find alternatives, and there are lots of alternatives. The biggest problem is that people resist the change because oil was so convenient and they hate to change to something less convenient even though it would be cost-effective to do so.
Yes, it does for decades at least because the alternatives will not make up for the decline in oil production as the world financial system frays (happening now) and ultimately disintegrates. Oil is the largest source of primary energy and because of its role in transportation and as the feed stock for many industrial uses, it has an outsized impact on the economy as it is configured now:
Hirsch put together a notional model of how we could respond to oil's decline and in his best case scenario there are ten years of contraction before leveling off occurs due to a mix of conservation and ramping up alternatives:
But this is his best case scenario and he didn't include debt in his analysis (I asked). We are far more likely to experience decades of contraction before any sort of leveling off occurs — if wars over the remaining oil, water and food don't keep the contraction going for longer.
Then there is the little problem that we are turning fossil fuels into food and as the fuels decline we will be hard pressed to grow food as easily as we do now:
The other side of the fossil fuel production curve will mostly be ugly — despite the inapplicable evidence Nick dredges up from our history.
the alternatives will not make up for the decline in oil production...
What % decline are you assuming? Aleklett projects an 11% decline in net liquid fuel BTU's by 2030.
Of course, I could reply to the other steps in your argument, but let's see if we can make progress on one tiny part of it...
I don't remember him ever saying only 11% by 2030; can you please provide a citation?
I do remember him saying something like "a couple % decline per year — something gentle really" but he then continued by saying that that number was the best case scenario, that even he didn't believe it and that the true situation was likely to be much worse because that was just the geology — it didn't take into effect geopolitical considerations, hoarding, wars and similar.
I have pointed this out to you before but you keep conveniently "forgetting" it.
Also, examine his group's work, particularly the decline rate of the supergiant oil fields and you are basically seeing what he thinks because it was his student, Mikael, whose work he approved on the way to getting his Ph.D. (which has now occurred). In several cases Aleklett is a coauthor, IIRC.
I think it's fair to say that most members of ASPO would agree that the graph below is the best case scenario — and it's far from likely to occur.
I have asked you for the citation before and you were unable to produce it then but you keep repeating that number.
So please provide your citation for Aleklett because I think your memory is incorrect or missing some pieces of what he said.
Here you go:
Look at page 40 of the presentation: http://www.aspo-australia.org.au/References/Aleklett/20090611%20Sydney4.pdf
We see that Aleklett is predicting only a .5% annual decline rate over the next 20 years.
On page 42 of the presentation - we see that this projection is precisely in the middle - between the "Standard Case High End" and "Standard Case Low End".
Yes, that was the one that he later said it was "very optimistic." He mentions this in his lecture at Aberdeen University, which unfortunately appears to have been taken down.
Global Energy Resources: The Peak Oil View
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cops/events/energycontroversies/peak-oil.php
I do not believe, nor does he believe, that we will have 75mb/d of oil in 2030. Also note that his analysis didn't take into account financial effects, just like Hirsch's did not. With capital availability severely curtailed, we will not be able to create all the oil projects needed to pump 75mb/d. Also, I think Simmons was right when he pointed out that it will take a lot of money to replacing aging equipment currently in use and that hoarding and other geopolitical effects will restrict oil flow.
And of course there is the net export problem, which Jeffrey Brown and Sam Foucher discuss repeatedly.
You are free to ignore all those other likely trends/probabilities but I will not. Oil availability is on track to be severely curtailed and your logic and analysis are gravely faulty.
I do not believe, nor does he believe, that we will have 75mb/d of oil in 2030.
So, he has said verbally that he disagrees with his published work, but he hasn't put in writing??
And his published work provides "best case" and "worst case", and a year later he said that his "standard case" was completely wrong and "very optimistic"?
I think you may have misunderstood him. Look at the table on page 42 of the reference I cited: you'll see that he doesn't project 75mb/d of oil in 2030, he projects 55mb.d. His projection of 75 is for all liquids - that's a distinction that is often lost on TOD.
I think Simmons was right when he pointed out that it will take a lot of money to replacing aging equipment currently in use
hmmm. The oil industry veterans on TOD generally seem to think that to suggest that maintenance costs will be a surprise, or cause unexpected problems makes no sense - people like Rockymountainguy. Simmons was prone to making dramatic, unfounded statements, as we have seen. Have you seen concrete evidence for this?
there is the net export problem, which Jeffrey Brown and Sam Foucher discuss repeatedly.
And, which I have discussed repeatedly. To summarize: ELM is useful in the short term and for individual countries, but the overall world balance of supply and demand is what matters in the long run. We can discuss that further, if you like.
Correct. Having worked with people publishing papers, there is very distinctly what one thinks will be published and can be strongly substantiated and what one says in private (and in public). Then there is the matter that one has to narrow what is studied so that a reasonably strong conclusion can fit in a paper. It's a lot more work to include more assumptions. That's why he limits himself to the geological argument. Hirsch starts with geology and adds mitigation. Neither include the lack of capital that the LTG team does.
One has to put it all together because not many people are doing that. Nicole Foss, Chris Martenson, Nate Hagens, me and some others I are doing that work.
Got it re: the 55mb/d.
And I have no desire to discuss ELM further. It's going to cause a mess because it will rapidly decrease available oil — far faster than the top line decline. That will crash the auto, financial and many other companies and make the debt unpayable, even if we were on a trajectory to try to pay it back, which we're not. It will reduce tax receipts and severely stress our democracies.
Having worked with people publishing papers, there is very distinctly what one thinks will be published and can be strongly substantiated and what one says in private (and in public).
That speaks for itself, right?
he limits himself to the geological argument.
And that's fine - it's useful to deal with things step by step.
Hirsch starts with geology and adds mitigation.
Well, kind've. His work is mighty incomplete: not including PHEV/EREV/EVs is big.
Neither include the lack of capital that the LTG team does
Are you sure LTG includes capital? How does it categorize it?
Got it re: the 55mb/d.
hmmm. Does that resolve the difference between the presentation I referenced and the presentation you're thinking of?
And I have no desire to discuss ELM further.
Why not? I've discussed it a bit with Geoffrey, and he recognized (at least a little) that it has limitations. It really can't be relied upon the way the following paragraph suggests.
ELM...going to cause a mess because it will rapidly decrease available oil — far faster than the top line decline.
Probably not. ELM is useful in the short term and for individual countries, but the overall world balance of supply and demand is what matters in the long run.
ELM suggests that as net exports will disappear, primarily because of internal consumption. That's true only if they fail to do something to stop it.
Such a decline is a serious failure of good government. If domestic consumption is growing faster than world consumption, due to price controls and subsidies, then the country has a serious problem of misallocation of resources. For instance, KSA has a serious problem of underproduction of natural gas, due to excessively low domestic gas prices. All of these countries should raise prices and eliminate domestic subsidies, and it is very likely that most or all of them will do so eventually.
Some countries have already eliminated price controls. China is an important example. Mexico mostly doesn't control prices, and their consumption is pretty much in line with world consumption. Iran controls prices, but they use other means to control consumption, such as rationing. These changes will accelerate as countries see their exports evaporating.
ELM tends to ignore embodied energy. We need to expand energy trade analysis.
Think of it this way: if Saudi Arabia decides to divert some of it's domestic natural gas production to ammonia, it reduces it's NG exports, but increases it's ammonia production. Assuming world consumption is constant, somebody else reduces their NG imports, and someone reduces their ammonia production.
An analysis that looks only at net NG exports would think that there was a growing problem with declining net NG exports, while an analysis that included ammonia would not. The same thing applies to oil and products like petrochemicals; electricity and aluminium production; etc.
"The reason we did not "buildout" 100% renewables is because there was no money in it. There will be even less money in it as the consumer base shrinks due to "No More Growth". Oil provided the means to quickly grow everything."
First of all, as oil/energy price goes up (and everything else along with it) renewables become relatively cheaper, not more expensive.
Secondly oil does provide the means to quickly grow everything...but economies grew before oil existed and they will grow after its all gone (admittedly this will not be smooth, but then again economic growth never has been).
"Those "new ways" will be extracting all they can from the misery of others."
That sounds more like what happens with fossil fuels, than with renewables.
Yes you are right I've been enlightened, how stupid of me to think otherwise.
Slavish adherence to money and profit are part of the problem not the solution.
LOL. I feel the same way about it. Why not go with the fusion reactor we already have?
We are so idiotic. There is certainly a reason for this. Money and power have distorted the true return on investment of various types of power sources with tricking accounting. Enron-style accounting.
It has to do with how much capital is needed up front.
Oddly, NUCLEAR is the most offensive in terms of upfront capital costs, but they get around that by writing off the nuclear waste management by having Uncle Sam take care of it -- lol -- by not taking care of it.
So the whole racket lurches forward making nuclear seem "Clean, safe, abundant, and free" when none of these can be true else you violate Chemistry, science and thermodynamics.
The earth is the surroundings and the nuclear system is very high energy. Equilibrium is occurring at Fukushima I right now as Earth mixes all 6 reactors and the spent fuel together to maximize entropy.
It is not really surprising at all.
Does anyone know how many reactors in Japan were only designed to accomodate a six meter tsunami level? Are other Japanese reactors at risk if they see a 10 meter tsunami?
I read reports in the Japanese papers that emergency construction is going on at existing facilities to raise the height to 12 meters. I will find the article but it is in Japanese.
The 1896 Meiji-Sanriku earthquake generated waves exceeding 38 meters in spots.
This is an interesting tsunami, since although the earthquake was in the 8 to 8.5 range, the nearest coastal cities experienced relatively little shaking. However, due to the type of fault, the type of rupture, and the sea floor profile the tsunami was very great.
The numeric ratings of the quake are only about energy released, and they do not directly indicate the amount and type of shaking at any particular place, nor the heights of tsunami waves that will be generated at any particular place.
Does raising a 6 meter concrete wall on top of the existing one really solve the problem? It's not more than making another assumption with a quite small margin of error based on the experiences with the last event - exactly the same way of thinking that led to the current situation.
According to some doomers more large quakes are approaching, so this scenario is very likely to happen again in the near future, adding the luck they had now, the next wave might hit 15 meters or more at some other site, and there we go again...
Dropping fail-safe generators with a few days fuel supply on the top of each remaining unit in all coastal plants would make more sense as an emergency measure, while it would take a smaller engineering effort and less time than building dams in a hurry. Am I missing something?
Waterproof the generators and/or put them in bunkers with submarine grade hatches. Design rapid hook in points for power/cooling and station reserve pumps/generators etc at elevated points so they can be brought in.
NAOM
I've seen a lot of buildings with the emergency generators mounted on the roof. This ensures they won't be submerged in the event of a flood. It's much more foolproof than trying to waterproof the generators.
However, the latter is not impossible. I recall an oil well we drilled one winter that went underwater during the spring. They didn't realize they had drilled it in the middle of a seasonal lake. However, it would have been too expensive to move the well, so they waterproofed the motor instead. It was rather weird though, watching the head of the pumpjack come up out of the water and then go back down, over and over again, like some kind of giant duck. We called it, "Our first offshore well".
What about a better battery backup? Why only 7 hours?
What's the power requirement for the cooling pumps?
Couldn't find numbers on Fukushima or actually even remember how many MW the six reactors power. But you like to run a bit of math. Figure maybe
1.5.15 billion gallons an hour has to be moved--we aren't even starting to talk refrigeration requirements. Seven hours of battery sounds like a fair amount of capactiy. Thats a lot of water to move. Curious to see what you come up with.edit above: Just a little order of magnitude error<?- )still 150 million gallons of water an hour is a fair sized stream to move with battery operated pumps, and I can't imagine they'd try. This UCS press briefing transcript sheds light on multiple aspects of the Fukushima emergency. They don't quantify power needs but do rough out the battery operated emergency cooling system used during Station Blackout (SBO). At lot of US nuclear plants have batteries that would only deliver power half as long as Fukushima's did.
Per design, batteries provided direct current (dc) electrical power for a bare-bones minimal subset of emergency equipment. The dc power enabled a steam-driven turbine connected to a pump of the reactor-core isolation cooling (RCIC) system to supply cooling water for the reactor cores. The steam was being produced by the decay heat from the shut down reactor cores.
Boy, it's hard to start without knowing specifics from the on-site equipment.
As you note, the heat that must be removed is a pretty small % of the normal waste heat production, and the batteries are designed to power a minimal subset.
We really need actual numbers.
Well I found some hard number in this LLNL doomsday report on station blackout (the pdf. linked on this page)
Fukushima Daiichi had approx 4600MW generating capacity so a minimum of 920MW of cooling are needed initially, not counting the spent fuel pond needs. Of course we are still missing the big piece of the puzzle--how much dc power it takes to enable the steam driven turbine connected to the pumps of the reactor-core isolation cooling (RCIC) systems--oh well
In reading this what jumps out is that if battery power lasted 24 hours the cooling needs would have been reduced by a factor of 10, so 24 hours may well be a very reasonable minimum requirement for initial battery life. That time frame would also give a bit more time to change out generators and bring in fuel in situation like the ongoing one.
Yes, the cooling requirements drop very, very quickly, so 70 hours of battery power is much less than 10 times 7 hours.
If it is as critical as it seems to be here then roof + waterproof. It would not be a huge effort to create a diesel engine that would be waterproof. Inlet, exhaust oil fills, fuel line plugged off just unplug and go. The electrical bit would be more of an issue but again do-able. Direct diesel to the pumps would be better. Protecting against a 6m tsunami is just nonsense, they have typhoons there regularly what would happen if there was a decent storm surge topped off with waves? 6m hardly sounds adequate.
NAOM
EDIT: Would hydraulic motors and transmission be viable, it would eliminate the water issues of using electricity?
10,000 year event protection. Supposedly they did analysis on Tsunami wave heights over the last 10,000 years and built in a margin of error. Evidently their methodology was flawed or maybe 10000 years is not such a good number after all
While it would be great to see lessons learned about safety measures, containment etc and all the other things that we inevitably do when hindsighting a disaster I have a hard time believing that here in the States it will do anything but hurt the nuclear industry. Electricity generation is number two behind transportation for our society. And while I'm not one to say that the ends justify the means there is in my opinion a very real tipping point for people to be able to say yes let's do the right thing here and say, well I need light and heat and to be able to get to work so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead.
I have not been able to find this anywhere so maybe someone here can help. Where is the hydrogen that they were venting coming from? I used to work/operate military nuclear plants and there was hydrogen tanks but that was to add during long shutdowns. Enough hydrogen to cause that kind of explosion is a significant amount and the reactor is not producing it.
Thanks
There was a comment about this yesterday. IIRC the zirconium in the fuel rod cladding reacts with water to form hydrogen and zirconium oxide. At normal operating temperatures the zironium oxide forms an impervious layer on the surface of the rods. At very high temperatures approaching the melting point of zircalloy, the coating cracks and the reaction is not limited by the layer.
Ionizing radiation also can disassociate the hydrogen and oxygen, but this appears to occur normally and at a very much lower rate.
I read somewhere days ago that there were three sources of hydrogen, but I only remember the third: A chemical reaction between the water and hot metal. I don't know if that is true or possible.
Water would need to be very hot for thermal hydrolysis.
This is mainly chemical H2 from metal reactions with water.
Radiolysis is secondary.
Of course the Sun does photolysis in plants all the time ;-) Then you take the high energy Hydrides to make carbohydrates with CO2 and you get oxygen as the waste product.
I remeber such discussions from the aftermath of Chernobyl. When it gets hot enough, carbon will rip the oxygen atoms out of water molecules, forming CO2, leaving H2 behind. In a nuclear reactor lack of heat is never a problem. I will not speculate about the exact chemistry but this never surpriced me at all.
Consider this: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/12-3
Hot zirconium reacting with water, oxidizing and releasing hydrogen.
Hydrogen is also added at some reactors to suppress the radiolysis of water. Radiolysis produced oxygen as well as hydrogen, and oxygen is very corrosive at these temperatures.
That is the idea of the Le Chatelier's principle.
Drive the reaction in reverse (to make water) with excess product (H2) injection.
I think I can answer this if I am correct that the Japanese reactors use conventional zirconium ( Zircaloy) fuel cladding with ceramic uranium oxide fuel pellets inside. I understand that Unit 3 has a mixed oxide pellet including plutonium oxide.
In 1956 my first job as a materials scientist was at the AEC's Hanford Laboratory in Washington State operated by General Electric. Over 8 years I conducted many laboratory scale high pressure autoclave experiments on the properties of zirconium alloys in high temperature and pressure water and steam. These tests were classified "secret' back then to prevent our technology from being obtained by the Soviets. Sometimes I fear that even though all this science is now declassified, this early science has not made into the education of today's engineers. I retired in 1995 and have followed TOD for 3 years now, having also worked on natural gas pipeline and geothermal system corrosion , but now feel I have expertise to share on this topic.
The source is the hydrogen is a chemical reaction between the uncovered, overheated fuel assemblies and steam.
Zr + 2 H2O (steam) = ZrO2+2 H2
Zirconium is an extremely reactive metal and has even been used in flash bulbs filled with oxygen. There have been fatal explosions handling zirconium powers. So how is it possible to use zirconium safely in a nuclear reactor?
Like aluminum, zirconium and is alloys (Zircaloy-2) oxidize instantly in air. A thin film of ZrO2 is so impervious to oxygen diffusion that the reaction stops. Even in 300 C (572F) water or steam at over 1000 psi, the oxidation rate is extremely slow and corrosion properties of Zircaloy fuel cladding are outstanding and safe, AS LONG as they are not overheated and cooling water flow is maintained. In fact it is standard practice to autoclave fuel rods in hot pressured water or steam to precoat these rods with the optimum coating of ZrO2.
But these fuel rods must NEVER be overheated. That is why multiple redundant cooling systems are required. All these backup cooling systems failed in Japan. Even after reactor shutdown, if the fuel rods are uncovered cladding temperatures can rapidly rise to 800C , or higher, due to fission product decay heat. As in any chemical reaction the rate accelerates rapidly with temperature, but in the case of zirconium, the protective character of a thin ZrO2 film is destroyed by this high temperature and catastrophic oxidation occurs. However this catastrophic oxidation occurs below the melting point, so I object to the media using the common term "meltdown" which is misleading.
This loss of the last battery powered cooling, led to the fuel rods becoming uncovered in a manner similar that also occurred in the Three Mile Island accident ( although due to different reasons). When overheated in steam the oxidation reaction above accelerates exponentially. As the zirconium oxidizes the coating thickens, cracks and turns white from internal fractures that increase the diffusion rate of steam to the metal. . It then has the look and mechanical properties of egg shells. Hydrogen from this process is released, but also is absorbed by the underlying metal cladding which causes embrittlement and metal fracture. Soon cracks form in the cladding releasing the trapped fission products inside. This is not "melting', but rather catastrophic disintegration of the cladding structural integrity and containment of fission products. If the process continues the cladding can fracture away exposing the fuel pellets which in the worst case scenario can drop out and collect on the bottom of the reactor vessel. It is the worse case scenario that I believe is causing the Japanese to inject boric acid. Boron is a neutron absorber and will prevent any possibility of a pile of fuel pellets on the bottom of the vessel from going critical and restarting the chain reaction.
These reactors are now a total loss, but I am still disturbed by their inability to bring in portable diesel generators and restart the back up cooling. I guess the chaos of the catastrophe is the cause.
I do question the use of sea water cooling. I hope the Japanese have considered the danger they have created by introducing oxygenated seawater into this stainless steel piping and pressure vessel at boiling temperatures. These stainless steels are extremely susceptible to chloride stress corrosion cracking:
http://www.tpub.com/content/doe/h1015v1/css/h1015v1_134.htm
Since residual weld stresses and tensile stress in piping, valves, control tubing, etc are always present, Standard Operating Reactor water quality standards require keeping chlorides at parts per billion levels.
Seawater has about 3.5% or 35 grams per liter of salinity!!!
I have no way of knowing how many days they have before a stainless steel component suddenly cracks, but, If it were me, I would be advocating an emergency program to get pure deionzied cooling water back into this stainless steel system ASAP. In laboratory tests in boiling chlorides, cracking of stainless in tensile stress can occur within days- They have at most a few months if they keep boiling sea water in this system and yet another disaster occurs. I am sure there are competent scientists in Japan's nuclear industry and government regulators. I hope they are on top of this threat!
Thank you for a clear and precise answer. Please comment more - we need your expertise here.
I'll second those thanks and suggestion for further info.
This is the best explanation I've seen for why they are putting boron in there.
Others have also expressed the concern about sea water, though without quite the clarity of your explanation. I assume that the decision to use it was made because there was no other readily available source of water.
It strikes me that those working in that area are not only risking their lives because of exposure to radiation, but also because at any minute there could be another explosion, potentially a very big one.
Thanks for the information.
Donshan, thank you for this outstanding contribution.
There you have it. I remember having seen very soon after the tsunami a message in the press (NYT?) that portable generators had been brought there. I can understand that there may be problems hooking them up to a short-circuited network. But is that really the problem? Have they not been able to work around that in all this time?
But they are also reporting that they are running pumps and injecting water using fire fighting equipment. So they have hooked up the portable generators, but they were not sufficient? Or had already too much water evaporated when the generators were hooked up, and were they unable to condense the vapour quickly enough?
This is what I mean when I feel the reports are not coherent and some information is being held back, either intentionally or because reporters do not see how the technical aspects are interesting. These questions may not be very relevant to the general public, but I find them crucial if you want to draw conclusions like deciding that “nuclear power cannot be made safe”.
One of the reactors exploded after they were unable to vent the steam for a long period because a valve was stuck. How many redundant valves did they have in the same circuit? Reports excel in describing the multiple layers of defence in depth, but so did also reports about the safety measures in deep-water drilling operations. During the Deepwater Horizon disaster we learned about defence layers corrupted in depth. Will we now also here learn about shortcuts, postponed repairs, and defence layers being found dispensable because there was so many other layers – that had also been found dispensable in separate decisions? If so, when will we be able to begin discussing what higher-level management structures or devices are able to withstand such corrupting forces?
Somewhere in all the info on the generators I read that they found the connection box/plugs for generators were underwater and could not be used to connect the generators they brought in.
I am like you in wondering why it could not be done. So the electrical connections are under water? Why not a response like, " Get some cutting tools and cut into the power conduit above the water line and install a new junction box." I have seen competent electrical crews do harder jobs in 4 hours. Gee! These guys work for the Electric Company and can't wire a generator???
The only reason I can think of for this lack of initiative, is the Japanese trait of "group consensus" decision making. It might have been unthinkable to assume "authority" to cut into the reactor safety wiring without a number of signoffs by upper management.
It only took the Three Mile Island work crew 16 hours to get the pure deionized water flowing again after the TMI accident. As a result of that effort TMI was brought under control within a day. That is what I expected to happen in Japan last Saturday and have been more and more troubled by Tokyo Electric's decisions and garbled communications. I read today that Prime Minster Kan screamed "What the hell is going on!"
That is exactly my opinion of TEPCO too. Here is a quote from that link, but I fear this government action is too late:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/japanese-angered-...
Finally, thank y'all above for the nice compliments( My education was in Texas where I thought I was going to be working in Houston where I worked summers for Humble Oil while attending Rice Institute). I am glad to help as many other TOD posters have done too. I have been learning from TOD experts for over 3 years and it is nice to have a chance to share my expertise. I will have other posts since this Japan nuclear crisis is still getting worse.
That is something I have wondered and I think is confirmed by the President or PM having to give the order to flood the reactors with seawater. The guys on the ground probably knew it had to be done long before.
Is it possible that the emergency cooling design is just not up to the task of cooling, that they just can't get enough pumping going? Were these reactors ever tested with power on and emergency cooling only?
NAOM
Given the lack of information any comment is speculative. From what I have read, it appears that when the earthquake hit the reactors automatically shut down and the diesel generators started and the emergency cooling worked. It was when the tsunami wave hit a short while later and shut down the generators that this crisis really started, This plant was originally designed for a Magnitude 7.2 earthquake. I understand this was later upgraded, possibly to an 8.0 level. Even so, the fact the plant survived a 9.0 earthquake is remarkable and a tribute to the design and construction.
The diesel generators were also protected with a tsunami wall, but it was NOT high enough for a wave said to be 10 meters high. Generator failure is not surprising considering there had never been a tsunami event this severe before. When the generators failed the third level battery powered backup kicked in and continued cooling. I read they had 7 hours of battery power.
It is here in the timeline that I have troubles with the TEPCO management in Tokyo. The analogy to the Apollo 13 accident response is apt. Knowing they had only 7 hours to save this reactor (not to mention all the subsequent failures where they had more than 7 hours), where was the "all hands on deck" and "damn the procedure books" initiatives? Where was a 30 minute decision from the top- that directed , -- "let's fly diesel generators there and get them connected and running in less than 7 hours"- "failure is NOT an option, so do whatever it takes to succeed!" TEPCO should have flown in there best senior "hands on" technicians and foremen authorized to make on the spot decisions to get the reactor deionized water cooling turned back on. Cut away the ruined generators and rewire replacements to connect to the reactor pumps! As I said above, TEPCO is an Electric Company who should know how to rewire the plant to new generators.
In the Apollo 13 accident, the creative re-engineering was remarkable and saved the mission. I have yet to see any evidence of equal technical creativity and initiative on the part of TEPCO management in those first precious minutes. I will be charitable and say I don't have the facts, and may be totally wrong.
Did the CEO of TEPCO have nuclear experience, or an immediately available advisor who knew the severity of a loss of coolant nuclear accident could lead to what we see today? Maybe they did try, but resorting to firetrucks pumping dangerous seawater into the plant is pathetic. The Military has portable desalination plants that can produce drinking water from seawater. Probably heavy lift helicopters too. I don't see that any Government or military equipment is involved at the reactors even now, but again we just don't know what was tried.
I am very saddened by world wide convulsions and all the radiation releases that now endanger thousands of people. I still think this nuclear disaster could have been made much less severe with a more aggressive, massive response in the first hours. We probably will never know. This was the worst earthquake/tsunami in Japan's history and maybe TEPCO has as helpless as those swept away in their houses by the tsunami.
Or maybe TEPCO top management were MBA financial types who did not comprehend the nuclear safety problem? Hmm!
The Boxing day tsunami was 24 metres at Aceh. There is a subduction zone off the coast. In the 6 years since that disaster, nothing was done. Failure of management, failure of engineers to speak out about potential problems, failure of regulating bodies to enforce better safety protocols.
Heard an opposition politician yesterday commenting on the situation. He says he does not believe that either the gov't or TEPCO is lying about the situation, only that all news is delayed. Said that TEPCO is very bureaucratic even for a Japanese company, and that information takes a long time to percolate.
I compare this to Apollo 13, and wonder about differences in lines of communications, direction, and initiative.
I'm inclined to agree that this is due to a mentality which requires very high authorities to sign of on anything done at a NPP, regardless of the urgency. The evidence of problems in spent-fuel cooling pools supports this; it should be obvious that the water must either be cooled or it will boil and be lost, yet efforts to prevent a failure there from cascading and interfering with the work to cool the reactor cores seem to have been given too low a priority. Something as simple as laying a few fire hoses may have been sufficient if done early. Letting the water boil is fine as long as the level is kept up.
I think that's unfair to TEPCO. TMI had all its backup systems undamaged, full supplies of things like water and a robust grid behind it for outside electric power, even clear and intact roads to the plant. Daiichi has none of those things. I am not sure how much to trust it, but this account mentions that Daiichi also lost the reserve pools of cooling water due to mud and debris slopped in by the tsunami. That's an avoidable problem if designed against (just put the water in sealed tanks or high silos), but the strategic thinking was lacking and the tactical people lost the option as a result.
What TEPCO appears to lack is people with expertise, tactical experience and emergency authority. It occurs to me that the US has lots of this, in no small part because so much of our nuclear plant personnel came out of the nuclear navy. This suggests that a Daiichi-scale event is far less likely here even if we should get a natural disaster of the same magnitude.
In the 1980s Korean Airlines had a long series of accidents, to the point that the president said it was matter of national pride to resolve the problem. They asked some people from US to help. They found a completely rigid hierarchical level of control, arising from cultural background - importance of seniority and the fact that juniors could not question their superiors.
The extreme case was (found from Voice Cockpit Recorder) when a co-pilot, seeing that the captain is flying the airplane straight into major thunderstorm, tells the captain: "The weather radar seems to be useful today". That is as much as he could say according to the societal/cultural rules.
The Americans switched them to use of English in cockpits, did retraining etc, and now Korean Airlines are as a good as any other.
There is probably a bias toward zero-exposure during normal operation, and of course preservation of equipment. The notion of taking a saw to a million-dollar customer-formed steel tube would be unthinkable for a tech to do normally, but would be perfectly reasonable if that provided a conduit to add water to a pool with little further effort.
One day in, dragging lines through low-grade steam radiation seemed risky, but now a few are working in 100x higher levels or more. One of those guys could have drug hoses by hand into some areas that are now truly lethal.
If a vision is accurately communicated to every member of the organization, and priorities are clear, decentralized decision making works well. Bureaucracies don't think that way, though.
Honestly, how many have died so far in this nuclear disaster? And how many are projected to die or suffer serious illnesses in a worst case continuation?
For comparison consider cars and planes.
Road accidents kill tens of thousands every year on each continent. We face a choice of living without cars to save those lives, or to let the show go on (possibly with minor adjustments). Would a world without cars really be a better world? Would the economic consequences lead to higher mortality still? I do not know. What I do know is that airplane crashes receive a disproportionate attention relative to the number of casualties per passenger-kilometer.
So, what about nuclear energy plants? Consider that this earthquake and tsunami this strong is a fairly rare event. Is this not the equivalent of a plane crash? Something we regrettably have to live with, because doing without would be worse still? How many people die of pollution and accidents from coal-fired plants? How much good would it do us to do with substantially less energy consumption? I do not have the numbers and I do not know the answers. I suspect that in a rational world we could do a lot better than we are doing, but I am not at all convinced that phasing out the nukes is the best way forward.
On the other hand, I still do not understand how these plants are failing so badly. (But "not understanding" is not the same as "being surprised".) I suspect that there are some crucial pieces of information they are not giving. Consider a closed circuit of cooling water. The water runs through the core picking up heat, and then moves outside the core to some kind of radiator or heat exchanger where the water cools down before returning to the core. Where in this picture are the changes? They speak about failing power to the pumps. Is that all? But power has been restored now, or? Have the circuits suffered other damages like leaks forcing the shutdown of a large part of the capacity? Are there obstructions in the circuit? The question are a-plenty.
Can anybody shed more light on on this?
-Cacadril
I think the problem is that the plants were shut down so the normal cycle was interrupted. You have to wonder if the plants had continued running, there would be fewer problems..
Caca
You are correct that the fatality rate is/will be extremely low even in a worst case scenario. The reactors were scrammed (shutdown) at the time of the earthquake and then the concern becomes removing decay heat. These are not small (100-500MW) military reactors though, they are 4000-5000MW boiling water reactor so they will produce a tremendous amout of decay heat. The good thing is that decay heat will follow an expontial drop off in production so the first few days are critical but unfortunatly they were only partially successful in keeping the cores covered with water.
I still have no idea where the hydrogen is coming from that caused the explosions but the "vapor" that the media talks about is probably primary coolant steam they are bleeding off to reduce pressure/temp.
The media is also doing a very poor job because they everything is radiation , rarely do you here the word contamination which is the real concern outside the boundaries of the facility. The US heloes and carrier were contaminated with radioactive particulates, that is what you breath and ingest which causes problems. The media makes it sound like the radiation from the plant is going to go across the pacific and harm people in the US. So much bad info....
s for the problems at the plant, the reactors produce steam to turn turbines to produce electricity. Once they are all shutdown, they need a backup power source, normally the grid but the grid is down. So they have emergeny generators but they were probably partially damaged in the disaster and with no easy way to fly in replacements or parts, roads are blocked etc, they have to do the best with what is on hand. The control rooms are shielded but to go out and repair generators, move diesel around is a task that has to be preplanned to make sure noone gets harmful radiation doses since they are so close to the reactors. Flying stuff in is probably out of the question because people on the ground can use shielding but aircraft are totally exposed.
You make predictions about the severity of the problem, yet you do not know enough about nuclear power accidents to know where the hydrogen is coming from... FAIL
DD
I think your numbers are a little off, but there is an interesting assumption that you are making on the scram (or cessation of fission), which is that it is in some way permanently stopped.
Since the fuel rods are "moderated" by distance and moderating materials such as boron, If those rods would happen to melt sufficiently, this puddle or slag could restart the fission
process at the bottom of the reactor vessel, this of course would be a really bad thing. This is not only true of the reactor based rods, but the "spent" rods in the storage pools, which
are "economically" spent but not "radiologically" spent.
Others should comment here, while there is no possability of a nuclear weapon like blast, (just to clear that up), but you should consider the scale of the issue. In a nuclear weapon once
you get past the "flash bang", overpressure, heat, gamma, xrays and all of that stuff, you basically started with tens of lbs/kgs of nuclear material of some sort, highly distributed
no doubt. What you are talking about here is tons, given 40 years of operations of 4 reactors if stored locally (I haven't tried to look that one up, i need to sleep at night), possibly
1000+ tons of material. Fractional release of what is present here is very big.
Once upon a time I read an unclassified report on the "optimal scenario" for permanently neutralizing the US in a nuclear war. Small nuclear weapons against nuclear plants
is a big winner.
all this is very interesting. I had been looking for a remark like that one about nuclear ON PURPOSE, way worse and more probable than nuclear ACCIDENT. I mean a bunch of people with appropriately insane motives, the right training and equipment, rush a nuclear plant, take it over entirely, put their ordinary chemical explosives in all the worst places, light the fuse and head for the right hill to watch the fireworks.
No nuclear bomb req'd.
That's the one to worry about. Why fuss about earthquakes, which are rare and usually not so severe when you have a world of crazies right here and now who can do bad things really fast and really bad?
And before I slither back into my hole, I want to cheer on Nick about renewables and FF. Wind, esp high altitude wind, is in my primitive 19th century engineer's mind, a clear winner. And so is solar thermal, which is what I am doing down in that hole. Gotta tell you, folks, looks to me like a home run. Don't ask for details, if it happens like we think, you won't have to. And if it doesn't, I'll just stay in the hole.
PS- Yes I DO know about the second law of thermo. And even the first one.
I want to cheer on Nick about renewables and FF.
Thanks.
Yay, renewables and EVs!
Both very false hopes. I have my name down to buy a plug-in hybrid but at least I'm under no illusions that enough of them will be bought in time to make one whit of difference.
As for renewables, by all means let's build as many as we can while we still have the money for it — but that won't be for too much longer.
So how come we "still have the money" to buy big fat gas guzzlers when we don't still have the money to buy things that might save the planet for our grandkids?
Please, would somebody stand up and publish the very long list of frivolities we have money for, in % gdp, along side the list of renewables we could buy for that fraction?
Start with bottled water and soda pop = n windmills.
BTW, my back of envelope calculation says the solar thermal widget that would provide me with all the energy I use is about the same hardware and cost, as an SUV. Go ahead, you calculate it. And use the numbers for what we know how to do, not the stupid stuff we are doing. Example, I use about 1/3 the energy used by the average citizen of USA, and I am not by any means living in poverty. Matter of fact, I'm having a good time, and even use some of it to read TOD, every now and then.
The money for all these types of purchases will disappear at the same time when credit goes. You are distinguishing how we are spending the money now and I agree that we could be doing a much, much better job.
What matters is what we can produce and what lasting stuff we have produced. Money and credit is just facilitators, they aren't production. If we can produce a SUV today, we likely can tomorrow too, whatever way money and credit flows.
Not likely to be true at all. A collapsing financial system has far-reaching impacts, both in the ability of the people to afford expensive, high-quality products and the ability of the companies, if they stay in business to produce them.
This is the heart of my disection of finance and economics. Jeppen argues the economic task is possible, aangel argues the financial task is not. Surely the financial end-of-growth impasse is coincidental with the economic need to build-out renewables? We must reinvent our financial system.
I'm much more worried about Climate Change.
The real problem: overcoming the objections of the minority of people who are hurt in the short run by EVs and renewables.
Like the Koch's:
"Poor Exxon. They used to be the oil company that everybody loved to hate. This spawn of the Standard Oil breakup had it all: Obscene profits, the Exxon Valdez, a mean CEO who sneered at clean energy, blatant funding for climate deniers.
But now, the new ExxonMobil is just not that special anymore.
It turns out that all the big oil companies are buying elections, paying front-groups to spread lies about climate change and dumping their tiny investments in clean energy while continuing to put out soft-focus ads touting how green and socially responsible they are. And they just don’t seem to care that much about preventing oil spills either.
In these days of peak greed, you have to drill pretty deep in the oil patch to find the worst of the worst.
A real gusher
Well, after coming up with a bunch of dry holes, the environmental and government-reform movements seem to have found the activist equivalent of Old Spindletop: Charles and David Koch."
See http://transitionvoice.com/2011/02/more-reasons-to-hate-the-koch-brothers/
I suspect they will have been operating an open loop cooling system pumping in sea water with returns going to the ocean. One of the problems they have had is once the system began to overheat, pressure built inside the containment vessel making it more difficult to pump water in.
I suspect there are unknown unknowns that we are not being told about because they are not yet known.
"Honestly, how many have died so far in this nuclear disaster?
And how many are projected to die or suffer serious illnesses in a worst case continuation? "
That, in my opinion, is the central question to be posed when looking at the future of Nuclear Power. We have winds now moving some unexact amount of radiation towards Tokyo, on it's way towards bigger population centers, it will also be salting the earth beneath it, in this Rice-Rich agricultural part of Japan. When the winds are 'good', it puts that stream of radioactive particles over the Ocean, the Ocean of an Island Nation that has a long tradition of relying on Seafood for much of its protein.
We just heard about Wild Boar in Southern Germany, running a bit amok in villages there, and they carry another worrying menace, in measurable radiation levels that are traced back to Chernobyl.
This accident is being compared to Cherynobyl and Three-Mile Island as an 'Either Or', as if only the worst of these failures should be of any real concern, but in fact it's simply cumulative.. each one has added to the overall number of precipitates that are salting the surface of the planet, and getting into air and water flows. Add to them the Bikini Atoll tests, France's Tests, India's Nuclear Tests.. They get put into separate boxes for sake of discussion, but when you're simply going to count the Toxic Load on the BioSphere, the difference is Academic, as they say.
These elements have been dredged up from far underground and highly concentrated to deliver this potency for our great thirst for Omnipotence and Power, but this is exactly the same potency that makes it dangerous to mix into our thin surface of living things.
Bob
Winds don't move radiation. Radiation is like light: it "shines" from a radioactive source, but when the source is gone it is gone. (Unless you have neutron activation of the target, but that requires a very large amount of the right kind of radiation to be significant.)
The danger is contamination. Contamination is when you have a release of radioactive material. In other words, it's when the source of the radiation itself gets out in a form that's mobile. The winds can move that. The Earth can be salted with that. That's what happened that made Chernobyl so bad.
So far I've heard about radiation levels increasing, but have not heard about significant contamination release. If the latter happens, then it's a very bad disaster. If it's only the former, then it will be forgotten inside the year except for the cost of decommissioning the remains at the site.
It gets even more complicated after that. If there is contamination, do the contaminants have a short half-life or a long half-life?
Bob,
You would be wise to wait until we know answers to the questions you raise. In the prior examples you named, only a handfull of people experienced cancer as a result, and most of them were "treated and cured". Seriously, more people have died in a single aircraft crash then in all the nuclear events to date.
Radiation is a boogy man -- consider the number of people who would be spared bacteria caused intestinal distress if we allowed meat to be radiated. But we do not allow it.
It has been explained that radiation is something we all live with all the time. More radiation is released in coal ash then the nuclear industry has released. Please skip adding nuclear warfare into the mix. We should all understand that the nuclear weapons industry has been let out of the bottle and it will not be put back by today's politicians who cannot even get CO2 concentration under control.
But lets get the information we need and after the reactors have cooled and the "crisis" is better understood then it will be time to run around and scream and shout about the dangers of generating power using the atom.
Ken
You better get busy explaining your arguments to the public at large. They will not believe you. The nuclear industry failed to make safe reactors and they are distributing significant quantities of radiation all over the local area. Sure humans can take it, but why should they take it. How much compensation should they receive for their exposure to radiation due to poor engineering design?
Was that compensation factored into the Cheap, Clean and Safe mantra I keep hearing from the Nuclear Lobbyists?
Where is the waste right now? Is it safe? Is the waste clean and safe and free? What is a second Tsunami hits the waste zone? Is it safe from further Natural disaster? Doubt it. This is a first class Human created disaster. An epic in our quest for "free energy" LOL.
Colekrc,
"Seriously, more people have died in a single aircraft crash then in all the nuclear events to date."
You do not help your arguments when you use statements like this that can be disproved in seconds via Google. For Chernobyl, conservative estimates by UN and Russian govt agencies put the eventual death toll at several thousand, the (IAEA) at 4000 and independent entities have numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
Your deliberate mixing of types of radiation, their effects, risks and potential uses also does not help. All radiation is not equal as we all know.
People get carried away when discussing these matters and their risks. Proponents minimize the issues and risks and opponents maximize them. There has been a lot of discussion this week that points out that when it comes to risks almost no one can evaluate them rationally. Every one has bias' that color their thinking.
I suspect that Euan is dead on. There is no rational argument that you can make to people about how the overall risk of nuclear power is low compared to many other energy sources. Radiation is ultimately terrifying to a large percentage of people. You cannot argue your way out of that box.
The death toll of Tschernobyl is somewhere betwenn 10.000 and 100.000 (http://www.benoroe.de/tschernobyl/tsch_05.htm). Soviet statics are much lower and even the IAEA has downplayed the effect. We at the Oildrum are used to not trust the statistics about oil reserves from the IEA - wouldn't the same doubt be applicable to the IAEA?
One look at the unreadably garish yellow on white of that website tells me that it's alarmist bullshit. A further dose of eyestrain reveals they don't even understand about radiation dosage units, which are measured in sieverts (human equivalent dose rate) or grays (nett human dose), not bequerels (atomic disintegrations per second). But, hey, quoting bequerels gives you nice scary millions and billions to wave around ...
The official UNSCEAR assessment, written with 20 years of hindsight, says:
So, we have 28 immediate + 19 later deaths, plus 6000-odd thyroid cancer cases (thyroid cancer treatment is almost always successful).
10,000 - 100,000 deaths, my a*** ...
Thank you Jorn, I did not have a ready source.
there is no rational argument that you can make to people about how the overall risk of nuclear power is low compared to many other energy sources. Radiation is ultimately terrifying to a large percentage of people. You cannot argue your way out of that box.
Wy, I want to look at what you are saying here, as I believe it is possible to make rational arguments about the risk of every system for energy production. Ultimately overcoming rational arguments with the fact that a large percentage of people are terrified about radiation is not where I want to go. I know people are emotional about radiation, they don’t understand it and they believe it when people distribute fallacies about plumes of contamination reaching across the pacific ocean to California.
Everyone has bias' that color their thinking.
This cannot be overlooked. Our biases not only color our thinking, they prevent us from understanding the facts of the matter. If someone believes massive numbers of deaths occurred as a result of Chernobyl, then they are not going to accept that the actual number of deaths and even the illnesses that did occur were treated and the people released. (Even thyroid cancer and leukemia were evaluated and no evidence increased fatalities was found. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18049227)
It is true that massive relocations occurred and this resulted in a serious upset to people’s lives.
Finally, when you look at coal production and factor in the hazards of coal mining and then look at the output of coal fired power plants and look at the radiation released, (Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioa...)
and the effect on the environment of the generation of large amounts of CO2, then generation using fossil fuels is a significant problem. Would you trade one for another? Rationally I would choose nuclear, The long term effects of dumping CO2 is not well understood. Emotionally, I am concerned about radiation as well, but when coal and nuclear both produce radiation, it is possible to become emotional on both sides of the issue.
Colekrc,
Re rational decision making. I completely understand what you are saying and, in general terms, I am of the same basic miindset. But what a couple of engineer/scientists might be willing to do based upon a rational and objective evaluatio of the facts just does not get us far.
The general public has no meaningful capability to separate emotions from decision making. To give you an example. My wife and I are in the process of deciding where our final retirement place will be in the near future (we are already retired but work full time running an organic farm). She is very intelligent and has spent well over 30 years with me. We have had long discussions over the current situation and I have explained in detail why we have nothing to fear from what is happening in Japan. Also we have gone over many of the items in these pages like the greater risk of dying in a car accident, from coal emmissions and how nuclear might provide us some kind of energy bridge to mitigate the effectsof AGW caused by CO2 emmissions. Her basic response after all that? "I know that what you are telling me is accurate, but there is no way we are going to live anywhere within 100 miles of a nuclear plant." She is against anyone building one anywhere near her. She is just terrified by radiation. As are most folks.
Rationality can never overcome fear and terror. If emotions are strong there is no recorse to rational thought and objectivity. If you try and push the issue the terrified persons are going to hurt you.
Wy,
I understand completely. Radiation is something that large majorities fear and do not understand. A member of our family had an accident that required literally hundreds of x-rays. Now he is quite certain of a shortened lifespan and sickness due to this radiation. I only meant to harp on my thesis that we have choices to make and many are unattractive.
I am one of those who do not believe that solar, wind, and hydro will in any way solve the power problems that future generations are facing. I also do not see moving to a primitive society as happening in an orderly manner. In this choice I see us in violent warfare until our numbers are diminished. The only approach that offers a palatable solution is nuclear power replacing fossil fuels until another better generation of renewables is found. And in saying this I accept that there will be nuclear disasters and radiation releases but I have faith in the engineering decision making process that includes all stakeholders (including those citizens who live in the vicinity or a reactor).
It is just a question of what approach has the best outcome for the greatest number of people. Others on this forum do not accept this choice, or fatalistically believe we will not make the choice rationally or in time. Of course my approach relies on a great deal of science and a downplaying of emotions. I appreciate that fear and non-rational behavior may carry the day but I don't have to accept it, only prepare for its eventuality. I don’t know if we will make the choice, or simply allow events to make the choice for us, good luck on your retirement site selection trade study.
"In the prior examples you named, only a handfull of people experienced cancer as a result, and most of them were "treated and cured"."
You'll need to back that one up.
Here's what I've seen.. (This is a brief selection from a long chapter..)
Alexey V Yablokov - Russian Acad. Sciences. (Co Authors, Alexey Nesterenko, Vassily Nesterenko)
CHERNOBYL
Chap 2. Chernobyl’s Public Health Consequences -
Some Methodological Problems
.. NOT just a 'handful of cases, mostly cured.'
Jokuhl
Contrast your numbers with Turnages (above)I will confess that I was going from media insight initially and I am willing to defer to cited examples, except where they do not agree. In truth, getting good numbers is not easy, but I don't think the hysteria surrounding chernobyl is justified. I do agree that iodine treatments (before exposure) and treatement for cancers such as lukemia are highly successful at reducing the death toll.
I also understand that operators and other safety personnel may have even higher exposures. I would keep their statistics in a separate category.
Lets wait and see what the eventual numbers from Japan give us. My prediction, (less than a commercial airliner crash is still on the table.)
Well, for now, here is the Chapter Preface by the author, just to see the broader view of his conclusions. This was retrieved from the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and appears well documented, but I don't know any more about the Authors or the context of this report.
The Yablokov work you quote is dubious in multiple ways - see http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/09/chernobyl-consequences-myths-... for an overview.
There was indeed increased morbidity. Studies have not shown any well-defined link between that and the Chernobyl fallout, except in the case of thyroid cancers and some increase of cataracts among power station workers most exposed to the radiation. The Soviet Union was in a state of collapse soon after that time, and the Chernobyl impact was overwhelmingly psychological rather than radiological.
Nuclearphobia and social collapse was the biggest killer. And let's not forget the increase in deaths resulting from the extra coal-burning needed to make up for the electricity that Chernobyl could no longer supply.
More Navajo uranium miners died of cancer from the nuclear pollution they were exposed to than can fit into an airplane.
It's unknown how many died downwind from Three Mile Island, but there was a rise in infant mortality in the downwind communities. The State of Pennsylvania tried to cover this up by mixing statistics from upwind with downwind communities. People downwind of the reactor reported metallic tastes in their mouths, there were numerous reports of farm animal deaths and elevated cancer risks. But the biggest exposure was probably through the milk that was mostly consumed in cities outside the plume area.
Eastern European medical studies in the contaminated zones estimate that about a million excess deaths have happened from the Chernobyl contamination. There is far more radioactivity in the melting reactors and burning fuel pool of Fukushima than there was in Chernobyl 4 reactor.
Asking people whether they want coal or nukes is like asking if you prefer lethal injection or the electric chair. The correct answer is "neither."
We could easily cut our consumption in half without suffering. And depletion will force us to do this anyway. Relocalizing food production is probably the top priority on the downslope of Hubbert's Curve.
I have commented what you claim in another answer, so I'll just mention that virtually nothing of what you claim is true.
An article on the zirconium hydrogen interaction.
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/dept/Courses/NE-104B/Steinbruck_article_Zr-H...
Rgds
WeekendPeak
After a car accident, I can practically lick the pavement with my own tongue and not feel the effects.
Please take a walk into Fuku I unit 3 and lick the side of the reactor for me. Then let me know if you can tell the difference.
See that is the problem.
Erin Brockovich: By the way, we had that water brought in specially for you folks. Came from a well in Hinkley.
Ms. Sanchez: [Puts down the glass, without drinking] I think this meeting is over.
There you go. Consider the costs and benefits from this context: chromium is not really worth it when one considers their own source drinking water. Did the lawyers drink that water? LOL.
It is not hard to understand.
Good luck doing that. Most of the dust you'll collect is poisonous. Altought it will go away after a century or two.
Hypothetically postulate a series of similar accidents
Each develops slowly enough to allow humans to leave the effected area before dying
Eventually, the entire planet is rendered uninhabitable
You won't see high causality rates till the very end of the process, as you run out of places to run to
Humans are mobile, so human causality rate is not an accurate assessment of ecological damage if the ecological damage is slow enough that it can be avoided for a period of time.
I recommend the movie WALL-E from Disney/Pixar for a light hearted depiction of where this is headed. Of course, in real life we don't have a shopping mall in space to flee to when Earth becomes habitable only for robots and cockroaches.
Don't pee in the gene pool.
A series of accidents such as the Japanese will make virtually nothing uninhabitable. Zero times a lot is still zero.
In terms of emotion, when one is deceived as to the dangers of something, then the feelings of being betrayed, placed in danger and general revulsion are normal. After all the advocates were rewarded and having been rewarded must bear the consequences.
As to the politics, we can expect a lot more regulation of all energy generation. After all the last 30 year experiments of letting the market decide has been a overwhelming failure.
To me, the above article is basically a complaint that the nuclear advocates minimized dangers and they feel somewhat insulted that there is a consequence of public recognition of the dangers. Once a city is made uninhabitable and a large number of its citizens have their life adversely affected, it is a bit odd to see the advocates complaining about pubic panic. Maybe their credibility would be enhanced by their moving themselves and their families into the affected areas.
The goodness of a thing is normally readily apparent. With nuclear, the goodness is very debatable. For example, will the energy consumed in cleaning this mess up exceed or be a significant part of the energy produced and will any surplus from this calculation exceed significantly the social and other costs. There is no way for the advocates to minimize this. Debates over energy will continue and nuclear will be on the table.
You jumped to the conclusion that a city was made uninhabitabe a bit too fast (unles you are complaining about temporary precautionary measures). You are only entitled to conclude that after a few weeks, if the city really was made uninhabitable.
After that time we may be entitled to conclude that the consequences were much worse. Ok, but only after we know what the consequences are.
I always thought the designers and construction people should live on site. Nice penthouses on top of a nuclear reactor appeal to my sense of justice.
The town of Pripyat was just that. The engineers and construction workers of the Chernobyl plant can return in about 600 years. The people responsible for the accident lived somewhere else off course.
600 years - nonsense. Back in 1992, the dose at Pripyat was already down to 25 millisieverts per year, about half of the dose if you live in Tamil Nadu. Nowadays, it is down to normal background levels.
So, on that score, I wouldn't mind living there.
I saw a video recently of a trip into Pripyat. The amount of radiation in the air was not life threatening, but the geiger counters really reacted s soon as you pointed them at the grass. I suppose you could live there, if you never left the sidewalks.
I've been thinking about this disaster in the larger terms of human hubris and our addiction to technology in general. Every technological advance generates increased complexity and has hidden costs (in the Tainterian sense).
Limits to Complexity on Question Everything.
Scylla, meet Charybdis. It's about time we started taking wave power seriously.
Hypnotized by you if I should linger.... If they can't make work at Inchon, South Korea where will it work. Portugal is cold, right?
Yeah, I dunno. I think the tech still needs a little more work before it hits the big time. I really just mean renewable energy, and conservation, and the green stuff in general. Too many big black and red lasers blasting holes in the world right at this moment...
I imagine a wave power plant would suffer a total wipe out in the event of a major tsunami?
OFM,
I cannot tell if you were joking or not. So I will assume not.
Off shore even a small distance only instruments can tell if a tsunami goes by. The ocean swell is only a few feet high and the crests are separated by many miles. Regular storm surges would be much more destructive due to the higher wave hieghts and close distances between crests. It is only when the tsunami wave reaches shore and/or shallows that it becomes visible to the eye. That is when the giant waves get generated.
A wave power plant off shore a mile or two would likely be unaffected except possibly by debris that the outgoing tsunami wave dragged out to sea.
Wyo
This is why ships on sea who hear about comming tsunamis always should sail stright ahead TOWARD the wave. It is the safes bet of all.
I wasn't joking, but merely changing the subject temporarily.
I know very little about waves and wave energy , but it is my impression that such plants would have to be close to shore and in shallow water, as that is where the waves are , on a consistent basis.
Would there be frequent enough and large enough waves to produce economic power two miles off shore?
OFM
I am pretty sure that what the wave generators would want to use are ocean swells. If you were very close to shore where shallows came into effect you would get into the area of breaking waves. This would just not work. During storms the larger swells start breaking a proportionally greater distance out as when the wave starts to break is dependent on wave height and depth of water. So I would think that 2 miles out (depending on water depth) would be a good number.
Of course in very large storms you can get breaking waves in the open ocean, but those breaks are caused by very high winds or crossing wave patterns.
Ocean energy includes two forms: wave amplitude and current. Waves a somewhat like wind -- modestly predictable but rather fickle. Currents, like tidal currents, tend be much better behaved and can be predicted and used more as base-load.
I haven't looked at tidal current maps around Japan (some years ago there really weren't that many accurate maps, even for mariners, though I assume the Navy has them somewhere), but if there are tidal flows between islands then there could be a very significant source of energy.
Of course that requires an innovative system to recover the energy, as it is a fairly low-grade source. Tidal currents rarely go faster than a meter per second or so, IIRC, but of course the mass in motion is huge. Still, getting power from currents seems simpler than recovering power efficiently from waves.
Today the Scottish government has approved plans for a 10MW tidal power array on Scotland’s West coast, claiming when completed it will be the largest of its kind in the world.
ScottishPower Renewables (SPR) will install ten tidal turbines, each capable of producing 1MW of electricity, off the Sound of Islay. The project will use HS1000 tidal turbines developed by Hammerfest Strøm, a company partly-owned owned by Iberdrola (SPR’s parent company).
The array will generate enough electricity for over 5000 homes – more than double the amount needed to power the island. SPR is currently constructing the first HS1000 device that will go into testing in waters off Orkney later this year.
And on the other side of the world in New Zealand, Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson has signed off the 200MW (200 turbines) tidal power station at Kaipara Harbour.
Astute readers will notice this is 20 times as large as the Scottish one.
That makes a nice argument foundation for Japan to start to install offshore wind farms, assuming they get enough wind to make it viable.
Or, dare I say it? Offshore nukes
I note the terrible reporting by most MSM. Rachael Maddow appears to get it right though.
I also note that people think nuclear must be 100% safe... but there is no system in the universe that is.
Death? God's systems seem intact.
Nope not 100%. The system requires solid engineering with safety systems that can stop the nuclear reaction safely even if a conventional weapon were dropped into the middle of the site.
Engineers need to properly site the nuclear system and they need to properly site the back-up systems.
Fail, fail, fail. Engineering here was lackluster at the very best. This site is extremely vulnerable to Tsunamis -- that word is actually of Japanese origin.
If you cannot ensure safety via solid engineering, then it is not worth it in the end.
We just need electrons, we do not need an exclusion zone 20 km in diameter to get those electrons.
Amen to that, I heard wind and solar power and even biomass, when done right, are compatible with other land uses, and I heard a rumor that burning trash for energy (with the proper filter on the plant, of course) actually saves land!
Dam breaks following Japan earthquake, homes washed away
http://www.hydroworld.com/index/display/article-display/5036367493/artic...
TOKYO, Japan 3/11/11 (PennWell) --
A dam in the northeast Fukushima prefecture of Japan broke and homes were washed away, Kyodo news reported, following the biggest earthquake in the nation's history.
The Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported that the Fujinuma irrigation dam in Sukagawa city, Fukushima, had collapsed, with homes washed away and people missing.
The 8.9-magnitude earthquake - the seventh biggest ever recorded - generated a monster wall of water that pulverized the northeastern city of Sendai, where police reportedly said that 200-300 bodies had been found on the coast.
At least 310 people were killed in the massive earthquake and following tsunamis, police and press reports said.
The government declared an atomic power emergency as officials worked to secure nuclear facilities in the affected regions, media reports indicate.
Hours after the Japan quake struck, TV images showed orange balls of flame rolling up into the night sky as fires raged around a petrochemical complex in Sendai.
A massive fire also engulfed an oil refinery in Iichihara near Tokyo.
We have three disasters:
First, a giant earthquake and a giant tsunami, scores of small eartquakes, +20 000 dead, perhaps 500 000 homeless, millions withouth adequate food, water and electricity.
Second, global economic damages, probably making hundreds of millions of people outside the disaster area a little poorer. This is tha smallest and most distributed disaster.
The distant third, a large slowdown in nuclear powerplant building exactly when the post peak oil era starts to bite into the economy togeather with manny other resource isues. Millions will lack adequate power in the 2020:s and 2030:s, manny kinds of non fossil fuel based sustanance will be slowed down, this is deadly in a shrinking economy.
If I were religious I would pray that our Swedish politicians stay the course for making it possible to build new nuclear powerplants, of course with the very best security!
I am religious and I am not surpriced. The Bible is after all loitered by dooms day prophesys. And they are lining up for fullfillment now in rows and columns. But I don't pray about energy politics since I see no outcome of those prayers that would help us. Yes swedish nuclears will help Sweden, but then what? We live in an interconected world.
Spontanously I come to think about this culture on Crete. Was it the Etrusks, my memory fails me? First they are invaded, looted and pillaged. Once the pirates are gone, they emediately have a severe earth quake. Followed by one massive tsunami. But it turns out the earth quake was actually an exploding vulcano, so they then get to see the inside of a realy realy big pyroclastic flow. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroclastic_flow). The last surviviors burnt to a crisp. Now build a time machine and go back and tell those guys the gods are not angry...
I posted a story on Our Finite World called
What would happen if we discontinued nuclear electricity?
I see this as happening differently in different places, but it seems to me to have the potential to cause rolling blackouts in some places. California has two operating nuclear plants, one rated at a 7.0 and one rated at a 7.5.
California had rolling blackouts due to greed and avarice. Maybe the question we need to ask is how will nuclear energy getting pulled affect the actuarial tables ten years from now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
Gail,
I see your analysis and agree with your conclusions. The logistics of supplying energy to our overcrowded planet are critical, as is the financial structure. The loss of either would result in a catastrophic breakdown of society and the loss of millions of lives. The issue for our leadership is how to promote the supply of energy (and associated commodities) and the continued maintenance of the economic system.
Will we encounter risk? Danger? Loss of life? The answer is yes regardless of the alternative that is chosen. If loss of life were the only criteria we would likely favor nuclear power as it has been proven to be less dangerous than coal and gas generation. In making a decision such as this, many other factors are (or should be ) considered in the decision matrix: Loss of life is one factor, reliable production of energy is another, the form of the waste residue of the energy production (CO2, Coal ash, nuclear waste are examples). The ability to provide energy in the short time frame and the long time frame are considerations. The capital outlay and the world wide debt situation are factors. Now we can add the environment, the production of food, the world’s transportation infrastructure, whether we work together with other nations or go our own way.
The complexity of these issues is the main reason why we are susceptible to the emotional pleas from people who take a more narrow view of the problem and solve it using a small subset of the actual criteria. How nice it would be if the full set of conditions were used by our scientific and political leadership. How nice it is to have forums such as this one to debate the concerns.
Ken
I don't think it would be a good idea and it would be overreacting to immediately shut down nuclear plants in response to the tragedy in Japan, but I do think it should give us pause in considering whether nuclear is really what we want more of going forward, or whether we should redouble and then requadruple our efforts in researching new and better forms of renewable energy, and actually building them out. We failed to learn our lesson with the Deepwater Horizon, as I see it; we should have used it as a reason to build positive answers and solutions in the form of mass transit, high speed rail, walkable communities, non-petro-agriculture, etc. etc., but we didn't. Maybe this time we'll learn both lessons. I can dream, at least...
No but it gives us a reason to handle the waste we have stockpiled better.
Gail, as indicated on your map, there is a heavy concentration of nuclear generation on the Eastern Seaboard. The Midwest could probably replace their nuclear generation with additional Wyoming and Illinois coal supplies and a modest expansion of coal plants. The southern states like the Carolinas may be able to do the same with Appalachain coal.
However, to replace nuclear from Virginia to Maine in a short time would be quite difficult. The most feasible way would be to expand gas turbine generation by:
- diverting GE and Pratt from commercial and military jet engine production to all out production of gas turbines,
- immediately building added gas pipelines from the Gulf and the MidWest, and
- immediately go all out drilling and frac'ing in the Marcellus Shale.
The consequences would likely be a severe rise in gas prices and a tightening of supply. Currently, gas is cheap and plentiful in the MidWest, but it is not plentiful in the NorthEast, where much home heating is still done using oil. We would probably see a return to gas supply conditions of a couple decades ago when gas was expensive, gas companies like Lilco were warning customers of low pressures, and new home hookups to gas distribution were not allowed.
Can't we just invade some more countries?
But really, why the exclusive emphasis on production? Are you really Dick Cheney?
And I doubt many will be demanding an immediate shut down of all reactors at once. Certainly the oldest reactors should be the ones that are retired first.
I think it is too soon to draw conclusions from this terrible incident. The whole event is literally still unfolding.
However . . . this event could end being viewed as a reason to go MORE NUCLEAR. Yes, more nukes.
After all, this not-so-great plant which was designed 40 years ago and thus out-dated did provide service for some 40 years providing a lot of electricity. It then got hit by one of the most massive earthquakes on record . . . a 9.0 on the Richter scale. (Dwarfing the 6.9 quake I experienced in SF and that was pretty bad.) It then got hit with a massive wall of water from a massive Tsunami which wiped out the back-up coolant systems. Improvised cooling systems were then used and it then had 3 explosions. And then a fire.
And after all that, it has leaked radiation. But no one has died from the radiation. Hopefully the plant will be contained and encapsulated eventually. So if after all of those disasters, it only ends up killing just a few people, it should be viewed as a relative success. A coal plant certainly would have caused the deaths of many coal miners during its existence and killed many others with the pollution it emits as part of its normal operation.
But as I said, we can't draw this conclusion yet . . . things certainly could get much worse. But I really think the various government actions being taken right now in the midst of this unfolding situation are done out of emotion and lack the critical thinking that should be done.
Even after all that the disaster could have been avoided had (a) the back generators not been placed in a low lying area (b) care taken to ensure that the connection for replacement generators been placed high enough of the ground. As I understand it one of their problems was that the replacement generators for the ones wiped out by the Tsunami couldn't be connected because the connection point was under water.
If that in fact is true then a plug atop at flagpole could have prevented this disaster!
What do some of you experts make of this business prof who's saying it's all a big nothing?
http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-r...
It was covered in one of the other drumbeats. Basically people were sceptical of his qualifications and the fact that these reactors don't actually have a 'core catcher' such as the one he described.
There's a nuclear renaissance in China, Russia, India and South Korea. But there is no nuclear renaissance in the US.
Of the nuclear power plants currently under construction in the world, 27 are under construction in China, 11 are currently under construction in Russia, and 5 are under construction in both India and South Korea. In the US, however, there is only one nuclear power plant currently under construction.
So those like Joe Lieberman who are calling to halt the nuclear renaissance in America are trying to stop something that ended more than 30 years ago!
Marcel F. Williams
The China point is quite valid here.
Even if a nuclear disaster occurred every few years that killed thousands, I'm sure that would be well within the acceptable losses ceiling for maintaining the growth rates beloved of the Chinese Communist Party. If the central planners want nuclear, they will get nuclear. If there is a problem, the planning bureaus will issue an edict demanding that the atoms cease fissioning. If people die, they will issue an edict revising the death estimates downward. If there is contamination, they will issue an edict redefining the minimum safe level of background radiation. Then business as usual will continue.
I recall years ago back in the 90s seeing environmentalists damning the American/Western less-centralized capitalist economies as the destroyers of the Earth while claiming that it was centrally-planned heavy-handed-socialist countries like China that would lead the way to a sustainable future.
Wouldn't it be interesting if it were the opposite?
...or more likely, neither. i.e. Neither system acknowledged limits to growth on a finite planet. Bills are coming due for both. Not gonna be pretty.
Good point Marcel.
Given that China allows 5000 people a year to die in it;s coal industry, we might be reasonable in suspecting that their nukes may not be built to the utmost standards. Same goes for Iran and N. Korea.
While there is only one US plant in construction, there are numerous more on the drawing board - and that, I expect, is where they will stay, unless they go into the dustbin.
The American nuke renaissance may well be long over, but the rest of the world is a different story. It will be interesting to see if thenon democratic countries react differently to the democratic ones.
Maybe you're unaware of the massive PR campaigns underway in the Washington, DC market touting the need for more clean and carbon free nuclear generated electricity. I can assure you that a ton of cash is being spent on lobbying for more nuclear plants in the halls of Congress right now.
Just dropping in to note that nuclear is not 'carbon free'. The huge amounts of concrete in the structure is one of the most carbon intense building materials that we use. Then there's the mining of the uranium. Tons of earth moved by FF fired equipment. Then the transport & processing. Then decommissioning, whatever that really entails. FF's are needed throughout. Oh - not to mention a bit of diesel for the backup emergency generators & pumps. Let's quash this 'carbon free' pass that nuclear gets. It just ain't so.
On the contrary, nuclear is about as carbon free as it gets, up there with hydro power.
Total lifecycle grams of carbon per kilowatt hour nuclear generation has been calculated at around 4 g/kWh for the Forsmark Nuclear power station. Other nuclear stations, depending on lifetime and enrichment method, give figures of 16 - 60g (last figure results from using the obsolescent gas diffusion enrichment method).
This compares with approx. 70g/kWh for wind assuming no rebuilding for 25 years. (Each tower for a 2MW wind turbine is made of STEEL and CONCRETE with massive foundations and 300 ft high.)
Solar is similar to wind.
Gas is up at 500g/kWh and coal is double that.
See Prof McKay's without-hot-air book for details.
Well this report says:
and:
So we have duelling stats. My main point is that nuclear is not carbon free. I stand by that. And I tend to believe these #'s in comparison to PV & wind moreso than the other way round, as your stats have it.
Nothing is carbon-free. Carbon-free is a talking-point for Washington D.C.
I do think it is funny that Solar and Wind are so high. Were they made with coal solely in that calculation?
Probably a fews odds and ends were left out of the nuclear equation. Usually that is the case with nuclear, the decommissioning, the waste storage, etc. Now how many years of storage costs did they include 1 or 2 years, 1 century, 10 centuries? It is curious how all these groups get to do their funny math to make their thing stand above the others.
How about plotting the chart of public support for each technology? In any case, good luck, nuclear. You are not making many friends with your latest accident.
My other interesting question. How will nuclear ever make it in with Senators being like they are. Nuclear needs democratic friends and Republican friends. Republicans like the Coal and Oil groups much much more. Democrats like the solar and wind much more.
Seems nuclear is lost in the middle. Now coal can play games and make central democrats run from nuclear by having them say certain key words the public cues in on -- like threat of a "meltdown."
Nuclear is just screwed I think. They cannot win.
Nuclear needed to seem as if the industry has control. But when TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima are analyzed post-mortem people see how poorly the industry handles basic problems and is not prepared for real world operations.
Also there is this idea that the plants are leaking materials all the time and the leaks are quite dangerous. The industry tries to suppress the details on the leaks -- like tritium and so forth saying it is no big deal -- but the public feels like they are being lied to then even if they are not being lied too.
I think without education and better PR from nuclear. It is dead in the US. They need to be more careful also about underplaying Fukushima. They should voice concern rather than continue to say, "No biggie. We planned for all systems to malfunction like that and the H2 explosions were controlled releases of a harmless gas."
It just smells like fraud and deceptions. People do not understand the science -- they see the poker player on the other side of the table, and Mr. Nuclear seems shady generally.
So all you pro-nuke folks think about those items to perhaps make a better case for your power source to the general public.
Maybe you can turn about 51% of the people. I think you need about 65% support however. You are far from it when you let these things blow up and act like nothing is wrong.
Dr. Richard Duncan had it right. Human industrial civilization will be over by 2030. This event is a giant shove in that direction. Any humans left in 50 years will be living with primitive technologies like the Middle Ages. Obviously there won't be many humans left by then.
You know what I find very fascinating about the present day intellectual climate?
Right now there seem to be two popular views of the human future. One is yours. The other is the equally extreme in the other direction techno-cornucopian vision.
Either we're all about to die, or we're all about to upload our consciousness to super-intelligent AIs and become immortal cosmic god-like super-beings. The singularity, or the anti-singularity.
Seems to me that both of these silly-- and I consider them both very silly and incredibly unlikely-- visions of the future come from the following procedure:
1) Do a mathematical curve fit / regression on past trends.
2) Extrapolate.
This works perfectly well for linear, Newtonian types of systems. You cannot predict the future of living systems this way.
Living systems are chaotic and computationally irreducible. They move in radically unexpected directions, often very quickly. It is impossible to predict the future of a living system. Not impossible-as-in-hard but impossible-as-in-perpetual-motion.
We keep thinking we can predict the future. It's a silly superstition that refuses to die. We used to think we could do it by dealing cards or examining goat entrails. Now we think we can do it with mathematical regressions and computer simulations. Simulation is just our equivalent of goat entrails.
Edit:
Even more interesting is how the techno-utopians and the eco-doomers do their models. What we have is a thermodynamic process. The techno-utopians are doing a linear model of the end-result of that process, while the eco-doomers are doing a linear model of the inputs of that process. Both are neglecting the fact that it forms a feedback loop with chaotic behavior, and that there is no exit or entrance to that loop.
One guy watches an elephant eat and predicts that the elephant will grow to infinite size. The other watches the elephant poop and predicts that it will soon shrink to nothing.
Deep: One guy watches an elephant eat and predicts that the elephant will grow to infinite size. The other watches the elephant poop and predicts that it will soon shrink to nothing.
In between the Cornucopian and the Malthusians is the Sustainabilty crowd. However, the Sustainability theory is just the Cornucopian theory with one or more growth variables set to 1 or less than one. It hypothesizes that human civilization can continue indefinitely, albeit at a very constrained level.
Prior to the industrial revolution, this branch of philosophy may not have existed. Malthus wrote at the very beginning of it, when growth was robust, but the future was unclear. I would put the origins of Cornucopianism in the late 1800s, when cheap coal, steam, steel, and land were the basis for exuberant growth and social optimism. As the constraints on modern economies became obvious in the second half of the 1900s, Sustainability became popular, along with the anti-nuclear, anti-pollution, etc., environmental movements. However, Sustainability is just a fall-back position of the Cornucopians.
Prior to Newton's mechanics, the industrial revolution, and the development of a general expectation that the world worked according to linear systems models, people would have looked about them to the natural world and seen a pattern of life and death as the natural way that things worked. Animals are born, reproduce, and die. Plants are born, flower, go to seed and die. Cities rise, flourish for a time and decay. Lakes fill with silt, become marshes and eventually peat bogs. And when paleontologists looked at the rocks they saw that species evolved, flourished for a time, and then went extinct.
Legend, myth and religion also operated with the same expectation. Most of the major religions envisioned an end time when human civilisation would cease or at least be transformed in some major way. Some religions envisioned long cycles, wherein past civilisations had existed and future civilisations would succeed ours.
So the most realistic model is that we are somewhere in the summer of civilisation's existance, but that winter will certainly come. Neither a perpetual summer or a perpetual fall are realistic.
I think the sustainability idea postulates something more like the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture. In this case, the goal is to use the present (unsustainable) industrial period as a bootstrapping tool to build a renewable technological civilization based on renewable energy. That, in turn, could become a new baseline sort of like agriculture did... a "new normal."
10,000 years from now many civilizations might have come and gone, but nobody would remember a time before the horizon was dotted with wind turbines or before digital communications were possible. Those things would just be assumed to exist, the way fields of wheat were assumed to exist. "Twas ever thus..."
After Rome fell, there was still agriculture.
I think that's more like what the sustainability crowd postulates.
Current US nuclear generation is about 100,000 Mwatts. So you need about 50,000 wind turbines of 2 Mwatt each. Over 10,000 years you will need about 200 generations of wind turbines, assuming a 50 year life.
That is only for the US, and only for 20% of our current electrical generation. If you assume that we have to switch to electric transportation and got half the electricity from wind, then multiply by 5.
The fundamental problem is that wind and solar do require a very large mass of material to generate the energy, and with each generation of devices, some of the materials always become unusable and are lost. So eventually things run down and are ultimately not sustainable.
Even agriculture is not sustainable because each crop removes elements from the soil. Some wind and water erosion also occurs, more in droughts and floods, but a little bit in any case. Areas where "sustainable" agriculture has been done are places like the Nile or Ganges, where water brings new material to the flood plains or North China, where dust from the Gobi desert replenishes the soil.
Closed systems run down. Open systems are sustainable, but only because some larger closed system is running down.
I've always wondered: what would it look like if one analyzed the sustainability of some natural systems using the same types of models used to analyze the sustainability of human systems? How would an African savannah or a rain forest stack up?
On a deep philosophical level and over a long enough time span, nothing is sustainable.
Sahara Desert Was Once Lush and Populated
•22,000 to 10,500 years ago: The Sahara was devoid of any human occupation outside the Nile Valley and extended 250 miles further south than it does today.
•10,500 to 9,000 years ago: Monsoon rains begin sweeping into the Sahara, transforming the region into a habitable area swiftly settled by Nile Valley dwellers.
•9,000 to 7,300 years ago: Continued rains, vegetation growth, and animal migrations lead to well established human settlements, including the introduction of domesticated livestock such as sheep and goats.
•7,300 to 5,500 years ago: Retreating monsoonal rains initiate desiccation in the Egyptian Sahara, prompting humans to move to remaining habitable niches in Sudanese Sahara. The end of the rains and return of desert conditions throughout the Sahara after 5,500 coincides with population return to the Nile Valley and the beginning of pharaonic society.
I think you may be mixing the existence of knowledge of a thing with the existence of the thing itself.
After Rome fell, agriculture still existed - but not in all the places that it did before. The Latifundia as an institution collapsed and with it most of those estates surrounding Rome (indeed, some even argue this was the cause of the fall of Rome as so many of the wealthy had moved their estates to Gaul).
Consider another reason that Rome is not a suitable comparison - the call of Rome was the fall of a city. The Empire moved east while splinter polities formed all over Europe. What we may be facing now is a global fall - there will be no where to move the capital, no place where the barbarians can settle that haven't already been impacted.
Popular, maybe among a small minority. Influential, unfortunately not.
An implementation of sustainability implies too many hard decisions for most people - politicians and financiers most prominently - to swallow. Having delayed taking these decisions to beyond the point of no return, is there truthfully anything left for the "sustainability crowd" except to side with one or other of the extremes?
Neither side is extrapolating current trends. Both sides are looking at available data, looking on what is possible, choosing a path to say "people will follow that path".
Also, it is quite unlikely that we can end up with any mid-way option. Really, there deosn't seem to be any mid-way option. It is more like that saying: "Some people say the Sun rises in the East, other say it rises in the West. Obviously, the truth is somewhere in the middle."
Not to say we can know where we will end up. We can't. But we can exclude some options.
Of course, the major factor affecting how events will play out is human choice. And let's assume there's such a thing, without getting into a prolonged, academic exercise in philosophy or biology to argue otherwise.
If enough people decide not to have too many children (which may already be happening, albeit slowly), if the elderly decide to pass away with dignity, and enough people decide to drop out of the rat race...then we may be surprised. We may actually face an energy glut in the near future.
Unbelievable, I know. But then again stocks, housing, and oil prices go up forever, don't they?
I will admit, though, that this must involve the Chinese, Russians, Brazilians etc. It won't happen by Americans alone deciding or being forced to forego consumption.
My thoughts are increasingly aligned with some of the deflationary thinkers, but maybe on a lesser scale.
I believe we face global depression, possibly for decades which might involve an energy glut and will certainly involve decreased consumption and investment. This will be followed by an even more difficult period of energy shortage, but by that point it might be the least of our concerns. Poverty and war will of course be in the background.
So you have to make it through the depression bottleneck first. Then, you have to make it through the energy bottleneck.
It's not going to be easy or pleasant, but it can be done.
If population stabilizes at 1 billion, say, from a peak of 9 that's around 1/9 odds, 11% or so. Not good, but not hopeless, either.
The most important decisions are where you choose to live, whom you choose to associate with, and what you do to protect your family and children.
The point is how to minimize suffering and maximize genetic survival at the same time.
Actually the future is quite easy to predict. Any process devised by humans that depends on digging stuff out of the ground on a finite planet is going to come to an end sooner or later. Its that simple. No goat entrails needed.
Your name suggests that you don't believe that human society depends on digging stuff out of the ground.
On the contrary. Our species managed to survive on solar energy alone for over 100,000 years before we became adicted to fossil fuels and uranium. We will do so again. Or we will go extinct.
Our species probably had a global population less than 10 million in total 100,000 years ago. We have a lot more folks than that on the planet now and our population continues to grow:-)
none of this invalidates what solardude said though..
our population, like all populations, grows when there are available resources for it to grow. When those resources are not available, our population, like
all populations, falls.
most people can't seem to accept that humans are just as much subject to physics and biology as any other living thing. maybe too much of the exceptionalism found in the ideology of 'conquer the world' religions, blinding even otherwise reasonable people in this regard.
but, if there is a god, he will be laughing his ass off at those people when they say 'but i thought that didnt apply to me!'
Yes, but the sun gives us about 100,000 terawatts of energy, while we use about 12.