Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change 652
_Sharp'r_ writes Two Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked for Google on the RE<C project to figure out how to make renewables cheaper than coal and solve climate change. After four years of study they gave up, determining "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?
Is Nuclear going to be acknowledged? (Score:2)
Hopefully it will. We should at least convert our base load power to nuclear as a start.
Deliberate (Score:5, Insightful)
Nukes need to move forward in a deliberate manner.
1. A few reference designs need to be established, accounting for some reasonable subset of possible sites such as coastal, inter coastal, inland, etc.
2. These designs would be vetted by the Industry, the feds, and what the hell, invite the Greenies.
3. Once approved, the designs should be exempted fro EPA meddling and some reasonable level of lawsuit immunity...as in the construction can't be delayed decades by lawsuit after lawsuit.
4. Operators should undergo the same rigorous training as military nuke operators...subs, ships, etc. Not the same, but just as rigorous. We don't need fucking button pushes on the night shift. They have to understand the plant, the theory and they consequences of each action they take.
5. Parts should be manufactured in factories using standard methods and specifications. Parts should be interchangeable from site to site. Minimize customizations as much as possible.
The Free Market is great, but this is one of those things he Feds can and should do.
Oh, and none of this jetting into D.C. for 1 day a month for hearings crap. Get all the experts into the same room and lock the door. Make it into a Manhattan Project kind of thing...get it done and get it done right.
Maybe, maybe not. (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe it's not,
But to abandon renewables,
'cuz 2 Guys With The Googles,
gave up is premature,
is it not?
Burma Shave
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Yeh, a bit of throwing the baby out with the bath water. They gave up because they couldn't make renewables cheaper than coal. However, if you really want to help mitigate(I emphasize mitigate based on the article's information, RTFA) CO2 output, you might be willing to pay more for renewable energy and not have to suffer the economic loss of climate change impact later(that of course being a whole different argument).
It was a business venture, and they knew it wouldn't succeed based on morals alone. It'
Re: Maybe, maybe not. (Score:3)
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3. Once approved, the designs should be exempted fro EPA meddling and some reasonable level of lawsuit immunity...as in the construction can't be delayed decades by lawsuit after lawsuit.
What happens if someone discovers a flaw? So far every reactor design ever built has needed some modification afterwards, due to unforeseen issues. Seems like if there is no way to force companies to make those modifications, like a government agency telling them or affected citizens having the right to sue we will just end up with another Fukushima style accident.
4. Operators should undergo the same rigorous training as military nuke operators...subs, ships, etc. Not the same, but just as rigorous. We don't need fucking button pushes on the night shift. They have to understand the plant, the theory and they consequences of each action they take.
That's going to jack the cost up to military levels too then. Probably more, because unlike the military the nuclear plant operators would have t
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What happens if someone discovers a flaw?
The person, who has to be an expert and not some lay-person expressing a vague concern, submits the documented problem to the company and relevant safety organization.
The problem at it's worst was that I could write a letter to the EPA 'What about the 3 dotted tree-frog' and plant construction shuts down for a month before they figure out that the plant isn't even being built on '3 dotted tree-frog' territory. Or I express some crazy concern and again, construction has to stop until they address my 'concer
Re:Deliberate (Score:5, Informative)
The high costs of nuclear are driven by non technical issues. Five year Environmental impact studies, lawsuit after lawsuit, etc.
And the feds can definitely provide a framework and structure to a thriving private industry. Pre-approved designs, standard manufacturing facilities and techniques, etc can drive costs down. Right now, every plant is a one off and many parts are only made by one overseas company...the most expensive way to build anything.
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Surely there are lawsuits over all types of new power generation. People hate windmills and coal plants and fracking and everything else near their homes. Nuclear is hardly unique in that regard.
Anyway, in the UK lawsuits are not such a big problem, but nuclear is still completely unaffordable and only gets built with massive, and I really do mean massive subsidy.
Re:Deliberate (Score:4, Insightful)
...nuclear is still completely unaffordable and only gets built with massive, and I really do mean massive subsidy.
It's a case of paying now or paying later, and with the latter option we'll be paying a ruinous rate of interest that keeps climbing. The economic consequences of AGW are already devastating in some areas of the world - as time goes on it will only get worse. As much as I dislike the nuclear option for a whole host of reasons, it may be the only thing that can save us from ourselves. So yes, I think masive subsidies are in order, if that's what it takes to get the job done.
Re:Deliberate (Score:5, Insightful)
The EIR and lawsuits are the result of demanding perfection for what is inherently a very dangerous process with catastrophic consequences for any mishap and this is technically not possible. So it is a technical failure. You can design a system that will work perfectly most of the time. You can't design a system that will work perfectly all of the time.
"Inherently a very dangerous process" - If it was really so dangerous, why do we have more deaths because of steam accidents than nuclear ones?
"catastrophic consequences for any mishap" - Bull. There only catastrophe for most mishaps in nuclear plants is the paperwork that has to be filled out as a result.
I agree with the last statement, but that's what redundancy is for. One failure is covered by another control. We need to balance risk and reward. Pollution from coal plants kills thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, every year. We'd save lives going nuclear even if we had a Chernobyl every year.
That being said, my 'ideal' non-fossil fuel electric grid ratio is roughly 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% 'other'. Nuclear provides baseload, solar covers the extra power demand of the day, 20% wind is about what we can support without extensive modification. Though the way things are going 30-10 in favor of solar might be more likely. Other includes hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass, and such. It's most of your peaking power outside of the extra solar online during the day.
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" If it was really so dangerous, why do we have more deaths because of steam accidents than nuclear ones?"
That statement is only true if you apply it only to human deaths. If you include sea life, I'd expect oil and nuclear to blow steam out of the water (no pun intended).
"We'd save lives going nuclear even if we had a Chernobyl every year."
Penny smart, pound retarded. Sure, we'd have less human deaths as a direct impact, but after enough Chernobyls, we would start have serious issues with ecological balanc
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More likely 20% hydro, 20% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% biomass+geothermal.
I think you are ignoring the fact that many countries have lots of hydro, like Brazil (70-80% of our electricity is hydro). Many other countries have over 50% hydro. The US alone about just as much hydro as nuclear (around 15%). Canada is close to 2/3 hydro.
But then there is this other argument that somehow big reservoir hydro is bad. It takes too much land. But produces ZERO CO2, and is far cheaper than ANY other electricity so
Re:Deliberate (Score:5, Insightful)
That's true but nobody has been able to solve these problems. The EIR and lawsuits are the result of demanding perfection for what is inherently a very dangerous process with catastrophic consequences for any mishap and this is technically not possible. So it is a technical failure. You can design a system that will work perfectly most of the time. You can't design a system that will work perfectly all of the time.
A coal plant, working absolutely perfectly according to its design parameters, will cause much more environmental and health damage than even a "catastrophic" nuclear failure. So no, it's not a technical issue. It's an emotional issue. We have all but cut off access to the cheapest, most abundant "green" energy source we have. It's like God handed us a big chunk of nearly-free magical energy and said, "Here, use this." Then Jane Fonda said, "But it's scary!" She's done more harm to the planet over the past 35 years than BP ever did.
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Bahahaha. Thanks for calling me out on that. I had no idea I was so wrong about:
hydroelectric : Great if you have it, but most people don't, and most areas which do have it developed so.... no additional baseload there.
geothermal : Great if you... oh just read above.
biogas : A non utility grade pipe dream great if you want to power your fridge, but no so good for a city... no additional baseload there.
biomass : Has barely been demonstrated outside of a lab let alone at any usable size... no additional basel
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Nuclear power is pretty safe but not perfect. Coal is terrible. I think they both should be decommissioned as quickly as possible.
The problem is that "pretty safe" is not good enough. Nuclear power has had two serious accidents, rendering two regions uninhabitable for the the foreseeable future. I don't think it's reasonable to have "accidents" regularly which destroy entire regions. It's only a matter of time until the next accident.
Nuclear costs much more than renewables, takes longer to build, and regula
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Actually, I'd be for this. Nuke sub power plants are over engineered to be safer for obvious reasons and powerful and small. Design them into a black box and drop them into any power plant.
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Re:Is Nuclear going to be acknowledged? (Score:4, Informative)
Just need to put on the Big Boy Pants and reprocess it. Carter's E.O on reprocessing was born of irrational fear and politics.
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Actually, the question is what you define as clean.
1.) energy usage
2.) Resource usage
3.) use of problematic chemicals
PV panels are simply spoken semiconductors, so the same processes apply like those for our precious CPUs and GPUs.
The most common base material is Silicon (Si) which is "refined" from SiOÂ (sand) which is highly energy intensive. resource usage is - given the amount of Si within the minable earth crust - within acceptable range. The elements used for doping are as those in our CPUs and G
Re:Is Nuclear going to be acknowledged? (Score:4, Informative)
Google "breeder reactor" and "thorium reactor".
Engineering-wise, nuclear waste is basically a solved problem. It's political and economical factors that are making it a problem still.
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It would require a huge amount of social engineering. Which is much harder than anything technical.
Re:Is Nuclear going to be acknowledged? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is Nuclear going to be acknowledged? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because nuclear is real clean [ap.org] and stuff.
The spent fuel is piling up at a rate of about 2,200 tons a year at U.S. power-plant sites. The industry and government decline to say how much waste is currently stored at individual plants. The U.S. nuclear industry had 69,720 tons of uranium waste as of May 2013, with 49,620 tons in pools and 20,100 in dry storage, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute industry group.
Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent is other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239. Each has an extremely long half-life — some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency.
And all of those sites are close to 50 years old with no maintenance and with no fuel storage because of the veto of Yucca mountain, etc....
Yes, there are some nasty by-products of nuclear power. But we have the technology to clean these sites up and store or re-process the waste. The only reason why these sites are left to fester is due to politics. It's pretty bad when the people who complain about these sites and nuclear power are the exact same people who block the solutions....
Re:Is Nuclear going to be acknowledged? (Score:4, Interesting)
The spent fuel is piling up at a rate of about 2,200 tons a year at U.S. power-plant sites.
Uranium has a density of 19.1. So 2,200 tons is about 120 cubic meters. That is a three car garage.
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Meanwhile, each of the USA's hundreds of coal plants are producing over 100 ktons of ash each year. Source [ucsusa.org].
There are uses for some of that coal ash, but much of it needs to be stored in (often unlined) ponds and landfills. I know, the nuclear stuff is much, much, much nastier, but in absolute terms, there's not really a lot of it. With its high density, that ~70 ktons of waste would fit neatly piled a few meters deep in the footprint of a football field. I know there are technical issues with storing it, bu
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2.2 kTons of waste a year!!! Scary. Meanwhile a single coal plant averages something like 200k tons [ucsusa.org] of sludge waste a year. 125ktons [ucsusa.org] of ash.
"Spent nuclear fuel is about 95% uranium" - This means it's still 95% fuel. Reprocess the sucker! That would reduce your high level waste down to about 110 tons a year.
"extremely long half-life" = it's not very radioactive. Seriously, a substance with a halflife of half an hour might be able to cook you alive with a few grams. A substance with a half-life 100k ti
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Why do people keep mentioning the (presumably left wing) enviro-weenies, when the US stopped running breeder programs and reprocessing spent fuel based on the arguement that we couldn't stop the isotopes from falling into the hands of terrorists - various parts of the shutdown were started back in both the Carter and Reagan administrations, by people who were Homeland Security type policy wonks, who went to work for Oil companies after leaving the public sector. In other words, - generally right wing, even
Well if two google engineers say so (Score:2, Funny)
I guess that's it settled then!
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Ummm... Obama, Gore?
Re:Well if two google engineers say so (Score:5, Informative)
It's not the engineers' fault; It's rare that I've seen as big of a misrepresentation of an article outside of say Russian state propaganda that I've seen with this Register article. Starting with the title.
The original article [ieee.org] absolutely, positively does not say in any way, shape or form, "Renewable energy 'simply WON'T WORK'" or "Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible."
The actual article says something very, very different. The engineers went into the project hoping that if we make the incremental improvements to make renewables as cheap as coal, then there will be a mass-switchover to renewables and CO2 levels will be held down. Except that that doesn't work. Why? Because of lead times. People who have existing coal power plants for example aren't just going to take them down because new renewables projects are cheaper than new coal plants. You need to get the price down well below that of coal to where it justifies them throwing their already-invested capital costs out the window. Without doing that, your switchover rate is limited by how fast power plants go offline, which is a very long time. So in their "as cheap as coal" scenario, they only get to a 55% emissions cut by 2050. They were hoping that'd keep the world under 350 ppm. But not only does the world still hit 350 ppm in that scenario, but it continues to rise. Hence, the hypothesis that getting renewables as cheap as coal is sufficient to prevent major climate change is suggested to be wrong.
What that DOESN'T say in any way, shape or form:
1) Renewables "WON'T WORK"
2) Renewables "don't help prevent climate change"
3) There's no scenario in which renewables can prevent climate change
What they call for are several changes.
1) They feel that focusing on preventing emissions with renewables isn't enough, that you need active CO2 scrubbing as well.
2) They call for renewables investment to adopt the "Google Model": 70% core business, 20% related new business, 10% risky disruptive new technology. This is versus conventional investment which is 90% core business (aka incremental improvements), 9,9% related, and 0,1% disruptive. They think this provides better odds for renewables or other technologies to stop climate change because incrementally improving down to the price of coal - while it'd have a big impact on CO2 emissions rates - still won't keep levels down below 350 ppm.
Does this even resemble the Register article? Nope. Not even a little bit.
Re:Well if two google engineers say so (Score:5, Informative)
TL;DR version: Register.co.uk is a serial clickbaiting site, they admit it [theregister.co.uk], and this article is an intentional, blatant misrepresentation of the research. Link to El Reg only for the same sort of reasons you would link to The National Enquirer.
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Cheaper than coal isn't enough, until it's so much cheaper people shut down existing coal plants early. As cheap or slightly cheaper just means people will stop planning new coal plants and start building new wind farms to cover new demand - that is, it only impacts the increase in desired power generation, not all the power already being generated that already contributes to CO2 rise.
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Stanford, damnit!
Just because the idiot editor let it slip by is no really good reason for everyone to pretend to idiocy themselves....
Oh, and I read the article you're quoting earlier. Wind and Solar are competitive as long as you include the massive subsidies they're currently getting. Enough so that the wind and solar industries are fighting to keep those subsidies (several of which are due to expire soon) intact....
LMFTFY (Score:2)
So, what? We should stop pursuing them altogether?
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Yes, because apparently technologies don't get developed from inefficient proof of principle prototypes through to efficient production units, but either spring forth fully developed or not at all.
Nuclear is certainly a good stop gate, but unless we come up with cheap fusion, fission has all sorts of problems; everything from finding fissile materials to getting rid of them.
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Part of the problem here is a very poorly written (or edited) quote in the summary. The relevant quote from TFA is:
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today's renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." (emphasis mine)
They aren't saying that today's renewables aren't good or important. They are saying that by themselves it won't get to where it needs to be, because carbon-emitting forms of energy will always be cheaper than the renewables of to
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This has always been my opinion. We NEED another generation of modernized nuke plants to bridge us until renewables are more mature.
Trying to mass-deploy renewables now WILL fail. We simply don't have the energy storage technology to do it.
One more generation of nuclear will bridge the gap. And ideally, during that time, in addition to renewables, work will be done on next-generation nuclear plants that can use the current generation's waste as fuel.
If I recall correctly, the IFR reactor design in the 19
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Environmentalists is why we still pump carbon (Score:2, Insightful)
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Ironically, environmentalists and their 'spooky nuclear' protests is why we are still so reliant on fossil fuels and still pumping carbon into atmosphere. Nuclear technology, especially breeder reactors that produce minimal waste, is how you eliminate emissions. Wind and solar are unsuitable for base load due to variability, and require often non-renewable backups.
while i agree in part, anti-nuclear proponents have a point: nuclear energy is dangerous if not carefully managed and handled. Fukushima and Chernobyl are deadly enough reminders.
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Fukushima and Chernobyl are deadly enough reminders.
Would it surprise you to learn that the deaths from producing renewables is orders of magnitude higher than the deaths from all the reactor meltdowns combined?
If so, do a little research and prepare to be surprised.
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especially breeder reactors that produce minimal waste,
Except that Pres. Carter issued a directive prohibiting reprocessing of nuclear waste. Given that Republicans are willing to overturn anything Obama has done as soon as they are elected to office, I can't imagine why nobody has the balls to overturn the Carter directive and get on with the work at hand.
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Carter was an engineer, he should have known better.
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It's because Republicans know a WMD proliferation risk when they see it. They just don't want to talk about it because that would make it look like they agree with the smelly hippie environmentalists.
If fission power were a viable solution to the world's energy needs, we'd already be selling centrifuges to Iran.
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Wind and solar are unsuitable for base load due to variability
Sahara disagrees.
http://www.desertec.org/ [desertec.org]
Not a perfect solution but a start. There are issues with desert storms and keeping the panels clean (currently done with water, dry cleaning isn't quite there) but if you think about how cars were in the early 1900s... there's hope, to say the least.
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Actually a lot of environmentalists are in favour of nuclear power. It's those investors and their "risk averse" nature that don't want to throw billions of dollars at something that might lose them money, especially when there are better opportunities.
The UK has to pay power companies to build new nuclear plants, and still only one player is interested. They are that bad of an investment. Nuclear is unsuitable for commercial operation, and always requires government funding to get built.
Won't work without massive changes (Score:2)
We have the problem that we expect to be able to work whenever we want. But the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest at certain times, not all the time. Solution, reduce waste, and work when the energy is available, or find more power storage technologies and install 'em. Either way, big changes in the way energy is handled.
We're coming to a point where we need less and less workers, but we're expecting to do more and more work. What?
If and only if (Score:5, Insightful)
You assume that economies can't lose any money in transition.
This is a flawed idea in that just refuses to consider political action in response. When you can't imagine a government putting the externalized costs of fossil fuels on fossil fuel consumers, this conclusion is a natural one.
That's not to say a nuclear heavy solution is bad, either. The real amazing thing here is that there are so many solutions that simply require not keeping the status quo, and we can collectively bring outselves to do none of them.
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And, of course, there's the massive subsidies to fossil fuel companies.
When you're giving money to the people who produce the fossil fuels, are you really ever going to take meaningful steps to fight climate change?
The government is proportionally spending MUCH more money on maintaining the fossil fuel industry than it is on alternatives.
Stop subsidizing the oil companies. See how things change.
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As someone who sorta agrees with you, the usual claim that fossil fuel industries are subsidized tends to incorporate my above claim that they aren't paying the external costs of their products.
I don't like to be dishonest about these things.
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This is a flawed idea in that just refuses to consider political action in response. When you can't imagine a government putting the externalized costs of fossil fuels on fossil fuel consumers, this conclusion is a natural one.
Sure, we can implement behavior changes via political action. But why should we? Also, fossil fuels also have externalized benefits such as cheaper everything due to lower transportation costs. My view is that there isn't a particularly good reason to act right now. But with a few decades of experience we should be able to tell if global warming is a serious problem or not. That should also give us a good idea how long we can push the various fossil fuel industries and may even obsolete a few of the uses fo
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Ah, the ostrich algorithm.
Do nothing, pretend like there's no problem, keep on with the status quo for now.
I'm sure that's great for the fossil fuel industry. Maybe not so good for future generations
But, hey, as long as quarterly profits and executive bonuses stay high, it's all good, right?
Unfortunately it means the rest of th
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Actually what happens if EU decided to make an CO2 import tax om all wares produced in countries who don't lower their CO2 levels to the same as EU ?
All countries dependent on EU would have to lower CO2 emissions too. Thus most countries in the world would do the same as EU to make sure other countries dont get trade advantages from them and also force their import goods to have a low impact CO2 footprint.
Thus everyone will be forced to do it. Just because EU is such a big and important importer of goods.
The problem is much bigger than energy (Score:2)
Hmmmm .... (Score:2)
So, two guys gave up after four years or study and conclude the whole thing is futile?
Sure, they're probably smart guys. But, their inability to solve a decades old problem in a few years doesn't mean anything more than they didn't come up with a magic bullet.
Maybe the problem is the arrogance of Google engineers who think they're going to solve something like this is a short period of time where nobody else has succeeded.
So, you'll excuse me if I take their sweeping proclamation with a giant grain of salt
Bogus Nuclear Summary (Score:2)
The two google engineers in question found that if we cut off carbon emission TODAY (like, say, going nuclear) it would already be too late. They were advocating climate engineering, which is to say we need NOT ONLY a cuttoff of carbon emission, but also massive carbon CAPTURE.
The submitter apparently didn't even read the article this time. How Sad.
70-20-10 rubric (Score:2)
We're toast! (Score:2)
From the IEEE article:
"As Hansen has shown, if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal, which means centuries of warming and instability. "
Their main problem was that fossil fuels are cheaper because the infrastructure is already built and they can dump CO2 into the atmosphere without any cost.
The easiest way to a
Silly Engineers (Score:2)
I'm blind !! (Score:2)
Except, with all the tax money changing hand, plus the political "land grab" taking place, I do not expect any change.
Ah, Standford... (Score:2)
No the solution is population control (Score:2)
A huge number of environmental problems could be solved if we could just get couples to have only 1 child. One side effect of this would be an aging population and reduction in labor force. But health care improvements and automation could cushion that.
Nuclear won't be acknowledged as a solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear won't be accepted as a solution until people who claim to believe that climate change has the potential to end civilization accept that the only proven technology capable of replacing base-load coal is nuclear, and that climate change is a technological problem, not a social problem.
This will take a long time.
The green activist movement is completely dominated by Naiomi Klein-style social engineers who don't care one whit about the environment, but who see it as a useful tool for defeating global capitalism. Thus their opposition to any technological solution to the problem of CO2 emissions whatsoever.
Now that climate change is increasingly widely acknowledged as a real issue--the Pentagon takes it seriously, can you get realer than that?--the green activist community will increasingly be seen as the major impediment to solving the problem. The question is: will we push these utopian socialists aside quickly enough to save the planet?
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With a network of solar satellites, night, day and weather wouldn't mean much at all.
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Neat.
Do you have any other trillion dollar solutions to billion dollar problems?
Re:It boils down to energy storage costs (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say solving our economic need for oil far outstrips billions of dollars.
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And you miss the point.
I'm all for solar. Satellites are a fucking moronic way to implement it. Like it would take the world's GDP several times over to launch enough satellites to meet the world's energy demands.
Not. A. Good. Solution.
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If we launched the Earth into orbit, we wouldn't need satellites anymore.
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It is already in the orbit, we should start constructing Dyson sphere [wikipedia.org] already.
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We're not talking about billion dollar problems, that's a severe underestimation.
Climate fuck-up and possible extinction (yes, it CAN get there, albeit not in the next few centuries, hopefully) can't be counted in dollars. It's actually reaching an infinite amount in damages.
So yes, if a solution costs trillions, then so be it. Do you think it's a lot? What's the total USA debt?
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Okay, you're the third person to misunderstand
To rephrase:
The cost of solving this problem other ways is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The cost of solving this problem by launching enough solar satellites is in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
All I'm saying is that launching spacecraft is really expensive. Prohibitively.
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No, I'm saying satellites are fucking expensive compared to just building goddamn solar panels on earth, and running some electrical lines.
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Nuclear is a kind of funny animal in that regard.
It's just as dangerous and expensive if you keep it running all night or turn it on or off. The only major difference is fuel costs, and that's just not that much of the cost of a nuclear facility.
The biggest cost of solar is improving minimum performance. Batteries, liquid metal cores to concentrated solar collectors, flywheels: all very expensive.
The biggest cost of nuclear is improving maximum performance. At some point you just need another reactor, wi
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Not entirely true, if anything, it's MORE dangerous if you're changing power levels to match load.
There's a reason France (along with nuclear-powered ships) are the only ones that do such a thing. (In both cases because they have to - those communities have gotten VERY good at doing so, but it's still NOT an optimal way to run a nuke plant and does introduce new ways for the plant to have an accident.)
Nuclear reactors have properties that cause delayed reactions to control inputs, if you don't handle these
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Yeah, and that.
I didn't want to spout my mouth and say that and be corrected by someone more knowledge of the increased safety of modern reactors. I just wanted to stick to what I knew was true for sure.
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Re:It boils down to energy storage costs (Score:4, Interesting)
In reality, nukes are terrible as backup power. Just assuming you have a plant that can ramp up and down quickly (most can't), nuclear plants are almost all capital cost. Hence they need to run at a high capacity factor to pay back the investment; it doesn't pay to idle them. But if you're wanting to use them as gap filling in low wind/solar times, then that's exactly what you're suggesting be done - sit idle until more power is needed. It's a terrible use of a nuclear plant.
Pumped hydro isn't that expensive. It's currently the cheapest option out there by a good margin (except for uprating already-existing conventional hydro). But other techs are trying to beat it. Probably the best thing you can do is simply have a powerful HVDC grid so you can move power between different geographic regions and to use different types of renewables techs. The randomness goes way down when you do this. NG is commonly used as a peaking fuel, and I see no problem continuing to do this (instead of doing energy storage) if you can keep it down to an average of under 10% or so of the total generation mix. It's low carbon to begin with and modern NG peakers can hit upwards of 60% efficiency once warmed up. So 90% renewables, 10% efficiently-used NG, you're talking near total elimination of electricity-related CO2 emissions.
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* when you don't take into account 24/7 requirements.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels*
*When you include the pollution costs of fossil fuels.
i.e. until fossil fuels have to pay for the cleanup of the CO2 they are releasing it's simply not a fair comparison for renewable sources.
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The second is a fair point: the main problem with coal and other fossil fuels is the external cost exported to society at large. (CO2 and other emissions.) If you could factor in that cost - and make the generators pay it - the cost of electricity from fossil fuels would go way up. (And, if they can afford to pay it - actually clean up their emissions to the point where they aren't harmful to the environment - then we don't actually have a problem with fossil fuels, except for the limited supply.)
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That CO2 and NO radiate heat doesn't make them 'cooling' agents in the way you're trying to imply. It means that they prevent the passage of heat energy, on the outside they radiate heat into space when they are hit by a solar flare. SOME energy does get through and the agents now keep that energy locked up longer because they restrict escaping heat.
ANYTHING hit by a solar flare is going to
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While I agree in principal. Even a lesuire society will still be doing things. They just won't be doing things to survive.
Also it has to be done slowly. As we need to wait until after generation X starts dying of old age before we can make serious changes.
Personally I like getting baby boomers rules up about equal rights and then point out that women weren't allowed to have credit cards in the use in their own name until 1974. The older a person is the more likely they gloss over base facts and assume it w
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People would spend their time engaged in their preferred hobbies. Tinkerers would tinker. Musicians would make music. Writers would write. Programmers would program. Gardeners would garden. And on and on. I see nothing wrong with such a world.
Now, whether people's needs (let alone wants) could be met when you're having such a big global GDP cut, I think THAT's a more serious concern...
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Or that that being employed makes people feel their time is being used in any way constructively.
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Who will build and maintain the infrastructure needed to accommodate said leisure society?
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Magnetbox
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No, because there's almost half a decade worth of FUD been spent on making people equate "nuclear" with "bad."
"Half a decade"? If you mean "half a century", you're about right.
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The electricity prices are low in France, not because nuclear power is cheap, but because they tax it less. It simply isn't economically feasible to build nuclear power plants that must operate on normal market mechanisms; it is too expensive. Gas and coal, and even oil prices makes it impossible.
The people of France and Europe are paying less for electricity generated with nuclear power. How else do I have to phrase that before you'll stop insisting it is impossible? It doesn't matter what kind market situations and various problems you can concoct about how challenging or impossible a task it is to accomplish. It has none the less been accomplished and won't cease to exist for all your insistences against it.