We are overloading the planet: Now What?

[TSwizzle]

Oh yes you are focused on one final solution. ... Is really the only final solution in the diatribe.

... That's Poisoning the Well. Don't do that.

People like Merle are pretty much the same.

That's a tautology -- the people who aren't pretty much the same aren't like Merle. Those you have in mind who want mass culls or forced abortions or forced sterilization aren't pretty much the same as him, and labeling them "people like Merle" misrepresents him.

They point out the human population is out of control and needs to be reined in. What are we going to do they ask. Round and round in circles they go, "I'm not advocating mass culls or forced abortions or forced sterilization or anything like but what are we going to do?"

Well, in the first place, if somebody really were implying forced abortions or forced sterilization is necessary, those things aren't a "final solution". China did the whole forced abortion thing back in the days of the One Child policy, and half the western world did the whole forced sterilization thing. (The U.S. didn't stop until 1981; the Czech Republic kept doing it until 2001.) That didn't make China or the west into Nazi Germanies. So even if these things really were what "people like Merle" advocated, your "final solution" rhetoric would still be misplaced.

for a problem where these things are the ONLY solution to reduce the human population by x billion by 2060 or whatever. It's another anti human cult.

And in the second place,

You say X.​

I think X implies Y.​

--------------------​

Therefore, you're arguing for Y.​

is a fallacy too. It isn't logical to casually mix your premises with somebody else's premises like that. Your opinion that these things are the ONLY solution to reduce the human population by x billion by 2060 or whatever entitles you to tell Merle the moderate approaches he has in mind can't work; it doesn't entitle you to tell him the extreme approaches you think could work automatically have to be what he's focused on.

In a nutshell, Merle and the rest of the anti human cultists view humans as a blight on the planet, parasites if you will. You don't really need to read too deep to see that. Merle's "path forward" that he linked to is strong on reducing the human population to some arbitrary number (2 billion I thought I saw somewhere) quickly. In fact I think that was his only "solution" or rather a non solution because, heaven forbid, Merle would NEVER suggest such a thing *wink* *wink*. The rest was just waffle.

Anyway, I appreciate your input. I'm tapping out.

 

[pood]

Another Swizzle Fizzle, I’m afraid.

 

[Merle]

Your repeaded use of often cartoonish images, always designed to invoke an emotional response, further illustrates that you are not reaching your conclusions via rational thought, but rather via allowing your emotions to override your reasoning.

I saw a picture this morning that reminded me of this post. I learned of the power of DALL-E for generating images in support of an argument from Michael Barnard. And no, the images are not there to prove the point, but to illustrate the point, often in humorous ways. Anyway, yesterday he published an interesting "generated panoramic satirical image depicting a hydrogen economy firm taking money from investors and burning it. " at Hydrogen Firm Ballard Lost $1.3 Billion Since 2000, Zero Profits. Some people here might enjoy his picture and learn from what he wrote.

 

[Merle]

how many Kgs of fuel do we need? That is more helpful

But the chart would look just as funny. The nuclear fuel bar would be invisible while the others run off the top of the page.

In what way is a bar chart that shows there is a variation in kg-of-fuel per KwH when using different fuel sources for power generation be funny? Sure, nuclear power would have a bar of virtually zero height. I would find such a chart to be informative, not funny.

But the point is, most of us are more concerned about dollars per KwH compared to kg of fuel per KwH.

And most of us on this thread would probably also care about ecological-impact per KwH, but that factor is very hard to quantify.

 

[Merle]

I have driven past the site on the way to the shore. Dontt know about today the cooling towers were there for a long time. A bond was approved for the nuclear plant and the cost of electricity dropped below where it was profitable to finish building it.

Nuclear power has been unprofitable because it can't compete on price with fossil fuels, because the government requires nuclear producers to internalize their externalities but does not require fossil fuel producers to internalize their externalities. If we had a carbon tax at a level corresponding to the harm CO2 does to people and the environment then the cost of electricity would rise to where it's profitable to build nuclear plants.

I agree that a carbon tax is a good idea. One estimate says that $50 per ton of CO2 emitted (about $0.44 per gallon of gas) would be sufficient. I suspect it would need to be far greater than that. This is certainly one way to address climate change. The free market could then decide which alternative might be better.

However, those countries that implemented this would have a disadvantage, because they would be forced to use less economical energy sources compared with cheap coal. Those countries which cared more about today's power needs rather than the future climate could have an enormous advantage. And when it comes down to it, all countries seem to be more interested in today's power compared to tomorrow's climate.

A tax that was accepted by all major countries, and was slowly phased in, would be helpful. All countries would bear the impact of being forced to use more expensive energy. But using more expensive energy is another way of saying they would all use less energy. And using less energy is another way of saying they would become less affluent.

But yes, this is one way of addressing overshoot: It limits affluence.

 

[Merle]

investors still don't see building nuclear power plants as a good investment

The only thing that the right wing shills for big oil have tarred worse than Hillary Clinton is Nuclear Energy.
They think it's a bad investment because it IS a bad investment, due to the campaign to make it a bad investment.
If people knew how many more people died - and still do - from coal mining and its proximity than from nuclear power generation, politicos would be out there ranting like Trump 2016 promising the return of coal mining, but promising nuclear reactors for everyone.

Actually, Republicans have historically been the biggest supporter of nuclear. That support has dropped somewhat since 2016, probably due to Republican preference for fracking. Still, Republicans tend to support nuclear more than Democrats. See Economics, not fear of radiation, is killing nuclear energy

 

[Merle]

Informed peak oil writers are

...an entirely fictional species.

Your beef seems to be that peak oil writers are only concerned about known resources. That is not the case for the leading writers on Peak Oil. Jean Laherrère, Charles Hall, and Roger Bentley, perhaps the leading researches in peak oil, write about how much oil we can expect to discover in the future, and write in opposition to some environmentalists who don't recognize this. See How much oil remains for the world to produce? Comparing assessment methods, and separating fact from fiction. They chart the amount they expect us to find in the future using Hubbert linearization.

 

[Merle]

If you don't breed it you are in effect throwing away more than 99% of your fuel.

...and you have committed the Sin of Onan?

 

[Merle]

My comment had to do with countries that have nuclear power. People claim that nuclear power would operate much more efficiently if certain regulations were changed. How do they know that? The claim is repeated endlessly, but nobody offers evidence.

We are comparing the places where nuclear power works vs the places it is uneconomic.

Seen any catastrophes out of France?

Economically? Yes. France has had a lot of economic trouble with their nuclear reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis_since_late_2021

 

[Elixir]

{scratches head}
Merle, it seems like you’re quite fascinated by abstractions. To a point where abstractions overrule objectivity.
Treating “things” like “overshoot” and “peak oil” as extant objects or forces standing in the way of a desired result that must be addressed as if they were Cerberus guarding the underworld, is not how I envision the solution to human impacts.
But maybe those concepts help some people come to the conclusion that something must be done, so it’s okay if neither overshoot nor peak oil is going to break into their house and steal their TV?

 

[Merle]

Yup--I find the green approach counterproductive. It's betting it all (taking that route will really clobber research as scientific budgets are highly related to the standard of living) on a path we know ends in failure. The greens always put that failure point off the end of their charts but the line is always heading down at the end.

I am still trying to understand why you think my approach will be counterproductive. I recommend we tackle this problem from all angles, including technical solutions, affluence reduction in wealthy countries, gradual non-coercive population reduction, and even a calm acceptance that we are screwed. I think the only part of that plan which disturbs you is the gradual non-coercive population reduction.

Scientific spending is a function of discretionary income. Cut the standard of living, you cut the scientific budget more. Trying to stretch things out as long as possible leaves no room for spending money to discover new things.

If the economy would collapse due to lack of spending on innovation if population was significantly below 8 billion, how is it that the economy and innovation did so well in the 20th century?

No. A lack of scientific spending will not damage the economy. Rather, a lack of scientific spending will keep us from finding answers that might save us.

So, if there is a population that has 2x births per year and makes a major discovery every y years, why is that better than a population that has x births per year and makes a major discovery every 2y years? Either way, the number of births before the next major discovery is 2xy.

I am still trying to figure out how you know the second condition ends in failure.

 

[Merle]

{scratches head}
Merle, it seems like you’re quite fascinated by abstractions. To a point where abstractions overrule objectivity.
Treating “things” like “overshoot” and “peak oil” as extant objects or forces standing in the way of a desired result that must be addressed as if they were Cerberus guarding the underworld, is not how I envision the solution to human impacts.
But maybe those concepts help some people come to the conclusion that something must be done, so it’s okay if neither overshoot nor peak oil is going to break into their house and steal their TV?

I would think that an abstraction is itself an abstraction.

Sometimes we need to use abstractions to describe things like overshoot, peak oil, desired-results, human-impacts, ecological-footprint, collapse, or sustainability.

 

[bilby]

how many Kgs of fuel do we need? That is more helpful

But the chart would look just as funny. The nuclear fuel bar would be invisible while the others run off the top of the page.

In what way is a bar chart that shows there is a variation in kg-of-fuel per KwH when using different fuel sources for power generation be funny? Sure, nuclear power would have a bar of virtually zero height. I would find such a chart to be informative, not funny.

But the point is, most of us are more concerned about dollars per KwH compared to kg of fuel per KwH.

And most of us on this thread would probably also care about ecological-impact per KwH, but that factor is very hard to quantify.

The dollar value of the fuel used per kWh in a nuclear power plant is also small by comparison with the dollar value of fuel used in other power generation technologies.

Fuel is a tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear power. The vast majority of the cost of a nuclear power plant is capital costs; The majority of the operational cost is regulatory compliance costs. That you don't know (and understand the implications of) this, just highlights your incompetence to discuss the subject at all.

Uranium costs about two thousand times as much as coal, by mass. But it generates (in current plants, without any breeding or reprocessing) about 20,000 times as much electricity.

Even the hugely ineffficient US nuclear power plants use a tenth of the dollar value of fuel, per unit of electrical energy output, that is used by a high efficiency modern coal power plant.

For every dollar you spend on fuel, you get ten times the electricity from a nuclear plant that you can get from a coal plant.

The Balance of Plant (turbines, gensets, switchgear, etc.) is identical between coal and nuclear plants; The only differences are in the steam generation area.

Both kinds of plant have a reactor (in a coal plant, it's usually called a "furnace", but potato, tomato) made of steel and concrete.

The coal plant has more moving parts, and is more labour intensive to operate (because you fuel it up and remove waste products constantly, while in a nuke plant it's a once-a-year task).

If you were permitted to build and run a nuclear plant to an identical quality standard as is routine for coal power plants (or equally, if coal
plants were required to meet the routine quality standard of the nuclear industry), you should expect to get electricity for around a tenth of the price from the nuke than from the coal plant.

That you don't see that difference in the real world is almost entirely a consequence of the difference in regulatory environments between the two technologies.






And for fucks sake, it's kWh, NOT KwH. How do you manage to get every single letter incorrectly capitalised? Just doing it randomly you would have had a seven out of eight chance of getting at least one right.

A Kelvin week Henry would be a measure of temperature time inductance, which is a seriously weird thing to want to measure or talk about.

A kilo Watt hour is a unit of energy, equal to a thousand Watt hours (kilo = 1,000).
A Watt is a unit of power, equal to a Joule per second, or 3,600 Joules per hour.
An hour per hour is 1 (anything divided by itself is 1).
So 1kWh is equal to 3,600,000J, or 3,600kJ (3,600kWs), or 3.6MJ.

 

[Merle]

But the point is, most of us are more concerned about dollars per KwH compared to kg of fuel per KwH.

And most of us on this thread would probably also care about ecological-impact per KwH, but that factor is very hard to quantify.

The dollar value of the fuel used per kWh in a nuclear power plant is also small by comparison with the dollar value of fuel used in other power generation technologies.

Fuel is a tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear power. The vast majority of the cost of a nuclear power plant is capital costs; The majority of the operational cost is regulatory compliance costs. That you don't know (and understand the implications of) this, just highlights your incompetence to discuss the subject at all.

Uranium costs about two thousand times as much as coal, by mass. But it generates (in current plants, without any breeding or reprocessing) about 20,000 times as much electricity.

Even the hugely ineffficient US nuclear power plants use a tenth of the dollar value of fuel, per unit of electrical energy output, that is used by a high efficiency modern coal power plant.

For every dollar you spend on fuel, you get ten times the electricity from a nuclear plant that you can get from a coal plant.

The Balance of Plant (turbines, gensets, switchgear, etc.) is identical between coal and nuclear plants; The only differences are in the steam generation area.

Both kinds of plant have a reactor (in a coal plant, it's usually called a "furnace", but potato, tomato) made of steel and concrete.

The coal plant has more moving parts, and is more labour intensive to operate (because you fuel it up and remove waste products constantly, while in a nuke plant it's a once-a-year task).

Yes. I agree. We have discussed this many times before. Nuclear fuel is cheap, but when you add in everything including the capital costs and cleanup costs, it is expensive.

You were the one that posted the chart comparing different fuels. I commented on your chart. No, my reply did not mention everything there is to say about nuclear power. I tried to limit my comments to what I thought was particularly relevant to the post I was responded to.

If you were permitted to build and run a nuclear plant to an identical quality standard as is routine for coal power plants (or equally, if coal
plants were required to meet the routine quality standard of the nuclear industry), you should expect to get electricity for around a tenth of the price from the nuke than from the coal plant.

That you don't see that difference in the real world is almost entirely a consequence of the difference in regulatory environments between the two technologies.

I haven't counted, but I think you have made similar claims more than a dozen times on this thread. I repeatedly ask you for evidence for this claim. You don't respond. Are you simply going to repeat this claim endlessly without ever trying to document it?

 

[steve_bank]

The term is ' total cost of ownership'.

If you factor in total long term environmental costs including medical costs from pollution related illness nuclear may not be all that more expensive or even cheaper.

Our problem is politically politicians think only as far as the next election.

One thing China has going for it is that it thinks out centuries. They have gotten very good at extinguishing goals and plans, and executing to plans. They quickly went from a third world economy to a modern industrial power.

I listened to a BBC report on population. Industrialized European counties are headed towards having a majority over 65. In Germany Immigrationis not offsetting the low birth rate, there will not be enough workers to support the aging population. The same with Japan ad China. Culturally neither is open to large scale immigration.

 

[DBT]

The trouble with relying on getting more workers in order to cope with an aging population is that the workers also age.... which we cope with by getting more workers?

It's a Ponzi scheme.

 

[steve_bank]

The trouble with relying on getting more workers in order to cope with an aging population is that the workers also age.... which we cope with by getting more workers?

It's a Ponzi scheme.

Good analogy. To keep it gong every generation has to buy into it.

 

[bilby]

Yes. I agree. We have discussed this many times before. Nuclear fuel is cheap, but when you add in everything including the capital costs and cleanup costs, it is expensive.

Building a nuclear plant isn't technically difficult or expensive. Capital costs are ARTIFICIALLY high due to massive overregulation.

Cleanup costs aren't included in the planning at all for coal plants, so no surprise they are lower for coal - zero is lower than any positive number.

I agree, you are absolutely correct, we should build a lot of nuclear plants starting immediately, because the apparent increases in cost are arbitrary and stupid so we should disregard them, and they are more than offset by the environmental benefits of nuclear power.

I an so glad you agree wholeheartedly and unreservedly with me on this issue.

 

[bilby]

But the point is, most of us are more concerned about dollars per KwH compared to kg of fuel per KwH.

And most of us on this thread would probably also care about ecological-impact per KwH, but that factor is very hard to quantify.

The dollar value of the fuel used per kWh in a nuclear power plant is also small by comparison with the dollar value of fuel used in other power generation technologies.

Fuel is a tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear power. The vast majority of the cost of a nuclear power plant is capital costs; The majority of the operational cost is regulatory compliance costs. That you don't know (and understand the implications of) this, just highlights your incompetence to discuss the subject at all.

Uranium costs about two thousand times as much as coal, by mass. But it generates (in current plants, without any breeding or reprocessing) about 20,000 times as much electricity.

Even the hugely ineffficient US nuclear power plants use a tenth of the dollar value of fuel, per unit of electrical energy output, that is used by a high efficiency modern coal power plant.

For every dollar you spend on fuel, you get ten times the electricity from a nuclear plant that you can get from a coal plant.

The Balance of Plant (turbines, gensets, switchgear, etc.) is identical between coal and nuclear plants; The only differences are in the steam generation area.

Both kinds of plant have a reactor (in a coal plant, it's usually called a "furnace", but potato, tomato) made of steel and concrete.

The coal plant has more moving parts, and is more labour intensive to operate (because you fuel it up and remove waste products constantly, while in a nuke plant it's a once-a-year task).

Yes. I agree. We have discussed this many times before. Nuclear fuel is cheap, but when you add in everything including the capital costs and cleanup costs, it is expensive.

You were the one that posted the chart comparing different fuels. I commented on your chart. No, my reply did not mention everything there is to say about nuclear power. I tried to limit my comments to what I thought was particularly relevant to the post I was responded to.

If you were permitted to build and run a nuclear plant to an identical quality standard as is routine for coal power plants (or equally, if coal
plants were required to meet the routine quality standard of the nuclear industry), you should expect to get electricity for around a tenth of the price from the nuke than from the coal plant.

That you don't see that difference in the real world is almost entirely a consequence of the difference in regulatory environments between the two technologies.

I haven't counted, but I think you have made similar claims more than a dozen times on this thread. I repeatedly ask you for evidence for this claim. You don't respond. Are you simply going to repeat this claim endlessly without ever trying to document it?

Here, this is the basis of my claim; Do you dispute its use, or its validity, or both? What alternative do you recommend?

 

[Merle]

Only if by "might be even more expensive", you mean "would certainly be VASTLY more expensive.

I suppose, instead of giving wind and solar the benefit of the doubt, I could have said what I really thought.

Anyway, this thread is quite long, and this topic is far too big to throw unto this thread. See this new thread: https://iidb.org/threads/the-best-future-sustainable-energy-source.28057/ .