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Keystone Pipeline

Well it's a shame you wasted so much effort on all those words that just repeat what you have already said, because I for one was hoping to see an answer to the new and interesting question you were posed by Noble Savage.

Perhaps I can re-phrase it a little, and you can try to answer it:

We have heard your opinions about what is wrong with how things are; so IMAGINE you were in charge. IF you had the powers to simply tell everyone exactly what to do, how would you excercise those powers?

He did answer it.

Well, I don't think anyone here wanted the trillion dollar wars. We do have many big alternative energy projects going on - billion dollar projects, I don't know about 100 billion. Steady effort has been made on the "smart grid". Could the government speed up alternative energy? Maybe. They might make a big huge corrupt mess of it. Anyhow, for all the progress we are making we still need oil.

http://energy.gov/oe/services/technology-development/smart-grid
Legislative Mandates
In December 2007, Congress passed, and the President approved, Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA). EISA provided the legislative support for DOE’s smart grid activities and reinforced its role in leading and coordinating national grid modernization efforts. Key provisions of Title XIII include:

Section 1303 establishes at DOE the Smart Grid Advisory Committee and Federal Smart Grid Task Force.
Section 1304 authorizes DOE to develop a “Smart Grid Regional Demonstration Initiative.”
Section 1305 directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with DOE and others, to develop a Smart Grid Interoperability Framework.
Section 1306 authorizes DOE to develop a “Federal Matching Fund for Smart Grid Investment Costs"
 
Are we counting all the deaths from the nukes here? You want to separate deaths of indians who come down with lung cancer on their reservations because they worked in Uranium mines or lived too near tailings piles?
I addition to bilby's point that uranium mined to make nuclear weapons should not be included here there are two more caveats here.
- what you are saying references conditions that prevailed 50 years ago or so. It is hardly relevant to death rates today. Otherwise you'd have to compare it to coal mine deaths and deaths due to air pollution due to burning from the same time period as well even for uranium used for power plants vs. weapons.
- you have to consider natural pollution as well. Radon from uranium deposits seeps out from rock into the atmosphere and can accumulate in dwellings. The local Indian mine workers lived above uranium-rich rocks anyway which means they and their families had higher-than-average radon exposure anyway, even without any mines. So at least some of their exposure and cancer/death rates would have happened anyway and that rate has to be subtracted from the total.
 
So Tom Steyer joins George Soros and the Kennedy family as people that we must hate because they are rich, even though it is supposedly wrong to hate *anyone* for being rich.
It's not about having to hate anyone for being rich. But if you are gonna hate on the Koch brothers for influencing politics (and many on the left love to hate them!) then why do people like Steyer get a free pass? This hypocrisy is even more blatant as both are trying to influence politics on the issue of Keystone XL (among others).
 
There is something telling in Loren's answer to power distribution. It starts out with "buy a gasoline car." Just yesterday, I drove my gas sipping motorcycle past a gas station advertising gas @ $4.59 per gallon. If you do buy one, make sure that is has high mileage per gallon and doesn't cost too much.

Are you sure that was yesterday?
 
You're forgetting the losses from putting it through all the steps. The big generators are more efficient than the car's engine but you have three conversion steps and transmission losses.
You also have conversion and transmission losses due to refining and transporting gasoline as well.
 
Get a gasoline car, connect those solar cells to the grid and turn down a coal plant. This emits less CO2.
I'd like to see your calculations for that. You seem to assign the dirtiest segment of grid power to electric cars which to me seems arbitrary (you do not by the same logic argue for gasoline powered appliances). I.e. if at some point in the future only 10% of US electricity is generated from coal and at the same time <= 10% of electricity is used to power electric cars you'd conclude that electric cars are 100% powered by coal and thus dirty.
You are also ignoring other advantages of electric cars such as greatly improved air quality in cities.
 
There is something telling in Loren's answer to power distribution. It starts out with "buy a gasoline car." Just yesterday, I drove my gas sipping motorcycle past a gas station advertising gas @ $4.59 per gallon. If you do buy one, make sure that is has high mileage per gallon and doesn't cost too much.

Are you sure that was yesterday?

Yup! at Burbank and 170 freeway Exxon...and a few blocks further at Shell and Chevron. California always seems to have the highest gas prices. The premium gas was $4.79. I wouldn't shit you on this, Derec.
 
Are you sure that was yesterday?

Yup! at Burbank and 170 freeway Exxon...and a few blocks further at Shell and Chevron. California always seems to have the highest gas prices. The premium gas was $4.79. I wouldn't shit you on this, Derec.

The refineries in So CA are either slowing down due to strike or disabled by bad maintenance or being changed over to summer production processes. Seems there's some of this activity in the east as well. I wonder why Texas and Georgia apparently, where there is refining capacity and production capacity, are not feeling the same pressures?
 
arkirk, doesn't that just mean demand is high and since demand is high there is greater need for fuel?
I don't know how it works but there doesn't seem to be a shortage of fuel so that means supply is adequate for the high demand.
high demand means production needs to be increased yet the problem isn't supply given the fact there is no shortage of fuel?
it is a weird system.
 
Yes.

The number of Uranium miner fatalities included is very small; Partly because Uranium has a very high energy density - you don't need to mine much Uranium to generate a given amount of electricity, but you do need to mine a LOT of coal to get the same amount of power; And this would result in much lower fatalities per TWh even if fatalities per tonne were similar (they are not). This is because these days, Uranium is very safe to mine - particularly when compared to coal. The fatalities in the study to which you linked all occurred before power generation was a significant market for Uranium - the stuff those guys mined went to making bombs.

The is explained here - and that page is linked from the page where the .04 figure is sourced from.

Modern Uranium mines generally have good management practices to minimise the risk from Radon; Uranium mines tend to be less prone to collapse than coal mines due to the geology of the target minerals; Uranium mines are not subject to firedamp (methane) explosions; They are typically less dusty than coal mines; and there are fewer 'legacy' mines using outdated equipment or methods than is the case for coal. The Radon threat is one of the largest issues in Uranium mine safety; In coal mines, Radon is also a threat, but rarely needs to be considered, as the measures needed to clear methane from the mine are usually effective in getting rid of Radon as well.

In regards to tallying deaths per terawatt hour, including deaths for mining uranium for nuclear weapons would be like adding in the deaths from falls from roofs, even if they were not installing or maintaining solar panels, against solar power.


Are we counting all the deaths from the nukes here?
I am not entirely sure what part of 'Yes' you are struggling with, but if you wnat the details, they are at the links provided.
You want to separate deaths of indians who come down with lung cancer on their reservations because they worked in Uranium mines or lived too near tailings piles?
No, I 'want' to separate those deaths that were due to making nuclear bombs from the ones that were due to generating power; a reasonable thing to do if we are discussing power generation. The alternative would be to include all the WWII casualties as due to oil fired power plants, because oil was used to lubricate the weapons used to kill them. Oddly enough, deaths from unrelated activities are not included when tallying the deaths caused by an activity. Not all Uranium is used for power plants; the Uranium used for other things no more counts towards power plant deaths than people drowning in backyard swiming pools counts towards hydroelectric plant deaths - they are unrelated.
I had an acquaintance who had been involved in uranium mining engineering his job involved the ventillation systems you are talking about here.
That's lovely. I expect you are an expert then. I have a friend who is a surgeon, so if you need your appendix out, I can do it for you. :rolleyesa:
Before you can trust any of these studies, you have to have an accounting of just what they count and how thorough they were and over what time period they made their observations.
Indeed. Which is why there are all those links to exactly that information at the sources I already provided. :rolleyesa:
A terrawatt hour is 1000 gigawatt hours.
No shit, Sherlock. It is also a million megawatt hours, a billion kilowatt hours, and a trillion watt hours. You can even express it as 3.41214163 trillion BTUs.
Such a calculation would involve one hell of a lot of monitoring and I am very skeptical of the figures you post.
What rot. Are you of the opinion that you can't say how many miles an hour someone is driving at unless they maintain a steady speed for an hour?
It would depend on researchers being utterly devoted to their research and being everywhere at the same time. For instance, keeping track of the fishes in the sea.:rolleyesa:
What the flying fuck do the fishes in the sea have to do with anything? Have I stumbled into a surrealist board?

You seem to want to characterize me more than what I am saying. For instance, in this comparison of deaths per unit of power generated. Many large solar arrays are at ground level and people are not falling off roofs. I suspect that grid power has a lot of deaths that were not included in the charts because there is no way to break out what power was coal, oil, nat. gas, wind, etc. as a function of people dying on the high line maintenance crews. It is true with any new technology of the scope and size of utility power, there will be deaths in contruction and these are remedied in time with safety measures that are generated by statistical data. As with all things, safety costs money. The better financed an operation is, the greater the likelihood of its safety being improved. The petrochemical co-opting of government subsidies has held the solar and wing energy sectors in their infancy for far too long. I am not apologetic for any differences in alleged safety.

The coal industry is reportedly responsible for at least 50,000 deaths per year due to lung diseases. It is true that figures don't lie but the petrochemical industry employs liars that can figure.

Automobiles took about 70 years to get seat belts, and at least 20 more years to get air bags.
 
arkirk, doesn't that just mean demand is high and since demand is high there is greater need for fuel?
I don't know how it works but there doesn't seem to be a shortage of fuel so that means supply is adequate for the high demand.
high demand means production needs to be increased yet the problem isn't supply given the fact there is no shortage of fuel?
it is a weird system.

Oh that Chevron could only bring Crude from the frack and put it directly into the tank.
 
Get a gasoline car, connect those solar cells to the grid and turn down a coal plant. This emits less CO2.
I'd like to see your calculations for that. You seem to assign the dirtiest segment of grid power to electric cars which to me seems arbitrary (you do not by the same logic argue for gasoline powered appliances). I.e. if at some point in the future only 10% of US electricity is generated from coal and at the same time <= 10% of electricity is used to power electric cars you'd conclude that electric cars are 100% powered by coal and thus dirty.
You are also ignoring other advantages of electric cars such as greatly improved air quality in cities.

If the objective is to improve the air then we should be removing the dirtiest sources first. Thus any options must be considered against those dirtiest sources unless something about the situation means that it won't happen that way. (Say, for example, on an island that's not connected to the grid. IIRC Hawaii doesn't have coal plants--thus you wouldn't compare it to coal in Hawaii.)
 
Yes.

The number of Uranium miner fatalities included is very small; Partly because Uranium has a very high energy density - you don't need to mine much Uranium to generate a given amount of electricity, but you do need to mine a LOT of coal to get the same amount of power; And this would result in much lower fatalities per TWh even if fatalities per tonne were similar (they are not). This is because these days, Uranium is very safe to mine - particularly when compared to coal. The fatalities in the study to which you linked all occurred before power generation was a significant market for Uranium - the stuff those guys mined went to making bombs.

The is explained here - and that page is linked from the page where the .04 figure is sourced from.

Modern Uranium mines generally have good management practices to minimise the risk from Radon; Uranium mines tend to be less prone to collapse than coal mines due to the geology of the target minerals; Uranium mines are not subject to firedamp (methane) explosions; They are typically less dusty than coal mines; and there are fewer 'legacy' mines using outdated equipment or methods than is the case for coal. The Radon threat is one of the largest issues in Uranium mine safety; In coal mines, Radon is also a threat, but rarely needs to be considered, as the measures needed to clear methane from the mine are usually effective in getting rid of Radon as well.

In regards to tallying deaths per terawatt hour, including deaths for mining uranium for nuclear weapons would be like adding in the deaths from falls from roofs, even if they were not installing or maintaining solar panels, against solar power.

Are we counting all the deaths from the nukes here?
I am not entirely sure what part of 'Yes' you are struggling with, but if you wnat the details, they are at the links provided.
You want to separate deaths of indians who come down with lung cancer on their reservations because they worked in Uranium mines or lived too near tailings piles?
No, I 'want' to separate those deaths that were due to making nuclear bombs from the ones that were due to generating power; a reasonable thing to do if we are discussing power generation. The alternative would be to include all the WWII casualties as due to oil fired power plants, because oil was used to lubricate the weapons used to kill them. Oddly enough, deaths from unrelated activities are not included when tallying the deaths caused by an activity. Not all Uranium is used for power plants; the Uranium used for other things no more counts towards power plant deaths than people drowning in backyard swiming pools counts towards hydroelectric plant deaths - they are unrelated.
I had an acquaintance who had been involved in uranium mining engineering his job involved the ventillation systems you are talking about here.
That's lovely. I expect you are an expert then. I have a friend who is a surgeon, so if you need your appendix out, I can do it for you. :rolleyesa:
Before you can trust any of these studies, you have to have an accounting of just what they count and how thorough they were and over what time period they made their observations.
Indeed. Which is why there are all those links to exactly that information at the sources I already provided. :rolleyesa:
A terrawatt hour is 1000 gigawatt hours.
No shit, Sherlock. It is also a million megawatt hours, a billion kilowatt hours, and a trillion watt hours. You can even express it as 3.41214163 trillion BTUs.
Such a calculation would involve one hell of a lot of monitoring and I am very skeptical of the figures you post.
What rot. Are you of the opinion that you can't say how many miles an hour someone is driving at unless they maintain a steady speed for an hour?
It would depend on researchers being utterly devoted to their research and being everywhere at the same time. For instance, keeping track of the fishes in the sea.:rolleyesa:
What the flying fuck do the fishes in the sea have to do with anything? Have I stumbled into a surrealist board?

You seem to want to characterize me more than what I am saying. For instance, in this comparison of deaths per unit of power generated. Many large solar arrays are at ground level and people are not falling off roofs. I suspect that grid power has a lot of deaths that were not included in the charts because there is no way to break out what power was coal, oil, nat. gas, wind, etc. as a function of people dying on the high line maintenance crews. It is true with any new technology of the scope and size of utility power, there will be deaths in contruction and these are remedied in time with safety measures that are generated by statistical data. As with all things, safety costs money. The better financed an operation is, the greater the likelihood of its safety being improved. The petrochemical co-opting of government subsidies has held the solar and wing energy sectors in their infancy for far too long. I am not apologetic for any differences in alleged safety.

The coal industry is reportedly responsible for at least 50,000 deaths per year due to lung diseases. It is true that figures don't lie but the petrochemical industry employs liars that can figure.

Automobiles took about 70 years to get seat belts, and at least 20 more years to get air bags.

Why are you two arguing?
 
You seem to want to characterize me more than what I am saying. For instance, in this comparison of deaths per unit of power generated. Many large solar arrays are at ground level and people are not falling off roofs. I suspect that grid power has a lot of deaths that were not included in the charts because there is no way to break out what power was coal, oil, nat. gas, wind, etc. as a function of people dying on the high line maintenance crews. It is true with any new technology of the scope and size of utility power, there will be deaths in contruction and these are remedied in time with safety measures that are generated by statistical data. As with all things, safety costs money. The better financed an operation is, the greater the likelihood of its safety being improved. The petrochemical co-opting of government subsidies has held the solar and wing energy sectors in their infancy for far too long. I am not apologetic for any differences in alleged safety.

It's possible that the situation is changing and the death rate per TwH is coming down. The total rate is low enough that it will take a while for trends to become apparent.

You are right that grid deaths wouldn't be counted--they're not associated with power production, why count them as power production deaths?
 
I don't think we will ever move entirely away from burning hydrocarbons for vehicle fuel - it is simply superior in terms of energy density, refill/recharge time, and safety compared with batteries or alternative chemical fuels such as Hydrogen.

What will change, if we can move to sustainability, will be the source of that hydrocarbon.

Fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. But hydrocarbon fuels (and lubricants, plastics, etc.) can be made from CO2 - with an input of energy.

The CO2 in the air can be collected by plants; these can be burned to produce energy plus concentrated CO2, and the concentrated CO2 can be turned into hydrocarbons using either more solar power, or nuclear, or wind, or (most likely) a combination of all of these.

By using the solar, nuclear and wind power to make liquid hydrocarbon fuels, you eliminate the issue of storage - make gasoline when the sun shines, the grid demand is low, and/or the wind is blowing, and stockpile it to use at your leisure.

All of the technology to do this exists today. It just needs to become cheaper (which it slowly is) and/or for mineral oils to become more expensive (which they already would be if they were taxed to cover the externalities of climate change).
 
I don't think we will ever move entirely away from burning hydrocarbons for vehicle fuel - it is simply superior in terms of energy density, refill/recharge time, and safety compared with batteries or alternative chemical fuels such as Hydrogen.

What will change, if we can move to sustainability, will be the source of that hydrocarbon.

Fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. But hydrocarbon fuels (and lubricants, plastics, etc.) can be made from CO2 - with an input of energy.

The CO2 in the air can be collected by plants; these can be burned to produce energy plus concentrated CO2, and the concentrated CO2 can be turned into hydrocarbons using either more solar power, or nuclear, or wind, or (most likely) a combination of all of these.

By using the solar, nuclear and wind power to make liquid hydrocarbon fuels, you eliminate the issue of storage - make gasoline when the sun shines, the grid demand is low, and/or the wind is blowing, and stockpile it to use at your leisure.

All of the technology to do this exists today. It just needs to become cheaper (which it slowly is) and/or for mineral oils to become more expensive (which they already would be if they were taxed to cover the externalities of climate change).

The Koch Bros want you to understand that the previous post does not exist.
 
arkirk, doesn't that just mean demand is high and since demand is high there is greater need for fuel?
I don't know how it works but there doesn't seem to be a shortage of fuel so that means supply is adequate for the high demand.
high demand means production needs to be increased yet the problem isn't supply given the fact there is no shortage of fuel?
it is a weird system.

Oh that Chevron could only bring Crude from the frack and put it directly into the tank.
Your words are so wordlike.
 
You seem to want to characterize me more than what I am saying. For instance, in this comparison of deaths per unit of power generated. Many large solar arrays are at ground level and people are not falling off roofs. I suspect that grid power has a lot of deaths that were not included in the charts because there is no way to break out what power was coal, oil, nat. gas, wind, etc. as a function of people dying on the high line maintenance crews. It is true with any new technology of the scope and size of utility power, there will be deaths in contruction and these are remedied in time with safety measures that are generated by statistical data. As with all things, safety costs money. The better financed an operation is, the greater the likelihood of its safety being improved. The petrochemical co-opting of government subsidies has held the solar and wing energy sectors in their infancy for far too long. I am not apologetic for any differences in alleged safety.

It's possible that the situation is changing and the death rate per TwH is coming down. The total rate is low enough that it will take a while for trends to become apparent.

You are right that grid deaths wouldn't be counted--they're not associated with power production, why count them as power production deaths?

Because power production without delivery is not the complete story. You only produce power to deliver it to some task and power delivery is the important factor. That INCLUDES BOTH PRODUCTION AND DELIVERY. I was just trying to show that the chart unduly skews the actual safety of any of these methods of power production. A lot of any power usage can be at the source and require no transmission lines whatever. This forgoes the transmission losses and the utility mark-up on costs.
 
It's possible that the situation is changing and the death rate per TwH is coming down. The total rate is low enough that it will take a while for trends to become apparent.

You are right that grid deaths wouldn't be counted--they're not associated with power production, why count them as power production deaths?

Because power production without delivery is not the complete story. You only produce power to deliver it to some task and power delivery is the important factor. That INCLUDES BOTH PRODUCTION AND DELIVERY. I was just trying to show that the chart unduly skews the actual safety of any of these methods of power production. A lot of any power usage can be at the source and require no transmission lines whatever. This forgoes the transmission losses and the utility mark-up on costs.

Transmission is not very dangerous on a 'per unit of energy' basis, and is slightly safer for more concentrated sources (due to the need for fewer power lines in total); the numbers of deaths due to grid transmission per TWh is tiny. Given also that almost no current generation capacity is off-grid (the vast majority of domestic rooftop solar installations include a connection to the grid), the change in the numbers would be too small to measure.

That might change in the future; but then again, it might not. And it might go either way - a nuclear plant set up solely to generate liquid hydrocarbon fuels as I described earlier would not need to be connected to the grid, while grid-connected solar rooftop systems might well become more common.

You are right that these 'grid deaths' should be measured, and Loren is wrong to exclude them; But they will have essentially zero impact on the overall figures (by the way you are wrong about it being difficult to 'break out' these figures; you can get a very good estimate of the contribution of each source to 'grid deaths' by simply measuring the proportion of each source that feeds in to the grid).
 
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