Attention greens, renewables won't cut it

[Loren Pechtel]

...
We know what to do with the waste (reprocess and bury), ... Seriously, we have much better technology today. We should use it! ...

Just to be clear, if there was no possibility of actually following through with safely storing the waste would you still be in favor of maximum use of nuclear energy knowing that all the waste would be stored on site? Because that's the elephant in the room.

The waste isn't a problem.

Reprocess it--most of it is fuel that belongs in a reactor, not in the trash.

After that a year's production from a reactor fits under your desk and decays to ambient in 10,000 years. My preferred approach would be to toss it in an old salt mine but all of the scientific proposals (not nonsense like shooting it into the sun) are fine.

 

[bilby]

Just to be clear, if there was no possibility of actually following through with safely storing the waste would you still be in favor of maximum use of nuclear energy knowing that all the waste would be stored on site? Because that's the elephant in the room.

The waste isn't a problem.

Reprocess it--most of it is fuel that belongs in a reactor, not in the trash.

After that a year's production from a reactor fits under your desk and decays to ambient in 10,000 years. My preferred approach would be to toss it in an old salt mine but all of the scientific proposals (not nonsense like shooting it into the sun) are fine.

If it's energetic enough to be dangerous, then it's energetic enough to be useful. Put it in a nice shielded box, attach a heat-sink, and bury it under the floor of buildings in cold climates. Presto - zero heating bills for the next five millennia.

 

[lpetrich]

Even the idea that we can replace all or most fossil fuels in the near future is a pipe dream. Here are the predicted energy sources in the future:

(gratuitously pessimistic graph snipped)

We have no further details about the alleged source of the data that was graphed, and I'm sure that certain of the American Enterprise Institute's financiers would be proud of it.

If leftists were actually serious about climate change they'd be gung ho for nuclear power as a way to reduce climate change

Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo.

They should also be much more in support of fracking for natural gas as a replacement for coal, as a temporary, but not permanent, measure to reduce greenhouse gases.

Preferably on the property of fracking-lovers.

Their refusal to adopt nuclear to any great degree and their anti-fracking attitude shows their concern for global warming to be spurious.

Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Who is "they"? You posted it here, so you must be talking about us locals yokels.

Woo hoo!!! Nuclear power! Yeah! Gung Ho!!!

I mean, we still don't know what to do with the waste, and it takes a long time to build reactors, and the reactors don't last more than 40 years, and every fucking plant seems to have issues (I grew up in a town with a nuclear plant, so it was always in the news), but yeah. Gung ho!!! Nuclear can only handle so much load in the US. We are a rather large nation.

You owe me a new irony meter!

You don't want nuke, you agree that renewables can't do it. Thus you are voting for global warming.

I said nuclear doesn't solve the whole energy issue either and it isn't the silver bullet claimed it is.

Also natural gas pollutes much less than coal ever did.

 

[lpetrich]

 Electric energy consumption -- electricity consumption in terawatts in 2008:

• World: 2.313
• US: 0.502
• EU: 0.415

 Wind power -- has some numbers from the GWEC | Representing the global wind energy industry. Using its numbers for each year, I find an average growth rate of 26% per year overall, and 17.5% (rough estimate) for recent years. Extrapolating from the 2015 figure of 433 gigawatts, I get the world generating capacity in 2022 and 2025, and twice it in 2025 and 2030.

 Growth of photovoltaics -- that's something that caught me totally by surprise. I expected solar thermal generation to be the way to go. Doing analogous calculations, I extrapolate from the 2015 figure of 229 gigawatts with a growth rate per year of 41% (overall) and 30% (recent). I get the world generating capacity in 2022 and 2024, and twice it in 2024 and 2026.

For the US in 2016, U.S. Wind Power Achieves Landmark Installed Capacity of 82 Gigawatts | Department of Energy, beating installed hydroelectric capacity. From WINDExchange: U.S. Installed Wind Capacity, I estimate growth rates per year of 25% (overall) and 10% (recent), giving the US electricity capacity by 2024 and 2035, and twice it by 2027 and 2042.

Map: Projected Growth of the Wind Industry From Now Until 2050 | Department of Energy has 2013 as its latest real figure, and projections by 2020 of 113 gigawatts, 2040 of 224 GW, and 2050 of 404 GW.

Wind and Solar Are Our Cheapest Electricity Generation Sources. Now What Do We Do? | Greentech Media Comparable to combined-cycle natural gas and cheaper than coal and nuclear.

Wind Outpaces Coal in Europe, Beats Hydro in North America | Greentech Media

It’s important to note, however, that wind power’s nameplate capacity isn’t the best way to measure its share in keeping the grid humming. Measured in terms of capacity factor -- the ratio of a generator’s annual power production to nameplate capacity – wind power’s best performance is in the 34 percent range, while hydroelectric power stands at about 40 percent.

IEA Boosts Renewables Growth Forecast as Global Installed Capacity Surpasses Coal | Greentech Media

While renewable energy installed capacity is increasing rapidly around the globe, renewables growth as a portion of overall electricity generation will be more modest, increasing from 23 percent in 2015 to nearly 28 percent in 2021.

A linear extrapolation gives 2030: 36%, 2040: 44%, 2050: 52%, but linear extrapolation is likely too pessimistic, giving the dramatic growth rates of wind and solar.

 

[Bronzeage]

I don't know any "green" that thinks switching entirely over to renewable sources of energy will solve the issues around climate change.

But they oppose anything but renewables, that's saying they think renewables can do it all.

If renewables can't do it all, we're in a pretty bad spot, eventually.

All sources of energy are renewable. It's just a question of rate, and after that, the difference in the potential and the realized.

Coal, gas, and oil are being renewed as we speak, but it may take a while. The formations which eventually became the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota were first deposited about 400 million years ago, give or take a million. Don't wait up.

I remember reading an interesting article published by the Royal Society in the late 1700's. The Society had done an intense analysis of London and it's rapid population growth, and came up with dire predictions. According to the Society, the present rates of population growth and the economic efforts to feed and maintain that population, meant that in less than a century, London would be buried in seven feet of horse manure. The capacity to remove horse dung from the streets would be overwhelmed by the number of horses which pulled wagons and carts through the streets and it would just accumulate where it landed, until London became it's own dung heap.

Although the prediction was based on solid statistical analysis, it never happened. The thousands of horse drawn carts were replaced by fossil fuel powered locomotives and their trains. Instead of being buried in horse shit, London became a grimy soot and ash covered city for the next century, give or take.

Just as the horses gave something back for the service rendered, fossil fuels leave an economic cost for the benefit of their use. As fossil fuels become more rare, and thus more expensive to produce, the costs of burning them will accumulate just like horse manure in 1790 London. We could spend a lot of money to extend our remaining reserves of petroleum sources, but that's a lot like developing a sharper ax because the trees which make good fire wood are gone and we have to chop down the really hard ones. The problem with predictions based on statistics is that the statistics can never account for future decisions based on statistics. When the same effort to develop renewable sources of energy match the work put into the past two centuries of fossil fuel technology, we might make it.

We better hope that renewables can do it all, because the alternative is for the planet to eliminate enough of its energy consuming creatures until the system is back in equilibrium.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The waste isn't a problem.

Reprocess it--most of it is fuel that belongs in a reactor, not in the trash.

After that a year's production from a reactor fits under your desk and decays to ambient in 10,000 years. My preferred approach would be to toss it in an old salt mine but all of the scientific proposals (not nonsense like shooting it into the sun) are fine.

If it's energetic enough to be dangerous, then it's energetic enough to be useful. Put it in a nice shielded box, attach a heat-sink, and bury it under the floor of buildings in cold climates. Presto - zero heating bills for the next five millennia.

Disagree--the threshold for dangerous is a lot lower than the threshold for useful heat.

- - - Updated - - -

Woo hoo!!! Nuclear power! Yeah! Gung Ho!!!

I mean, we still don't know what to do with the waste, and it takes a long time to build reactors, and the reactors don't last more than 40 years, and every fucking plant seems to have issues (I grew up in a town with a nuclear plant, so it was always in the news), but yeah. Gung ho!!! Nuclear can only handle so much load in the US. We are a rather large nation.

You owe me a new irony meter!

You don't want nuke, you agree that renewables can't do it. Thus you are voting for global warming.

I said nuclear doesn't solve the whole energy issue either and it isn't the silver bullet claimed it is.

Also natural gas pollutes much less than coal ever did.

Natural gas doesn't put quite as much CO2 in the air as coal but your answer is still major global warming.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A linear extrapolation gives 2030: 36%, 2040: 44%, 2050: 52%, but linear extrapolation is likely too pessimistic, giving the dramatic growth rates of wind and solar.

Linear extrapolation is far too optimistic. The problem is both solar and wind are variable sources. Until we have suitable storage technologies (and we aren't remotely close on this) they can only reduce the use of peaking plants, they can't touch the baseline plants.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But they oppose anything but renewables, that's saying they think renewables can do it all.

If renewables can't do it all, we're in a pretty bad spot, eventually.

All sources of energy are renewable. It's just a question of rate, and after that, the difference in the potential and the realized.

Coal, gas, and oil are being renewed as we speak, but it may take a while. The formations which eventually became the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota were first deposited about 400 million years ago, give or take a million. Don't wait up.

I remember reading an interesting article published by the Royal Society in the late 1700's. The Society had done an intense analysis of London and it's rapid population growth, and came up with dire predictions. According to the Society, the present rates of population growth and the economic efforts to feed and maintain that population, meant that in less than a century, London would be buried in seven feet of horse manure. The capacity to remove horse dung from the streets would be overwhelmed by the number of horses which pulled wagons and carts through the streets and it would just accumulate where it landed, until London became it's own dung heap.

Although the prediction was based on solid statistical analysis, it never happened. The thousands of horse drawn carts were replaced by fossil fuel powered locomotives and their trains. Instead of being buried in horse shit, London became a grimy soot and ash covered city for the next century, give or take.

Just as the horses gave something back for the service rendered, fossil fuels leave an economic cost for the benefit of their use. As fossil fuels become more rare, and thus more expensive to produce, the costs of burning them will accumulate just like horse manure in 1790 London. We could spend a lot of money to extend our remaining reserves of petroleum sources, but that's a lot like developing a sharper ax because the trees which make good fire wood are gone and we have to chop down the really hard ones. The problem with predictions based on statistics is that the statistics can never account for future decisions based on statistics. When the same effort to develop renewable sources of energy match the work put into the past two centuries of fossil fuel technology, we might make it.

We better hope that renewables can do it all, because the alternative is for the planet to eliminate enough of its energy consuming creatures until the system is back in equilibrium.

In other words, bet the human race on the idea that a solution will come along.

In the long run there are only two answers within sight at all: solar and fusion. Barring major breakthroughs in storage solar will have to be space-based where it can deliver a steady supply.

 

[bilby]

https://www.electricitymap.org/

France, Sweden and Norway are the only European countries with low current emissions of CO₂. They use mostly nuclear and hydro power - but hydro power requires geographical conditions that are common in Scandinavia, but rare elsewhere.

The UK and Germany have invested heavily in renewables, and in replacing coal with gas. But they still have high emissions.

Nuclear power as a means to reduce CO₂ emissions is not a theoretical possibility; it's the reality that France has been living for several decades.

France is smart.

Be like France.

 

[Bronzeage]

If renewables can't do it all, we're in a pretty bad spot, eventually.

All sources of energy are renewable. It's just a question of rate, and after that, the difference in the potential and the realized.

Coal, gas, and oil are being renewed as we speak, but it may take a while. The formations which eventually became the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota were first deposited about 400 million years ago, give or take a million. Don't wait up.

I remember reading an interesting article published by the Royal Society in the late 1700's. The Society had done an intense analysis of London and it's rapid population growth, and came up with dire predictions. According to the Society, the present rates of population growth and the economic efforts to feed and maintain that population, meant that in less than a century, London would be buried in seven feet of horse manure. The capacity to remove horse dung from the streets would be overwhelmed by the number of horses which pulled wagons and carts through the streets and it would just accumulate where it landed, until London became it's own dung heap.

Although the prediction was based on solid statistical analysis, it never happened. The thousands of horse drawn carts were replaced by fossil fuel powered locomotives and their trains. Instead of being buried in horse shit, London became a grimy soot and ash covered city for the next century, give or take.

Just as the horses gave something back for the service rendered, fossil fuels leave an economic cost for the benefit of their use. As fossil fuels become more rare, and thus more expensive to produce, the costs of burning them will accumulate just like horse manure in 1790 London. We could spend a lot of money to extend our remaining reserves of petroleum sources, but that's a lot like developing a sharper ax because the trees which make good fire wood are gone and we have to chop down the really hard ones. The problem with predictions based on statistics is that the statistics can never account for future decisions based on statistics. When the same effort to develop renewable sources of energy match the work put into the past two centuries of fossil fuel technology, we might make it.

We better hope that renewables can do it all, because the alternative is for the planet to eliminate enough of its energy consuming creatures until the system is back in equilibrium.

In other words, bet the human race on the idea that a solution will come along.

In the long run there are only two answers within sight at all: solar and fusion. Barring major breakthroughs in storage solar will have to be space-based where it can deliver a steady supply.

That will require a very long extension cord.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In other words, bet the human race on the idea that a solution will come along.

In the long run there are only two answers within sight at all: solar and fusion. Barring major breakthroughs in storage solar will have to be space-based where it can deliver a steady supply.

That will require a very long extension cord.

Microwave beams.

The receivers are huge but they're not solid, you can put them over pastureland.