We are overloading the planet: Now What?

[Loren Pechtel]

All power plants require a large amount of fossil fuels to build them.

You have not established this.

Nuclear plants cannot supply all of our future energy.

If you think everybody looks foolish who says that, then have a good laugh as you read the writings of these fools. (Davis, 2012, Zyga, 2011, Abbott, 2016, Clifford, 2022, Murphy, 2021, B, 2021a, Berman, 2023 ).

I have seen a lot of bogus stuff from the greens. It's always a matter of faith that it if we just slow down we will be ok--but they always ignore the fact that their own models lead to collapse.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This reminds me of a science lesson from back in high school. The required reading for that day was a treatise written somewhere in the mid-to-late 19th century. It was written by a very educated gentleman from England. In it he explained why coal powered cargo vessels couldn't cross the Atlantic. Sailing vessels were here permanently. With lots of grammatically perfect verbiage, math, and graphs, the author explained that no vessel could carry enough coal to cross from New York to London and float, much less carry cargo.
The class was really a lesson in critical thinking and noticing tacit assumptions. Clearly the author didn't take into account the human ingenuity that resulted in vast increases in steam engine efficiency. How once shippers realized that fossil fuels powered ships were faster and more reliable than sailing ships they'd want more. Etc.
The teacher also mentioned that the author was the son of a very wealthy merchant ship owner and had recently inherited a fleet of profitable sailing vessels. That he was young enough at the time of writing to have faced the choice between upgrading his fleet to coal power or watch the value of his fleet plummet during his lifetime.
Tom

We don't know what future science will find. I agree.

But one should not say, "I don't know. Therefore, all is well." That is like saying, "I don't know. Therefore God."

We are not saying that. We are saying that your path is definite failure. We don't want to choose a path we know leads to collapse.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

'Economy' is more than just a matter of currency, that is one aspect, the term may broadly refer to how we conduct our business, our lives, business models, values, the natural resources we use and how we exploit our environment.

But in order for growth to have an end, wouldn't that require a stagnation of technology?

Yup--technology is fundamentally a way to accomplish the same ends for less effort. This causes change.

But note that useful innovations pretty much can't be infinite. Someday we really will know everything and technology will plateau.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That is because the process to convert the energy from fossil fuels to electricity is inherently inefficient, with the best new systems yielding an efficiency of about 37.5%.

No, that's largely an irrelevance. The process to convert the energy from nuclear fission to electricity is exactly the same as the process to convert the energy from coal to electricity.

How could these almost identical processes not have similar efficiencies?

He's looking at heat-driven processes. Which are obviously more efficient when driven directly by heat. Plenty of industrial things aren't heat driven, though.

You can use many sources of energy to provide industrial process heat without a conversion via electricity.

Getting heat from fissile materials is easier than getting it from fossil fuels.

Yes, but I don't exactly like the idea of doing so. You really want that chemical plant (with the potential to go boom) next to your nuclear plant???

Nuclear has trouble competing because of an insane level of regulatory costs. The fundamental cost of building and running a nuclear power plant is lower than the cost of building or running a coal power plant.

Running, I agree, but building? Most reactors use a heat exchanger between the reactor loop and the actual generators to minimize the amount of piping carrying material that has the possibility of neutron activation. (Although I have seen the idea of using helium as your material because it's immune to neutron activation--but problematic in energy density.)

After seventy years of a concerted political effort to make nuclear power as uncompetitive as possible, it's still competitive with coal; Anti-nuclear campaigners have to appeal to governments to intervene and withdraw or refuse to renew licences from perfectly sound and working reactors in order to get them shut down - because without government intervention, they simply refuse to stop being profitable businesses.

And in the countries that aren't insane about them they're working well. France isn't having a problem with mostly nuke power.

 

[bilby]

What about the problem of funding a nuclear plant? The return on investment is many times that of a gas powered plant. Who can wait 8 to 10 years to show a profit?

Superannuation and investment funds?

There's plenty of capital locked up in long term investments. Nuclear plants are an excellent investment.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx

The biggest risk by far in investing in nuclear power is the possibility that a plant will be closed prematurely for ideological reasons, or that needless hurdles will be placed in the way of construction (also for ideological reasons).

Nuclear power has a seventy year history of being profitable, despite massive efforts to make it unprofitable; If the idiotic environmental vandals who are working to make the technology as expensive as possible were to wake up to the damage they are doing to the environment, and to the deaths and injuries they are causing by their opposition, and were to desist from their insanity, it would be even more profitable.

 

[bilby]

Government subsidized nuclear power plants?

Better than government subsidized wind turbines or solar panels.

 

[bilby]

I know that we are using up resources that we can't replace

Not really. We are using up Helium; Apart from that, we're just spreading resources around in ways that will require lots of cheap energy to reverse.

We aren't "using up" anything - it's all still here, apart from that Helium.

 

[bilby]

Yes, but I don't exactly like the idea of doing so. You really want that chemical plant (with the potential to go boom) next to your nuclear plant???

Sure, why not? A nuclear plant is very tough indeed, and will stand up to almost any external threat. It's essentially a big block of metal, wrapped in a very big block of reinforced concrete.

And of course, we shouldn't be building chemical plants with inadequate safety and containment systems. It's not the nineteenth century anymore.

 

[bilby]

Running, I agree, but building? Most reactors use a heat exchanger between the reactor loop and the actual generators to minimize the amount of piping carrying material that has the possibility of neutron activation.

Sure. But that's not vastly expensive to do, unless you need to spend millions on licence applications and red tape before you even start to build the plant.

South Korea builds nuclear plants at FAR lower cost than the US. That's not because their plants are of a lower standard, nor is it because Koreans are inherently better at building things than Americans are. It's because their government is less beholden to lobby groups who will do literally anything to prevent a nuclear plant from being built cheaply and efficiently.

 

[DBT]

Government subsidized nuclear power plants?

Better than government subsidized wind turbines or solar panels.

For sure, yet our Government appears to be very reluctant to do that, regardless of what needs to be done.

 

[bilby]

While I would welcome government subsidies for nuclear power plants as part of their commitment to reducing carbon emissions, they really aren't necessary.

I have little doubt that we would see nuclear power construction in Australia in fairly short order if the Commonwealth repealed S140A of the EPBC Act, and S10 of the ARPANS Act.

Given the insistence of the Greens that nuclear power is unprofitable, uneconomic, and just generally unsupported by investors, they should have no objection to repealing these laws.

It's not necessary to make something illegal, if nobody wants to do it, and/or if nobody could get funding to do it even if they wanted to.

Right?

 

[Tigers!]

4) Shielding (it's just a big pile of rocks. We stick those rocks together, to stop them from moving; That's called "concrete". The Romans used it to build loads of stuff, including the Collosseum Colosseum, and they didn't need a single piece of fossil fuel burning equipment to do so).

<nitpick>
The Romans would have used some fossil fuels to build the Colosseum
1. Lime for mortar Roman lime burning
2. Cooking of some food for slaves, free workers, soldiers etc.
3. The metal used in the construction would have been forged using fossil fuel

Granted nowhere near the proportion of fossil fuel used by them compared to what we would use
</nitpick>

Wood. I don't believe they used any fossil fuel.

relases carbon though

 

[bilby]

4) Shielding (it's just a big pile of rocks. We stick those rocks together, to stop them from moving; That's called "concrete". The Romans used it to build loads of stuff, including the Collosseum Colosseum, and they didn't need a single piece of fossil fuel burning equipment to do so).

<nitpick>
The Romans would have used some fossil fuels to build the Colosseum
1. Lime for mortar Roman lime burning
2. Cooking of some food for slaves, free workers, soldiers etc.
3. The metal used in the construction would have been forged using fossil fuel

Granted nowhere near the proportion of fossil fuel used by them compared to what we would use
</nitpick>

Wood. I don't believe they used any fossil fuel.

relases carbon though

Nope.

It only "releases" carbon that was captured yesterday, and that was likely to be released again today or tomorrow regardless.

The issue is releasing back to the atmosphere carbon that hasn't been in the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.

About 350 million years ago, the carbon dioxide, that was then part of the atmosphere, was taken in by plants which grew in the swampy conditions caused by high sea levels and high global temperatures.

As those plants (mostly seedless lycopsids in the early carboniferous, and later sphenopsids and the first conifers) died, they failed to fully decompose (it was swampy; The air couldn't get to a lot of the rotting vegetation. Also many of the insects that today break down dead plants had yet to evolve), and instead formed peaty layers that, over time, were compressed into the coal seams that we mine today.

The carbon dioxide in the pre-industrial atmosphere of two millennia ago was in equilibrium; The trees and plants took it in, and when they died (or were harvested by Romans for food or fuel) they let it back out.

At any given time, the amount of carbon in plants, and the amount in the atmosphere, was roughly constant. If you cut down a tree and burned it, the carbon went into the tree (or the crops, or the grazing lands) that grew in its place, and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration didn't change.

But if you dig up coal (or oil, or gas) that's been buried for millions of years, and burn that, you are pushing the atmospheric carbon dioxide level away from what it has been for the few tens of thousands of years of human existence, and towards what it was 350 million years ago. When sea levels and temperatures were very much higher than today.

Nobody cared back then that the temperature was too high for humans to survive and thrive, or that sea levels were sufficient to flood major cities and even wipe inhabited islands completely off the map - Because there were no humans; And there were no cities; And there were no inhabited islands.

But a return to the conditions of the beginning of the age of coal formation wouldn't be survivable for humans.

So it's harmless for us to burn wood, or charcoal, or vegetable oils. But it's disastrous to burn fuels whose carbon wasn't removed from the atmosphere only a few years ago, but rather was fossilised millions of years ago.

Hence the term "fossil fuel", to describe those fuels for which this problem of adding extra carbon to the atmosphere applies.

Taking carbon out of the air, and then putting it straight back, has zero net effect.

Putting back into the air carbon that's been out of play, for hundreds of millions of years, is a whole other thing.

If you take a hundred bucks out of your bank account every day, and your boss* pays you a hundred bucks a day, no problem. That's what burning wood does to the carbon account.

But if you take a hundred bucks a day out of an account that was bequeathed to you by your long-ago deceased ancestors, and never put any money back in, eventually you are going to go bust. That's what burning coal does to the carbon account.









*In this case, your boss is the sun, and your job is to watch the trees photosynthesise. Nice work if you can get it.

 

[Merle]

Government subsidized nuclear power plants?

That's what we have. -- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the...to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html

 

[Merle]

We don't know what future science will find. I agree.

But one should not say, "I don't know. Therefore, all is well." That is like saying, "I don't know. Therefore God."

We are not saying that. We are saying that your path is definite failure. We don't want to choose a path we know leads to collapse.

Here is my written path forward:

So, what do we do? Most of the above. First, we need to accept that whatever comes, it is what it is, and make the most of it. And we must always make room for hope, to always hold out that we will make the most of what comes. But that hope should not include denial and should not come at the expense of a realistic preparation for what may come. And yes, societies need to include nuclear reactors, windmills, solar panels, batteries, and hopefully many other innovative technologies that are around the corner. And we could tell people that, for each decision not to have another child, that is one less person that needs to be supported on this overfilled lifeboat, Earth. We could actively ask for people to reduce birthrates, especially in rich countries. And of course, where we can individually or collectively cut back our impact to preserve the planet, let’s do so.

Nobody knows what is going to happen. There needs to be a concentrated effort to understand it better. We need accurate models and predictions of the future based on the best available science. And we need to inform people of what scientists find. We need to be working to develop technical solutions. There are plenty of challenging areas in which people can apply their thoughts to make things better.
-- https://mindsetfree.blog/we-are-overloading-the-planet-now-what/#Forward

Can you please explain to me how you know that choosing this path leads to collapse?

 

[Merle]

France isn't having a problem with mostly nuke power.

Actually, France is having a lot of problems with nuclear power. The company that runs them has had their credit rating downgraded, specifically because of all the problems they are having with nuclear power. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France and https://www.spglobal.com/marketinte...f-on-troubled-finances-nuclear-fleet-69013165

 

[steve_bank]

Archeologists and anthropologists intuit a lot from ancient garbage dumps.

People picked a spot and dumped trash. Fine for revelry small groups and even ancient cities.

Walking a European city street with multifloor buildings and you could get waste dumped on your head.

We are te same old humans, the scale has become global.

Now it is plastic rain. There was a report of plastic rain in Japan. Plastic in coastal waters gets pummeled into small particles and goes up as water potatoes.

In the early 90s l;ate 80s I spent time in the North Idaho panhandle, silver mines. The smelter in Kellog had contaminated the entire town land with arsenic. It was scraped up and put in a berm next to the highway.

Out in the back country abandoned mines and waste dumps are everywhere.

We are the same old humans. We will consume until the environment itself reduces population

 

[Elixir]

Plastic in coastal waters gets pummeled into small particles and goes up as water potatoes.

Water potatoes sound okay.

In the early 90s l;ate 80s I spent time in the North Idaho panhandle

Maybe not as good as those potatoes though.

 

[Merle]

We are the same old humans. We will consume until the environment itself reduces population

Sadly, yes.

And, as I say in my post:

Consider also that we have never seen space aliens in the universe trying to contact us. Could it be that, in the past, there were other species in distant planets that built great civilizations, but they hastily burnt through the available resources and filled the planet with garbage, thus ending any hope that they would be able to contact us? Perhaps this is just the universal way that things go. The first creatures that are able to exploit an environment do, leaving little for their descendants. -- https://mindsetfree.blog/we-are-overloading-the-planet-now-what/

One would think it would be good to have a conversation about how Homo sapiens might do better.

 

[southernhybrid]

Why aren't you talking about the coming water shortages, that are becoming a problem around the world. I'll add a gifted article from WaPo, but there's one that I read in the Times that showed how most of the acquirers in the US are rapidly drying up. Some areas are already experiencing extreme water shortages. So, what is the solution to that problem, regardless if the population increases or decreases in the coming decades?

https://wapo.st/3TK6kye

A growing population and rising temperatures will strain the world’s freshwater supplies over the next 30 years, jeopardizing available water for drinking, bathing and growing food, according to new research.

An analysis of newly released data from the World Resources Institute (WRI) shows that by 2050 an additional billion people will be living in arid areas and regions with high water stress, where at least 40 percent of the renewable water supply is consumed each year. Two-fifths of the world’s population — 3.3 billion people in total — currently live in such areas.


WRI used a global hydrological model to estimate how renewable water sources — such as rivers and lakes, which are replenished through precipitation — might change under future climate change scenarios. According to their analysis, the Middle East and North Africa regions have the highest level of water stress in the world. Climate change is shifting traditional precipitation patterns, making the regions drier and reducing their already scarce water supplies. Population growth and industrial use of water are expected to increase demand.