The happy promoters of giant space projects are at it again. “Should we terraform Mars?”, they ask — to which I reply that we aren’t even close to being able to implement such an undertaking, so your fantasies are silly, and worse…why do you always express it in such palpably stupid ways?
Before we talk about terraforming another planet like Mars, we have to talk about Earth—and whether we should be spending our resources trying to save it, or moving on to another pale blue dot. It’s a grim debate that some scientists say it’s time to have.
“Some scientists say…” is one of those grossly dishonest constructions bad journalists use. I can well image some dunderheaded engineer might say such a thing, but I hope it’s not representative of the scientific community at all.
But also, what the hell are you talking about? The rest of the article is about slamming meteors into Mars and other such tedious tropes, but nowhere do they talk about the problem of transporting billions of people to this distant world, along with training people to live in an artificial environment (note that they’ll have to be transported at a rate faster than the birth rate, too); there’s no talk of building habitats for polar bears, elephants, whales, pygmy marmosets, tuataras, ants, salmon, whooping cranes, sequoias, or baobabs. Implicit in these delusions is the idea that almost the entirety of humanity, less a tiny lucky elite that reads science fiction novels, will die, that every biome on the planet will be trashed in favor of a tenuous, constructed environment, and that the vast reserves of planetary biodiversity will be sacrificed.
I will be blunt: fuck no, we won’t be moving to “another pale blue dot.” It’s impossible. There is no technological solution even imaginable, and it’s especially not possible when proponents of uprooting humanity can’t even consider the magnitude of the problem.
One sign of progress, though, is that they’re now emphasizing an alternative excuse: figuring out how to terraform Mars would help us figure out how to fix the Earth, they say. Bullshit, I say.
It’s true: Discussions about terraforming Earth, not Mars, are becoming more and more common. It’s almost as if the science of making Mars livable could actually inform repairing our own. In an essay called Terraforming Earth, the scifi author Kim Stanley Robinson—who described terraforming the Red Planet in his beloved Mars trilogy—argued that we should be thinking about using similar techniques to fix our own planet, like carbon capture and even shooting sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays. “Geoengineering,” he writes, “has become our ongoing responsibility to life on this planet, including all human generations to come.”
Oh, god. Geoengineering. Let’s do radical experiments on our own home — big projects to modify our atmosphere or oceans, for instance, and hope they are sustainable and don’t lead to even bigger problems. Please don’t “help”.
Here’s the deal. The solution does not lie in mucking up our planet any more; it lies in changing ourselves. These solutions ought to be doable.
Someone wants to mine the tar sands? Fine. Part of the cost has to involve restoring the terrain to a livable, fully repaired, sustainable ecosystem afterwards — none of this poisoned moonscape crap — and you have to have a plan to compensate for the release of all the fossil carbon into the atmosphere. If that means the project is no longer economically viable, then so be it. You don’t get to subsidize your profits on the back of the environment.
You want to increase pork production on your factory farm? Even setting aside the ethical concerns, you don’t get to pump pig sewage into vast fecal lakes that will be there for your grandchildren to deal with. Instead, you’ll manage it now, and that will be part of the cost of production. Maybe that factory farm will look a little less cost-effective if you have to pay for the environmental havoc you’re wreaking.
You have a plan to reduce infant mortality? That’s a good thing, I approve. Can we also simultaneously have a plan to educate the population and improve their economic opportunity so that their will be a concomitant voluntary willingness to have fewer children?
All this geoengineering nonsense is about making desperate efforts after the fact to compensate for the bad behavior of humans. Maybe we ought to spend a little more effort not doing destructive things in the first place.
Also, maybe it’s too much to ask, but the self-congratulatingly clever community of science fiction fans needs to learn to think bigger, and stop settling for a universe in which humans live alone in flying sterile tin cans.
“Part of the cost has to involve restoring the terrain to a livable, fully repaired, sustainable ecosystem afterwards ”
my god yes. Living in Salt Lake and watching this worlds largest open pit mine, this thing we are all so proud of(!), just grow and grow over the years and then lately had some cave ins and slides. Now there’s talk of shutting it down because it’s become too unstable, well fuck that. Fill it back in. You just get to dig a giant hole right into the middle of a population center and just leave it when you’re done? There’s years of jobs right there, you profited off it, why do you get to just walk away?
Yes! A million times yes on the way corporations have just dumped their expenses on the public and the environment. Genuine hard-hitting environmental reform where corporations where directly financially liable for their messes in a way that was regularly and brutally enforced would go a long way to fixing some of the worst aspects of our self-destruction.
Shutting this stuff down isn’t so much “hard” as it will be financially inconvenient to the type of rich fucks who are used to buying legislatures. And that’s what makes it really “hard”. It’s all privatize the profits, subsidize the costs.
“I don’t wanna tidy my bedroom! Can’t we just move to a new house instead?”
This leaves me with the selfcontradictory attitude of naysaying these geoengineering proposals as ignoring the “big picture” and focusing on solving a single problem with no consideration of its possible longterm effects. While simultaneously deriding others who dismiss proposed solutions to address big problems as being infeasible because the problem is “too big to fix (so stop trying to trim small edges of it”.
So, I both: advocate addressing solving individual aspects of a problem, while deriding some for addressing only a single aspect of a different problem.
I’ll just refuge in the motto, “So I contradict myself…I contain multitudes.”
PZ:
Makes me think of the Futurama episode Crimes of the Hot. “Go mine a gigantic ice cube from a comet to drop in the ocean!”
While I agree with everything you say, PZ, I also think that enough people will not change that this particular planet will continue its downward slide until things are truly terrible for most everyone. Then, there will be attempts to terraform the earth. I don’t like it, but I think humans, taken as a whole, just cannot think and plan for the long term. Different groups will continue to do stupid shit even when it becomes undeniable that it’s stupid shit. Here in America we’re especially bad because ‘freedom’.
I used to be optimistic about the future. I was a kid during the time of Apollo, and when liberalism was still a national thing. I thought that big things were possible. But I learned later that, even at that time, things were not good for many people, and enough of those in charge had no interest in making things better that things were not getting better. I’m still optimistic that some time in the more distant future, we’ll wake up and do better, but I’m not sure why I feel that way. Earth is in for some really bad decades coming up, centuries maybe, because people, especially well-off people, don’t see why they need to change, and don’t want to.
“Sure, honey! We can’t really find any place to our taste, so we figured we’d just bulldoze that forest over there, bring in totally different flora and some giraffes (you know how much your sister loves giraffe) and build the coolest house ever! “
Can’t do that. The whole economic ponzi scheme is entirely dependent on a constant increase of productivity, which requires improvements in technology, the constant exploitation of natural resources, and an increase in population. If any of those three fails, the other two have to take up the slack. Less-industrialized countries like China that are seeing a population decrease recently can still see increases by improving their use of technology, but in most cases this goes hand in hand with resource exploitation, which as you mention tends to hurt the environment even more in order to drive productivity. In already heavily-industrialized countries like the US or Canada, we try to offset the population issues with immigration, research and new technology. But it doesn’t really work: immigration only shuffles population around; technological improvents are either limited in scope (the expected robotization of manufacturing, for example, is not happening because of globalization and inequities making offshore manufacturer cheaper), are linked to exploitation of new resources like shale oil, or consist of more exploitation of human resources through various means (economic means to force people to work more hours linked to technological systems allowing more work time to be extracted on or off-hours).
Indeed, making sure any exploitation of natural resources is sustainable, renewable and neutral would ensure no rise in productivity occurs. Combined to a decrease in population, nothing short of battery-sized fusion reactors technology could offset the hurt this would do to the economy.
What I’m saying isn’t that I don’t agree with you. I do, completely and heartily. We need sustainable development, population stability and responsible use of technology. But it cannot happen in our current economic system. A system based upon constant growth is eminently unsustainable. I had been hoping it would blow up in our face and we might move on to something else. Instead, it looks like we’ll destroy our planet before we get to that point.
Sad. I liked this place.
re OP,
I suspect this was inspired a recent post on io9 about Erasmus Darwin’s original version of geo-engineering. He proposed putting big ship sails on icebergs and herding them to the tropics to cool the sweltering weather there.
Reading the comments there was, inevitably, the snarky comment (yes, actual sarcasm) that maybe moving the ice around could alleviate global warming. That back in Erasmus day, it would’ve caused global cooling. (The Futurama icecube was also posted).
Slightly more relevant, and not so sarcastically, someone snarked, ‘tow that iceberg to California, they could use that fresh water’.
Cormacolinde @8-
Yeah, the model of consumption capitalism, of ever-spiraling profits, rather than sustainable profits cannot survive much longer. Whether we adopt drastic reform or not. And that’s a reality Americans don’t want to accept, but we will have to, either soon or in the rather near future.
http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia
cormacolinde #8: I agree entirely. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. The thing is, we are going to have to change this system at some point, and sooner rather than later. It just is not sustainable anymore. But its another example of long term thinking that doesn’t get done, and this time it’s far worse: changing to a sustainable economy would especially hit those who get their wealth from the future potential growth of the economy rather than the actual production of goods and services. For the most part, these people run the world. I don’t think they see a reason to change anything.
And what I said @10 also goes for things like the housing bubble’s insistence that home prices can only go up and never down, while simultaneously continuing to lower real wages for workers.
Honestly, America is really on one big bubble that is going to be painful* when it finally bursts.
*More painful than it already has been so far.
@11, chigau
Well, killing ourselves, yeah…and an absolutely enormous portion of the biosphere.
I agree completely it does appear that the only environmental concerns that we have ever made in deciding to do anything when we even try and make a determination at all is how much damage can we allow as the result of the what it is we are going to do. From farming to fishing to extraction to building and development it is how much damage can we tolerate if we even notice at all.
I have never heard any ideas for doing anything to Mars that are not going to end up severely impoverished compared to even a 20 century farm more like a pet-shop aquarium. Most of it is just idle speculation as are all these wonderful ideas of Geo-engineering earth’s environmental problems away
flying sterile tin cans indeed
uncle frogy
Sidenote in defense of Kim Stanley Robinson: his Terraforming Earth essay actually argues against traditional geoengineering proposals (e.g., injecting sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface, promoting algal blooms to capture CO2). Rather, KSR argues for a broader definition of geoengineering, claiming that any actions undertaken by a 7-billion person civilization* represents geoengineering. His suggestions in fact are a lot like PZ’s: greater sustainability, changing social habits, stabilizing populations through legal and social empowerment of women.
—
*Although I’ll admit I find his speaking of everyone on Earth as being part of a single civilization a bit problematic, considering the power dynamics between (as well as within) different nations.
You shouldn’t be so derisive of geo-engineering. For one thing, any effort to alter the balance of gases in the atmosphere is by definition geo-engineering, though I realise you have conveniently drawn your definition to exclude it.
Even if we’re talking about the large scale, and largely fictional projects like building giant space mirrors, the principle is the same, they only differ in degree. Sci-fi rarely bothers with details, which is often a shame and leads to cartoonish notions of what is and is not possible.
While it is entirely true that a fully sustainable world would be vastly preferable to our current systems of exploitation, it’s been pointed out that such a world would entail radical changes in the social, political and economic spheres. Changes which I honestly believe less likely to occur than the giant space mirrors.
It seems less realistic to believe that global human civilisation can be steered through a 90 degree turn with no impetus other than hope and goodwill, than to believe that we could seed clouds to increase planetary albedo while building plants to suck co2 out of the air. Such efforts may not be a solution in the absolute sense, but when it’s a choice between that and a catastrophic global temperature increase, at the very least it’s likely to buy us time.
All that said, the notion that colonising Mars would be easier than preventing Earth becoming uninhabitable is risible. Until such time as someone comes up with a way to give Mars its own magnetosphere, there is no way it will ever be able to sustain a biosphere. Not in the long term, unless we’re happy with it continuously pissing atmosphere into space.
Actually, organizing a mass emigration to Mars is a fairly trivial engineering problem. All we need to do is refocus the space elevator project into a sort of zipline to Mars type of deal. Not only is it a cheap and easy way to travel, it’s fun too!
CO2 emissions could be considered a massive, worldwide geo-engineering project, one that we do not have a clear idea of the outcome. Reducing atmospheric CO2 through various projects should be seen as alleviating that, returning things to a more normal state, and should be considered on smaller scales.
There are some small-scale geoengineering projects that may be worth considering; ocean seeding, for instance, shows a lot of promise. The unauthorized (by the Canadian government, anyway) project to seed off Haida Gwaii a few years ago was followed by one of the largest salmon runs in BC history.
“Let’s do [impossible thing]!”
“We can’t.”
“Not with that attitude!”
“Okay then, what about [fatal obstacle]?”
*hand wave*
Futurists: far too grand in scope, far too glib on the particulars.
well if you want to hear my speculation on how to re-start the magnetosphere of Mars. The key might be to remelt the planets iron core. That might be accomplished by inserting deep in the center enough enriched radioactive heavy elements and material keep the core liquid. That would also give us a place a safe place to sequester them. there are a few details that would need to be addressed first like transportation and deep drilling on Mars of course. and housing for those working on the project. maybe it could be an entirely robotic project.
uncle frogy
^ An excellent example of exactly my point.
Now, let’s not be hasty. Colonizing Mars could really help improve things on Earth.
Ideally, of course, we’d send the most non-productive members of society to Mars, but I’m afraid the 1% won’t agree to move there until they see proof of luxury condos with organic produce gardens and private red sand beaches.
On the other hand, there’s a certain subset of the population who would be very attracted to the idea of moving to a brave new world with no government regulation or taxes, no Federal Reserve banking system. Add in the freedom to mine bitcoins and collect guns to your heart’s content, with no social justice warriors to mess it up, and Mars is practically a Libertarian Paradise! Brave Heroes will line up for the chance to get a one-way flight to Mars and set up Galt’s Gulch.
Meanwhile, back on earth, we’ll have eased the population problem and made it easier to address the remaining environmental problems.
Hey, it worked for the Golgafrinchans. (Well, until that dirty telephone disease.)
PZ, you are sheer awesomeness!
What’s the point of trying to terraform Mars when it has no magnetosphere? Even if you could produce breathable atmosphere the combination of low gravity and solar wind will make short work of it?
Terraforming Mars would be difficult. Thin atmosphere, cold climate, and a surface covered with dust and fines. Do you know how to make soil? It requires a huge biomass of eukaryotic organisms, annelids, insects and nitrogen fixing organisms. Throw it all together, tend it carefully, and in a human generation or three you’ll have an inch or two of topsoil.
Tetsuro: So that’s Mars.
Maetel: They’ve raised the air pressure here up to the levels on Earth, but it’s taken them a century to do so.
Tetsuro: They created it artificially?
Maetel: Exactly. It’s a place where humans can live without any difficulty. Yet, the only ones who live here are people with machine bodies.
Tetsuro: So they didn’t even have to bother raising the air pressure to Earth levels.
Maetel: Indeed. It was a complete waste of effort.
— Galaxy Express 999
This is why I never liked sci-fi as a kid. In addition to the male-centeredness of the genre, passion-killing on its own to a female child, it always seemed to me that it catered to a class of people who gathered around to masturbate to pure technology. And don’t get me wrong: I appreciate science. I think that it is useful and worth knowing–fuck, my career is biomedical engineering, if you want to know how I fee about science. But it still remains a tool to be used by humanity, not valuable in and of itself, and it needs always to be employed within a populist moral framework. Using technology to save a handful of us and carelessly dispense with the billions of others who inhabit this planet is the height of human arrogance.
feel*
@iankoro #18:
On the offchance that you’re not just taking the piss, I’d like to see your calculations for the required tensile strength of that zipline…
@razzlefrog #28;
“But it still remains a tool to be used by humanity, not valuable in and of itself, and it needs always to be employed within a populist moral framework.”
I think you will find that many of the best scientists value scientific knowledge in and of itself, and might not flourish if their research were to be directed by “populists”. Lysenko, anyone?
X-rays were not discovered because a committee asked “How can we best improve medicine?” Quantum mechanics was not developed in order to make the internet, the PC and the iPad possible.
It’s kind of interesting how the article talks about terraforming the Earth without realizing the extent to which it’s already happened. We forget that in many parts of the world, even those parts of the environment which are called ‘wild’ or ‘natural’ are very much the product of deliberate as well as accidental human activity. Terraformers fantasize about a different speed and scale to the process. I’m not sure if any of it could ever work, but imagine you could, for instance, get reliable water in the desert regions of the world (never mind how, just imagine). It would cause ecological and social change to rival the drainage of most swampland across Europe over a period of a few millenia.
You’d also want to ask what they’re sending up that requires a space elevator’s capacity, since it’s going to be expensive too. Space mining? Tourism? Right now, the vast majority of payloads are governmental or non-profit, which is why SpaceX is trying to get into the military launch market.
Since it’s looking like we’ll get a 4-5 degree Celsius rise regardless of what happens in the next 20 years or so, we might as well look seriously at certain kinds of geo-engineering – namely, injecting silicate aerosols into the atmosphere to increase reflectivity. We know that it probably works, since those emissions helped to suppress warming for 30 years before the 1970s. But it might also fuck up rainfall patterns elsewhere.
In any case, I think we’ll just muddle through. The Chinese have the right of it – better to be muddling through with a richer society capable of paying for all those incredibly expensive adaptations (like sea barriers, engineering, etc) than be the one too poor to do anything about it while your population flees elsewhere.
As for a Mars colony, I find that prospect a little hilarious in the next 100-200 years. It’s not enough just to have a set of enthusiasts willing to go with the funding to do so – your colony either needs to be wholly self-sustaining (or have a way of paying for imports), or it needs a reason for people to actually go and stay long-term. Perversely enough, too, faster transit makes it less likely that people will stay, because they can cycle back home after a tour.
I don’t see why modest geoengineering endeavours can’t be part of our overall response to climate change, along with moves towards sustainability.
For instance, deforestation is a contributor to climate change. Therefore, it seems reasonable that the reduction and ultimate reversal of deforestation should be part of our environmental strategy. Such an undertaking—planting trees, intelligently deciding which species and what locations are feasible and optimal, and so on—is geoengineering. Of course, we are still going to have to drastically reduce our carbon emissions and most likely have to resign ourselves to lifestyle changes that come with that.
Finally, does anyone have any recommendations for science fiction where there is an attempt to face our environmental challenges head on, rather than send out small lifeboats into the cosmos?
All this geoengineering effort is because it’s cool to think about it.
I don’t understand why people would need a practical excuse to justify it.
I should probably begin by saying that I agree that relying on speculative technology to solve immediate problems is wrong-headed, and I think abandoning our current planet for another one is irresponsible.
In spite of that, I still have problems with some of the sentiment here. I feel like I’m stuck between two extreme positions here. On the one hand are the futurists who insist that we’ll have amazing technology in just a few decades in spite of having no idea how to make it, and on the other are people who jump right in and declare various speculative ideas to be outright impossible. I dislike both extremes. I realize that the cliche of “take the middle ground” is often wrong, but I think this issue is an exception.
With the futurists, you have people insisting that we’re going to have Mars colonies in a few decades in spite of us not even sending a single manned mission there yet, or saying that they can transplant heads in spite of doctors still working on how to fix severed spinal chords. They exaggerate how fast technology will progress and don’t go into nearly enough detail as to how they plan to actually make anything they’re talking about. It’s like seeing a victorian gentleman insisting that he can build a rocket ship with a steam boiler and iron plating.
The other group, the naysayers, insist that certain speculative technologies are completely impossible and will never be made at any point in the future. I can understand this attitude if the technology is based on an incorrect understanding of how physics, chemistry, or biology works. For example, I would accept that stereotypical nanobots are impossible because silicon and steel components wouldn’t work right on the nano-scale, or because reconfiguring matter on a molecular level would be impossible from a chemical standpoint.
However, I don’t appreciate people insisting that a certain technology is impossible simply because we don’t know how to do it yet, or because there are technical obstacles that would be difficult to overcome. I tend to think of technologies like terraforming, life extension, or brain transplants as highly speculative and with no pinpointed date as to when they would come about, but I also see most of the technical problems with them as being due to ignorance of how to solve them, not because they can’t be solved at all.
To summarize; don’t try to insist that we’re going to have Mars colonies in the next few decades, but also don’t try to insist that colonizing Mars is literally impossible and will never be done.
brett
Not just into the air for reflectivity. It’s possible if not yet demonstrated that you can have a massive effect on ocean acidification if you were to Select Your Silicate carefully. Olivine is the best but there are a couple of others worth looking at.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/throwing-rocks-at-co2/
My own feeling is that we will eventually do this – or something very much like it. But only after we decide that we can spend a couple of hundred billions a year on more useful activity than propping up the world’s profligate banks or subsidising destructive, self-defeating mining-processing-use of fossils. That is, once we go onto a footing equivalent to mobilising for WW2.
In the meantime, we should be emphasising bio-sequestration by restoring the carbon content of agricultural soils – massive amounts of carbon have been lost from all those grasslands, prairies and savannahs converted to agriculture as well as restoring and expanding the extent of forests of all kinds, including mangroves.
Sorry. I omitted the important bit. Reducing ocean acidification directly, and first, means that we get faster and better CO2 sequestration. Directly supporting and maintaining corals and fish stocks by improving the chemical composition of seawater will also keep the oceans available as the major absorber of surplus CO2 production as it’s been for the last couple of centuries.
Of course. This would be pointless if we don’t also simultaneously reduce our CO2 emissions aggressively.
@mildlymagnificent
Definitely. I think of it as a multi-prong effort – the aerosols buy you time to switch over to low-carbon energy sources, and possibly more if you want to wait for the oceans and plant life to draw out a lot of the CO2 shot up by human sources in the past.
@emergence
I’ve said this in other space-themed PZ posts, but once we get into the second half of the 21st century making predictions on space exploration gets a lot more complicated. On the one hand, you have better and better robots to do exploration – but on the other hand, you have all kinds of robots to do stuff that better enables off-world human habitation. Let the robots guided by humans back on Earth build your O’Neill cylinder for you!
chrirez:
The people who originally defined the term “geo-engineering” deliberately used it to refer to alternatives to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Because they thought reducing greenhouse gas emissions was impossible or undesirable. And it has been consistently used that way for a long time, by most people on both sides. Note the NAS 1992 used the term in scare quotes to refer to “… altering atmospheric chemistry …” – that is, adding CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That shows everyone knew the term could be expanded – but they chose not to make that expansion.
Now for many years, I really did like the idea of redefining “geo-engineering” to include reducing the emissions of greenhouse gasses. But in that time, I have met many people who promoted that idea, who later turned out to be disingenuous. That’s not say that you are, but you will encounter suspicion, thanks to those strangers, your fault or not.
We have, or will have in the next few decades, all the technologies necessary to replace all of our fossil fuel energy systems. And doing so will cost only a few percent of global income, since it can be spread out over decades. The Stern report demonstrated this as far back as 2007. It’s not “hope” – it’s the result of our best technology and economic experts studying what we have available.
In many cases, solar and wind are already more profitable than fossil fuels – despite huge government fossil fuel subsides, and depsite the fact that enormous health and evironmental costs.
Furthermore – the impetus is that by radically reducing emissions, we will avoid relocating tens of millions of people – in fact, hundreds of millions of people if we look as far ahead as the centuries that ice sheets take to melt. See USGS slide on sea level rise and consider. Note that in our present political climate, relocating so many people – most of them Muslim – would be politically impossible, and they would die.
It’s not “hope and goodwill”. It is demonstrated feasiblity and demonstrated severe need.
See the link I already gave above. Or the NAS report linked therein. Affecting albedo brings with it many unknowns, and many risks. Relying on that requires far more hope than reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Furthermore – seeding clouds is *not* a good way to affect albedo, because it is far too short lived; it has at best a lifespan measured in weeks. The primary methods focused on are therefor putting SO2 into the stratosphere and orbiting mirrors. Ironically – this mistake of yours is an exemplar for “Sci-fi rarely bothers with details, which is often a shame and leads to cartoonish notions of what is and is not possible.” .
The first problem with any scheme to suck co2 out of the air is that it has a very low concentration – 400 ppmm and rising. That’s high compared to the last few million years of climate history, but it’s very low when you need to extract it from the atmosphere. As a result, so far, the only methods likely to work are very large scale alterations in agriculture and forestry. Unfortunately it is not really clear how much co2 such methods will be able to suck back out. I suspect the maximum feasible amounts lie in the range of 2 gigatons and 10 gigatonnes per year. The RCP 2.5 pathway for keeping climate below 2C of global warming is very close to the top of that range.
That leads us to the next problem – presently, global CO2 emissions are about 9.9 gigatonnes per year. This means that if all we can do is reach the optimistic estimations of how much co2 removal is possible, we’ll just be treading water. That’s very bad, because we are at 400 ppm now, and it probably only takes 300 ppm to raise sea level by about 5 meters – so it’s necessary to get back down below 400 ppm as soon as feasible.
Which leads us to the next problem – the difference between, say, 500 ppm, where we are likely to peak at, and 350 ppm, what a certain big name greenhouse gas drawdown org wants, is about 320 gigatonnes CO2. In other words, it will take many decades to take that much CO2 back out. It’s worth thinking about how much 320 gigatonnes of CO2 really is. It is about 87 gigatonnes of C . For comparison, all human crops on earth are only about 2 billion tons – although that figure does not include soil, and the methods to which refer will store much of the carbon in the soil. But the point is, we need to remove an amount of carbon from the atmosphere whose mass is about 43.5 times that of our entire agriculture industry. That is a lot.
Even with that rant that I just did, I still think that geo-engineering seems like kind of a cop out. If it’s like bioremediation or some other system to get some damaged part of the environment fixed, then I can understand. When I hear about it used as an alternative to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it always brings to mind a guy with a weight problem who decides to take some bullshit herbal weight loss pills while still eating fried food for every meal of the day.
I’ve didn’t have time to chime in earlier today, but I did want to say that I can’t see any way that having this debate makes any sense right now.
For it to make sense, earth would have to currently be harder to live on than mars (air we can’t breathe, barely any water, very poor soil, unfavorable temperatures, no vegetation…etc.).
Only then would such a debate make sense, at which point we would face the following two options:
1) Stay on the world that is worse, because staying is easier.
2) Take the risk (and endure the great difficulty) of moving, because we would arrive at a better place.
Until then? The debate is easy: staying here is clearly the best option.
And I doubt earth will become as bad as Mars any time soon.
Our economy is like a ponzi scheme?
@Brian Pansky
Nah, not really. It’s just that stronger growth makes it easier to engage in redistribution and investment (more tax revenue, growing economic pie, etc), and we need economic growth as long as overall population is growing to avoid per capita income declines. And of course there is “good growth” (greater productivity out of an existing stock of raw materials and energy) and “not so great growth” (greater utilization with diminishing returns of raw materials and energy).
It’s the Interstellar problem. Even if the Earth became so bad that we had to grow all our crops in greenhouses and wear filtering masks outside of buildings, it still would be a thousand times more habitable than Mars. And I don’t think it will get that bad – by the time we hit mid-century, we’ll be heavily utilizing low-carbon energy and moving away from fossil fuels. It’s just we’ll be stuck living through the temperature rises caused by past activity.
. . . . You know, this raises an interesting question. Suppose the Earth does rise to about 5 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. Would it be better to maintain it at that level, rather than put all the ecosystems through the stress of a downward GMT adjustment over the course of the next century?
@#44, Brian Pansky:
You are right to question that metaphor. A Ponzi scheme involves paying the early victims using the money handed in by the later ones, in order to get enough good publicity to continue the scheme. That’s not an accurate picture of the modern economy — the term which should have been used is “pyramid scheme”, where each sucker who is defrauded not only hands over their money but also goes out and finds new victims to defraud. Either way, the only ones who make money in the long run are the ones at the top. Everyone else gets screwed, especially after the scheme collapses.
Eventually the whole thing necessarily collapses, because either a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme requires continuous exponential expansion which isn’t possible in the real world — just like the modern economy requires continuous exponential expansion of both profits and physical resources. Sooner or later, the economy will unmistakably hit a brick wall from which there will be no recovery, one which will make the collapse of 2007-8 look pleasant.
@llewelly
Agreed.
Bullshit. Solar and wind are only cost competitive if you ignore the intermittancy problem / the energy storage problem.
Citations please. Citations better include numbers. I want expected lifetime numbers, efficiency numbers, cost numbers. I want to see a methodology section that describes specific proposals. I want to see a methodology section that does hour-by-hour modeling to show how the specific proposals will provide the necessary power.
About that. The CO2 concentrations in ocean water is IIRC like 100x times higher. Recently, the US navy has been funding research into pulling CO2 out of ocean water. The idea is to pull CO2 out, split water to get H2, and use standard chemical processes to convert that to liquid hydrocarbon fuel. For the navy, if it works, awesome solution to supply line problems for their liquid hydrocarbon fuel. They have it demonstrated at lab scale.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/01/16/zero-emission-synfuel-from-seawater/
If it works large-scale, I’ve seen estimates that suggest anywhere from 3 USD to 6 USD at the pump for synthetic carbon-neutral gasoline. Of course, the carbon neutral part assumes a carbon neutral source of electricity to run the equipment.
I admit that this scheme of pulling CO2 out of seawater is still speculative, but it’s the best shot I’ve seen by far. Full steam ahead on R&D please, and full steam ahead on all plausible technologies that might help our plight.
As for the electricity, we need a carbon neutral source. The only thing that I’ve seen that is economically cheap enough to work, and approx carbon neutral, and scalable and reliable, is conventional nuclear fission reactors. I suggest we start building gen 3+ reactors like the AP-1000s like candy, and full steam ahead to get a breeder reactor working, such as IFR or LFTR. Stupidly safe, inexhaustible fuel, IFR in particular uses existing nuclear “waste” as fuel, economically cheap comparatively speaking, awesome in every way except for bad PR.
I figured the nuclear enthusiasts would show up sooner or later. You wanna provide a detailed, line-by-line political action plan for how you intend to get past the intense political opposition that comes up every time you propose a new nuclear plant? How about a realistic plan for expansion of nuclear power comparable to wind and solar energy by 2050? Citations, please – let’s not let ourselves get into the realms of speculation!
Sorry, but until you can do that, all your proposals for nuclear power expansion are just vaporous nonsense. In the mean-time, we can actually build lots of new solar and wind capacity, and are doing so. That’s assuming no further drops in cost of producing it, no further drops in the cost of storage (whether batteries or other storage), etc. And of course, let’s not forget that your nuclear reactors aren’t cost-effective as well.
How about your nuclear plants? Can you provide similar details showing how such plants can be built, en masse, without completely disregarding concerns over safety and the permitting process and without massive federal financial support?
Which storage tech is that? There is not enough raw lithium, nor lead, nor nickle in known world reserves for a battery sufficient to cover the intermittancy of solar and wind just for the US, e.g. basically impossible. As for pumped water storage, the scale of such a thing would be the size of another Great Lake (ex: Lake Michigan), e.g. implausible. Flywheels? Compressed air? It is true that a bunch of solutions on their own may be added together to produce a viable solution, but the only kinds of solutions we have are the woefully inadequate solutions. Adding together a dozen woefully inadequate solutions doesn’t provide a working solution. Even doing 1% of many of these solutions would be a new modern wonder of the world.
Don’t forget efficiency costs too.
Together, take whatever levelized cost of electricity you have for solar and wind that doesn’t include storage, figure out how much you need by the nameplate capacity, then multiply the amount of needed panels and mills by 5x or 10x to represent the true amount of solar panels and wind mills that you will need.
Consider this: Expectation are about 9 or 10 billion people on the planet in the near future. That’s the expected peak that we will see. I consider it part of my moral duty to raise these people out of poverty, and to do so in a way that won’t destroy our environment. Using optimistic numbers for wind and solar, and optimistic numbers for round-trip efficiency of energy storage, and using modern Germany as our target, we would have to cover approx the whole of South America with solar cells and wind mills. It’s economically possible. Even if we could, can you image the massive damage to our biosphere from such a scheme? Even if we could, it would be a never-ending project because those things have a working life of only a few decades.
What’s your plan? Does it involve keeping the rest of the world in poverty? Does it involve plunging the developed world into poverty?
How are you going to get enough food and water, and water for the food, for those 10 billion people? That takes energy, and a lot of energy.
Generally in public policy debates such as this one, it’s customary that both sides possess a certain degree of fiat power. Fiat power is the hypothetical mythical power to say “what if we changed public policy to X?”. Some degree of fiat power is necessary. Otherwise we’re not having a public policy debate; instead it would be a discussion about what will happen with the status quo.
I also believe that solving the PR problem is much easier than solving problems of fundamental physics, or relying on radical breakthroughs of technology which no one can say will happen.
Citations available on demand.
#25, Akira MacKenzie
Short work is relative; it certainly won’t last for a geological length of time without regular maintenance, but once you’ve somehow managed to get an atmosphere in place it’ll take a long time to blow away again. People have even done some studies on terraforming the moon, and come to the conclusion that it isn’t totally implausible, though I don’t think that anyone could come up with a cost-benefit analysis that would make it seem like a good idea.
#48, brett
Ahh, yes, wind and solar and perfect power storage and jam tomorrow and all good to go by 2050 just like that fusion power we’ve all been promised.
In the mean time, the lights still have to be kept on, and the heaters still need to be run in the winter, and you can either burn fossil fuels or uranium to make that happen because there are no practical alternatives right now. It isn’t rocket science.
How about a realistic plan to power the world for the next few decades until the solar fairy fixes everything for us? Citations, please – let’s not let ourselves get into the realms of speculation.
I am far, far, far away from being any sort of expert, but aren’t we tied to this place by our evolution?
There’s certainly enough for us to get started and to use for a decade or two while other people come up with better/easier/cheaper alternatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial
Once people see lithium depleting rapidly, then possible cheaper solutions like Sadoway’s if you want it dirt cheap, use dirt approach. http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy?language=en
There’s been some progress since this talk in 2012 but I still like it.
Certainly if you look back a couple of billion years. Terrestrial life … on the surface … wasn’t possible until after all those itty bitty ocean organisms poisoned the atmosphere with enough oxygen. Not just to breathe, but more importantly to form the ozone layer to protect animals and plants on land surfaces from being blasted by radiation.
In evolutionary terms, 90+% of those non-oxygen dependent organisms had to die and make room for the rest of biology to get a start.
@mildlymagnificent
About that liquid metal battery in particular. Last I checked, they haven’t released their engineering specs. What little is known is that their first version used some relatively rare metal, which means it couldn’t scale. Rumors are that they are looking for a different metal mix / trying for a different metal mix. At least, that’s the last I heard of it. Do you happen to have links offhand for the actual elemental constituents of this proposed battery?
From some preliminary investigation I did back a while ago, it’s vaporware.
#53, mildlymagnificent
I wonder if you have this a little backward… most things that live on the surface have a limited tolerance for UV, but isn’t that because they haven’t needed such a thing, given the existence of the ozone layer?
PS:
Here’s a good basic introduction in the difficulties of chemical batteries.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
PPS:
I will note that sodium sulfur batteries look like they can scale when looking at the supply of raw materials. However, sodium sulfur batteries have their own difficulties (cost).
You’ve left out one really important technological approach which would substantially reduce the task. “Negawatts”.
Making new items like refrigerators and air conditioners more efficient … or entirely unnecessary in the case of aircon and heating … by better building techniques and by retrofitting existing buildings means that you can reduce the amount of power required to achieve the same level of comfort or service from your surroundings or appliances or equipment. Similar considerations apply to transport. Though ‘retrofitting’ environments to make car-tram-bus-train travel less needed is a bigger ask than one-by-one retrofitting of buildings it can still be done.
Simultaneously making those vehicles more fuel efficient (regardless of the fuel source) is not an especially challenging prospect when you look at the relative inefficiencies of vehicles and urban design in places like Australia and the USA compared to Europe. Electrifying railways at the same time as installing wind farms to power them is a sensible approach.
As for power to the most impoverished, there are already good programs in several African countries as well as an outstanding example in Bangladesh.
Though this article on Kenya shows how the tiniest solar panel can make a poor family better off by $100+ per quarter within 3 months or less. Most of us would be pretty happy with an instant saving of $400+ per annum.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/science/earth/25fossil.html?_r=1
Bangladesh http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/14/480000-new-solar-home-systems-bangladesh/
@mildlymagnificent
No, I really haven’t. I chose Germany for a reason. They’ve been going hog-wild on energy efficiency for a while, while also retaining an industrial base, which makes them a good exemplar for our purposes. Even if you think you can outdo modern Germany in terms of energy efficiency improvements, how much do you think you can lower it? By half?
Once you realize the scope of the problem, you’ll realize that a factor of 1/2x here and 1/2x there doesn’t matter w.r.t. solar and wind and conventional energy storage. Using optimistic numbers, we’re talking all of South America fully covered in solar panels and wind mills to provide the energy for 10 billion people to live in the same standard of living of modern Germany. Throwing on a factor of 1/2 doesn’t make a significant difference. Half of ridiculous is still ridiculous.
For example, just to make a battery for the 300 million people in the United States, we would need approx 5 billion tons of lead, or approx 2.5 billion at Germany’s per capita usage. Known worldwide reserves are only 80 million tons. Estimated reserves are only 3x that. It should bother you when no one can point on a map and locate even 5% of the needed lead for the US alone. Lithium is worse, Nickle is worse. Antimony is worse (the constituent of the liquid metal battery cited above, at least for their first and published variant). Now multiply that by 33 or so for the 10 billion people that we are expecting to enter this world.
As I mentioned above, how about pumped water storage? If you ran some reasonable numbers, the surface area of just one of the two reservoirs is the same size as one of the Great Lakes. Where are you going to get all of that water? Where are you going to put that new Great Lake? Going to reuse one of the existing Great Lakes? Better say goodbye to all of the cities along the shore before you do it. And again, that’s just for the US, a population of approx 300 million. We need to handle 33x that.
Until you run the numbers, it’s very hard to appreciate the scale of the problem. Once you do, you should feel incredibly daunted, because it’s a very daunting problem. We have too many people on this planet, and we don’t have the technology to handle it, except conventional nuclear fission – specifically next gen breeder reactors like IFR and LFTR. When ranked with all alternatives, these breeder reactors are at the bottom of CO2 output. They’re tied for cleanest. They’re tied for safest. Conservative estimates say we have more than enough fuel to last until the Sun goes out. With breeder reactors, the waste is only about 1/100 in volume compared to conventional light water reactors, and is only dangerous for about 300 to 1000 years instead of 100,000s of years.
I always saw it that way. Then I watched Dr Iain Stewart’s BBC series, I think it was How to Grow a Planet. He put it the other way around. Geologists and physicists tend to do that. Puny ephemera like biological systems that function perfectly well for 100s of millions of years are mere data points or subservient contributors in a much bigger, longer series of events and phenomena.
It might have been one of his other series though I don’t think so, (and I can’t remember whether Brian Cox’s last series linking physics and biology might also have mentioned much the same idea). It makes sense though.
With enough spare solar capacity, you could probably crack water into hydrogen instead. It might be grievously inefficient, but it isn’t clearly impractical, like the battery approach. Then use fuel cells or whatever to get power out of it again. By way of a bonus, it alleviates the problem with the terrible range of electric vehicles and the inconvenience of recharging them. Then all you need to do is to solve the issue of transporting large amounts of hydrogen across the globe and storing it safely for a useful length of time. But hey, its easier than fusion!
A hydrogen economy doesn’t have the happy touchy feely decentralised nature of a solar panel on every roof though, so its a harder sell. Dead hand of big oil trying to impose control and centralise infrastructure and so on. #notallcapitalists
@anym
Quick search says 35% to 50% round trip efficiency for using electricity to split water, then store the hydrogen, then use a fuel cell to convert back to electricity. Far worse than other storage mediums like lead batteries and pumped water storage which IIRC are closer to 80% round trip efficiency. Remember that quote about all of South America? With that reduced efficiency for the storage, we need to gather more energy to account for the losses in storage, which means as a first gross approximation you also need to add all of North America in addition to all of South America to be covered in solar panels and wind mills.
Not to mention IIRC all of the good fuel cells require rare materials, which means it couldn’t scale. Instead of using rare material catalysts, maybe we could simply burn the hydrogen, but again another huge efficiency hit compared to hydrogen fuel cells. Oh no, now we need to cover all of Europe too in solar panels and wind mills.
Not to mention the problem of storage. Want to run some numbers to see how much volume capacity is needed? Want to see what that looks like on a map? I bet you won’t like the answers.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
You’ll note I opened with ‘inefficient’ and ‘spare solar capacity’. I am well aware of the difficulties involved. The key point is that it is less insane than the other alternatives that are being proposed. The practical, realistic solutions using stuff we can already do that doesn’t involve burning up the rest of our coal reserves is to build nuke plants instead.
Don’t like the nukes? Then you’re stuck with the “less insane” options, as outlined above. Or you can push for the more insane options. Good luck with that.
@anym
Ok. I guess.
I’m not contradicting you per se. I just like to call it what it is: ridiculous. Two whole continents covered in solar panels and wind mills or just one whole continent – the difference in ridiculous levels is not worth mentioning.
Eh, you don’t need that many solar panels. The total area required is surprisingly low; its only the tranmission and storage of power that’s the problem. The US has quite favourable geography (and political unity) for that sort of thing, but most other parts of the world arten’t quite so luck.
Windmills won’t get you far though, that’s for sure.
EnlightenmentLiberal. At last. Something we can agree on. Hydrogen is a dead end idea. it sounded clever 20 odd years ago. The more we know, the more we know this is not a useful notion for any but small, specialist applications.
As for Sadoway. He seems to think he’s still going strong. Here’s an item about setting up some facilities in Australia earlier this year. http://www.afr.com/markets/commodities/energy/batteries-to-revolutionise-energy-says-mits-donald-sadoway-20150127-12zb52
One thing puzzles me though. Where are you getting the numbers from for the area of solar panels/ CSP/ windfarm installations from? Do you have a reference?
The graphic I’m familiar with is this one http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127 . Let’s say the actual power needed is 3-5 times that used for the exercise – because the basis was current power use and we want people who currently have no power or no reliable power to get in on the act. Let’s also say that the calculations are far too optimistic – by an order of magnitude. So you then have to change those tiny little squares scattered over the map by increasing them by 30-50 times. You’re still nowhere near the area you were talking about. Those little squares on the Sahara and near the Kimberley region of Australia? Would hardly be noticed if you doubled them again and the pilot of your plane had accurate map coordinates.
If it’s still wildly inadequate, add in wind turbines averaging one every 30 to 50 kilometres along every long distance railway line and major highway in the world. Still wildly wrong? Add another wind turbine averaged as 1 every 50 sq km of farmland in the world. Averaged because terrain and climate make some sites – like those at 35ish degrees of latitude in South Australia – much more suitable than others.
Apart from all that, Elon Musk points out that you need no area at all for solar panels on roofs of buildings already constructed/ in use for other purposes.
While dealing with stuff here can we also send some bacteria/microbes/fungi that can handle close to Mars environments and see if some of them can adapt? Spread life to a lifeless world. Maybe in a billion years it will make a difference?
@anym
Let’s do some back-of-napkin estimates.
From easily available online sources.
Average German person’s energy usage: about 4000 kgoe / year
Area of land of South America: 17,840,000 km^2
“Full sun” solar radiation values: 1000 W / m^2
Say 15% efficiency for the solar panels, which is generous.
Say 1/6 is a good approximation for daily average values – the sun only shines for about 1/6 of the day on average for the purposes of solar power.
Throw on another 1/4 for seasonal variation worst case and the latitude variation over the continent – a generous number.
The required land area is
= (10 billion people) (4000 kgoe / person year) (year / 3.15569e7 sec) (41.868 * 10^6 Joules / 1 kgoe) (Watt / (Joule/ Sec)) (full sun m^2 / 1000 W of incoming solar radiation) (1/(1/6) adjustment for daily average) (1/(1/4) adjustment for seasonal and latitude) (km^2 / 1e6 m^2) (1 / 15% for the efficiency for the solar panels)
= 10e9 * 4e3 / 3.15569e7 * 41.868e6 / 1e3 *6 *4 / 1e6 /.15 … km^2
= 8,491,176 km^2
So, I calculate about half the land area of the whole of South America for solar only, ignoring any wind mills we can put there. However, I am using generous numbers for solar. I’m also ignoring weather. If we take into account overbuilding to cover charging energy storage to cover periods of weather plus the efficiency losses involved, it’s pretty easy to see how this number can grow drastically.
As I mentioned before, the numbers are staggering. Solar and wind are just complete non-starters if we want to do our moral duty and raise the world out of poverty.
If you look into the technical literature for the “greens”, a common underlying assumption – but one which is rarely stated – is the assumption that that we have to abandon the western developed lifestyle and drastically cut back on our energy usage. People complained about fiat problems earlier? This is the mother of all fiat problems. Convincing people that nuclear is safe and good is a far far easier task than moving the world back into the stone age, give or take any necessary programs for growing all of that food and desalinating all of that water.
@mildlymagnificent
I assume your numbers are for certain unreasonable estimates of growth projections of certain parts of the already-developed world. I’m simply asking what it would take for 10 billion people to have the same energy usage as the average modern German.
@mildlymagnificent
Looking at your source, here are the different assumptions that I can see.
Your source assumed 2000 hours of “full sun” per year. Hours in a year: about 8760. That comes out to a claimed uptime of about 22%. I assumed something around 1/6 * 1/4 = about 4%, which is much more realistic for anything which isn’t the equator. Also encoded in this number is that we do not care about yearly average. We care about the worst daily average. We care about winter months, where the daily average is much less than the yearly average. We need a solution that will work in winter months. We cannot store energy from summer to cover the winter. That’s an obscene amount of storage. That’s what my “1/4 factor” is meant to model. For example, in Germany, for several months in winter, the solar panels get less than 1% of nameplate capacity by daily average (which includes weather), far less than my generous 4% number. It really depends on the latitude and weather.
However, that’s still chump change. That’s a difference of about 5x or 6x.
The big difference is the assumption of business as usual where everyone except the west stays in abject poverty. It says “1980 (based on actual use)”, “2008 (based on actual use)”, and “2030 (projection)”. Most people in the world today live in abject poverty. I’m making the assumption that we raise those people people out of poverty, and I take into account a conservative upper bound of 10 billion people whch are expected to be on the planet within the century IIRC. Sure, your cited numbers make some sense, if the plan is to keep most people of the world in abject poverty, which is both immoral, and frankly isn’t going to happen (see my “mother of all fiat problems” above).
Ah, there we go.
Their 2030 estimate: 715 exajoules per year worldwide-total
My estimate:
= (10 billion people) (4000 kgoe / person year) (41.868 * 10^6 Joules / 1 kgoe)
= 10e9 * 4e3 * 41.868e6
= 1,674,720,000,000,000,000,000 Joules per year worldwide-total
= 1,674.72 exajoules per year worldwide-total
Ok. I guess I’m wrong above for accounting for the differences.
So, the difference in assumed power requirements is about a 2.3 x difference, e.g. the “2030 estimate” vs “10 billion people at a modern Germans power consumption”.
There’s another 5x or 6x difference in assumptions about realistic real-world solar nameplate-capacity uptime. They seemed to use highly inappropriate numbers that don’t take into account the worst case of daily averages in winter, nor does it seem to take into account latitude variations, nor does it seem to take into account weather.
Another 1.33 x difference for the difference of 20% vs 15% efficiency solar panels. Even 15% efficiency is optimistic for current tech AFAIK.
And that’s the difference between our estimates.
To be clear, when I say “weather”, you need to overbuild to handle periods of weather that reduces solar panel output. That depends on what assumptions do you want to make. Do you want 7 days of storage and the ability to recharge that storage over 7 days? Then you need to overbuild by +100% * the efficiency loss for round-trip storage conversion. For pumped water storage, it’s about 80% round-trip efficient, which means we would need to overbuild by +100% / 80% = +125%. More than double the numbers quoted in the article. That’s another 2x approx right there.
I honestly don’t know reasonable numbers for this. If the historical data indicates that you can have 14 days to recharge your 7 day storage, then you only need to overbuild by +50% / 80% = +62.5%. I should look into that. That’s an important number in the calculation.
Looking more into it, I found this source:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/RenewableEnergy/renewable_energy3.php
I’ll assume it’s legit for now. From that, we can assume about 20.8% “full sun” uptime daily average for winter months for the Sahara desert, which is a little off from the slightly more optimistic 22.8% assumed by your source (equivalent of 2000 hours of “full sun” per year). This takes into account weather on solar radiation values. It gets worse from there for other locations. A city in Brazil gets about 17.7% “full sun” update daily average for the worst months. Let’s rerun my numbers for Brazil.
= (10 billion people) (4000 kgoe / person year) (year / 3.15569e7 sec) (41.868 * 10^6 Joules / 1 kgoe) (Watt / (Joule/ Sec)) (full sun m^2 / 1000 W of incoming solar radiation) (1 / 17.7% for worst-month daily average for Brazil) (km^2 / 1e6 m^2) (1 / 15% for the efficiency for the solar panels)
= 10e9 * 4e3 / 3.15569e7 * 41.868e6 / 1e3 /.177 / 1e6 /.15 … km^2
= 1,998,864 km^2
Reminder: Area of land of South America: 17,840,000 km^2
So, before we start talking about the necessary overbuilding to handle charging the backup storage to handle periods of clouds and other weather, we’re already at about 1/9 of the whole landmass of South America, using the optimistic numbers of 15% efficient solar panels.
It’s about 4x more than your cited number. The breakdown in difference is thus: About 2.33x difference for the different starting power requirement. About 1.33x difference for the different solar panel efficiency assumption. Finally, another 1.3x difference for real world solar radiation values for South America. Even for the Sahara, the numbers they should be using for “full sun” daily average uptime for the worst time of year are too optimistic based on real data – 20.8% vs 22.8%. 2.33x 1.33x 1.3x totals to the observed 4x difference.
And again, my newest estimate doesn’t even include the necessarily overbuilding to recharge the storage during times of sun to cover times of clouds and other weather. I don’t have a good basis for an estimate, and my best guestimate is at least another 50% overbuild. Now we’re up to about 17% the landmass of South America, using generous assumptions.
Even considering covering 17% of South America in solar panels is a massive ecological disaster. Even if you spread those out over the world, it’s a massive ecological disaster.
Keep in mind solar panels degrade over time. Want to throw on another +50% modifier because of the decrease in efficiency as they experience wear and tear? Up to 25% of the South American land mass. At this point, we probably have to factor in differences in weather, latitude, etc., which will make the number grow even bigger.
Now, want to calculate the cost of that? Also, you should keep in mind the recurring costs for the never-ending project of continually replacing the panels as they reach their end of life with a 30 year lifespan. Have fun.
Not to mention that construction of solar panels is hardly clean. Involves all sorts of toxic stuff. That’s one of the main differences between diffuse “green” energy sources and nuclear. To do the same thing, we’d only need like a few thousand nuclear plants. To do it with solar, we need millions of square kilometers of solar panels, which need to be regularly replaced on approx 30 year time scales. Can you image the strip mining needed to do that? Can you imagine the amount of toxic chemicals from the never-ending manufacturing process? It’s a nightmare. It’s a difference of scale of construction on a scale of a million to 1, and maybe even a billion to 1. That’s because nuclear energy is that much more dense than solar.
Four hours per day? That’s less than 1500 hours per year. Every capital city in Australia gets at least 2200 per year – that’s Hobart. (Though I’m not quite sure of the exact definition of “bright” sunshine used here – http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Australia/Cities/sunshine-annual-average.php)
At latitude of 42 degrees, Hobart is much like Rome, Madrid, Istanbul. Though geography is as important as latitude. Perth, Sydney, Adelaide and Canberra are at much the same latitudes – from 33 to 35S – but their “bright” sunshine hours vary. 3212, 2592, 2774 and 2811 respectively – the closest and the furthest from the equator are the two largest numbers. I’m pretty sure Los Angeles at latitude 34N would be somewhere in that range rather than a measly 1500.
Just add up the populations of all the cities listed here – https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=List_of_cities_by_latitude – between 40N and 40S and work on a much higher solar number than 1500 hours of sunshine per annum and go from there. Maybe use a lower number for higher latitudes.
The assumption I’d make is that you’d be sensible like South Australia. For all our blistering summer heat, we can still get a bit chilly in winter even though we never go below 0C – there are real drawbacks to an arid climate. We rely on wind year round, but especially in winter. (We have solar panels on our roof and we overproduce – a nil or credit bill – for 2 or 3 quarters per year, but never in winter.) We have the great advantage – along with Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia of being on the upper, outer edge of the “roaring forties” winds that circle the Southern Ocean so we’d be mad not to make best use of it. Tasmania of course is well endowed with water so they rely mostly on hydro. Other places with other geographical advantages and disadvantages should choose the best mix for their conditions.
OK, I have to ask. What about the “lunar ring” / any other solar-panels-on-the-moon project; any chance of feasibility there?
I hear Germany is a good example of a country using large amounts of renewables (solar and wind).
Powering the world with half a continent’s worth of 15% efficiency solar panels sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Except that commercial solar panel production will evolve, efficiency will rise. It’s like saying in 1950 that the fuel economy of the average American car will never rise over 15mpg because, reasons.
Saying that solar panel production, recycling and disposal involves toxic substances glosses over the fact that every other competing power technology has environmental problems too. Recycling solar panels will become a growth industry when it’s needed most.
Ignoring all the other complementary renewable energy sources seems odd too, wind, geothermal, wave and current etc will all come on stream to complement solar power in its various forms. Oh and solar panels can be placed on vertical surfaces of tall buildings to capture solar energy at the times that insolation isn’t vertical. This adds no extra land area to solar collection at all.
Finally, if someone actually manages to produce a nuclear power plant that is clean, safe, portable, recyclable etc at sensible cost it will be assessed at the time to see if it can compete with zero input cost renewables.
Nuclear is already far far in front of renewables in every sense except for the waste.
@mildlymagnificent
I’m interested in the daily average for the worst months. That’s the constraint on the system. Yearly averages are meaningless. I covered this already. Please read.
In the real world, relying on a mix is silly, absent one or two concerns. We should care about lowest carbon footprint, cheap economics, good environmental quality, etc. That means we should pick the best technology on these measures, absent one or two concerns. Advocating a mix means we’re going to score lower on the aggregate on these metrics of carbon release, economics, other environmental impact, etc.
There are a couple of reasons why you might want a mix.
For example, perhaps hydro is better than the alternatives, but it may also be that hydro is maxed out. It is true that all of the good hydro installation sites are taken. It’s dubious whether the world could even double hydro output. Remember that every hydro installation results in a massive reservoir, destroying large amounts of local habitant. Greens really care about that stuff, and they’re often on the forefront of stopping new dam construction.
The other argument for a mix is that one renewable technology might be too intermittent to be reliable, but mixing a bunch of intermittent sources can make a reliable source. This is simply not true for most areas. I’m not familiar with Australia offhand. I’ll be sure to look that up later. However, I know my numbers for Europe offhand. You see, there’s this thing called weather systems. In the last couple of years on record, there have been times where for a week at a time, solar produced only approx 1% of nameplate capacity weekly average, and the wind was similarly dismal, across all of western Europe. The idea that mixing wind with solar will smooth out irregularities is just wrong. The idea that sufficiently diverse geographic distributions of wind and solar will fix problems is also wrong – unless we’re talking a single ultra high voltage grid connecting the western part of Europe to the eastern part of Russia – I’m not sure of the numbers then. However, even then, with experimental ultra high voltage grid technology, there are still losses.
This mantra of “relying on a mix” has little to no basis in real-world engineering with the constraints we have been given. It’s just an excuse without evidence that greens employ to stay in denial of reality.
Give me a single local area, with a specific local mix – I want numbers – and we can run the numbers right here, just to demonstrate the absurdity on many metrics, including human deaths, environmental impact, economic cost, and ability to generate electricity reliably.
@Lofty
There are certain fundamental limits that constrain solar cell conversion efficiency.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/dont-be-a-pv-efficiency-snob/
We can dodge some of those limits by using multiple kinds of semiconductor in the same solar panel, but then costs go up dramatically. 15% is a fair number for the mass production that we’re going to need for any appreciable amount of solar.
Similarly, there are limits to the fuel efficiency of internal combustion engines. Those limits do not mean 15mpg limit, but they do impose a limit somewhere that you cannot avoid because thermodynamics says so, or you use a different kind of thing than an internal combustion engine.
I didn’t just say it involves toxic chemicals and waste. I said that it involves millions, perhaps billions, more in volume amount of toxic chemicals and waste. That’s not true of nuclear. You’re glossing over the very real-world differences in the scope of the problem by ignoring quantity.
Hydro currently provides about 6% of global energy production. As I mentioned above, it’s dubious if we could even scale it up by a factor of 2x. When you also take into account the energy we’ll need to raise 10 billion people to the standard of living of modern Germany, hydro won’t even be 1%. We can safely ignore it for our back-of-napkin calculations.
Wave technology? I admit this stuff looks promising. Rarely do people ever talk about it, except as a throwaway “and that other stuff” like you just did. Let’s look at it for a moment.
Let’s see how much coastline we would need for outrageously generous numbers. I don’t think I’ve ever done this calculation before. Let’s do it.
optimistic available energy: 40 kw / meter coastline
optimistic conversion efficiency: 40%
Needed coastline for power for 10 billion people at standard of modern Germany, wave power only:
= (10 billion people) (4000 kgoe / person year) (41.868 * 10^6 Joules / 1 kgoe) (year / 3.15569e7 sec) (Watt / (Joule/ Sec)) (meter coastline / 40 kw) (1 / 40% conversion efficiency)
= 10e9 *4e3 *41.868e6 /3.15569e7 /40e3 /.40 … meter coastline
= 3,316,865 km coastline
It’s actually surprisingly difficult to find simple coastline length estimates of the continents with google. Here are some I found:
Africa: approx 26,000 km
Australia: 35,876 km.
“Europe”: approx 32,000 km
North America: approx 60,000 km.
South America: 144,566.8 kn.
Being generous IMHO for Asia, the total world’s available coastlines cannot match even 25% of the needed power. Chances are that my numbers are way too optimistic anyway, and I bet it’s closer to 10% of the needed power. Hey; at least it’s significantly better than hydro. It might actually make an appreciable dent, at a much higher levelized cost compared to nuclear.
Of course, I want you to consider what kind of engineering problems it would be to put water wave generators along all of the coasts of the world, and the transmission requirements, and the maintenance, upkeep, and replacement requirements. Some IMHO optimistic estimates are that water wave generators require replacement after 20 years. A salt-water environment is a generally pretty nasty place to have equipment.
Geothermal is also generally pretty dismal if you try to scale it up. I’m too lazy right now to take that down too.
What else did you mean to include in “etc.” ? Hydro is less than 1% of our needs. Water wave is probably less than 10%, and it comes with its own intermittancy problems, but which are admittingly less bad than wind and solar. Solar panels would require covering significant amounts of our available landmass in solar panels, and have huge intermittancy problems for anything that’s not the equator. Wind has huge intermittancy problems.
I’m not seeing a workable solution here.
That will increase costs by another factor of approx 5x. Great plan. With realistic estimates for one of the best situations in the world, Brazil, we would need to cover at least 25% of South America in solar panels.
We have one. It’s called Fukushima. And yes I’m being purposefully provocative. Contrary to popular myth, no one outside the plant has yet to die from radiation poisoning, and it’s likely that no one ever will. You can look at the safety numbers of conventional nuclear, and it’s ridiculously safe.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
More people died from hydro-electric accidents than nuclear power plant accidents; a dam that breaks and releases a massive flood tends to kill a lot of people. Just to put this into perspective: it is fair to that that more people have died choking on sliced bread than have ever died from radiation poisoning from a nuclear power plant. It’s the new safest thing since sliced bread.
“What about all of that nasty nuclear waste?” Let’s put it into perspective. All of the nuclear waste we’ve ever made from nuclear power plants would fit into the field of a single football stadium, 3 meters tall. Want to compare that to billions of meters of coastline for wave power that we would need to power the world and raise everyone out of poverty? Want to compare that to millions of square kilometers for solar power that we would need to power the world and raise everyone out of poverty? It’s not even in the same neighborhood. It’s not even close.
“But a very large area around Fukushima will be uninhabitable for centuries / hundreds of thousands of years / insert your favorite fearmongering quote here.” No it won’t. Look up the numbers.
And Fukushima is a 40 year old pisspoor design. Modern designs like the AP-1000 are ridiculously safer. They are walkaway safe. No operator intervention required IIRC.
And then we have future designs like the IFR which are just as safe, and LFTR which arguably is even safer still.
LFTR especially will be even ridiculously safer still. LFTR lacks the high pressure of a light water reactor, and the chemistry is different. All of the nasty stuff wants to stay in solution in the liquid salt. That means that there is no driver to put the radioactive stuff into the air in case of an accident. Even if you set off a literal bomb in the core of a LFTR, there is no driver to move the radioactive stuff into the air. All you would have is a very small localized area of highly radioactive fluoride salt splattered about that would quickly freeze. Cleanup would be a relative breeze.
I don’t know why portable is a metric that I should care about.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by recyclable.
Finally, you missed an important metric: sufficient fuel to last a very long time. With breeder reactors, it can be shown that we have enough nuclear fuel to outlast the lifetime of our Sun. It’s “renewable” by any relevant and reasonable standard.
PS:
Oh, and IFR, LFTR, and any other breeder reactor will generate 1/100 of the waste of a light water reactor in volume. It’s a consequence of the higher fuel efficiencies of a breeder. Also, the remaining waste will only be “dangerous” for 300 to 1000 years, as opposed to 100,000s of years for conventional light water reactor waste. We know how to handle 300 to 1000 years. Wet pool storage for a couple years. Dry cask storage for a little longer. Then vitrify the stuff in glass. The glass will last longer than 1000 years. What’s left is no more dangerous than simple uranium ore that’s already in the ground. Problem solved.
Keep in mind the massive differences in scale here. I cited some of the numbers above.
EL, wake me up when someone builds a gigglefactory to pump out these world saving nuke reactors in worthwhile quantities. I’m not saying that they won’t be good sometime, just that now the planet needs action and wind and solar are busy ramping up production as we speak.
@Lofty
France did it in under 30 years. They went from near 0% electricity from nuclear to 80% electricity from nuclear in about 30 years. There is every reason to believe that we could do similar things and move the planet to basically completely CO2 free electricity production in 30 to 50 years. I’ve seen plausible time estimates that are far less.
@EnlightenmentLiberal 79
Actually the opposite seems to be true, from what I’ve heard from actual engineers (I’m not sure if you are one). Hydro was also described as being tragically underutilized here in Alberta, with a major river project being cancelled for dubious reasons. To be fair to you, nuclear wasn’t even part of the discussion, for reasons I don’t recall (or weren’t stated).
Again, I just want to point out my numbers above regarding hydro, and the relatively non-controversial observation that the world could not double power production of hydro from existing hydro power levels. Most of the good spots have already been tapped.
So, apparently (maybe) there’s a good spot that is still left somewhere in Alberta. Congrats for you. In terms of solving the problems of how to raise 10 billion people out of poverty, it’s a rounding error. Hydro power production is a rounding error in terms of the power we need.
*by “the opposite seems to be true” I mean that a mix was suggested as a good idea in my recent alt energy class. Your objections seem bogus because I think a mix is the solution to each of them. Though, of course, if there were indeed one single technology that was superior in every way and all that, obviously that would be the best choice. But otherwise it is best to use as much renewable as possible and back those up with natural gas or something. Unfortunately I haven’t learned enough about the nuclear techs to say much about that.
False, there are new small dam technologies.
@Brian Pansky
You cannot avoid basic physics.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
If all you care about is raw power, which is good for a first approximation, then a bunch of smaller dams of the same power as a single larger dam will have massively more reservoir area by surface area.
Physics places tight constraints on the possible solutions to the problems we face, as I hope I demonstrated here with mere back-of-napkin calculations. Apparently it’s not sinking in yet.
By the way Canada does have a ton of Hydro. But Alberta (an outlier) uses mostly coal :(
Interestingly someone recently suggested a good use of abandoned open cut coal pits, as large energy stores. Install pumped hydro between the pit and a ground level pondage and you can store quite a bit of intermittent energy.
@ Lofty
I urge you, and everyone else, to read the link I just gave for pumped storage. The problem with pumped storage is that it’s just so diffuse.
Using leftover pits from open pit mining is not likely to change some of the basic calculus given in the link. Here’s one moneyshot of many:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
Bolding added
This is a discussion for using hydro as a battery and not as a power source. It’s also in the context of the US for a mere 7 days, for a mere population of a 300 million, not the the 10 billion we need to be able to handle. If it will take the size of Lake Erie for just 300 million, imagine what it would look like for 10 billion?
Also from the same link:
@Enlightenment Liberal
To be honest I’m not even sure what you hope will sink in (I already know that “physics puts limits on stuff”, that is oblivious). I tried looking at the start of your posting here but I didn’t spot anywhere that really made sense of why you are even doing the calculations you are doing.
@Brian Pansky
Estimates are that we will have 10 billion people on this planet within a very short time. I want to find a way to produce enough energy to raise these people out of poverty, and that will do so affordably, and with as little negative environmental impact as possible, and preferably with abundant supplies of fuel.
The only technology which I know which passes those metrics is conventional nuclear fission power, and particularly the next-gen breeder reactors like IFR and LFTR.
So EL, you are saying, don’t bother chasing 10 different renewable technologies that each can supply say 10% of the world’s energy needs, because, Uncle Nuke will just gallop to the rescue, any time now? Pardon me for being faintly cynical just now about the claims of the nuke industry.
just one article
@Lofty
Your source is simply not engaged with reality. I hoped to argue that case strenuously with my back-of-napkin calculations here.
New nuclear is that much more expensive because of several factors, ridiculous over-regulation, lots of delaying lawsuits, etc. China and Russia seem to be building them cost-effective just fine.
Sorry. 10? I only saw like 5. What’s the other 5?
For a target of 10 billion people at modern Germany’s per capita energy consumption:
Water wave power. Available coastline limits this to less than 10% from my rough guestimates. And that’s one of the better options.
Hydro electric dams will be a rounding error.
Solar on its own will require approx 25% of South America completely covered in solar panels.
Wind. IIRC, it requires 50x more land than solar. On the plus side, perhaps much less of an environmental disaster. On the negative side, 50x more of 25% of South America is several times more land than we have.
Geothermal? Which? There are several fanciful schemes of digging large bore holes and harvesting heat. I’m highly dubious of those, and for good reason.
Biofuels. It’s a great plan – if your goal is to create starvation in the world by driving up food prices. Also with the available land, and with our target energy production, I’d bet it’s a rounding error just like hydro.
What else do you have?
What do we have? Only solar might plausibly scale on just this simple analysis alone, with the others constituting no more than 10% to 20% of the total production.
Then there’s the energy storage problem for solar. Pumped hydro the size of Lake Erie for just 300 million people, meaning it cannot scale to 10 billion. Common chemical batteries are right out too. Sulfur-sodium might be able to scale at this level of analysis, but on further examination costs will kill that. Other options like compressed air, flywheels, etc., are even more fanciful.
What am I missing? You’re all talk and hot air, just like your sources. Give me specifics so I can run some numbers. Do the math.
Also, in case I wasn’t clear before, I advocate research into everything. I just think that we should start solving the problems that we have now with technologies that we have now instead some unspecifiable technologies that we’ll discover in the future.
I appreciate that nobody necessarily has the time or the inclination to answer (and I was thinking in terms of a couple of lines, not an in-depth reply) but just in case this got lost upthread – could anyone say whether solar panels on the moon are a pipe-dream or actually feasible at all? I’ve seen it being seriously suggested as doable with current technology for investment on a par with other energy technologies, but personally have no idea whether it’s pie in the sky (ha) or a genuine possibility (technically, at least, if not politically) within a few decades.
What are you talking about? OF COURSE terraforming Mars would be way easier than fixing Earth, after all, there are no politicians on Mars!
Nothing wrong with solar panels on the moon for use on the moon but they’d still be in shade half of every month. Solar panels in geostationary orbit would be able to provide power virtually continuously to a receiver on Earth. No idea what the power beam would look like though, microwaves perhaps.
EnlightenmentLiberal
I just don’t understand this. We have choices about where and how we place wind turbines. Many are placed on hilly portions of agricultural land which are unsuitable, partly or entirely, for cropping. If they were only suitable for grazing in the first place then virtually nothing is lost by installing turbines. People who want crops and turbines on the same land simply redesign their fencing and access roads to maximise the utility of both. Many farmers want turbines on their land to provide reliable continuing income rather than being entirely at the mercy of the vagaries of agricultural production and the even more variable prices for their crops and animal products.
Other turbines are placed on land that is unused or unusable for any other purpose – maybe because of the constant wind – so placing them there is neither burden nor interference with other purposes.
opposablethumbs
Obviously solar panels on the moon would work just fine for any local purposes if, for instance, we installed scientific equipment there. But the engineering and the cost of transmitting the energy to Earth is prohibitive.
One simple rule for power generation/collection/transmission is that there should be as few steps as possible in the process. Solar power is easiest and best collected right where it’s to be used – the classic rooftop panels powering hot water and other household services and appliances or those nifty rollup-panels-in-a-backpack used by the US Army. http://cleantechnica.com/2010/09/14/u-s-army-deploys-solar-power-backpacks-in-afghanistan/
Even when there’s an existing generation and transmission system, local solar or other generation at the level of household, business or community premises reduces demands and stresses on transmission and transformer equipment. When you’re looking at getting fuel to supply power generators in remote areas, military sites or islands then it’s even more important to eliminate the consumption of additional fuel/power just to get fuel/power to another location.
We may have problems getting enough power for a good – decent – barely adequate standard of living for all of earth’s occupants from its own resources. But trying to get it second-hand from somewhere as far away as the moon would make it impossible. (Apart from the extreme unlikelihood of getting some/much/lots of usable power from moonlight itself which would at least eliminate the effort and expense of transmitting it).
I should have mentioned. Solar “farms” are just as capable of supporting grazing – sheep and poultry at least – as wind farms are.
According to this report, solar fixings only take up 5% of the land. Sheep and chooks can happily graze in the shade of panels just as they do under trees or beside hedges. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/21/are-solar-farms-really-hitting-british-food-production
@mildlymagnificent
I see a short attention span. Did you even read the sentence or two after the bit you quoted from me? I made the same point (albeit much more briefly).
@mildlymagnificent
Oh? So, only approx 5% of the sunlight is captured per m^2? Remember my estimate for 25% of all of South America? I was assuming 100% land utilization. With only 5% utilization, the required amount of land to devote to solar panels to power 10 billion people at modern Germany per capita usage is around 500% of all of South America. That’s 5x the landmass of South America. And now we’re definitely dealing with different latitudes, which means the number is only going to get higher. I don’t think we have enough land on the planet for that.
In the same way a slim ankle can support the cross section of a beer bellied boof head a solar panel has support structures that only use 5% of the ground covered by the panels. The rest of the ground is available for other purposes. Sunlight can even enter that space at times for shade tolerant plants to grow. Evaporation is reduced too.
Ok. My misunderstanding. My apologies.
mildlymagnificent, thanks for the Guardian article. It’s always entertaining to read comments of people shouting their perceived ‘truth” and being roundly refuted. I’d imagine that solar farms would be even more effective in drylands, the panels’ shading gives a microclimate benefit in more ways than one. Much like planting trees for shelter but instantly providing a harvest of energy and improving soil moisture.
The fact is that distributed generation annoys the hell out of right wing, they prefer it to be located in discrete, large and above all easily controlled lumps. Power “should” be in the hands of the 1%, they say. The 99% need to pay for the privilege of using that centralised power, and at a steep price.
EnlightenmentLiberal, no worries, we do live in “interesting times”.
In the OP, PZ complains that science fiction solutions to human-caused destruction are implausible, and that more time should be spent in preventing humans from causing destruction in the first place. Talk about a pipe dream! It is almost infinitely easier to develop technological solutions than it is to change human nature. Chemistry and physics, we have a decent grasp on. Human biology, we barely understand…and human psychology might as well be a black box.
Thousands of years of history demonstrate that humans, both as individuals and as a species, have difficulty in placing the needs of the many above the needs of the few; humans also have difficulty in planning for the short term.
So, PZ, how are you going to make humans less destructive, exactly? To use an American example, how are you going to make the Republican party less selfish, less greedy, less self- (and everyone else- ) destructive?
Brainwashing? Dictatorship? Seriously, I’m curious what you have in mind to change human nature. Because frankly, THAT is far more idealistic and far fetched than terraforming Mars.
And then they can’t discuss how planned obsolescence means unnecessary manufacturing producing excess CO2. Shouldn’t “scientists” have noticed by now.
Oh that creates JOBS. But then they can’t make accounting mandatory in the schools or report Demand Side Depreciation.
The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederick Pohl
brett
A little known dirty secret in Germany is that while any conventional power resource, be it coal or wind or whatever has to be insured to 100% of possible damage. Thta insurance cost is, of course, part of the energy cost. Nuclear plants only have to be insured to 5% of possible damage. Because if they had to ensure 100% of a damage like Chernobyl, the cost would be gigantic.
Which isn’t even touching the subject of waste disposal and the little fact that it’s non renewable, too.
anym
Funny thing, people are working on it. People who believe that it’s possible and realistic. People who don’t believe in solar fairies, but efficient panels and things like the Spanish Torres Solares (now with storage!)
Lofty
Also, solar panels aren’t the only possibility for getting energy out of the sun. Spain is currently developing plants that rely on conventional technology, turbines, which seems to be more efficient in hot climates. There are some that store energy by superheating salts so they can still provide energy at night.
EL
As task that will not be accomplished within a generation or two. So you’re trying to solve 2065’s problem by insisting on 2015’s technology.
I find that very cynical. To handwave the massive destruction and harm brought to generations by saying that accidents happen elsewhere, too.
It’S funny how those things always become “pisspoor design” or something like that after the catastrophe happened. Can we just turn off all the other piss poos nuclear plants, please?
You’re assuming that breeder reactors, something that is NOT currently in use (with very few exceptions) can be easily converted into a large scale solution on short notice, but something that is currently being in use and constantly improved cannot do so in the long run.
Yep, and we’re getting information about the accidents in their totally safe piss poor design rectors about once a week. They also sometimes have to buy energy in Germany because their cool nuclear power plants aren’t coughing out enough megawatts
Both countries known for their reliable track record of giving correct numbers, lack of corruption, extreme respect for the environment and the people who live there.
Really, you want to model your society and the decision making process after China and Russia?
+++
Oh, has anybody mentioned gas from agricultural waste yet? Another piece that adds to the total and that can rely on current technology and infrastructure.
I haven’t read Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy on terraforming Mars, so I don’t know if his characters tackled the problem of Mars’ lack of a strong magnetic field. It’s something I’ve never seen discussed when people talk about colonizing Mars, but Earth is somewhat unique in the Solar System in that it generates a strong magnetic field which protects us from Solar radiation. Water and oxygen alone would not make Mars habitable for life and I don’t know how you get the planet’s molten iron core (if it has one) to start spinning to generate a magnet field.
Lofty: some businesses are also putting solar panels above open-air parking spaces — which could not only generate extra power, but keep cars from becoming ovens during summer days. That would save at least a few drops of gas each time someone gets back into a car, by reducing the need for immediate use of the car’s AC.
Seriously, I’m curious what you have in mind to change human nature.
We don’t have to change human nature; we can improve our ability to efficiently recycle our various waste materials, which will give us access to more resources and thus less need to fight our neighbors for raw materials. We can also redouble our efforts to make contraception available to poor people, which will give them the ability to control their own populations and thus reduce the number of people needing to fight for necessities.
…human psychology might as well be a black box.
Given the increasing effectiveness with which demagogues and advertizers manipulate human thinking to induce them to cling to beliefs that are clearly destructive and wrong, I’d say human psychology is far from a “black box,” and it’s both lazy and irresponsible to think it is. It’s not a “black box” to people like Karl Rove, so it shouldn’t be a “black box” to people like us.
Apart from whatever else, as Ze Madmax mentioned, this is pretty unfair to Kim Stanley Robinson; he wrote a set of novels that was in some sense anti-terraforming, or at least very complex and ambiguous about terraforming. He’s a pretty intense environmentalist and very much not part of the “whatever, let’s just set off some volcanoes!” crowd, and makes pretty much all the points made in PJ’s post.
gadfly47: yeah, he covers the magnetic field problem, albeit in a handwaving sort of way that’s definitely intended to be “okay, let me get on with my story” and not “here’s a serious proposed solution.” He’s well aware that this stuff will all be much harder in reality than in novels.
That’s why people still think that shitting in the street is a good idea.
Oh, wait, they don’t. If I look at human history, humans have changed a lot over the last decades, leave alone centuries.
Really? I presume you mean this paragraph …
I must be misreading you. I see the bolded sentence as saying that wind turbines require a lot of land. Which is exactly the opposite of my point.
@Giliell, plenty of people still are shitting in the street. It’s a hard and unsolved problem on the global scale.
Raging Bee @110, advertising is designed to get people to buy things, which, frankly, people enjoy doing. Advertising can be used to persuade people not to do things, but its much harder. Consider how many people still smoke (20% of the U.S. population, I believe?), despite the vast anti-smoking campaigns.
Giliell @ 112, I would call that a societal norm, not a fundamental aspect of human nature. I’m talking about greed, short-sightedness, and frank, gross stupidity. And please believe that I know that I suffer from those flaws myself–for example, I don’t recycle nearly as much as I should, for example, largely because I’m lazy and because I’m good at justifying that laziness.
Despite my tone, I’m really not trying to be confrontational, I’m just frustrated. Given that roughly half of Americans don’t even believe in evolution (last time I checked), what makes PZ and others think that societal changes have a snowball’s chance in hell of fixing the massive ecological problems that humans cause? What miracle will make humans (as a group) suddenly agree to stop mis-using resources?
As I said, I think it’s much more likely that we will come up with some sort of technological fix, then that humans will agree to start working together to share resources and fix problems.
Your answer is right there. You’re not unusual, you’re not especially lazy, you’re certainly not a moral failure. Those “flaws” are ordinary human attributes.
When a society genuinely wants to achieve certain things, it makes those things easy, routine, more or less invisible, or it can make them desirable or profitable, rather than imposing tasks or requiring individual grit or persistence or courage to make sure they’re done. Hence the success of container deposit legislation and other schemes that make people want to take the necessary action and make that action as simple and painless as possible.
mildlymagnificant@116, with respect, the problems facing humanity require far more radical solutions than container deposits.
The sea levels are rising, yet people continue to build extensive developments along the coasts. Sea life is dying out (except for the jellyfish), but overfishing continues. Water supplies are dwindling, but only token measures are being taken (stopping people from watering their lawns doesn’t help when 75%+ of our water goes to agriculture.) There is increasing evidence that fracking poisons water supplies and causes earthquakes, yet the amount of fracking is increasingly rapidly, and state governments are even over-riding local bans on fracking.
All sorts of antibiotic resistance diseases are brewing in India and Bangladesh (and probably China), most notably resistant TB, but antibiotic misuse continues. Anti-vaccination idiots have caused a resurgence of whooping cough and measles in the US and England, and anti-vaccination fears have prevented the elimination of polio in various African and Asia countries (partly because the US, in its infinite wisdom, had a CIA team pretend to be a polio vaccination team to gather information on Bin Laden, leading Pakistanis to turn on real vaccination teams.)
Lessee, what else? Oh yeah, the Good Friday accords in Ireland are on the verge of breaking down, China is flexing its muscles in the South China sea, Japan is talking about military re-armament…I could go on.
Global warming, by itself, would be bad enough. But when you add in the desertification of the seas, the increasingly probability of one or more devastating pandemics, and the likelihood of several nasty wars, and the outlook for the next century is exceptionally grim.
So, container deposits just aren’t going to cut it. Humanity needs to stop doing stupid shit (like fracking) RIGHT NOW. If we don’t, a lot of people are going to die in the not too distant future.
But how do you get people to stop doing stupid shit? We can’t even get people to stop killing each other because they have the wrong skin color!
@Giliell
It’s the prudent thing to do. We have to start solving this problem now. We don’t have the time to wait around for global warming. We need to start building now.
Chernobyl wasn’t a nuclear power plant. Chernobyl was a research reactor.
Chernobyl had a positive coefficient of reactivity. No reactor in the west has such a thing. It was “designed” to explode. Reactors in the west cannot explode in that way.
At most, approx 4000 people will die from radiation release from Chernobyl. With the worst design imaginable.
Expected death toll from radiation release from Fukushima for people outside the plant? 0.
Number of people dead from the tsunami? Approx 15,890.
Number of people dead from the evacuation of Fukushima? About 1,600. Including suicides, illness from hospital exposure, etc.
Coal kills millions every year from airborne particulates. Millions. We’re not even getting into global warming. And yes, I know you’ll want to cite wind, solar, etc., but I hope the purpose of this thread is to emphasize just how massively unready these technologies are to scale. We only have 2015 technology, and we have a problem that we need to fix, and we need to start fixing it now.
I think you need to check your math on that insurance cost.
IFR. Demonstrated at engineering scale in Argone National Lab in 1984-1994 (except for the pyroprocessing which was only demonstrated at lab scale). All of the parts, chemistry, physics, engineering, has been more or less demonstrated, and it’s likely to work. The only thing left to do AFAIK is build a commercial prototype. Right now, we have GE willing to build a commercial prototype, pyroprocessing and all. It’s called the S-PRISM reactor.
But yes, I also advocate building out conventional light water reactors like candy, like the AP-1000. About safety – they have done the tests. The AP-1000 is passively safe, walk-away safe. No operator intervention required for 72 hours. In a Fukushima scenario, there would have been no problems. Don’t judge the technology of 2015 by the technology of 1975.
Death count? Injury count? Impact to the environment? I’m going to assume about 0.
Also, I assume you’re talking about the experimental Phoenix reactor and/or their aqueous reprocessing facilities. Of course you should expect problems at experimental reactors. They’re experimental. As for the aqueous reprocessing facilities, those things are a nasty mess, which is why I’m promoting breeders as a way to end the need of aqueous reprocessing. Aqueous reprocessing is a great way to get nuclear bomb material, which means it’s a great win again nuclear weapons proliferation too.
Lol.
But seriously, I know that in the recent history, many news sites have claimed that Germany has gotten all of their electricity from their solar, and they had excess to sell to other countries. What those news stories do not tell you is that it was for an hour or less at mid-day, and that the German grid would collapse without neighboring nations like France to provide power when the Germans need it, and/or without a massive uptake in the use of coal and nat gas by Germany.
That’s the problem of wind and solar, the need for backing power generation or backing power storage. We simply do not have the energy storage technologies, which means Germany is relying on dirty fossil fuels and its neighbors to keep their grid up.
Want to know the CO2 footprint for a German and a French?
France per capita per year: About 5 tonnes CO2.
Germany per capita per year: About 9 tonnes CO2.
Why is that? In large part because France has 80% grid electricity from nuclear, and Germany is burning some of the dirtiest forms of coal at an unprecedented rate.
…
@mildlymagnificent
Ok. Let me try again.
Windmills need a certain amount of separation before they start suffering losses. According to my rough calculations, for our target energy production, for wind mills alone, for the standard spacing of windmills, the area of land that would be “covered” in windmill is more land than there is on the planet (approx). 12.5x the land mass of South America is a lot of land. All of that land would not literally be covered in wind mills, but there would be no more land that we might be able to place wind mills on without suffering efficiency losses of individual wind mills.
El
Actual numbers:
Source
Now, this is only the USA, but simehow I doubt your numbers are adding up to millions for the world. Now that we have established that you are simply making your numbers up, we can end the discussion.
1. France is closer to 6 than 5
2. Germany has reduced its per capita alrady by 20% over a short few years.
3. Those numbers are pretty unreliable anyway since they don’t take export into account. Guess which is one of the world’s biggest export nations and which one has been struggleing with an ongoing economic crisis and a sharp decline of its industry, especially the automobile industry, shutting down many plants?
Oh, look at that picture in the corner
Increase of cancer in childhood near nuclear power plants
Of course, your argument is that of the drunk driver who made it home safely after almost killing a few pedestrians.
EL
But loads of ocean, some of it quite shallow...
@Lofty
And the costs go up drastically for water deployment.
Again, don’t you pause a little when you consider the scope of it? Again, I want to you consider the scope: We need to cover every square kilometer of the land of this planet in wind mills, or some significant fraction of that. That’s obscene. It’s patently ridiculous on many levels.
I don’t think you’re paying attention to what I’m saying. Or you think I made a mistake in my math somewhere. If so, please point it out. I have been known to do simple mistakes in situations like this.
@Giliell
Regarding deaths from airborne pollution from coal. A simple study that says “coal kills this many per year” is hard to come by. Here’s some good sources on the matter:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/dec/17/pollution-car-emissions-deaths-china-india
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/
http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2013/12/12/map-health-impact-chinas-coal-plants/
http://noharm.org/lib/downloads/climate/Coal_Literature_Review_2.pdf
Let me take a quote from the noharm.org paper that cites WHO and a paper from the Lancet (which unfortunately is behind a paywall).
From one of the WHO links above:
A lot of that is vehicle exhaust. However, a lot of that is fossil fuel burning for electricity, and a lot of that is coal. Also, a lot of that is indoor heating and cooking, and a lot of that is coal. Poke around some of the links I provided for additional details.
1 million is not all that farfetched when you take into account the higher population densities of China and India, the lack of good pollution controls of countries like China and India and the rest of the developing / undeveloped world, and the use of coal for personal dwelling heating and cooking. The actual numbers of yearly deaths from coal air pollution might by closer to 2 million.
Regarding France v Germany on CO2 footprint.
At the end of the day, it’s trivial to find data on electricity usage per capita, and it’s trivial to find breakdowns on what percentage electricity usage is of total energy usage for these countries, and it’s trivial to find breakdowns of energy sources for that electricity.
We can see how Germany is planning on building more coal power production alone in the next decade than it will have in combined wind and solar capacity at the end of the decade.
Germany is going down a road all right – a road to becoming the highest CO2 emitter per capita in Europe, the largest emitters of airborne particulates which is the number 1 immediate environmental killer of people, and intermittency problems which their electric grid cannot handle without outside help. They’re sacrificing their country on the political altar of green energy because of the hysteria surrounding nuclear power, hysteria which you Giliell are party to.
Quoting Giliell:
Note: This link appears to be broken.
Just as well, because it’s almost certain to be pure unmitigated bullshit. The levels of radiation released from normal operation of nuclear power plants is well within the noise of background radiation levels. There are been many studies on the effect of differing background radiation levels on people, and they have all come back negative. Different cities across the globe can vary by factors of 2x and more. You think less than a 1% difference is going to have an effect? 1% difference is also being very generous. If I had to guess, it’s more like 0.001%.
Also, I know of several unfortunate situations where you can cite good numbers of increased cancer risks from nuclear storage problems in the US, but those would all be the unfortunate byproduct of weapons plutonium manufacture, and the results of that is particularly nasty. The technologies for weapons plutonium manufacture and nuclear electricity are wildly different. Evidence that damns one does not damn another.
Don’t get your evidence from Greenpeace. They lie in such matters. For example, The World Health Organization and many other reputable organizations put the deaths from Chernobyl at only 4000.
As for Fukushima, here’s what the World Health Organization has to say on the matter:
http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/pub_meet/risk_assessment_radiation_japan_2013_exec_en.pdf
Yes, I know the report goes on to name some adverse health effects, but that’s for the most affected locations inside Fukushima, which were evacuated, which means no actual harm will happen. Also, it’s also highly controversial whether 12 to 25 mSv per year is sufficient to produce any health effects whatsoever. Such analysis tends to rely on the linear no-threshold model of radiation toxicity, which should have been discredited long ago as anything but an overly conservative bound for low dose rates.
Workers who went into the Fukushima plant to deal with the mess, sure, they’re going to have problems.
Also, this is why I’m advocating that we build 2015 technology like the AP-1000 where the problems of Fukushima and Chernobyl cannot happen because the engineering and physics is different, instead of 1975 technology of Fukushima. That’s also why I’m advocating the building of IFR, specifically the GE S-PRISM reactor, which is ridiculously safer still.
EL @122:
My bolding. What about emission spikes during fuel replacement? Maybe you have a ready answer, but “unmitigated bullshit” seems a bit precipitous. See here.
@Rob
http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/perspectives-on-nuclear-issues/the-kikk-study-explained-fact-sheet.cfm
I’m still in the process of fact-checking this, looking at the citations, etc., but it seems that even the Germans dismiss the conclusions which you draw from their study.
@Rob
Hmm… I did some more research. I found this link:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2574389/radioactive_spikes_from_nuclear_plants_a_likely_cause_of_childhood_leukemia.html
Fascinating. This might be a legitimate case of LNT underestimating risk. I’ve never heard of this before.
Do note that this is unlikely to change my mind. At worst, the proposed danger can easily be dealt with and mitigated, and the purported worst-case damage itself is still quite small. Still much better than alternatives.
I need some more time to look into this thoroughly. LNT is definitely bullshit, and thus looking at yearly averages vs spike doses is very important.
@EnlightenmentLiberal #121
Well you started from the patently ridiculous premise of using nothing but windmills to power the entire world, which no one has proposed, so there you go…
@Brian Pansky
Could you please engage with what I write in totality? It would help.
Repeating myself:
Even getting to 10% of the number of needed windmills for windmills alone would be amazing. I would be amazed. Even getting to 1% of the needed number would be amazing.
When the anti-nuclear greens have less than a dozen solutions, and none of them can scale on their own to 100%, and when individually it would be a modern wonder of the world to even get 1% of that target for any one technology, then it’s time to rethink your position.
EL
Run of river hydro is very low impact and does not require a reservoir. What is it with libertarians and all or nothing thinking?
One interesting proposal for large scale electrical energy storage is a reversible aluminum smelter. The smelter at Kitimat, British Columbia uses about the same amount of electricity as a city of a million people, so the storage capacity of such a system is huge.
nepos
You did notice that I was responding to a comment that was explicitly about recycling, did you?
I very likely view the next century even more grimly than you do. Those nasty wars you so politely allude to are likely to include disputes over water from the Himalayas – Pakistan versus India versus China versus sundry others dependent on the Mekong. http://www.voanews.com/content/china-mekong-dam-project-generates-growing-controversy/1859964.html
http://www.irrawaddy.org/magazine/lao-dam-troubles-mekong-waters.html
Add in several millions of Bangladeshi refugees escaping the encroachments of the ocean to already fractious political, religious and racial relationships where more than one participant has nuclear arms and I see nothing good for anyone. And yes, regardless of the nuclear weapons issue, millions of people will die – in floods, regional conflicts, refugee camps and famines. Those last deaths – of refugees and from famine – will be caused mostly as they are now, by people failing to organise and cooperate early enough despite the prospects being as plain as the nose on everyone’s face.
The most important thing is to plug on anyway. Remember, people got through WW2. The destruction of towns and cities from London to Hiroshima and anywhere and everywhere in between was devastating. The number of casualties was grotesque – as many as 80 million dead in 5 years by one estimate – and that doesn’t include the Chinese casualties of Japanese invasion for several years preceding that. The most likely figure is around 20 million dead in China but some/most of that is included in the WW2 numbers generally.
This new challenge will take longer and probably kill more people in total. We could have avoided it in much the same way as we could have avoided the European WW2 if we’d only been sensible in the Treaty of Versailles. We weren’t then and millions of people suffered and died.
We weren’t sensible 30+ years ago when we were seriously warned about the climate going pear-shaped. People will suffer and die. But we will come out the other side with a lot of death and destruction behind us and even more work before us. (The seas will keep rising, now that we’ve started the icesheets melting, for a couple of centuries after we get atmospheric CO2 concentrations back down to a more sensible 350 or less.) We can deal with it even if we’re sad and stressed while we do so.
@127, EnlightenmentLiberal
“Anti-nuclear greens” is ambiguous. Are you engaged in an argument with some phantom person who wants no more nuclear at all?
I suppose I could concede that completely abandoning fossil fuels is unlikely without more nuclear. Though hydro is more promising than you seem to grant, and you seem to know very little about current hydro technology.
Anyways, your worry about using 100% of one technology is silly and irrelevant, because that’s what a mix of technologies is for. Again, look at reality, where a mix of technologies is currently actually successful. I even provided a link to show how some parts of Canada are almost 100% hydro alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Canada
EL
Ridiculous doesn’t begin to cover it. My state has installed enough wind power to meet more than 30% of our power demand in less than 10 years. That’s been helped, of course, by destroying demand on the grid before it even gets started by having a quarter of residences with solar panels on their roofs. Most people in the state have never even seen a wind turbine, let alone having the whole place infested with them.
The one thing that you seem to overlook is the technology increasing the size and power of wind turbines themselves. If we do find ourselves running out of placements for turbines, we’ll just build bigger ones and/or go offshore. http://www.windpowermonthly.com/10-biggest-turbines
militantagnostic
I’d never thought of it as a libertarian issue. My feeling has always been that politicians and business execs dislike distributed power generation because of the lack of naming rights and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
that one site EnlightenmentLiberal linked to is pretty neat. I’m liking this post, The Alternative Energy Matrix, which makes a color coded array for comparing basically every alt energy side by side on various criteria. A great way to analyze things. And the author even suggests re-making the chart yourself if you disagree with some of the evaluations.
I’d add to the chart the categories “environmental detriment” (like climate change)” and possibly “health detriment” (which is a bit similar but also admittedly a bit different from “environmental detriment”). And perhaps the category for “abundance” should be separate from the criteria of being “renewable”. Because some things are renewable but don’t provide much power, and some things can provide a lot of power while supplies last until they permanently become very scarce.
mildlymagnificent @129, You’re right, my comment about the container deposit was manifestly unfair to you, and I knew it at the time; I just have a weakness for snarky comments. I apologize for making that comment, and will try to rein in the snark in the future.
Not to get into a “I’m grimmer than you” contest, but I find it unlikely that human civilization will survive the next century. Oh, humanity will survive, probably, but billions of people will die, the cities will be abandoned, and society will revert to an agrarian (or even nomadic) model. Barring some sort of technological miracle (or series of miracles, really) that will fix the huge problems we are facing. Or a 1984-style dictatorship that will enforce societal change via boot to the face.
I guess that’s why PZ’s post hit me so hard–I truly believe that the technological miracles that he dismisses so harshly are actually our only chance to avoid catastrophe.
*well, reading more of the analysis at that site you linked to, EnlightenmentLiberal, perhaps Canada could be an outlier in some ways for its hydro resource.
Also, from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#World_hydroelectric_capacity
When dealing with the percent of energy generation, everyone should note that Canada has low energy demand per unit area (due to low population density, much lower than the population density of the USA). So that is probably what allows Canada to have such high percent reliance on hydro.
@Brian Pansky and mildlymagnificent
I’m really glad that your state managed to get 30% wind. How does that address my argument and my numbers for providing for a population of 10 billion people?
You’re still not engaging with my arguments. Half a dozen solutions that can only scale to 10% of the target each will not together sum to 100%, and that’s being generous. Hydro will be a rounding error for out target. Biofuels will be a rounding error for our target, and worse – its use will contribute to increasing food prices and starvation. Water wave technology is highly limited due to simply not enough coastline. Wind can scale to appreciable amounts, but even so it cannot scale to even 50% of our target. Solar can scale, but only by taking large fractions of the land mass of whole continents. Geothermal – digging big bore holes and using a lot of water to harvest questionable amounts of heat and in a way that will run out of heat in the near future? Great plan. Great use of water. In the end, the only ones that will make an appreciable difference are wind and solar, mostly solar, and those have the problem of intermittency which has not yet been solved, and no promising solution is forthcoming. Currently this is “fixed” by burning a lot of nat gas. We could build a bunch of nuclear as backup, but most of the cost of nuclear is the cost of the plant itself, which means if we have to build nuclear backup, that’s enough to run the grid on its own, and we might as well not bother with covering large fractions of our available landmass with solar panels.
I’m just repeating myself here. No one seems to be engaging with my points.
You can repeat your mantra “a mix will do it” all you want, but I will call shenanigans on your empty claim. Give me numbers. Tell me what technologies will do it, and in what mix. Show me how we can meet our target number for 10 billion people, because existing so-called green technologies are not going to do it.
@Nepos
Thankfully, the problems we have are still eminently solvable. We just have to convince the world to give up its irrational fear of nuclear reactors, and build them. A lot of them. Quickly. France did it. There’s every reason to believe that we can scale that up and do it for the whole world in a matter of decades.
EL
I’m really glad I borked the link.
Because it shows that you are not a bona fide participant in the discussion.
http://m.aerzteblatt.de/print/60198.htm
It’s the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, THE most prestigious German medical outlet, referencing the data of a study done using the German Krebsregister. Yep.
So, forgive me for giving you the finger. You are either unable or unwilling to have an honest discussion.
@Brian Pansky
Oh, and finally, regarding the energy matrix at:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/
I trust his math when he does it, but his amazing ignorance of some of the nuclear options is astounding. Example:
The only kinds of thorium breeder that are being pushed are molten salt reactors. That’s a liquid salt of fluoride or chloride. There is no liquid sodium metal used in any of the designs of any of the common thorium breeders. He could have found this out in a few minutes from wikipedia. Don’t trust anything he says on the nuclear front. It’s pulled directly out of his ass.
Odd that he says the uranium breeders have difficulties due to proliferation, but not the thorium breeders. Whereas, the situation is probably the opposite. The uranium breeders like the integral fast reactor, and the GE S-PRISM reactor, don’t use aqueous reprocessing, and the pyroprocessing it does use will not separate uranium or plutonium from the actinides (IIRC), which means it’s not usable for bombs. To make a bomb, you need to make a pile of graphite and uranium to produce weapons grade plutonium, or you enrich uranium with centrifuges. Everyone who has made a bomb has done it that way. The facilities of an IFR / S-PRISM reactor simply don’t help.
Whereas, the good breeder version of a molten salt thorium reactor, i.e. LFTR, has some pretty big proliferation concerns. The opinion I’ve heard on the matter is mixed. Some of the proponents of the technology say proliferation concerns are huge, some not. I don’t have enough engineering background to sort it all out.
As for “backyard?” – is that meant to measure current public acceptance, or actual risk? I’d much rather live next to a LFTR than many of the other options present. The continuous reprocessing and offgas capture, plus the lack of pressure and chemistry of the system, means that it’s incredibly safe. A coal plant might actually kill me. A hydro dam might actually kill me.
@Giliell
I believe I changed my tune already, based on the link Rob provided, and some of my own independent research. I apologize for appearing to be close-minded. I have adjusted my opinion on the matter.
Still, you should note that there are plenty of prestigious groups on the other side of this particular discussion and these particular numbers.
A 50% increase of childhood leukemia is tragic, but the conditions that may create this are manageable, the problem can be mitigated, and a 50% increase of an incredibly rare childhood disease is still a very small number of deaths. This is not a big enough health concern – even if true – to make me abandon my advocacy of nuclear power. It seems to be a very small concern in the grand scheme of things, especially because I don’t see anything resembling a reasonable alternative.
EL
That your statements that we’d need turbines … to cover every square kilometer of the land of this planet in wind mills, or some significant fraction of that. That’s obscene. It’s patently ridiculous on many levels … are patently ridiculous given this example and probably several others as well.
As for approaching the problem of thinking the power-for-10-billion-people through, I rather like the idea of “wedges”. You can estimate-calculate the power required for various things and then see if you can get rid of or solve them one by one.
1. Standby power for appliances and equipment, especially domestic. There’s at least one estimate, which I personally don’t believe, that 10% of domestic power consumption in the US goes on standby power. It doesn’t matter how much it is in the end, because it can be entirely eliminated. (Or so close as to make no difference.) By design for new items and by supplementary, very cheap, devices between the switch and the item for existing or old-fashioned designs thereafter. So, whether it’s current consumers or people who will be new to power supply, less power than now is used despite increased availability and use.
2. Hot water. Talk about naive. 25+ years ago when we bought our solar hot water service, I honestly thought that by 2000ish Australian governments would have changed building requirements to make solar hot water compulsory for all new homes and for all replacement services. How silly was I. They’re still selling electric only and gas only heaters. We had entirely free hot water for 20+ years, then 4 years ago we bought this place and we’re back to paying for hot water again. A solar heater is pretty near the top of our to do list – we’ve already installed solar panels.
However, heating water is one of the biggest contributors to domestic power demand. I’d say someone somewhere has calculated how much of current power consumption is used for this purpose – I used to have a number for the US but can’t find it just now. It would be pretty easy to identify a “wedge” of power demand – and pretty well eliminate most of it, at least for 90+% of homes at lowish altitudes and between latitudes of 40N and 40S. And all those new power users looking for that German standard of living would impose no demand on a power grid – because they’ll move straight onto solar hot water also. And that technology was mastered decades ago for small quantities by the boating, caravanning and camping crowd.
Note that that’s the whole of Africa, the whole of India, and all of China from Beijing southwards as well as the whole of SE Asia and the Pacific Islands. For higher latitudes, a different calculation, but reducing the current demand by making best use of technology and geography to reduce grid demand by at least half.
And someone better equipped to extract the data and do the calculations than I am could parse out plenty of other “wedges” of demand and work out how to reduce/ eliminate them or effectively supply them. (For instance, I read some years ago that many US hotels air condition all rooms all the time regardless of occupancy. That ought to stop right now regardless of how the power is obtained.)
No one’s pretending it’s going to be easy, but we’re very far from finding out that it’s impossible. If it comes to that – 30, 40, 60 years from now, if ever – we’ll think about rationing.
@mildlymagnificent
You are aware that industrial processes dominate the need for electricity from the grid, right? Stuff like aluminum smelting and the like. Also, if we’re looking at total energy needs, we also need to deal with transportation, including ship, rail, trucking, etc.
Let me tell you some stories about how the real world works, because you seem to be grossly ignorant.
Aluminum smelters. Wonderful things. You cannot just turn them off when it’s cloudy. The capital costs are immense, and prices of all goods would skyrocket if we just turned them off and left that capital sitting idle when it’s cloudy. Worse, simply turning off aluminum smelters for extended periods of time without a lot of forewarning and planning basically destroys them. You cannot just flip the switch when needed without more or less destroying large amounts of equipment.
http://www.fmglobalreason.com/article/what%E2%80%99s-smelter
My uncle works for Guardian glass manufacturing. It’s one of the few remaining flat-glass manufacturers left in the country IIRC. He works in one of the actual flat-glass production plants. They use the float-glass method. The plant is basically a gigantic furnace to heat up the ingredients of the glass hot enough to melt, and then this liquid is drawn over a pool of molten tin. Drawing it over a pool of molten tin allows a near-perfect flatness of the glass.
Last Thanksgiving, he was talking about some basic maintenance they were about to do at the plant. Usual stuff. They would shut down the furnace, replace worn parts, and start it up again. It will take 2 months to go from cold shutdown to ready to manufacture. 2 whole months. It takes that long to heat up the furnace and various equipment safely. Any faster and you risk damage from large heat differentials in the equipment. The plant will be fully staffed during this time to monitor the 2 month startup process. That’s my favorite example because I happen to know so much about it.
A lot of industrial processes are like that. They take an incredible amount of electricity, and you cannot just turn it off when there’s several days of no electricity and turn it back on again. I want to stress the economic concerns and the impact to consumers like us for letting that capital sit idle, but I want to more strongly stress the difficulties in many of these industrial processes of shutting them down at all for vagaries of the weather. It will cause severe and costly damage to many kinds of industrial equipment to simply shut them off when the sun stops shining and when the wind stops blowing. For others, it can take months to turn back on from cold shutdown.
Residential uses of electricity are a small fraction of electricity usage. That’s not the problem. You could reduce it to 0, and you still will not have begun to address the problems of powering our industrial society. The much bigger problems are these massive industrial processes and transportation. Residential uses are a sideshow. Start addressing the 80%, not the 20%, and I might start taking you seriously.
@Giliell, Rob, and others
I did want to add this. I want to say that I am upset that I’m just learning about this plausible causal hypothesis regarding childhood leukemia. I have seen many lectures dismissing these concerns out of hand by referring to yearly average rates and how it’s impossible for the nuclear power plants to be responsible. I am upset that my view has been so apparently insular on this topic. It still seems to me that this is a small problem that can probably be mitigated, and it doesn’t change my overall position, but it does give me pause, that apparently I have been and many of the pro-nuclear people have been so insular.
I’m ruminating about possible explanations.
Perhaps some of the pro-nuclear people have been slaves to the wrong-headed LNT; under pure LNT analysis, nuclear power plants cannot be the cause. Again, it’s rather fascinating to see LNT analysis underestimate risks – that’s a new one.
Perhaps the idea that it’s the result of radiation spikes from refueling is not widely known. If so, I have to ask why this hypothesis is not widely known. That’s a horrible failure in the communication of these ideas and some of the forums and discussion groups I have been in. It changes the apparent analysis from “completely implausible” to “maybe true”.
Concerted efforts at lying and distorting the truth? IMHO no, considering some of the negatives that they bring up about their own technology which is not even widely known.
Still, this experience has definitely been informative. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me, especially Rob.
EL
I know all that. But all the previous conversation was, I thought, about improving living standards for currently impoverished people with no, or too little/too unreliable, access to power.
As for industrial uses, I think the examples of power hungry computer sites is one model other industrial users could follow. Arrange a guaranteed supply from a CSP with storage or a group of windfarms or a single offshore windfarm and agree that the providers can sell any surplus into the grid at large but only after all the contracting party’s needs are met. Specific industries, locations or industrial parks would have their own ideas about the best way to meet their particular needs.
All of this is very much up in the air until we see what can and can’t be done with grid level storage and large user onsite storage over the next 10 to 15 years. Similar considerations apply to things like train, tram and bus electrification. Though I think the issue of personal transportation is going to need a lot more work on making cities and suburbs more pedestrian and bike friendly along with improved battery driven bicycles and tricycles which can be recharged from solar panels at home and/or at business premises and shopping centres.
(My husband had an electric bike 15 to 20ish years ago and loved it. The kids at school even thought it was cool, maybe because it was red? Caused trouble with the cops a couple of times because you didn’t need a motorbike license to ride it nor did it have to be registered – it had deliberately been designed with low power so that people with neither car nor motorbike licenses could use it. But it sailed past buses and cars halted in peak hour traffic with silent, effortless ease. Better design of bike lanes would have made it a lot safer though.)
I think that this is the height of foolishness to say that we should wait 10 to 15 years to see what new technologies we should get to solve global warming. It is the height of foolishness to bury our heads in the sand, and hope for a radical breakthrough technology, and delay 10 to 15 years, rather than taking the first steps to solve the problem now.
I include things like appliances in standard of living. Did you mean to restrict “standard of living” to some incredibly bare-bones subset? I fail to see how that’s reasonable. How can you have the same standard of living as the average modern German without an industrial base? It makes no sense.
I cited Germany above, and above I also gave some of my reasoning for citing Germany, and part of that reasoning included the fact that Germany still has large amounts of industry.
Who said we “should wait”? It’s not new technology we’ll be relying on, it’s how well-established concepts like storage, with or without batteries, will be deployed and developed in varying circumstances.
It makes even less sense to think that it will take less than 2 decades to get modern plumbing – showers, toilets and all – to the current 1 billion people in the slums and favelas of the world, expected to become 2 billion people by 2030. Then there are the 10s of millions of currently displaced persons of whom several million are more or less permanent residents of refugee camps. There’s probably another billion or so in rural and remoter parts of the world. My own feeling is that keeping as many people as possible in these places and raising the standard of living right where they are along with the possibilities for earning income/ starting businesses locally is a more manageable task than converting ever bigger slums.
Do you really think we’re going to go back to the 50s with everyone everywhere making washing machines, TVs, phones and cars for their local or national market? I can see it for small manufactures like bicycles and tricycles, scooters and motorbikes – but that presumes reasonable roads, also in pretty short supply in the poorest areas. I think manufacturing industries will change, but that doesn’t mean that every country will be a version of Germany or South Korea.
That also includes things like domestic arrangements of facilities and appliances. Aiming for a washing machine and a flush toilet in every home by 2030 or 2040 is looking to fail. Establishing communal laundries/ laundromats and civilised toilet blocks/ latrines for groups of homes will be a much more achievable intermediate step for far more people. It would improve the poorest people’s lives enormously to provide such facilities anyway.
Have a look at Hans Rosling’s estimates on these things. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine?language=en
“Well-established” energy storage technologies that can scale to cover even a week of intermittency of wind and solar? Like what? I thought I just explained in excruciating detail just how wrong that sentiment is. Hit me with your best shot. What’s an example of this “well-established” concept?
Do you mean that the concept itself as an idea is well-established in the culture? Of course the concept is well-established in the culture, but that’s not germane. The question is the readiness of the actual technology, not the concept of the technology.
We’ll never know, because the nuclear industry and the Japanese government will make sure we don’t. Moreover, and almost certainly much more important in terms of numbers of deaths, we’ll never know how many people died because the Japanese government could not send help to the areas worst affected by the tsunami by the most efficient route, and had to divert huge resources, at a time of national crisis, to evacuating people from the vicinity of the plant. The lessons of Fukushima are clear:
1) The nuclear industry will always cut corners on safety, and lie, rather than accept a cut in profits.
2) Whatever your natural disaster, nuclear power plants can make it worse.
3) This is one for terrorists: target the cooling system.
Four years after the tsunami, constant cooling is still required to prevent further releases of radioactivity, contaminated water from this process is flowing from the site, the “clean-up” stretches decades into the future and unsurprisingly, many former residents are unwilling to move back because they dsitrust the official reassurances that it’s safe. Why woiuldn’t they, when the plant operators lied and cut corners before?
I’ll get back to this thread later, after I’ve had time to read it all and chase up appropriate references, but I couldn’t let this particular piece of gormless nuclear fanboi nonsense pass.
Nonsense. Just look at what’s happened with solar and wind.
5 years ago people were bleating that the costs were prohibitive and we’ll never be able to reduce coal & gas dependence for decades. Decades!! I tell you. The IEA kept on drafting its annual reports bleating about the expense and talking about possible cost reductions 5 years hence … and by the time they were published wind (or solar) prices had already passed the price points the IEA were predicting for 5 or 10 years into the future.
Much the same thing is starting to happen with storage. http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/plans-for-australias-first-non-hydro-renewable-storage-project-move-forward-52911
5 or 10 years from now, such projects will be commonplace. People will learn from each successive implementation just as they have with solar panels and wind turbines. We really don’t need research into alternative systems anywhere nearly as much as we need the development part of R&D. Deploy, learn, modify, deploy, learn more, modify again, … lather, rinse, repeat as often as necessary. The more deployment we have, the faster the development we will get.
@mildlymagnificent
Australia electricity usage 2010 estimate: total 213.5e9 kwh
Yearly average: 2.435e7 kw
battery for 7-days: 4.095e9 kwh
Proposed storage specs: 10e3 to 20e3 kw, and 20e3 to 200e3 kwh
Proposed storage specs as a fraction of average national power requirements:
.0004107 to .0008214
.04107% to .08214%
Proposed storage specs as a fraction of national 7-day energy requirements:
.000004884 to .00004884
.0004884% to .004884%
What is this supposed to be evidence of? How is this meant to contradict anything I’ve said?
Further, your source doesn’t even say what kind of storage technology will be used. From a quick google search, the technologies that will be used are not even specified at this stage. Instead, that will be later determined.
Again, what is this supposed to be evidence of? That a lot of people think that storage technologies exist and can scale? Great. That point is not controversial. I want some evidence that storage technologies we have now can scale.
Your own article says this:
This is the biggest project of its kind, and look at the numbers. It’s not even 1% of the total energy capacity needed. It’s not even 0.1%. Nor 0.01%. That’s how bad it is.
Remember my earlier “Do The Math” blog links? Energy storage requirements in pumped water storage are on the size of adding extra Great Lakes i.e. Lake Michigan. Remember that pumped water storage is by far the best demonstrated technology in terms of scaling to grid-scale.
Now, please try again.
You cannot develop pumped water storage. You cannot change the laws of physics. Today, tomorrow, and the day after, the size in land needed is still going to be on a monumental, almost unimaginable scale, like that of Lake Michigan. We don’t need mere “development”. We need radical breakthrough technologies.
Your inability now to name anything even remotely resembling a plausible solution is telling. Stop living in delusion. Do the math.
National power requirements don’t come into it. (Especially if we plonk this thing over at Port Lincoln.) We don’t want to power Australia, just to manage South Australia’s variable renewable power better. We have only 8% of national population – Adelaide itself has only 1.2 million people – and we have even less of a share of industrial activity than that now that car manufacturing has been given the heave-ho.
It’s in the name, non-hydro renewable storage. Anyway, it’s too right you can’t. Not in South Australia anyway. They don’t call us the driest state in the driest inhabited continent in the world for laughs.
Oh, ok. 8% of the national. Let me just round that to 10%. On that metric, you’re still here:
Proposed storage specs as a fraction of average regional power requirements:
.004107 to .008214
.4107% to .8214%
Proposed storage specs as a fraction of regional 7-day energy requirements:
.00004884 to .0004884
.004884% to .04884%
You’re still not even 0.1% of the required energy capacity. 0.1%. And they didn’t specify what magical technology it would use. Let me again remind you that your source characterized this storage venture as the biggest venture of its kind. It’s wishful thinking at its finest by people who don’t want to face reality.
Firstly, I have no idea why we might want, let alone need, 7 days worth of storage. Is there any good reason why we would want that? I can’t imagine how or why that would come about – apart from storing over-production long term for some inexplicable reason.
(If the weather is cloudy/cold, we’re likely to have plenty of wind to compensate for having reduced solar. And we never have snow or ice, let alone being isolated by such events. We do have occasional frosty snaps in the Riverland and other semi-arid regions when vignerons and orchardists have to take some care of their plantings for a few nights in a row.)
We’ve never had a blackout in Adelaide since we started down this solar + wind path. Before this, power could be blacked out area-by-area on high heat days – mainly because power was less available from interstate when Victoria/Melbourne is highly likely to be suffering the same extreme weather.
Enough power for 7 Days? For the whole state? Even if we wanted such a thing, this project isn’t it. The original feasibility studies http://arena.gov.au/project/energy-storage-for-commercial-renewable-integration/ were directed at …
… simply saving and spreading and evening out day to day variability and surplus overnight generation from wind. It’s not at all intended to bank surplus power like a savings account to use on a “rainy day” basis.
I don’t know where you live, but you seem to be unfamiliar with environments with 2500 or more hours of sunshine per year which also have very few entirely cloudy days in winter (which have the bonus of being right next to substantial regions with reliable steady wind). What we call dull and miserable, visitors from Europe tend to think of as sunny and mild (though they can get a bit of a surprise on a cold and windy day).
As for my faith in people’s “wishful thinking”. We set ambitious targets for supplying 20%, then 25%, then 30%, of SA’s power from renewables and beat every one of them. I see no reason to doubt that the same/similar group of people can achieve the same sort of result with other power projects.
I’m sorry. I’m not impressed by bullshit.
It’s magical thinking to rely on a project where they don’t even specify the technology and to try and use that as evidence for your position.
It’s magical thinking to look at this project – the biggest project of its kind – and argue it will help, when it’s not even 1% of your goal of overnight storage.
It’s bullshit to focus on yearly averages instead of daily average in winter because that’s the limitation on the system.
It’s magical thinking to extrapolate from 10%, 20%, 30%, all the way up to 80% or 90%. It’s outright denialism and delusion to use that extrapolation to pretend that the intermittency problem doesn’t exist. Your the base numbers of your bullshit extrapolation never had to deal with the intermittency problem and nat gas (probably nat gas) was sufficient to cover the lulls.
It’s magical thinking to extrapolate from “daily average power production” numbers of 10%, 20%, 30%, to try to apply that to “daily reliable baseload numbers”.
You have not demonstrated that your solution can reduce the carbon footprint to near 0 for your particular solution. You haven’t even tried.
Let alone solving the problem I’m interested in, which is providing near 0 carbon power to all of the people in the world.
Of course I haven’t. We haven’t. I’d say anyone who did try, on the basis of nothing-but-arithmetic, would be kidding themselves. I’ve grown pretty tetchy about all the technutopians I’ve met online over the last 15ish years, as well as others like Lomborg and his acolytes, who keep on telling us that we have to abstain from trying anything at all until some genius doing some mysterious research we’ve not yet heard of turns up with the one and only, whiz bang, magic bullet, 100% reliable, one size fits all, stand alone solution to everyone’s power needs everywhere in the world. I’m not suggesting you’re like that, but far too many people are.
(I confess to a lingering fondness for the idea of thorium generators. But no one has offered a remotely commercially viable model, just a lot of untried artillery – gunna do this, gunna do that, gunna turn them on and off at will – without the least embarrassment that none of this has ever made it much further than the dream, the drawing-board or the small scale model.)
We need different horses for different courses.
– Costa Rica, Iceland and New Zealand are showing the way for renewable electricity for the few countries/ regions that have similar advantages of volcanic, geothermal power right under their feet.
– Denmark, Scotland, a few portions of some US states, and South Australia are moving nicely showing the advantages of wind resources – along with solar in SA’s case.
– Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria and other countries with large impoverished populations and unreliable/non-existent power grids are showing what can be done to supply cheap clean rooftop power to people who would otherwise never get it from a grid.
Me too. However, the problems of power supply to slum dwellings, refugee camps and to desperately poor people in rural and remote regions is – for the most part – simply one of will. Micro-finance and tiny solar PV is making a huge impact in the countries where it’s being implemented. That could cover the great majority of deeply poor people but there are still others in regions less suited to the very small solar solution who may need other approaches. The only obstacle to getting more feet onto the first step on this very accessible ladder is incompetent and/or obstructionist governments and reluctant or over-stretched financiers, quangos and charities.
If Bangladesh can plan to have everyone in the country, 156 million people, supplied with some amount of clean power by 2021 and now be well on the way to achieving that, then so can other countries with similar latitude/ population/ power profiles. 60% of Bangladeshis are not connected to the grid and they still won’t be once this program is finished – but they will have power. That’s a bloody impressive start in my book.
We won’t get there overnight. We won’t get there in a decade. But we can give a hell of a good start to a hell of a lot more people than we currently do if we make the best use of whatever renewable and financial resources are available right now, wherever they may be.
It isn’t easy. It isn’t neat or pretty or laid out like a well-planned path through a manicured garden. If we wait for that kind of a solution, we’ll be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And promoting unnecessary fossil emissions and leaving too many impoverished people to lag behind into the bargain.
@mildlymagnificent
I’m sorry, your position is ridiculous. You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m not demanding a magic bullet (even though I think we’ve found one). I’m definitely not advocating technocracy bullshits. However, you still need to do the math. Refusing to do the math at all is obscenely ridiculous. You need to do the math to distinguish between workable solutions and pipedreams.
Look into the IFR. It’s like LFTR, except ready to be built, now.
This statement is unsourced and unsupported. That’s my complaint. How can you so wildly make that assertion when you have done absolutely no math whatsoever? It’s pulled directly out of your ass.