Nice. I’d guess the temperatures when I was born were a little lower still.
A little arrow that just says “today” is a bit anodyne, don’t you think? Here, instead, this is today: Thousands flee Greek island Evia by boat as ‘horror-movie’ wildfires rage.
Maybe you’d prefer video?
The fires are coming for you, unless we all take action.
Ya sou, if only we’d had some sort of warning. /s
Voting, or convincing other people to vote, is not enough.
And no, I don’t know what is.
You can’t just vote, you also need to march, and work in the community to make viable alternatives to the status quo.
Democracy isn’t just an Election Day thing,
I’ve been fighting the stupidity of climate denialists my entire adult life. That’s about 40 years, which is about how much time we have pissed away trying to explain the science to the slow students in the class who really never wanted to understand it in the first place. The fuck around stage of climate change is over. Welcome to “Find Out”.
For years, the glibertarians and vulture capitalists have told us: 1) It’s not happening; or 2) I’t not our fault; or 3) It won’t be as bad as they say. Now all but the stupidest of the denialists have moved on to their second to last line of defense: Oh, well, it’s too late to do anything. And what makes this line of defense formidable is that there is an element of truth to it. It is not too late to avoid serious consequences. The next century or so is going to be filled with pain. But the fallacy behind this argument is that all the futures we have to choose from are equally filled with pain. We can still make things better or much, much worse. If the glibertarians and vulture capitalists can keep us in despair long enough, then they can move to their last redoubt: “Oh, if only the scientists had warned us!!!”
You will also note that these are precisely the same strategies they’ve adopted with respect to COVID. Climate change is a replay in slow motion.
If you like your humor prescient but dark;
clip from 2014, The Newsroom: Main Justice
Huh, re the clip at #5 stroppy.
You may have to hit replay to see the interview. Sorry about that.
Oh, you’ll listen to the scientists when they warn you, but not when it contradicts your Green dogma. Scientist James Hansen warned us about global warming, and you listened, but when he and other scientists say that 100% renewable energy worldwide is impossible, you don’t listen. When James Hansen and others say that Greens are more to blame than climate change deniers because Green plans won’t work, you don’t listen. Only cleaning the mantle of science when it’s convenient, and ignoring the scientists when it’s not.
I’ve been fighting your Green kind for decades, making little progress the whole time. It’s not climate change deniers that are the problem. It’s the Greens that are the problem. The Green Luddite pseudoscience ideology is the most dangerous and harmful movement in the history of humanity.
Gerrard, take your meds. Your monomaniacal tirades really aren’t doing nukes or the environment any favors. Policy has to extend beyond punching hippies.
The hippies are the thing standing in the way of the solution. Again, picking and choosing when to listen to the scientists based on whether it fits your preconceived dogma.
Do you doubt that these scientists have said these things? Do you need sources?
Do you think that James Hansen is “off his meds”?
And that’s probably some kind of extreme ableist insult. Please don’t do that.
The IPCC report released yesterday notes that we have alas now already passed 1°C warming since pre-industrial times (that is since 1850). The specific measured increase they give is 1.07°C. I’m working through their documents found at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/.
The IPCC report released yesterday notes that we have alas now already passed 1°C warming since pre-industrial times
Meanwhile “drill baby drill” but “oh yeah we’ll stop by 2050!” Somehow I think they are lying.
Oh, you’ll listen to the scientists when they warn you, but not when it contradicts your dogma.I fully agree with Gerrard that it certainly would be intellectually dishonest to not listen to what the scientists actually say, and instead presuppose they actually support the position of 100% of your preferred technology, imagine there is a vast conspiracy preventing them from saying so, and accuse anyone who disagrees of being an enemy of humanity.
I hope no-one here would do such a thing.
“Only cleaning the mantle of science when it’s convenient, and ignoring the scientists when it’s not.”I was unaware science had a mantle, let alone that it was dirty.
Marcus, the IPCC report considered five emissions scenarios, and the most severe one does have us linearly decreasing emissions to zero at 2050. That scenario leads to the least severe outcome of ‘only’ suffering a 1.5°C warming since 1850. The next scenario gradually decreases emissions to zero by about 2080, and that has a 2°C warming. The other 3 scenarios considered all have worse outcomes.
So, what, Cutty Snark? Where’s the catch? Can’t read the IPCC reports which say that lots of nuclear is required? Or did you not pay attention to when Greens get power, they shut down nuclear and replace it with coal and natural gas, like they’re doing in Germany right now?
So, what, Cutty Snark? Where’s the catch? Can’t read the IPCC reports which say that lots of nuclear is required?Actually, I can (and did) read the IPCC reports. However, clearly I missed the bit where it said that we should build 100% nuclear – perhaps you can send the reference?
Where did I make that claim here Cutty? I have never made that claim.
I have noted that a 100% nuclear plan would be cheaper, but I’ve always advocated for nuclear and hydro (in spite of hydro’s damage to the environment).
My preferred plan is one of the many feasible plans that involve lots of nuclear. None of the feasible plans involve zero nuclear. The Greens are a religious cult. Even James Hansen describes their anti nuclear resistance as quote “quasi-religious”.
Germany has already spent so much money on renewables that had they spent it on nuclear instead, even at Hinkley C or Vogtle prices, that would be enough for all of their electricity needs. This is a fact. “But next time will be different” I hear you say. No, it won’t.
Where did I make that claim here Cutty? I have never made that claim.Oh, you have my apologies. I should have asked, where in the IPCC report does it claim we should only build 100% nuclear (+some hydro, with caveats)?
Again, I never said it did. What’s your point? You’re trying to strawman me. You’re twisting my arguments into something else.
See also
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/…
So, if you remove the artificial handicaps from the IPCC models, then nuclear dominates the solution. Fun times. The Greens are the problem.
Again, I never said it did.I didn’t say you did – I asked you (please note the question marks used in my comments @ 15 and 17, they signify the interrogative) if your position of 100% nuclear (+hydro) was the consensus from the IPCC report.
After all, you asked me if I’d read the IPCC reports, and I was concerned I’d missed the bit where the scientists had promulgated your position as being the optimal route forward.
What’s your point?My point is that I fully agree with you it is important to listen to the scientists, and not ignore them when they contradict one’s personal dogma, as I said in my comment @ 12.
You’re trying to strawman me. You’re twisting my arguments into something else.I don’t particularly appreciate this accusation. Please point out where I have strawmanned you / twisted your argument, or retract this and offer an apology.
Cutty
When you care to engage honestly, I’ll be here. No apology will be forthcoming.
When you care to engage honestly, I’ll be here. No apology will be forthcoming.Gerrard, your inability to actually show anywhere where I have strawmanned you or twisted your arguments is noted, as is your refusal to apologise.
I have little interest in wasting time on someone who’s only response is making unfounded accusations of dishonesty.
Gerrard @14:
Can you give specific references?
Gerrard,
James Hansen is quite sane. On the other hand, he is also not a monomaniac incapable of discoursing on any subject other than turning the planet into a nuclear waste pile.
Yes, we have probably passed the point where we can be picky about the solutions we adopt, and yes, nukes are probably a part of the mix. However, to pretend they are anything but a partial solution is ludicrous and labels you a crank rather than a visionary.
Wind and solar power could supply up to 80% of the U.S.A.’s energy demand, and biomass energy could supply the rest. There’s no absolute need for nuclear energy, although it will be part of the mix in the immediate future.
Solar and Wind Could Meet 80% of US Energy Needs, Study Finds
The cost will be huge, but over a thirty year period it is feasible to revamp the current electric grid.
I think that Gerrard has a point.
If we went back in time to 2001 and started building nuclear plants, we would have already reached the 2030 emission goals.
Its like the old saying, “The best time to build a nuclear power plant is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today”.
I struggle to care any more. I’ve done 35 years of fundraising, letter-writing, educational events, marching and lobbying, plus a small number of somewhat more adrenaline-fuelled activities, and I’m drained. These last four or five years I’ve only really been responding on autopilot. I hardly ever bother reading the literature or campaigning material these days; I can’t remember when I last attended a meeting.
I don’t feel that we’ve achieved anything of substance. Yes, climate change and other environmental issues are now part of the public consciousness in a way that they never were back in the 1980s when I was mostly worried about the species extinction rate (“Save the whales! Collect the entire set!”), but for every little concession a government or industry makes we see time and again that it will be implemented in some toothless fashion or with loopholes that companies will pay their lawyers to find. We’ve been scammed. They’re not really listening, and they certainly don’t care. Fuck them. Fuck the lot of them. If we’re going to burn I aim to stay alive just long enough to watch them burn too, or at the very least see them dangling from lampposts.
@Gerrard:
Obviously, I can’t speak for everyone on FTB, but I’m not fond of your loosely labeling people as “Greens” and therefore supporting or recommending a certain set of views. That’s intellectually laziness.
I, for one, would be perfectly supportive of any alternatives to fossil fuels and have often observed that the US should be investing heavily in fusion, pebble-bed reactors, etc. I have personally walked around in Pripyat and the reactor facilities in Chernobyl and I don’t think I have a particularly unrealistic view of fisson or fusion for power. Or solar or wind or water, for that matter.
Here’s where I get to the part you probably won’t like: it’s unavoidable that we observe that nuclear safety is a consideration. Similarly, fossil fuels have safety issues other than their emissions – the stuff is, after all, combustible, flammable, explosive, and toxic. Rational people would concern themselves with the dangers of either. And rational people would notice that solar, wind, water don’t have the problem of exploding or catching fire or potentially poisoning the landscape.
It may be that people like me aren’t “Greens” we’re just selfish and rational and want to challenge our energy solutions’ safety and long-term toxicity. After all, that is what humanity should have done with fossil fuels, but didn’t.
Now you’re welcome to keep ranting about your “Greens” but it just makes me dismiss you as a tedious crank. It’s easy because I just go “well he’s not ranting about me” and ignore you.
Cutty Snark,
And nothing of value was lost. Now go away you little troll.
…
Rob,
Do you really want me to dig up the references of all of the example pathways? Fine.
I don’t have a source for the individual pathways offhand. I do have this.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/SR15_Chapter2_Low_Res.pdfInternal page number 132, Table 2.6, nuclear row.
No scenario involves zero nuclear. The min, median, and max changes in nuclear from today in the pathways are: -64%, +24%, +400%.
IIRC, it is my recollection that most of the pathways involve more nuclear than today. I would characterize even the -64% scenario as still “a boatload of nuclear”. If people think that they’re going to get rid of nuclear in most places, they’re in for a rude wakeup call.
Please also see my source upthread which discusses how the reports seemingly intentionally penalize nuclear power with artificial unreal limitations, primarily an artificial limit on fuel supply, and otherwise nuclear would dominate their models.
…
naturalistguy,
I know that study very well. I’ve even conversed by email with some of its authors to make sure that I understand it correctly. I know that you don’t know that study. Let me educate you.
For starters, that summary is wrong. A better summary is: Using historical wind and solar data, assuming an idealized cross-continent transmission grid that is lossless and with infinite capacity, and assuming certain amounts of ideal lossless batteries, and ignoring other vital realworld constraints like blackstart capability, grid inertia, and other frequency control services, we arrive at the following conclusions.
Also, 80%? Am I supposed to be impressed? I’m not. You’re not taking this problem seriously enough. We can’t have 20% natural gas and meet our climate goals. The poor parts of the world are going to industrialize, and other sectors of human activity are going to be much harder to fix compared to electricity (and heat) generation. We won’t get anywhere close to any of our goals with 20% natural gas for electricity.
Also, as I hoped I made clear, their model is a “spherical cow” model (the words of the paper). It’s meant to be simple enough that all of the data and source code is available online. It’s meant to provide a lower bound for solutions. This is not claiming that it’s feasible. However, you’re claiming that the paper claims that it’s feasible, which means that you’ve been duped by your source.
Here’s the paper, plus a blog post from one of the authors about the paper.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323441860_Geophysical_constraints_on_the_reliability_of_solar_and_wind_power_in_the_United_Stateshttps://kencaldeira.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/geophysical-constraints-on-the-reliability-of-solar-and-wind-power-in-the-united-states/The real world requirements are going to be much higher. Why?
We are not going to have an infinite capacity lossless cross-continent transmission grid. Also, transmission lines cost a lot of money. The transmission costs in most Green papers that really try to model this come out to higher than the costs of the baseline solar cells and wind turbines.
We are not going to have idealized lossless batteries that don’t lose charge over months. Moreover, there’s not enough mineable lithium, nickel, or lead in all estimated worldwide reserves and resources for the amount of battery that this paper “calls for”.
Grid inertia via synthetic condensers is going to cost a lot. How much? I actually don’t know. It’s surprisingly difficult to find this answer. Apparently it’s expensive enough that several Green papers that talk about grid inertia don’t give costs to it, and just say that work is ongoing. That’s scary.
Blackstart capability is also vital. That’s not free either.
…
snarkrates
Why? Why can’t they be a total solution to electricity production and high temperature heat for industrial processes?
Again, the brute fact is that almost everything you know about this topic is a lie from the Greens. We could grind up all of the nuclear waste into dust, and spread it evenly in the atmosphere near the surface of the planet, and it would still do less damage than airborne particulate pollution from coal. Coal kills a million every year from airborne particulate pollution. How many do you think would die from grinding up nuclear waste into dust and spreading it evenly in the atmosphere according to the conservative linear no-threshold model? Spoiler: Not as much as coal. Now imagine that we properly disposed of it. No one is ever going to die from nuclear waste from a civilian power reactor.
Everything you read from Green sources on nuclear power should be immediately suspect and assumed to be bogus.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-worldthat is true what ever we decide to do or we fail to decide.
like the stupids who think we can have an economy if we ignore the pandemic with their freedom or masks argument. we are going to have to revamp our complete power supply any way and some are in the process of changing already. Time will tell if it is enough or fast enough.
And nothing of value was lost. Now go away you little troll.And again, nothing but lies and insults.
Truly, the mystery of why people don’t take someone seriously when all they have to offer is vitriol and dishonest accusations is beyond our ken….
Cutty,
I give as good as I get. You’re the one who started by trolling me by repeatedly asking me to provide sources for a claim that I did not make, even after I clarified repeatedly explained that I did not make it. I never claimed that the IPCC reports says we should only build nuclear and hydro, and I said that the IPCC reports include no such thing, and yet you kept asking me to provide such a citation. That’s trolling.
…
Marcus
Is Dr Kerry Emanuel a crank?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/Is Dr James Hansen a crank?
Quoting James Hansen:
https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdfBack to Marcus:
And that’s where you’re completely wrong.
They don’t catch fire? Yes they do. Here are some pictures of two young mechanics moments before their death, trapped at the top of a wind turbine that is on fire. One jumped to his death, and the other burned to death. Look at the pictures.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q0sca/last_week_two_engineers_died_when_the_windmill/That is already a larger number that the total number of deaths from radiation from any nuclear accident other than Chernobyl.
Hydro doesn’t have the possibility of poisoning the landscape? What are you talking about? Talk to any good environmentalist, and they will tell you of the incredible destruction that the artificial reservoir has on the nearby environment.
Also, if we are going to talk about outliers, and that’s really what this is about, then I can invoke the Banqiao dam failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failureTens of thousands of people instantly killed. Approx another 10 million people displaced as their cities were destroyed. This is way worse than Chernobyl on any reasonable measure. Yet very few people are afraid to live downstream of big dams. I’d be more worried living downstream of a big dam than I would be a nuclear power plant.
Solar cells are classified as hazardous waste. They’re joining the electronic waste stream in unimaginable numbers, and being shipped to poor parts of the world where they’re poisoning their land. “Out of sight, out of mind”, right? /s In related news, one of the big reasons why solar cells are so cheap now is that they’re probably being made with Uighyr slave labor. Gotta support that slave trade in China, right? /s
Wind turbines are also highly destructive. Each big wind turbine requires approx 1 thousand tons of neodymium, plus other rare earth metals. Almost all of that comes from China, and it’s not because they have most of the ore. It’s because it’s the only place on the planet that has lax-enough environmental regulations to mine and refine that stuff cheaply. It is incredibly toxic and polluting. It’s so bad that the BBC article on it has the url “the worst place on Earth”.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earthCompare those pictures to the pictures of Chernobyl. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a beautiful wildlife refuge. That toxic lake in China is, well, not.
Nuclear is safer and cleaner than all alternatives, including solar and wind, by a lot. Even including the accidents. The dangers of an accident have been exaggerated out of all proportion. Almsot all of the Fukushima and Chernobyl zones are safe to live in. Much of the food grown there is safe to eat too – they do regular testing in Fukushima. See if the food is safe to eat, or the water safe to drink, or the air safe to breathe near that gigantic rare earth metal refining facility in China.
I’m not a crank. The problem is that most of what you know about the dangers of nuclear power is a lie. Have you read this link? Have you read its primary sources? Do so. It’s from an email exchange between Helen Caldicott, foremost anti-nuclear “expert”, and a Guardian author. It includes loads of citations of primary sources. It shows that the anti-nuclear arguments are almost entirely full of shit. Note the title: “The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-worldI can link to open letters from leading climate scientists saying much the same things. Here:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.htmlAuthors: James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley
Another open letter:
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/10/25/open-letter-to-heads-of-state-of-the-g-20-from-scientists-and-scholars-on-nuclear-for-climate-changeAuthors: Many, including Tom Wigley, Kerry Emanuel, and other professors.
…
Gerrard, my sources on nuclear waste are not “green organizations,” unless you consider USGS, NRC, DOE and other gummint agencies to be “greenies”. One very informative source was the analysis that went into the Yucca Mountain repository, which revealed that sequestering nuclear waste over a period of millennia is not a trival undertaking. There are also the many studies on nuclear accidents that reveal that nuclear plants will never be risk free until we resolve the stupid problem, because humans, even intelligent ones, are incredibly stupid at least part of the time. And finally, we have seen the problems with letting a small group (fossil fuel interests) control the power grid. I don’t consider giving the job to General Electric to be a vast improvement over Exx-Mob.
Then there is the fact that the electric grid is only a tiny portion of the problem. Transportation is not going to be resolved by nukes, and ultimately, we have to come up with a better solution than our current grid for all the third world countries whose energy needs are only going to increase in the future.
As H. L. Mencken said, “Solutions to complex problems exist–simple, easy to understand and wrong.” A monomaniacal focus on a single solution is simply wrongheaded, and your insistence on hijacking every post on climate change just so you can beat up on hippies is trollish.
look sir of the titans as has been noted you are a crank on this subject and a monomaniac as well. you sound like a purest on this subject and yous is the only answer. You fail to answer the question of all the external and brush the waste problem away with
I happen to live now in this time and not in some imaginary time with perfect unsubscribed storage and disposal systems. How are we going to actually going to deal with all of the waste including the low level waste and the decommissioned plants and what is the cost and who will pay for that and where does any profit again I live in the real world come from and where does it go and when is it calculated?
because you are sounding like a very glib used car salesman with all the answers to none of the questions
snarkrates
Yes it is. In the same way that solar and wind are purported to solve it. If you get cheap enough electricity and/or high temperature process heat, then you can do wonderful things. Whether it’s li ion batteries, directly electrified passenger rail, or synthetic hydrocarbons from seawater and co2 from seawater or the atmosphere, you can do things.
Yea. Ideally factory-build nuclear power plants, with passive decay heat removal, and which are as idiot-proof as possible, that are shipped to site. One of my personal favorites is still ThorCon because of their sales pitch. Basically, there is no valve or control that the operator has which can disable the safety features of the reactor, and the reactor safety features do not require electricity or any moving parts. While I know that every time someone says idiot proof, they invent a better idiot, this is still really good. The only way that I can conceive of something going wrong is if someone started actively dismantling the safety systems for some bizarre reason.
But again, we don’t need perfect safety, which leads to the next point.
We don’t need them to be risk free. Why do we need such an impossible goal? We could have a Fukushima or Chernobyl every decade, and that’s still way better than airborne particulate pollution from fossil fuels, and way better than fossil fuel caused climate change, global warming, sea level rise, ocean acidification, species loss, etc.
It’s completely informed by Green propaganda. The rules for allowable escape are orders of magnitude too strict. It’s all based on this ridiculous notion that radioactive material is infinitely harmful, and that any releases of it, no matter how diluted, is still infinitely dangerous. That’s not how reality works. The dose makes the poison. Homeopathy isn’t true.
The dose rate limit for potential exposure in the future is 0.15 mSv per year. That’s off by at least one order of magnitude. Remember that background is typically 3 – 10 mSv / year. I wonder how much this ridiculous limit raises costs? /s
There’s also better ways to dispose of this. Here’s some.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdfhttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/10/the-sub-seabed-solution/308434/https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/And a quote from the comment section from the author of the article from the last link. I reproduce here because it’s the critical think that you need to understand.
Because you refuse to accept that your understanding of the dangers involved is wrong, and a result of 60+ years of Green propaganda. It’s not as dangerous as you think it is. Not even close. Quoting from one of the above open letters from many scientists and others:
Let that sink in. The most highly exposed clean-up workers at Chernobyl suffered a smaller chance of death from the radiation compared to simply mundane boring air pollution in a big city. They’re not denying that some of them died. About 50 of them did die from acute radiation poisoning, and some small but uncertain number later from cancer. But the dangers of fossil fuels are so unimaginably larger. Airborne particulate pollution is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. About 1 out of every 8 deaths worldwide is directly attributable to airborne particulate pollution, including indoor and outdoor air pollution. We could fix almost all of that, 7 million deaths per year, of them by moving away from fossil fuels (and animal dung as fuel) to nuclear power. Nuclear waste leaks will be nowhere close to that death count. We’re already in an apocalyptic situation, but you don’t even notice it, and you’re comparing nuclear to perfection, and not to what we have right now. Nuclear is miles better than what we have right now, and miles better than solar and wind too.
Edit: Correction. It’s about 1000 lb of neodynium per large wind turbine, not 1000 tons. My bad. Still a huge number. Something on the order of one ton per turbine, especially for the new 5 MW and larger turbines.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a beautiful wildlife refuge.
I have been there, and it’s not. It’s polluted by tons of crap humans left all over the place.
Are you ignorant or lying?
I give as good as I get.No. You respond to a relatively mild inquiry with nothing but insults and accusations. That’s not “giving as good as you get”, that’s behaving like a toxic bully.
You’re the one who started by trolling me by repeatedly asking me to provide sources for a claim that I did not make, even after I clarified repeatedly explained that I did not make it.No. I did not “troll you by asking for sources for a claim you did not make”, I asked you if the IPCC provided a position which is in line with the position you do claim (100%nuclear+hydro).
I never claimed that the IPCC reports says we should only build nuclear and hydro, and I said that the IPCC reports include no such thing, and yet you kept asking me to provide such a citation.I never, ever, claimed you did claim that. Why are you strawmanning me? Are you just a dishonest troll?
Here, for your benefit, is what happened from my perspective:
@ 15 I asked you if the IPCC supported your position of 100% nuclear.
@ 16 You quickly corrected me with a comment I took to mean you do not claim the position of 100% nuclear, but instead 100% nuclear+hydro.
@ 17 I responded by immediately apologising for the erroneous mischaracterisation of your position as being 100% nuclear and not 100% nuclear+hydro, and instead rephrased the same question so as to account for this.
I never claimed that the IPCC reports says we should only build nuclear and hydroI never said you did. Not once in any of my comments here. Why do you keep poisoning the well?
I asked you, once (and then rephrased, once, as – unlike you – I actually care about not mischaracterising people) if the IPCC report supported your position of 100% nuclear + hydro.
The reason for my question, as I have tried to make clear to you several times now, is because I was unsure if I’d missed something.
When I say
“it certainly would be intellectually dishonest to not listen to what the scientists actually say, and instead presuppose they actually support the position of 100% of your preferred technology”
And the response is
Can’t read the IPCC reports which say that lots of nuclear is required?”
My immediate thought was, well if someone is saying “can’t you read the IPCC report?” in response to me, maybe I have missed something and the report actually supports 100% someone’s preferred technology. The report is long, after all, and it is not impossible I might have missed a point (even one as important as this) if it was “buried in the text”. I am fallible, and was worried I’d erred.
and I said that the IPCC reports include no such thingNo. This is wrong.
Not in any of your comments @ 16, 18, 19, nor 21 did you ever say the IPCC does not support 100% nuclear + hydro. If you think you did, please quote the text and I will happily apologise.
What you did was respond to my first comment @ 12 where I said it is important to listen to the scientists by responding @ 14 (somewhat contemptuously, I thought) with a demand if I’d read the IPCC report. I asked you if it supported your position, and you firstly went on a large tangent about Greens again, then accused me of strawmanning you, then you insulted me and called me a troll.
That’s trolling.Actually, what seems to be trolling is repeatedly lying about what I said, repeatedly accusing me of dishonesty and never actually showing any, then repeatedly insulting me.
Final remarks
In general, I try to remember on the other commenters on the internet are people too, and try (not always successfully) to respond to them with a reasonable degree of charity. This is not always easy, as my spoons are limited. When the response is the exhausting constant accusations and lies and vitriol I get from you, it depletes my spoons considerably – though, given the way you behave, I doubt you are capable of sufficient empathy to ever give a damn how your toxic behaviour affects others.
Fair enough.
Certainly you can bully me by exhausting me with your agressive strawmanning and toxicity. Good for you. By all means have the last word and continue to scream insults and abuse at someone who has repeatedly tried to engage in good faith discussions with a degree of generosity and charity you have never, ever, ever responded with.
I will co-sign with Marcus, and say that the way you continually behave makes it very easy to dismiss you as a tedious crank.
I am very glad I’ve never met you in person, and am unlikely to ever do so – you seem a pretty unpleasant individual. Fortunately, I don’t have to read anything you say – nothing, to borrow from you, of any value will be lost.
Is Dr Kerry Emanuel a crank?
If he’s mis-labeling his readers as “greens” and making wrong assumptions about their beliefs, he is.
Marcus in 40
Acceptable. I’m not sure where I did that exactly, but I might have.
Cutty in 15
In context, that’s clearly insinuating that I made the claim that the IPCC made the claim that we should build 100% nuclear. That’s the strawman. You repeat it in #17. You’re clearly trolling.
Marcus
The only spot in this thread where I said someone is a Greener is in my post #7 where I said that snarkrates holds Green dogma based on the content of post #4. Upon reading it again, I think that was a fair deduction. Are you complaining about that?
I’d like to improve here. Could you point out where I directly (or indirectly) accused someone else of belonging to the Green environmental movement in this thread? I did accuse many others of repeating lies that are based on Green propaganda – and I think I stand by those accusations – but that’s not the same thing as accusing someone of actually being a “member” of the international anti-nuclear Green movement.
You probably think I’m being snide or trolling, but I honestly don’t know what you find objectionable. Is there a specific sentence or two that you could point out please?
I have said very little that is not supported by peer reviewed papers.
Regarding the 100% nuclear hydro claim, I posted above an indirect link to one paper that argues that the IPCC modeling would go to mostly nuclear if one removed the artificial limitations on nuclear fuel supply from the model.
Basically, the last resort of someone losing an argument to someone with overwhelming peer review vs people who haven’t cited a single paper The last resort? Tone trolling. In Pharyngula of all places. Pathetic.
Tedious? Yes. Crank? Absolutely not.
The most highly exposed clean-up workers at Chernobyl suffered a smaller chance of death from the radiation compared to simply mundane boring air pollution in a big city.
The “bio-robots” the USSR brought in for the clean-up were rotated through so that everyone got their maximum allowed dosage, then were sent home. The fact that the Soviets concoted a brutal method for side-stepping the safety issues in the cleanup does not mean that the cleanup was safe. I believe it was something like 250,000 national guard and miners that were rotated through, and given no choice in the matter.
Some of the equipment left lying around included an earth-moving machine (a bulldozer built from a T-72 chassis) that registered 120milliseiverts/hr. Not lethal but not exactly playground equipment either. Just standing outside the “coffin” around the blown reactor registered 25milliseiverts/hr. Is that enough to shorten one’s life? Tricky question but since cancer is probablistic the answer has to be “yes.”
As far as wind killing some people – sure. And there are probably people who died dropping solar panels on themselves. But you’re stretching, there. I was referring to things like pipeline breaks, burning fuel trucks, oil spills, and refinery explosions. Next I suppose you’re going to argue that “dams kill” based on Jonestown. Your attempts at propaganda are as lame as the “greens” who go around screaming that the radiation from Fukushima is killing LA.
Again, I actually think safe-er nuclear power is fine and I support it as a component of humanity’s future power grid. I’m on your side in this matter, so stop lying at me you ass.
I do think that building nuclear reactors where they can be flooded out by tidal effects, or building them on fault lines, or building them shabbily (the crumbling concrete at Chernobyl was not confidence-building). Yes I’d be more concerned if a hydro plant’s concrete was crumbling. This isn’t a matter where one technology is the one true ring that will save us – we should be throwing the non-fossil-fuelled kitchen sink at it.
What worries me mostly is things like politicians that say they are going to stop fossil fuel extraction, by which they mean they will stop granting new licenses in 5 years, or some such bullshit. There’s already a whole lot of bullshit swirling around on this topic and I think you’re contributing to that tide of bullshit. As you can maybe tell, you’re not impressing people a whole lot.
I did accuse many others of repeating lies that are based on Green propaganda
As I pointed out above, I think you are also “spinning” propaganda; it makes me dismiss you and I actually agree with you.
Saying stuff like that the Chernobyl exclusion zone is a beautiful nature sanctuary, to someone who has been there, is really lame. Unless you have a fucked-up idea of “beautiful”. I don’t know if that’s “greener” propaganda or whose propaganda it is, but I’m hyper sensitive to propaganda and when it’s coming at me, I shut the source off.
Marcus
To the extent you’re right, ignorant. Yes there’s a bunch of stuff left over. But it’s my understanding that much of the exclusion zone is forest. I would call that a wildlife preserve.
120 mSv / hour? Forget cancer. That will kill you from acute radiation poisoning in a day (or less). However, areas in the exclusion zone with this level of radiation are an incredibly tiny and isolated area of the overall official Chernobyl exclusion zone, and thus it doesn’t contradict anything I’ve said. I’ve said that the very large majority of it is safe to live in now. Not all of it. I didn’t say it was safe to live in the reactor core, nor in that basement with the disposed radiation shielding clothing, etc.
This makes no engineering sense. We are talking about a zero sum game. Every bit of time, money, labor, and material that we spend on solar is resources that we could be spending on something else.
Yes we should continue R&D into everything, including wind, solar, batteries, etc., but we shouldn’t continue devoting vast amounts of money to be wasted on building vast amounts of borderline useless solar cells and wind turbines. We need solutions, and we need to start building solutions right now. Waiting on unspecified radical technological breakthroughs in energy storage, or building out tons of infrastructure that will only “work” based on future unspecified radical technology breakthroughs, in the context of climate change? That is the most irresponsible thing that I have ever heard.
When you start doing the math and modeling properly, like the IPCC models without the artificial constraints on nuclear fuel supply, you will find that nuclear will dominate the model. This is because of a few simple facts. We require 24-7 power. Nuclear power plants can ramp their output up and down by significant amounts and quite quickly too, when designed to do so, but they don’t save money for doing so. A nuclear power plant costs as much to operate at 50% of max power output as 100% of max power output. Adding solar and wind to the grid requires backup because the storage tech is not there. Building nuclear to back up solar and wind means we already have enough power to provide power for the full demand, rendering the solar and wind useless and redundant.
Solar and wind make sense in off grid applications, and maybe small islands whose power demand is too small for a nuclear SMR to make sense. (Remember, nuclear SMRs can get really small. NuScale is 77 MWe.) So, solar and wind are 1% of the solution, at best, barring radical breakthroughs in energy storage technology.
Most of them because they refuse to believe that 100% renewables are impossible, and that it’s likely that their sources of information, most Green orgs, are probably funded in large part by fossil fuel money. They don’t like hearing the truth told in a blunt forceful way. I’m a firebrand.
You, I don’t know what your problem with me is. Do you disagree with anything I’ve said? Or just the way that I’ve said it?
The only spot in this thread where I said someone is a Greener
“This” thread. You may be surprised to know that I read most of your comments. You’ve characterized “green” as an ideology that propagandizes, while propagandizing.
In my Argument Clinic series I advocate avoiding labels because it’s too easy to deflect them by saying “no true greener here” (as I did). The way to prevent that is to deal with specifics – which I know you can and do. For example, dealing with your propaganda about the exclusion zone, I can respond specifically by calling you a liar. To me, you lost me there. So if someone were to, for example, lie about the radiological damage from Fukushima and how it is going to poison the entire Pacific (I’ve seen those articles too) the fact that the claim is stretching the truth is how to defeat them. If someone said “going to Chernobyl is a death-sentence” I wouldn’t try to brush them off by labelling it as “china syndrome propaganda” – I’d say that the ambient radiation is not anywhere near that lethal and “why are you lying to me?”
Labelling is one of the primary techniques of propaganda and marketing and it gives me hives.
Marcus
Re: Propaganda. How much of the Chernobyl exclusion zone is forest? If you were in that forest, could you see any obvious signs of human habitation or pollution? My understanding is that for most of the official exclusion zone, you would neither signs of humans nor pollution. You would see forests and animals, all perfectly normal. To me, that’s a wildlife preserve. I welcome to being corrected on this.
Gerrard has precisely the same approach to “research” as the Q-morons: Find a bunch of shit on the Intertubes and post an avalanche of it, applicable or not, to anyone who points out that you don’t understand what you are talking about.
It’s the Gish Gallop gone nuclear.
Marcus
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: 1,004 sq mi.
The red forest: 4 sq mi.
Pripyat: 3 sq mi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone
When you visited there? How long was the car ride or hike into Pripyat? Did you go to Pripyat? What did you see along the way? Miles and miles of pristine forest, I presume.
It’s not propaganda. It’s putting it in context. You apparently think that Pripyat and the Chernobyl site constitute all 1000 square miles of the exclusion zone, and this is not true.
snarkrates
I have shit from peer reviewed sources, and quotes from leading climate scientists, including preeminent climate scientist James Hansen. What do you have on your renewables side? A bunch of lies and fearmongering.
I’m sorry that it takes so much space and so many peer reviewed sources to rebut the incredible volume of shit that someone like you can write out in the space of a few sentences.
@36
like usual you answered the question not asked. Let me try that again more simply given that waste is a problem what is the concrete solution for it? Do not just give the same answer of “it is not a problem and no worse then everything else” because that is not the answer to the question asked. If you or anyone else do not have an answer to that besides anything other then it is not a problem OK say that plainly that no one knows how we will solve that today. If not then what are the actual solutions to the waste including all waste; high level, waste low level waste and decommissioning the plants? Who will pay for that . because there are costs and there is waste.
Do not go all “but the coal plants are dirty” either because that is a question for another thread not this one and probably not you.
Shut UP, Gerrard. Cutty Snark has you nailed.
Do you disagree with anything I’ve said? Or just the way that I’ve said it?
Well, I was fine with what you were saying until you turned what I thought was a fair rumination about the fact that fossil fuels are dangerous and that many alternatives are not, into some bullshit “yeah but some people have died in windmills.” I was agreeing with you and you responded with distortions. So it’s that I don’t like how you say these things and I don’t completely agree with you.
Frankly, I think you’re being a jackass when someone says “we ought to throw the kitchen sink at this problem” they are not opposing you – you’re making enemies. You can do that if you want, it’s not my problem. But … why?
I’m not happy that “safe pebble bed reactors” keep cropping up in the news but I don’t see them going online. (Why not?) And the whole “fusion in 30 more years!” Seems like a hail-Mary way of kicking the can down the road. And watching Fukushima’s containment building pop like a champagne cork was not reassuring. Meanwhile, there are windmills going up like dandelions out here and I just leased 120acres of my land to a Canadian solar development company for an array to collect about 1mw of free yummy sunshine. I don’t see what’s wrong with pursuing all the alternatives and I wish the nuclear power companies hadn’t shit the hot tub so hard.
unclefrogy
My snarky solution to the nuclear waste problem: Build facilities where we can grind it up into dust, and build other facilities that will shoot that dust into the lower atmosphere so that it evenly spreads over the whole surface of the planet, approx. When you calculate the expected death count from LNT, it’s still less than the yearly death count from coal. Given that doing one of the worst possible things imaginable for “disposing” of nuclear waste results in less deaths than normal coal operation, and given that coal is seemingly acceptable, I don’t need to provide better solutions for waste disposal. If you want to read better solutions for waste disposal, I provided three links that all outline reasonable approaches.
I started with the weaker position that we need lots of nuclear power to solve the problem. I think that a 100% nuclear hydro solution is better, but we at least need some nuclear. That was my opening position. Plenty of people disagreed. Plenty of people think that nuclear power is too dangerous, or too expensive (which seems to be just a convenient excuse and cover for “too dangerous”), and that we should try 100% renewables. So, I don’t agree with your characterization of most people in this thread.
For you particularly Marcus, I think you’re closer to the truth. I don’t know why you would stop at “some nuclear” and not just go “mostly nuclear and hydro”. Have you thought deeply about this? Is this just a political move in order to be more approachable and attractive? Because it’s a very poor engineering move.
For most people in this thread, they are vehemently anti-nuclear. I believe what James Hansen and Kerry Emanuel said, which is that anti-nuclear environmentalists (e.g. Greens) are a bigger obstacle to fixing climate change than the climate change deniers. They are my enemies. Two examples.
Greens in Germany shut down nuclear power plants and built a new coal plant and are building a new nat gas pipeline. The person who started the Green energy transition, the German president at the time, in alliance with the German Green political party, is now on the bankroll of the Russian national gas company Gazprom. I can’t make this shit up. These facts are all open and uncontested.
In California, my new home state, we had enough nuclear power plants in the early construction and planning phases circa 1960-1970, that if we finished them, California today would have basically 100% nuclear electricity. Instead, governor Jerry Brown, the first time he was governor, stopped most of that construction. He had the help of the newly born anti-nuclear movement with David Brower and Friends Of The Earth, stated by fossil fuel money. Jerry Brown was doing it to protect his family’s massive investments in fossil fuels. Again, I can’t make this shit up. I wish I could. These facts are all open and uncontested.
Greens are going backwards. When Greens get into power, they shut down nuclear, and open up new coal plants and natural gas plants.
I could also rant about how Green ideology is the primary cause of a large portion of world hunger today, especially in Africa. People who hold to standard Green ideology of “nuclear bad; we need to consume less” are just despicable people.
Again, what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with building lots of solar and wind? This is what is wrong with that:
1- It delays our progress to the solution. It doesn’t help us get any closer to our intermediary goals of no more fossil fuels for electricity generation.
2- It provides small benefits in the short term compared to just building nuclear. History shows that Western countries can build nuclear much faster than the Uighyr slave labor can build comparable amounts of solar cells in China.
3- It also becomes stranded capital in the final solution. We’re not going to have days of storage. The final solution is going to be mostly nuclear and hydro, and in that kind of grid, the solar cells and wind turbines are basically useless. They won’t reduce the amount of nuclear and hydro that we need. To support them in the interim, we’ll also need to waste lots of money on extra transmission that we won’t need in the final solution, ditto for batteries, synchronous condensers for grid inertia, many boilers for blackstart capability, etc.
4- It produces a shitton of toxic waste that I’d rather not produce in the first place.
5- It raises electricity prices, which especially hurts the poor, including poor people in developed countries, and poor people in developing countries. Well-being is intrinsically and strongly tied to energy consumption (at least up to what we would call rich in Western countries).
@56
thanks for that as I see that the only answer to waste is some BS joke so we can build your new house from the re-cycled steel from a reactor core and you car from the rebar and other re-enforcing steel from the containment building and the crushed concrete for backfill base under your foundation as well as a % of the aggregate.
so who pays for that?
unclefrogy
I can’t answer the question because I don’t accept your premises. The “answer” to the question is to challenge the premises. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. I reject to the very premise of the question, which is that nuclear waste is some unimaginably horrific thing. It’s not. My snarky example was meant to show that to you. You don’t make the same demands for how solar cells and the waste for wind turbines are going to be properly disposed before allowing them to make more solar cells and wind turbines, but by any objective measure, that waste from solar cells and wind turbines is much worse than nuclear waste (when comparing equal amounts of power generation). If you are ok with making more solar cells and wind turbines, then you should also be ok with making more nuclear power plants. If you don’t agree that nuclear waste is less dangerous than solar cell waste and wind turbine waste (when comparing equal amounts of power generation), then we need to start there.
When you visited there? How long was the car ride or hike into Pripyat? Did you go to Pripyat? What did you see along the way? Miles and miles of pristine forest, I presume.
No, the forests are polluted with random crap. Huge areas around the reactors look terrible because the topsoil was scraped off and buried. There are wrecked, irradiated, boats sunk in the river leaking oil, still. There is earthmoving equipment all over the place. I remember one field where they had torch-chopped draglines from strip-mining gear (some of which was made in Pittsburgh Pa) and buried them – I tore a chunk out of my leg and ruined one of my boots stepping on razor-sharp ends. There are huge areas where vehicles are piled up – acres and acres. I metered the vehicle cemetary and there was stuff in there putting out 300msievert/hr and getting rained on and leaching into the groundwater. There’s an entire abandoned railway station full of cars that are falling apart.
It’s as pristine as you’d expect a place to look 50 years after a nuclear war. Yes there are trees. Lots. It’s the Pripet marshes, which ate panzer divisions in WW2. There are signs of humanity everywhere. Pripyat is about 4 miles by road and 1 as the crow flies from the reactors, which can be seen from the top of the buildings. We walked a lot and drove a lot. There are debris fields you don’t want to walk in. There are abandoned factories, like the Jupiter plant, which still has big open tanks that looked like they had a lot of dichromate in them. And randomly, stuff meters as fairly radioactive. Not lethally radioactive but its like getting an Xray every minute of every day (if I estimated that right). The rivers are apparently wickedly polluted – you’d expect to see fish but all I saw was algae.
We stayed in the barracks built for the Japanese consultants who came to help, in Chernobyl proper. The food was awful. There was one convenience store that mostly sold vodka.
It’s not a beautiful or happy place and I don’t think anyone would call it “pristine” if they had been there. Sure, there are lots of trees. But that’s probably more the Pripet marshes than exclusion zone. BTW, my bog oak is hauled out of the marshes by entrepreneurs. Nobody seems to care about environmental damage there, because everything is already thoroughly fucked up. One thing that bugged me: all – and I mean all – of the copper wire has been “recycled” out of reactor 6 and every building in Pripyat. Also all the buses and trucks in the vehicle graveyard were missing carbureators, alternators, etc. I wonder if wire stays radioactive if you melt it down.
I didn’t see any wolves.
Also, I am unsure offhand, but I bet the rebar from the containment building has negligible amounts of radioactivity because it’s inside of the concrete. I’d probably be totally happy having my car, house, etc., built from such recycled steel. First, tell me what the radioactivity is of the steel, but I’m betting it’s quite low.
Marcus
Ok. I stand corrected. I will partially counter that it still has an amazing wildlife diversity because of the lack of humans, and there is no perceptible damage from radiation to current animal life. I guess I have to drop the word “pristine” when I describe it as a wonderful wildlife refuge. More like “post-apocalyptic wildlife refuge with wonderful biodiversity and practically zero apparent harm to current animal life from radiation”.
PS:
I know that most of the topsoil removal for Fukushima was not medically indicated. I wonder to what extent the same was true for Chernobyl. Immediately around the reactor makes sense to me. I don’t know how far out they removed topsoil.
PPS:
Yes. However, it probably wasn’t radioactive in the first place. It wasn’t exposed to any neutron flux or anything like that, and so it wasn’t transmuted into anything radioactive.
Having said that, there be trace contamination on the surface from fallout. I don’t know how that will behave during a metal recycling process. Maybe much of the stuff will plate out or otherwise precipitate out. I don’t know. That’s an intricate chemistry and engineering question. However, it’s very probably safe to assume that whatever amounts of fallout remain in the recycled metal are harmless because of the incredibly small amount of fallout – unless they’re swiping things directly from the reactor building area. Even then, maybe safe. I have no idea.
Marcus
Wait a tick. I reread what you wrote, and I think you might be making a mistake in several of your posts. Are you confusing milliSieverts with microSieverts? I think you meant to write microSievert but instead wrote milliSievert and mSievert (which I also interpreted as milliSievert).
300 mSv / hr is very lethal. IIRC, 1 Sv is a decent ballpark for when acute radiation sickness sets in, and so you’ll get that dose in about 3 hours. Wait a whole day at that level, and you’re dead.
300 μSv / hr is very different. That’s definitely not lethal. Not immediately. That’s about 2.6 Sv / year. Consider, a MIT experiment exposed mice to radiation dose rate of about 1 Sv / year, and the mice were unharmed. They did detailed genetic tests to look for genetic damage, and found none. Having said that, it was just one experiment, with mice, not humans, and with only one kind of ionizing radiation. It’s unclear whether a dose rate of 300 μSv / hr from any ionizing radiation can cause cancer in humans, but it’s definitely not something to mess around with. That dose rate is at least two orders of magnitude higher than what I would propose for a regulatory safe exposure limit.
Gerrard, this was the very first paragraph of your very first post in this thread:
I don’t know whether you were addressing this to PZ’s original post, or to one of the handful of comments above yours, but I can tell you it turned me right off. It seemed to me you were calling everyone in this forum – bloggers and/or commenters — Green true-believers. I saw nothing in the original post or comments to justify this very aggressive attack. I tried (a bit half-heartedly) to give you the benefit of the doubt after that, but it didn’t take too many more of your follow-on comments to turn me off completely from any message you might have been trying to convey.
Are you confident that your strategy is likely to win people over to your point of view?
1- It delays our progress to the solution. It doesn’t help us get any closer to our intermediary goals of no more fossil fuels for electricity generation.
The only thing that will do that is legislating fossil fuel extraction out of existence. There is a lack of political will to do that. (They should also stop making nuclear weapons, and stop wasting money on the military) none of which is going to happen.
I agree about the toxic byproducts of many processes, but again that applies to pretty much every industrial process people do including nuclear and solar.
I don’t think I buy the zero-sum logic. Photovoltaics and wind tech have improved considerably in the last 2 decades. Maybe continuing to invest in wind and PV will result in worthwhile improvements. Meanwhile, it seems dumb to elide the possibility of putting PV on my roof because my money would be better spent wishing PenElec would build more nuclear reactors.
Also: anything that offers an alternative to fossil fuels makes it harder for politicians to keep kicking the can down the road. I worry that the lead-time for nuclear would allow politicians to say “it’ll take 20 years to roll out nuclear so lets burn fucking MORE coal while that’s happening” – and it never does. So whether alternatives would replace fossil fuels that are an important competitor and if we actually did cut back fossil fuels and build nukes we’d need to boost alternatives (which have a faster setup time) to keep humans from falling back off the wagon.
Yes there are several nuclear reactors in Pa. I am not happy that 2 of them are 1hr upwind of NYC and one has had a whole city grow up around it and the other is 10 miles from Pittsburgh. It seems like a bad idea. I’d rather see newer, better designed reactors going up that are situated somewhere like Mississippi where nobody will give a fuck. (I kid!) maybe the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones are overly conservative but if the reactor by Pittsburgh required an exclusion zone like Chernobyl’s because of an accident that would encompass the city. Seems like a bad idea.
Hydro is totally the way to go, but we suck at water management. I have long wondered why there are no integrated designs that combine a nuclear reactor with a dam/reservoir (one hell of a coolant pond!) but that seems not to be happening.
I agree there is a lot of NIMBY and I think that’s stupid because humanity’s energy hunger is not a backyard-size problem. I honestly don’t see this as a technology problem so much as a political problem, which means we are fucked.
Another place we probably disgree is I support standing down the US nuclear weapons arsenal and investing that money in fusion research instead. Of course that won’t happen and it’s a huge longshot. But we need to take those, too. Also, we need to burn oil executives, lobbyists and politicians at the stake. No sense letting them get away with it.
Gerrard @ 42, I commend you on your ability to exhaust people with your aggressive dishonesty.
Context
Again, my comment @ 12 I said
“it certainly would be intellectually dishonest to not listen to what the scientists actually say, and instead presuppose they actually support the position of 100% of your preferred technology”The context is “we should listen to the scientists, and not promulgate our ideologically preferred solution”. Note that all your subsequent comments were responses to this initial position.
Your response @ 14
Can’t read the IPCC reports which say that lots of nuclear is required?The context here is you imply I can’t read the IPCC report (which was poisoning the well), and you imply it supports your position (remember, this is a reply to a comment regarding “scientists not personal opinions to form positions”) by promulgating “lots of nuclear”.
So you are correct that you didn’t literally claim the IPCC report supports your position (and I have never said you have), but certainly it could not unreasonably be interpreted there is an implication there due to the context of the comment you respond to.
My response @ 15, which you selectively quote
Actually, I can (and did) read the IPCC reports. However, clearly I missed the bit where it said that we should build 100% nuclear – perhaps you can send the reference?Here I did not ask you to supply sources for a claim you did not make, but I ask you if the IPCC report supports your position (due to the context of @ 12 and your reply) and to send a reference if it does.
So, since you are so concerned with context, the total exchange was
@ 12 “We should listen to the scientists and not just our personal opinions to form our positions”
@ 14 “did you read the IPCC report, it support lots of nuclear”
@ 15 “Yes I did read the IPCC report – given we should listen to the scientists, does it support your position of 100% nuclear (note1)?”
@ 16 “That’s not my claim. I think 100% nuclear is better, but support 100% nuclear + hydro. (something something about how greens are bad)”
@ 17 “OK then, does the IPCC support your position of 100% nuclear + hydro”
@ 18 “I never actually said the IPCC report supports my position. You’re trying to twist what I said. You’re strawmanning me”
@ 20 “I didn’t say you said the IPCC report supports your position, I asked you if the IPCC report supports your position because of the previous context which implied you think it does”
@: subsequent Gerrard comments “why are you lying, you’re a troll, you’re dishonest, blah blah insult insult”.
Note 1: I mistakenly characterise your position as 100% nuclear instead of 100% nuclear + hydro, for which I then subsequently apologise.
Note 2: despite your previous claim, you in fact never actually said “that the IPCC reports include no such thing” – this is just factually incorrect.
Comment
I think, given that you are selectively quoting me, and ignoring the context of the previous comments, it is you who are being very dishonest right now.
Not only did you try to imply I claimed something I did not claim (this would seem to be fine when you do it, which would make you a hypocrite in addition to your other failings), you also seem to be trying to pretend that it is totally unreasonable of me to have formed the impression that you believe (but not state) the IPCC report supports your position of 100% nuclear + hydro, despite this being a direct response to my comment @ 12 (“listen to the scientists not personal impressions to form positions). That seems pretty close to gaslighting. It is especially irritating given your comment @ 19, where you insinuate that the IPCC report does in fact support your position, if you “remove the artificial handicaps”.
For myself, I’ve established to my satisfaction that the kindest interpretation is that you are the sort of person who is happy to make all sorts of suggestive implications and accusative comments, but takes exceptional umbrage when people respond fairly mildly; and that the least kind interpretation is that you are a deliberate gaslighting troll.
I’ll leave it to others to draw their own conclusions.
Are you confusing milliSieverts with microSieverts?
Could be. Over 200 whatever it was my radmeter started beeping a warning. I just did some research and found the model of meter I had (it was borrowed) and it was micro- scale not milli-
Marcus
I specifically said we should continue (substantial) R&D into all of the above, including solar, wind, batteries. I also said we shouldn’t waste money on large-scale deployment of solar, wind, and batteries at the current time. I am unsure if you are disagreeing with this or not.
If you want to spend the money to do it, go for it. However, in a proper “fair market”, the rate that you would sell electricity back to the grid would be substantially less than what you buy it at because the grid provides many benefits that you do not, including resiliency during times when solar doesn’t produce and grid inertia and other frequency control services. Allowing people to sell electricity back at wholesale prices is allowing these individual homeowners to hugely leach from the grid, and those prices are passed on to everyone who isn’t rich enough to afford the initial investment for solar panels on their rooofs. Allowing people to sell solar electricity back to the grid at wholesale prices is a huge transfer of money from poor to rich.
All new designs, AFAIK, have a large cooling pond of some kind attached to the passive decay heat removal system. IIRC, the AP-1000’s pond will last for like 30 or 60 days. I forget. IIRC, it’s also atmospheric pressure, meaning it’s really easy to top off the pond. It’s also relatively easy to increase the pond to handle unlimited decay heat removal, but I guess the AP-1000 designers didn’t want to spend that extra little bit of money. Ugg. At least it’s atmospheric pressure so it’s easy to refill without specialized equipment, unlike IIRC Fukushima.
PS:
I also hugely agree with James Hansen that the proper solution is not to ban fossil fuels outright, but do a simple greenhouse gas emissions tax (not a cap-and-trade which are mostly scams AFAIK), where the tax is collected at the mine and/or the point of burning, making it easy to enforce. Then, do the “dividend” part of his “fee-and-dividend” approach – splitting the tax money evenly to all residents, so that we get a progressive tax instead of a regressive tax.
DonDueed,
Sorry, I should have addressed post 4 to snarkrates.
To paraphrase Dan Dennett, there is no polite way to ask a religious person “Good sir or maam, have you considered the possibility that you’ve squandered significant portions of your life on a lie?”.
I’d love to know an effective way to do the same for anti-nuclear pro-renewable energy persons, but I don’t think that there is one. I think that it’s a religious cult, and like any religious cult, members are very resistant to information that challenges their worldview.
Some religious persons respond to the nice approach, and some religious persons respond better to the firebrand approach. It takes all kinds.
PPS: A greenhouse gas emissions tax that increases year over year until such point that fossil fuels become uneconomical. The key is to strike the right balance between ending fossil fuel use quickly, without needlessly hurting poor people with the tax, and without going faster than what can plausibly be delivered e.g. avoiding needless crashes of the economy. Still, that should be relatively simple and straightforward to do. One can adjust the tax year by year based on results of the previous years.
Cutty
I can say this. I apologize for not being clearer and being too hair trigger. I could have been clearer. I probably let my anger get away from me. I’m still highly dubious about your good intentions, especially when you started out by mocking me, see post 12.
PPS: A greenhouse gas emissions tax that increases year over year until such point that fossil fuels become uneconomical.
So Bezos could still operate a 12cylinder Lamborghini. Admittedly it would be insignificant, in terms of emissions, but cap and trade markets inherently favor inequality. Outright bans don’t.
Marcus
Once we reach 99% or 99.9% elimination, outlaw the rest for all I care. I’m ok with that. However, an outright ban at the start is hugely counterproductive.
Also, a simple greenhouse gas emissions tax in the form of a fee-and-dividend is the opposite of favoring inequality. It’s a progressive taxation policy that moves money from rich people to poor people.
Notably, though burning fossil fuels is the greatest contributor to AGW, it’s not all.
Which means that, even if all fossil fuel usage for power production were stopped, the increase in greenhouse gases would still continue.
@ Gerrardetc.
So we shouldn’t be building the Dogger Bank windfarm? Or have built any of the other windfarms in the seas around the UK? Of course if we hadn’t built those windfarms along with solar power in various forms, our hydro power plants, and our remaining aging nuclear power stations we wouldn’t have the days when we use no fossil fuels to power our national grid or the days when 50% of the power comes from windfarms, which happen now, not in however long it really takes to finish building Hinkley Point C.
@Cutty Snark, Don Dueed and others
I don’t think Gerrard really cares about convincing anyone else. He’s too busy doing a Gish Gallop to show off his knowledge to actually consider the effect of his rudeness, his preconcieved notions about other commenters here, his assumption that any points raised are in bad faith, his strawmanning, his sealioning etc. etc. have on his apparent attempts to browbeat us all into agreeing that his is the One True Way to solve climate change. I and others have raised this with him and he always brushes it off as unimportant – if he was really interested in achieving change he would consider changing his off-putting communication style, that he doesn’t simply convinces me that he is only interested in “winning the argument” even if just by being the last poster.
Jazzlet
As John correctly notes above, there are significant sources of Greenhouse gas emissions other than electricity. A mere 80% reduction is not enough for electricity. We need a 100%. Solar and wind won’t help you get to 100%. Also, as cited above, in history, nuclear has been built far faster in France than solar has been built by Uighur slave labor in China. Citations above.
The real problem is that solar wind advocates have been saying the same thing you have been saying for decades now. I can give the quotes. They say things like “It’s finally this year that solar and wind are ready” and “nuclear power takes too long to build”. They were wrong then, and they’re still wrong now.
If your goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity by 30%-50%, then sure, build wind. My goal is to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from electricity – at least, something in the neighborhood of 99%.
Gerrard @ 72
Apology accepted.
I apologise for having set you off – not in a “sorry you were offended way” to try and dismiss you, but rather “I am sorry that I provoked you – it was not my intention to come across as trolling you, and I am sorry for whatever of my actions have led you to feel that way”. I think we may have talked past each other, and may have wound each other up a bit here. It happens!
Let’s start again. I will accept you are merely passionate about arguing your position, if you are willing to accept I am not a troll or dishonest. I want to be clear I am genuinely not trying to be rude or unfair here (I realise tone does not always carry well on the internet) when I say I would legitimately appreciate it if you try not to jump to conclusions with me in future, and I will try to do the same. Let’s try to be kind to each other – life is too short otherwise.
Cutter
Ok. Sounds good.
As I’ve been saying for the last thirty two years: we’re a doomed species. The earth will be better off without us. =/
@81 re @60
how the f*** do you know what I think of solar or wind? I have never said much about them and not here on this thread.
You are just full of it.
all of the material that is used in reactors except maybe salt suffer from nuclear degradation and must be removed the steel just breaks down and becomes increasingly brittle I suspect that the concrete does as well as it is just calcium which is not I think immune to nuclear degradation plus aggregate stone
so I have never seen anything from you or anyone else has any answers you just brush it aside. so like wise I brush you and all similar advocates
It’s probably fair to assume that most of GOCT’s claims are also off by around 223,900%.
While poorer individuals and parts of the world certainly need increased energy use, the fastest ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions don’t involve either new nuclear or new renewables, but changes in behaviour (primarily by rich people such as most of us): shifts to diets much lower in meat and dairy, and in travel behaviour – shifting short trips to walking and cycling for those capable to them, longer trips from private vehicles to mass transport, and cutting long distance travel by any mode, but particularly by private car or plane – air travel should be for emergencies only. Combating consumerist culture and encouraging the reduce-reuse-recycle order of priorities is also essential. All difficult politically, but now, in the immediate aftermath of the IPCC report and extreme weather events, and around COP26, is the time to push for such changes.
De-carbonising the transport of goods has almost the same requirements whatever the mix of nuclear and renewables, because only large ships could feasibly be powered by nuclear reactors – for everything else, either batteries or hydrogen/methane/alcohol/whatever produced from biomass or using low-carbon electricity are the only options. Improving the insulation of buildings and the efficiency of appliances are also important and relatively fast. But you won’t find GerrardOfConspiracyTheories advocating any of these measures, possibly because they are all campaigned for by Greens, as part of their evil conspiracy to undermine nuclear power.
KG, a nitpick:
Um, there’s wind. Around half the speed of engine-powered ships if only wind, or even as an adjunct to engines. But the fuel is free!
Good point, John Morales@85!
And you wonder why people know you’re an idiot? Nothing marks you like one more clearly than making a universal statement like “No one is over going to die…”.
So yeah, you’re not just a monomaniacal troll, you’re an idiot.
Boy, talk about an old fashioned flame war!
Going on about Fukushima and Chernobyl, ignoring a island chain that’s still uninhabitable due to strontium-90 and cesium-137 levels in plants from Castle Bravo.
I’m actually pro-nuclear power, but know it’s dirtier than hell, right up there with rare-earth metals and solar panel manufacturing.
Like in biology, when something is consumed, shit gets generated.
And utterly ignored was the stronger greenhouse gas, methane, 10% coming from livestock, 14% from energy sources and procurement.
Oh, clean coal is real – as a good water filter. ;)
Seriously, it is.
@GerrardOfTitanServer
I am going to only say one damn thing on this subject, which is this – People like you tend to piss me off, because while I agree that Nuclear energy is likely the best possible solution, its still all run by greedy ass bastard, who will place profit over either safety, efficiency, or sanity, and the result will be costly, giant assed, plants, which generate spent fuel we can’t f-ing get rid of any place, and just leave us with the “next” crisis that will have been warned about by experts for 40-50 years, until it becomes impossible to ignore INSTEAD OF SMALLER LESS WASTEFUL DESIGNS THAT DON’T MAKE SOME MONOPOLY BILLIONS BY MAKING EVERYONE ONLY USE THEIR GRID.
Kagehi,
I’m a card-carrying radical Marxist. I think it’s a problem that the bourgeoisie own the means of production. This is a problem. However, the solution to this problem is not to burn down the means of production. Your comments are basically asking to burn down the means of production. Asking for decentralized production is basically impossible. Modern industrial processes don’t work like that.
…
KG
Great. Go nuts. I’m all for energy efficiency and reducing energy usage in rich countries. However, it’s not a replacement for the need of large-scale deployment of lots of nuclear reactors.
Jesus Christ. You could at least read what I’ve written. Instead, you’re attacking this caricature that exists in your head, but not in reality. Quoting me in this thread, post #35:
“Yes it is. In the same way that solar and wind are purported to solve it [transportation]. If you get cheap enough electricity and/or high temperature process heat, then you can do wonderful things. Whether it’s li ion batteries, directly electrified passenger rail, or synthetic hydrocarbons from seawater and co2 from seawater or the atmosphere, you can do things.”
Fucking asshat.
…
unclefrogy and dean56,
You are simply misinformed about the scale of the dangers involved. The blunt truth is that most of what you know is a lie. I encourage you to read my links of actual scientists instead of relying on the lies of 60+ years of propaganda from the Green movement. Just as another example, the World Health Organization says this:
https://www.who.int/news/item/05-09-2005-chernobyl-the-true-scale-of-the-accidentSee also this commentator commenting on the result of a modern study regarding leaks of long-term nuclear waste disposal.
https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/And another climate change thread hijacked by GOTS.
OK dude or should I say comrade. you are saying that the problem of waste is not as dire as the “greens ” are purporting it to be, ar e you saying as well that it is not dangerous? It does not seem so. There is then some small problem existing with high level waste spent fuel rods and other material directly in contact with it. There are also low level and intermediate level waste that has been determined to be dangerous and can not be handled in the normal way waste is handled like being buried in simple land fills, burned or recycled. As you say not the end of the world stuff but you or no one else involved with promoting nuclear energy has ever given a direct clear answer to the question of what will we do with all of that stuff and who will pay and for how long. Just because you write it off the project spread sheets and do not account for it in any way society will still have to deal with the stuff because it exists. All you say is it is not that dangerous and what we have been told is lies.
As for you being a Marxist I do not believe you for one moment. All you have ever done here is promote big business in the name of the nuclear energy lobby. An industry that has proven itself to be solely interested in profit for itself and nothing more. Has no hesitation buying every politician it can to manipulate the rules to minimize over-site and regulation. to counter any questions with propaganda equal to anything the tobacco industry ever attempted. All of which you “a card carrying Marxist” copy paste on every thread that even tangentially you can squeeze them into
@GerrardOfTitanServer
What the F are you talking about. Pebble reactors, for example, are used by China, at least, and probably other countries, to produce local “city wide” power, though usually only in emergencies. But this is not necessary. They could be used all the time, and there is talk of doing that. I am not advocating the, “burning down of the means of production”, I am saying, “When you build new means of production, to augments the existing sources, stop handing the shit to monopolies instead of building local sources, which some asshole can’t turn around and jack the price up on for no good reason, or run rolling blackouts on, while lying that its the consumer of that product who is at fault, for needing to not boil/freeze to death, instead of the freaking energy companies, for hoarding all the money they could be spending to make sure the f-ing grid actually works, and can supply demand.
I have no idea where you got this BS idea that I want to “Burn down” the existing system. That wouldn’t even be possible. But the freaking solution isn’t to let the same bunch of assholes who are already screwing us over, and letting people die, then blaming the victims for it, build more giant assed, single source, single location, absolute monopolies over every source of new freaking power.
Anyone that thinks that is the path to solving this, and I can’t help but think, since you seem to believe that its totally fine if this is how it happens (if it happens), is on the side of the assholes that created this mess in the first place (largely by refusing to stop using horrible, toxic, sources to produce power, even when alternatives exist, then claiming that this is “better” than literally either building better solutions, finding ways to pollute less OR actually maintain, never mind upgrade, anything they already own, so it serves the public (which constantly raising prices, and claiming they, “need to do this, so they can sit on their assed and do absolutely nothing”, not the side of the customers, the environment, or even sometimes the f-ing law.
Like unclefrogy, I think rightly, accuses you of – your “solution” drops the “solution” into the hands of the same greedy bastards that refused to fix the problem when they already knew it existed, and now are willing to let people die, rather than pay to fix it, so that what? They can pull the same scams on us again? Let them keep the shit they have, and provide power with it, then jail the bastards when they fail to maintain it, instead of gifting them subsidies to lie to everyone, and hell no, don’t “tax” the people who are NOT using their grid, to get the money to pay those bullshit subsidies. If other solutions kill their businesses, then good f-ing riddance, they had more than 40 damned years to invent those solutions themselves, instead of now whining, bitching, and complaining that they need the government to punish people for using them, in order to keep their backward, out of date, garbage running. If it burns down, as you lie about me wanting, it wouldn’t be because I advocated to march on them with torches, it will be, and always was, and should be, because they damn well have NEVER WANTED TO CHANGE AND FOUGHT TOOTH AND NAIL TO NOT DO SO FOR FOUR DECADES.
Why the F would anyone, especially a “Marxist” want the bloody reward them for that crap, not hold them accountable for anything, and offer them all the new contracts to build new power plants, nuclear or otherwise.
I will say it even more harshly – I smell a corporate shill. Because this is always the argument, and the false promise, that such companies always make, “We are the ones who can best do this, and if you give us money, we promise to eventually do this, but in the mean time we can’t, so lets keep using fossil fuels for another 20 years, while we PRETEND to research it (then get caught having not lifted a single damn finger to improve, or research jack shit).”
Why the F would we trust their constant claims about how hard they are trying to change, and make things better, “again”? You think this time it won’t still be a complete lie, like it was every other time?
@GerrardOfTitanServer
(Other version had a few words that.. apparently got hit with a filter? lol This one is.. nicer)
What are you talking about. Pebble reactors, for example, are used by China, at least, and probably other countries, to produce local “city wide” power, though usually only in emergencies. But this is not necessary. They could be used all the time, and there is talk of doing that. I am not advocating the, “burning down of the means of production”, I am saying, “When you build new means of production, to augments the existing sources, stop handing it to monopolies instead of building local sources, which some jerk can’t turn around and jack the price up on for no good reason, or run rolling blackouts on, while lying that its the consumer of that product who is at fault, for needing to not boil/freeze to death, instead of the freaking energy companies, for hoarding all the money they could be spending to make sure the grid actually works, and can supply demand.
I have no idea where you got this BS idea that I want to “Burn down” the existing system. That wouldn’t even be possible. But the solution isn’t to let the same bunch of liars who are already stabbing us in the back, and letting people die, then blaming the victims for it, build more giant, single source, single location, absolute monopolies over every source of new power, and collect more toxic waste at them, which we can’t get rid of.
Anyone that thinks that is the path to solving this, and I can’t help but think, since you seem to believe that its totally fine if this is how it happens (if it happens), is on the side of the jerks that created this mess in the first place (largely by refusing to stop using horrible, toxic, sources to produce power, even when alternatives exist, then claiming that this is “better” than literally either building better solutions, finding ways to pollute less OR actually maintain, never mind upgrade, anything they already own, so it serves the public (which constantly raising prices, and claiming they, “need to do this, so they can sit on their backsides and do absolutely nothing”, not the side of the customers, the environment, or sometimes even the law.
Like unclefrogy, I think rightly, accuses you of – your “solution” drops all the “benefits” into the hands of the same greedy people that refused to fix the problem when they already knew it existed, and now are willing to let people die, rather than pay to fix it, now that its impossible to ignore, so that what? They can pull the same scams on us again? Let them keep the what they have, and provide power with it, then jail them when they fail to maintain it, instead of gifting them subsidies to lie to everyone. And no, don’t “tax” the people who are NOT using their grid, to get the money to pay those bs subsidies. If other solutions kill their businesses, then good riddance, they had more than 40 years to invent those solutions themselves and actually build them, instead of now whining, and complaining that they need the government to punish people for using them, in order to keep their backward, out of date, garbage running. If it burns down, as you claim I want, it wouldn’t be because I advocated to march on them with torches, it will be, and always was, and should be, because they have fought tooth and nail, for decades to NOT solve the problem, or improve anything.
Why would anyone, especially a “Marxist” want the bloody reward them for that, not hold them accountable for anything, and offer them all the new contracts to build new power plants, nuclear or otherwise.
I will say it even more harshly – I smell a corporate shill. Because this is always the argument, and the false promise, that such companies make, “We are the ones who can best do this, and if you give us money, we promise to eventually do this, but in the mean time we can’t, so lets keep using fossil fuels for another 20 years, while we PRETEND to research it (then get caught having not lifted a single finger to improve, or research jack).”
Why would we trust their constant claims about how hard they are trying to change, and make things better, “again”? You think this time it won’t still be a complete lie, like it was every other time?
And this is exactly what I mean. Local sources don’t work. Trying to build “local sources” in the sense that you mean will likely result in burning down the means of production.
Local energy sources don’t work. Solar and wind and batteries on everyone’s house won’t work for several different reasons. You need big centralized energy facilities.
Furthermore, imagine that I’m wrong about energy production. You’re still ludicrously wrong about the board point that you just made. Consider, who makes the solar panels, wind turbines, computer chips, and everything else? That’s “means of production” too. You can’t make those at home. You need big centralized facilities. (3D printers are not going to replace big centralized production facilities.)
Again, for example, you’re never going to have a cutting-edge chip foundry in your back yard. Any high-heat industrial process – you’ll never have that in your backyard. You’re never going to be smelting aluminium in your backyard. You’re never going to have a steel mill in your backyard.
Your “alternative” is physically impossible. You can never have decentralized means of production for most of the means of production.
Maybe try going back to school or doing proper online research on “the means of production” before using fallacious “appeal to consequences” reasoning to conclude that we can make it decentralized. Once you’re properly educated, then maybe you can tell the difference between a shill and someone who is puncturing your ridiculous romantic pipedream. Feelings and desires are not replacements for cold, hard, engineering facts.
It is easier to change government policy and oversight than it is to change the fundamental laws of physics and engineering.
As should be clear from above with my discussion with Marcus, there is a point where radiation is extremely dangerous. At high enough doses and dose rates, it causes cancer. At higher acute doses, it causes acute radiation poisoning syndrome. At higher doses still, it causes (immediate) death from acute radiation poisoning.
However, at much smaller doses, it’s not as harmful as you think it is.
Consider the tritium water at Fukushima which everyone is worried about. If I’m doing my math right, you could drink nothing but that water in place of all of your daily water intake, and you would not exceed a cumulative 1 Sv dose over a year. The best evidence that we have suggests that this kind of dose and dose rate is actually completely harmless. I’m referencing the MIT mice study, which exposed mice to a dose rate of approx 1 Sv / year, then did detailed genetic testing, and found strong evidence that there was zero elevated rates of mutation.
http://news.mit.edu/2012/prolonged-radiation-exposure-0515I know, I know – there’s a lot of differences involved here. Internal vs external exposure. Mice vs humans. Different kinds of ionizing radiation. That’s why I strongly favor doing more actual experiments to get hard evidence. It’s pathetic that this is one of the very few sorts of experimental studies on the health effects of radiation.
Still, back to my point. Everyone is freaking out about leaking this tritium-“contaminated” water into the ocean when it’s already probably harmless in its concrentrated form for direct ingestion en masse. With careful release and dillution into the ocean, we can be sure that it will never hurt anyone or anything. It’s another complete non-issue. “The dose makes the poison.”
Again, here are three concrete plans for the high level waste, all of which seem to be very good.
Cover it in a certain kind of clay, and put it underground in geologically stable areas.
https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/Keep it around for a few hundred years for the really bad stuff to decay away, and do some simple reprocessing on it to separate out the remaining bad stuff. Almost all of the remainder is no more harmful than natural uranium ore, and so we can just put it somewhere. The small remainder that is really harmful – we could put down a deep borehole or something. I encourage you to read this full (industry) pdf, it’s just a few short pages, and it’s really informative about the real dangers involved.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdfBury it under the bottom of the ocean. We know that there are spots on the ocean floor that have not been disturbed for millions of years, and silt constantly accumulates. If you put it there, it won’t go anywhere, ever. It would be borderline impossible for humans to purposefully recover.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/10/the-sub-seabed-solution/308434/Re Marxism.
Please see my post just above.
Also, you can check my post history and see how I constantly advocate for radical police reforms, and constantly advocate for guaranteed minimum income schemes, and constantly advocate for extremely high progressive taxation on the rich, specifically income taxes (approx 90% or higher), asset taxes (don’t know the exact number offhand, but I mean all assets, including stocks), and inheritance taxes (approx 99% or higher), with the express goal of wealth redistribution and drastically reducing the wealth gap with the explicit reason that money is power and it’s hard for democracy to survive in the face of such extreme power disparity in its citizenry.
Re tritium water:
Here, let me again take the high road, cite my sources, and show my math, to show that another Green worry is complete pseudoscience.
https://warwick.ac.uk/services/healthsafetywellbeing/guidance/ionising_radiation/isotopedataforcommonradionuclides/tritium/https://safecast.org/2018/06/part-1-radioactive-water-at-fukushima-daiichi-what-should-be-done/Take the upper end.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/water/art-20044256Take the larger value.
(3.7 L / day) (4.0 million Bq / L) (1.8 x 10e-11 Sv / Bq) = about 2.7 mSv / day = about 0.97 Sv / year.
So, if you drank nothing but the most contaminated water, it’s still plausible / likely that you would not be harmed at all.
(Having said that, it would be extremely high, and I would be worried. It’s about 2-3 orders of magnitude over the regulatory safe limit that I would propose, something around 1 to 10 mSv / year chronic exposure dose rate from all artificial sources, aka about equal to current background, and 2-3 orders of magnitude less than a chronic dose rate that appears to be harmless in mice.)
But again, that’s for drinking nothing but the most concentrated form and directly without dilution, and no one is suggesting that. They’re going to dilute it before dumping it in the ocean, where it will be diluted even further. Thus, this is why I say that this issue has been exaggerated beyond all reason. Anyone complaining about carefully diluting and releasing this tritium water is playing at pseudoscience.
And let’s double-check my math:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-radioactive-hydrogen-in-drinking-water-a-cancer-threat/So,
(4.0 million Bq / L) (40 microSievert / (20,000 pCi / L)) (1 Ci / 37 billion Bq) = about 0.22 Sv / year
Maybe they’re using different dose coefficients or using different daily water intake amount. Regardless, it’s in the same ballpark (lower even!), and that’s good enough for me for me to pretty confident in my math.
Omfg… “local sources don’t work”? They worked well, for a while, but the current system we have was built around two premises – 1. Everyone should have access to electric power, so a national grid is a great solution for this, and local power can contribute to this.
2. Such a grid can/will adjust and compensate for usage requirements, preventing black/brown outs.
This has proven, now, in the modern era, to be bullshit. Why? Because:
The grid isn’t updated to a point where it can’t fail.
We already have a lot of local sources, but the people running them, like in Texas, are even greedier freaks than the ones running the national grid.
The companies involved have falling back on the same BS game that everyone else does – “Thing that used to be recycled by the companies themselves are not any more, and end up in land fills, so blame the customer, not the companies that no longer recycle.”, “Such county/state has a water problem. We have spent years removing damns, destroying man made reservoirs, or just refusing to even build such, while letting millions of gallons of water wash into the ocean, instead of caching some of it. Lets blame the people that own pools for all of the problems, and your refusal to solve them!” And, of course, “Wow, people don’t like to die of heat exhaustion or to freeze to death, and there are more and more of them, so, instead of recognizing that we “need” to expand the grid with more local options, instead of relying on shit that is hundreds of miles from where it is used, or can’t be expanded/increased, to meet actual demand, or make sure the grid is working right.. lets blame the customers, for not turning everything off during the hottest and coldest parts of the day, or when everyone is freaking working!”
I am freaking surprised the power companies are not offering the suggestion that, “To save power.”, everyone should just start using candles again, during “peak hours”, its would be in theme with the f-ing excuses.
But, its telling that your answer is, “The thing that would could easily do now, with modern technology, but was nearly impossible in the past, so has never actually been tried, especially with modern technology, won’t work, because, if it did, we would be doing it.” What do you want to bet that if we looked at other f-ing countries, we would find that a) they somehow, miraculously, made this stuff work, or b) the countries themselves are small enough to fit 4 of them in a single US state, and don’t share power grids, so ARE using what would, for us, be “local power solutions”, while we are running 8+ different states off of 3 power plants, or something similarly stupid?
The rest of your stuff is, as far as I am concerned, TLDR. You are pro having the same assholes that failed to fix the problem in the first place, before it became one, being the people offered the job of fixing it, despite the fact that they have done nothing but raise prices, and refuse to do anything. I got that. I think it makes you a damn fool, and we need “better”, and “new” solutions, not the same bull pucky. But, I could care less for your excuses for why we should, instead, fix this by trusting the very people, including, BTW, politicians, who allowed it to get this bad in the first damn place.
Oh, and like someone else said before, stop f-ing acting like a Republican politician, or Fox News, exec, and labelling everyone with concerns, or problems, with your ideas, “Greens”. It just makes you look even more like a fanatic, who won’t freaking listen to anything other than their own opinions. And we have enough of the crap going on in this country already.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here.
You will find that every country that is close to 100% renewables has succeeded because most of that renewables production is hydro. That’s only possible in rare countries that have high amounts of the correct geography (the right kinds of hills, valleys, and rivers) for lots of hydro, and a population that is small relative to the hydro abundance. The rest of the world cannot follow this example. Most countries don’t have sufficient geography of the correct kind to build enough hydro to follow these examples. It’s ignorant to argue that the rest of the world can succeed on solar and wind because these exceptions have succeeded on hydro. There is no noteworthy country that is powered mostly by non-hydro renewables.
Also, hydro is far from decentralized. If this is what you mean, then you’re confusing topics here. Or you’re making the wrong assumption that all renewables are decentralized. If so, I encourage you to look at pictures of (big) hydro dams to get a feel for how not decentralized they are.
PS:
In this case, I have the full support of most of the scientific community behind me, both on the complete inadequacy of nuclear power, and to a smaller but significant amount that the Green movement and ideology is a bigger impediment to solutions compared to all climate change deniers.
Please listen to the scientists instead of the liars and shills that are part of the Green movement, and people swayed by their lies.
Here are some more choice quotes from leading climate scientists in support of what I’m saying.
Quoting leading climate scientist Dr. Ken Caldeira:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=121https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=3109Quoting leading climate scientist Dr. Kerry Emanuel:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=251https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1297https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1956https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/Quoting preeminent climate scientist Dr. James Hansen:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdfAlso see these open letters from scientists arguing for nuclear power.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.htmlhttp://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/10/25/open-letter-to-heads-of-state-of-the-g-20-from-scientists-and-scholars-on-nuclear-for-climate-changeGerrard:
<snicker>
Sure, and distributed computing won’t work. You need mainframes and terminals.
You’re mired in the past. You’re thinking of the grid as a one-way transmission system, but that’s twentieth-century thinking. It can be a distribution system, with upgrades to its topology and components.
—
You might be amused by this story:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/power-companies-to-charge-solar-owners-for-exporting-to-grid/100368588
Oh yeah, in passing:
No, it can’t, because the only generators of note are big and centralized. Distributed solar on everyone’s house is not going to cut it, and I don’t think the behemoth 8 MW wind turbines should really count as “decentralized”.
And yes, any attempts at meeting this goal will find that they need ever increasing and very expensive upgrades to the grid. Both to allow bidirectional electricity flow, and also to allow substantially higher flows to move large amounts of electricity from one region to another region, e.g. from the windy and sunny side of Australia in one minute to the other side of Australia which happens to be cloudy and windless in that one minute. Note that these grid improvements will cost more than the solar cells and wind turbines.
That’s the easy part. Every additional solar panel on the grid now has decreasing value, decreasing utility, as there’s excess solar electricity at midday. Now you start running headlong into the intermittency / grid storage problem for which there is no feasible solution. Very long distance transmission can partially stave off the problem and allow for higher solar wind penetration, but well before 100% you’re going to run headlong into the problem that solar and wind don’t produce 24/7, even with a cross-continent transmission system, and that there is no feasible way to store the necessary amounts of energy.
But it doesn’t have to be 100% all the time, Gerrard.
Besides, “If you get cheap enough electricity and/or high temperature process heat, then you can do wonderful things. Whether it’s li ion batteries, directly electrified passenger rail, or synthetic hydrocarbons from seawater and co2 from seawater or the atmosphere, you can do things.”
and
“Every additional solar panel on the grid now has decreasing value, decreasing utility, as there’s excess solar electricity at midday.”
Hm. So there’s excess electricity, and one can do things with cheap enough electricity. Right?
BTW, I have solar panels on my roof; I drew 334.598kWh from the grid, put 1568.604kWh into it in the last billing period (90 days).
This is during mid-winter where I live.
You’re such a troll. I should keep a tally of how many times that I’ve explained this to you. Here we go again.
The tl;dr What is economical and feasible for transport is not necessary economical and feasible for electric grid storage, and many / most industrial processes physically cannot run on intermittent electricity supply.
Re batteries
There’s not enough mineable lithium, nickel, or lead in all estimated worldwide resources and reserves for the amount of batteries that the world would need. Even 1 day storage at 20 TW requires than what we have available.
150 g Li metal per 1 KWh of battery. Assume 80% max depth of discharge. Assume 92% round-trip conversion efficiency of storage. (1 day) (20 TW)(150 g / (1 KWh)) (1 / 80%) (1 / 92%) = about 98 million metric tons of pure lithium. Compare that to 13 Mt reserves worldwide, 33 Mt estimated global resources.
Doing the math for nickel and lead gets the same result. All other battery chemistries are way too expensive, or have worse material needs, or are unproven / vaporware.
Re synthetic hydrocarbons, power to gas, hydrogen, etc.
Many industrial processes, and most industrial processes that involve elevated heat levels, and especially the very high heat levels, cannot be turned off and on at will.
Most high heat industrial processes cannot be turned off without a few days or weeks warning to power down the equipment; otherwise the uncontrolled cooling damages the equipment, e.g. through thermal stresses. If you tell a high heat industrial process manager whose equipment is in cold shutdown that they will have electricity for the next 6 hours, that’s not good enough either; it takes days or weeks, sometimes months, to go from cold shutdown to operating temperatures. Again, this is often to avoid excessive thermal stresses that damage the equipment. These things cannot run with anything less than 24/7/365 power. The vulnerable ones always have backup diesel generators on site to handle the rare power outage that happens today.
Turning electricity into methane gas involves a high heat process, ex 300+ C Sabatier process. You can’t run that on intermittent excess solar electricity.
Turning electricity into hydrogen gas still involves a process heat industrial process, typically around 80 C. Even that takes time to turn on. Also, the most popular of these machines, PEM electrolyzers, suffer horrible horrible efficiency hits from deposits on the membrane from frequently being turned on and off. Research is ongoing to see if they can mitigate this effect, but it’s another industrial process that simply cannot run on intermittent excess solar electricity.
There’s also the problem of capital costs. Much of this equipment is quite expensive. Running it only 6 hours every day (generously) from excess solar electricity means that the effective costs go up drastically, up to 4x (depending on the ratio of capital costs, energy costs, and other costs). On a grid that uses solar and wind, much, probably most, of its energy is going through storage. Ignoring the physical engineering problems that it’s physically impossible to run this stuff on intermittent electricity, we have a further problem: Letting that capital sit idle most of the time is going to drastically increase the overall cost of electricity.
Oh, also, forgot this: The round-trip conversion efficiency of using hydrogen or methane for grid storage is approx 30%, assuming a combined cycle gas turbine. It’s around 15% if we assume a fast simple cycle gas turbine to stabilize the grid in the presence of a lot of highly variable solar and wind. So, figure out what that does to your solar cell and wind turbine overbuild requirements, and to your additional transmission requirements.
Your thinking is muddled.
You yourself claimed synthetic fuel can be created using excess electricity, and that fuel can then be burnt for power generation. Duh.
(How is that not power storage?)
mr copy & paste Dude
I really like the clear and specific answer at the end very helpful that
again even with all of those specifics you neglected to indicate how much will that cost and who will pay for that for a few hundred years?
as an example related to your bringing up Fuk take a look at the pictures widely available you will see a lot of steel and other metal bent up and thrown around after the accident where will it go and who will pay?
When any plant (machine) reaches the end of its functional life span it is decommissioned. It is relatively easy to take most industrial plants down grind the concrete up to be used in road construction and as base in new buildings all of the metal can be simply re-smelted and added to new metal but not so with the containment vessel and associated piping and supports
Who pays for that and what are we going to do with it. There are no answers to what we are going to do with it save vague “idea plans” and the solutions are not included in the price of the plants nor the price of any power they generate
The answer that you fail to honestly state and avoid with insults and accusations is the obvious one
generations to come for as far as we can see will pay for it.
John Morales,
You’re the troll for pretending that I haven’t answered this many times over, and asking for the answer anew, instead of just preemptively attacking the answer that I’m going to give.
My thinking is clear. Yours is muddled. You’re confused and conflating two very different economic and engineering use cases – grid storage and transport.
. We might have enough raw materials for batteries for our car fleet, but definitely not for a hypothetical worldwide solar wind grid.
. We can use reliable dispatchable 24/7 electricity from the grid to make fuel for cars, but we can’t use intermittent unreliable excess solar wind electricity to make fuel because the industrial equipment doesn’t work that way. You’re conflating these two cases.
. We can afford a 30% efficiency (or worse!) loss by making synthetic hydrocarbons from electricity and seawater, but we can’t for electricity generation because of the costs of the entailed overbuilding of solar, wind, and transmission. We already pay more for transport, and we can absorb these losses, but assuming it could even work (it can’t), doing so for electricity would be hugely disruptive economically because it would drastically raise electricity prices which would drastically raise the price of damn near everything else.
…
unclefrogy,
Again, these wastes are not as dangerous as you think they are, and they’re so small in number and size that we can do stuff about it. We don’t have to live it to our children. Unlike the coal ash that we produce every day from coal that we do leave to our children. We and they can’t do anything about that. Or the toxic lakes in China from producing rare earth metals for our wind turbines. Or the giant stacks of toxic waste that is used solar panels.
The problem is still that you have a double-standard in play where you are ok with other kinds of industrial waste but nuclear waste is still this unimaginably horrific thing, but that’s simply not true. Pound for pound, high level nuclear waste is one of the worst things that humanity can make, but we also produce such incredibly small amounts of all kinds of nuclear waste that it is within our ability to safely dispose of it. Again, contrasted with the toxic waste from coal, solar, and wind; there’s too much of that kind of waste and so all we can do is leave it in an open lake or pile somewhere, leaving it to hurt many people in the current and coming generations.
unclefrogy,
Also, let me emphasize from the W.H.O. report that I cited and quoted above. There is such exaggerated fear about radiation in the area around Chernobyl that the reports concludes that (excessive) fear from radiation has caused more public health damage than the actual radiation. Most people’s understanding of the actual dangers of radiation and radioactive material is all out proportion compared to the actual scientific reality. Please, please read these scientific reports that I’ve cited. You will find that many of your preconceptions are just flatly wrong.
Gerrard:
“… we can’t use intermittent unreliable excess solar wind electricity to make fuel because the industrial equipment doesn’t work that way”.
Heh.
“If you get cheap enough electricity and/or high temperature process heat, then you can do wonderful things.”, but “the industrial equipment doesn’t work that way”.
If you’re gonna engage in special pleading, probably best to at least have some basis for it.
—
Meantime, your devoted focus on big-scale nuclear, you ignore all the other aspects of the doom that threatens our current civilisation. Electrical power generation is your focus, and it must (MUST!) be a centralised generation using nuclear power plants, and using the existing grid, and using only existing technology (other than sucking nuclear fuel out of seawater and granite, of course, which is just obviously doable as far as you’re concerned).
That for sure will be the solution to all our ecological problems!
“You’re such a troll.”
bwahahaha…
While I have my own criticisms of John Morales, I really don’t think they are the “troll” in this thread…
lochaber,
I said that because I’ve explained the same thing to John like 10 times now. He could at least try to remember it and give it a little lip service instead of pretending that he’s hearing it for he first time. It’s really frustrating.
Cheer up, Gerrard; here’s the nuclear industry spruiking its own off-peak electricity for fuel generation: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/hydrogen-production-and-uses.aspx
At least. Thing is, I’ve retorted each time, which means I’ve explained the same thing to you no less. ;)
(Your efforts at argumentum ad nauseam are futile)
this thread has been discussing nuclear power as described and advocated by you. this is not a coal thread. that subject has not been under discussion it makes no difference what so ever what they do or not do with what you are advocating. If you want to discuss coal.
their are no concrete plans approved and contracted for any of the waste high level or low and intermediate level none there are ideas but no sites nor anything other then pilot programs which are not working out very well even for the low level stuff regardless of how little there is the only solution we have for high level waste is keeping on site in water to keep it cool. so there is literally no way to come up with an estimate of cost though from the start that cost will not be born by the operators, developers nor their share holders the profits are baked in it is the rate payers and the general public that will be left to pay.
Do you think that all of the decommissioned plants will just be entombed like the russian disaster for 1000’s years. count them up we would need how many 3? 7? 1000 to stop global warming and we would need them when exactly I am afraid immediately wont happen regardless ?
it will take 100’s years can you name one human institution in history that has been stable enough that gives you confidence that we mire humans could carefully watch all of that ?
My guess is climate change really scars you and you want to believe all of the hype even if it is good hype that nuclear is the only answer to being able to keep doing what we are doing in the same way we have been doing it. the only ones who benefits from that are the 1%, the ordinary people are one step from poverty, there is a great die off happening whole ecosystems are threatened the way we are doing it and the first of the pandemics is raging through the population at will. and of course the climate which is what this thread was supposed to be about. we will have to change what we are doing and how we are doing it one way or another.
John,
Your retorts are no more intelligible than “nuh uh”, and do not engage any substantive point that I’ve raised.
@ GerrantOfTitanServer 95 & 96
The name “tritium water” itself is propaganda because the waste water contains many other radionuclides. The rationale is that all the other radionuclides appear to be under the threshold in WHO guidelines for drinking water, with only tritium in violation, thus “tritium water”.
However, WHO guideline calls for the sum of all radionuclides in the water (emphasis mine, formula reformatted):
Similarly, it’s BS to calculate the dosage based on tritium only, ignoring all the other non-trivial (albeit apparently under the WHO threshold) radionuclides, which is what you just did.
“Greens” may not know enough to evaluate how dangerous this waste water can be, but you, as a strong nuclear power proponent, should not be making this BS.
P.S. 0.97 Sv / yr is not something you should brush off easily, unless you want to demonstrate the callousness of some nuclear proponents regarding cancer risk for others.
So, given that they’re under the regulatory limits, it’s probably minuscule, much much smaller than 1 Sv / year, and therefore adding them all up very probably won’t change the result.
I very clearly did no such thing. Please re-read what I wrote if you think I did otherwise.
AstrySol,
Also, please read the following sources. The best direct evidence we have shows pretty strongly that LNT is false. 1 Sv delivered all at once is very different from 1 Sv delivered over a year. The first will cause severe sickness in mice. The second (from a particular kind of external exposure) doesn’t harm a particular breed of mice at all. Bernard Cohen’s radon study is also really solid evidence against LNT.
http://news.mit.edu/2012/prolonged-radiation-exposure-0515https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijrit/international-journal-of-radiology-and-imaging-technology-ijrit-2-014.pdfIt turns out that even GerrardOfConspiracyTheories’ modified claim that a large wind turbine requires 1000lb of neodymium is not true.Aalthough neodymium and other “rare earth elements” are used in many turbines, and have considerable advantages in some cases, there are a number of alternatives, some already used, others the subject of research. This is a tactic of GOCT that I have encountered before: pretend that a specific renewable energy technology is the only possibility, and then purport to show that it is unfeasible, or has unsurmountable drawbacks – the example I recall was an “analysis” he linked to which “showed” that sufficient storage of renewables would not be possible because it would all have to be done with lithium-ion batteries.
Another link relevant to #119. I would of course concede that there is no energy-generating (or energy-saving) technology free of all environmental problems. That’s one reason I stressed the importance of cutting GHG emissions by behaviour change in my first comment on this thread.
“First” in what sense? Do it first before doing other things? I hope not. That’s an extremely bad idea, and I think even you would grant that. What did you mean by “first”? Because this really sounds like you have a fantasy of reducing quality of life of human civilization for its own “benefit” instead of worrying about climate change like me. That is the real “secret” goal of many Green advocates. They view modern industrial society as inherently unsustainable and inherently evil and unfixable.
Re wind turbines. I was talking about the mainstream tech. That’s not cherry picking. Your response, choosing relatively uncommon tech without explaining its own unique drawbacks, that’s cherry picking. Projection much? There are reasons that we are not using en masse this other kind of wind turbine, but it seems like you don’t care. No intellectual curiosity or intellectual honesty. I didn’t write about inferior options because I’m already writing too much.
You’re especially not honest here because you didn’t admit your gross error saying that I would never say X, even though that’s one of the first things I’ve said in this thread. If you gave a damn, you would have apologized for attacking me without even bothering to read the first few posts of mine in this thread. Instead, just silence.
Re my typo. I spotted it before you, and posted a correction before you. Sue me.
Ignore my previous post. I cannot read.