Pretty much everyone who follows the news would be aware of the new report released by the United Nations yesterday about the impact of climate change, this one focusing on what is happening to the biodiversity of the planet. You can read the summary of the report here with the full 1,500 page report to be released in September. This news report outlines the major findings.
Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.
…Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”
At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.
…Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox.
Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.
The report goes beyond discussing the loss of biodiversity but looks at how that will affect food security and access to clean water for everyone on the planet, not just those in poor countries.
A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.
…The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for “transformative changes” that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture’s environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing.
What is disturbing is that this is almost entirely human-made problem. We know how to fix it. We know what is causing the change and losses, and we know what needs to be done in order to at least halt the decline, even if we cannot reverse it. What is lacking of course is political will.
Farmers and ranchers would have to adopt new techniques to grow more food on less land. Consumers in wealthy countries would have to waste less food and become more efficient in their use of natural resources. Governments around the world would have to strengthen and enforce environmental laws, cracking down on illegal logging and fishing and reducing the flow of heavy metals and untreated wastewater into the environment.
This is not a problem that we can recycle away. We have to reduce our consumption, change our consumption patterns, and accept that those in the richer countries will have to adjust to a reduced standard of living.
In the US, the power than corporations have over the government that enable them to hinder any actions that might harm their profits is a significant obstacle. Large-scale naming and shaming of the worst offenders may help..
Another obstacle in the US are the religious people who are convinced that their god is not going to let the planet be destroyed and that thus we do not have to worry since that ultimate deus ex machina will swoop in and save the day. I can’t count the number of times I have heard politicians and others express variations of this view and the sheer self-serving idiocy of that sentiment drives me crazy. The fact that this report is from the UN will also enable these people to dismiss the warnings since they tend to also believe that the UN is part of a global conspiracy to take away American sovereignty and that actions to combat climate change is one way they seek to do that.
In all the discussions about this I haven’t seen or heard a word about what should be obvious: we need to stop population growth. But that seems to be taboo. All the other solutions mentioned would be much more effective if we did not have to deal with the ever increasing demands on resources that will inevitably come with more people.
Taboo? Please. It’s an idea banal enough that liberals can freely discuss it without reprisal around the dinner table. I’ve only recently started to see criticism of the ideas underpinning population control. Seriously, it always seemed to me like everybody except catholic mormons quiverfulls and shinzo abe agreed fully that the population should be limited. I don’t know if I ever heard anyone say anything otherwise until Thanos brought up the conversation last year.
What is disturbing is that this is almost entirely human-made problem. We know how to fix it. We know what is causing the change and losses, and we know what needs to be done in order to at least halt the decline, even if we cannot reverse it. What is lacking of course is political will.
It seems worse. It’s as if the gerontocrats who run the world have decided they don’t care and are happy to shit all over the place on the way out the door. I don’t think it’s ignorance or laziness, it’s active maliciousness. At the level where they sit, it is impossible for politicians to claim ignorance, and they aren’t really that stupid.
I know this sounds crazy, but I think that nihilist politicians have basically decided they are happy to watch the world burn, so long as they get to be the ones who light the match.
actions to combat climate change
Be careful in your choice of words; the US might launch a war on the climate.
#2 It may be banal, obvious and non-controversial for many people to casually talk about it but have you seen any main stream reporting talking about it as a potential solution for the latest UN report (or any other similar reporting)? It is taboo when any serious policy discussion is made in the western world. Actually you’re more likely to hear about natalist policies to counter aging population and worker shortages.
I think population limits tend to be taboo in official discourse because the arguments for them have a lot of cruel, racist baggage -- “it’s all the fault of those poor people having too many kids, we should just let them starve.” A lot of people who are worried about overpopulation don’t think that way, of course, but those attitudes are the first thing lots of people think of when they hear “population control.”
There’s a bit of a catch-22 with population and resource use. The best long-term way to stop or at least shrink population growth is to increase economic prosperity -- this seems to lead to slower population growth almost everywhere. On the other hand, greater prosperity means more consumption per person, so you still end up with growing consumption.
The best long-term way to slow, and even reverse, population growth is to educate and empower women. The relatioship between economic growth and population growth is not entirely straightforward.
Video: Why the world population won’t exceed 11 billion | Hans Rosling | TGS.ORG
Which is handy, because that’s something we should be doing anyway.
Genuinely curious if you know any citations for this offhand. I’m not saying that you’re wrong. I’m saying that I don’t know, and I would like to have good reasons and citations so that I could preach this to others.
…
False, on numerous counts.
The biggest underlying problem is increasing worldwide population, and the only way to address that without genocide or preventable famine is to raise people out of poverty, to something approaching a western standard of living. Most if not all western and industrialized countries have birth rates per women below breakeven (roughly 2.1). We just need to raise the rest of the world out of poverty, which has a separate moral benefit of raising the rest of the world out of poverty.
You do not protect nature by making humans live in harmony with nature. Humans cannot live in harmony with nature. Humans alter and destroy their surrounding for their own benefits and comforts. The way that you protect nature is you remove humans from it and move humans into cities.
Even if you reduce the “standard of living” of Europe and the USA by 4x, whatever that might mean, the rest of the world is going to industrialize, and that means energy usage and raw material usage is going to go drastically up. You literally cannot stop this. This is an unsolveable fiat problem.
Famous preeminent climate scientist Kerry Emanuel is IMAO right with his suspision. History will record that it was the Greens and not the climate deniers who were the most responsible for inaction against climate change because of their opposition to nuclear power and because of their neo-Malthusian delusional beliefs which you tacitly endorse here.
We could have solved this already several times over, and many places would have, if not for the Green opposition to nuclear power and Green fetishization with keeping poor people poor and trying to the rest of the world poor too.
…
This person is starting to understand the truth.
@10, it’s bit difficult to swallow the greens are more at fault than greenhouse gas-caused climate change-denying republicans, who incidentally are also not pushing nuclear because that would be admitting a problem even exists. So… seems kind of a bullshit move, and maybe you have an axe to grind or a chip on your shoulder?
I think it’s clear at this point nuclear would need to be part of a solution to reduce greenhouse gases to recommended levels within 12 years, but you do yourself no favors in not also advocating for leveraging wind, solar, hydroelectric, or even tidal solutions, where possible. Just because we’ve managed to go for this long without truly world changing catastrophes from unmanageable fission, does not mean we should embrace it wholeheartedly. My recollection when studying this 17 years ago was that in order to minimize waste, fuel needs be refined to weapons-grade levels. It’s preferable to expand fission over a climate catastrophe, but I’d prefer to minimize that reliance wherever possible.
The world is bigger than the United States. Republicans are not in charge of countries other than the US. For example, Europe is doing almost nothing when it comes to climate targets because of the anti-nuclear Greens. Take Germany as the poster-child. Emissions are basically unchanged, and that’s basically because they shut down their nuclear power plants to replace them with coal power plants.
If you want the opinion of the relevant experts:
In the clip at the timestamp, preeminent climate scientist James Hansen talks about the warping effect that the Green groups have on scientists, including himself, because they are an important source of funding, and they won’t fund anyone who is pro-nuclear. James Hansen talks about having his funding sources disappear because he became an outspoken pro-nuclear advocate.
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041Leading climate scientist Kerry Emanuel has said “The anti-nuclear bias of this latest IPCC release is rather blatant, and reflects the ideology of the environmental movement. History may record that this was more of an impediment to decarbonization than climate denial”.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/In related news, dozens more leading scientists, many involved directly with the IPCC, wrote this open letter critiquing the IPCC report’s hostility towards nuclear, writing “Such fear-mongering about nuclear has serious consequences. As IPCC itself acknowledges, public fears of nuclear are behind the technology’s slower-than-desirable development.” and “We strongly encourage you to do everything in your power to speak out for nuclear and expand its share of electricity production, heating, and transport, including shipping production, to achieve the intertwined goals of climate change mitigation, pollution reduction, and poverty alleviation.”
http://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-changeThe short version is that renewables are a pipedream, and the only chance we have of really combatting climate change will depend on a massive rollout of nuclear power worldwide. Again, let’s see what the experts say: James Hansen said that believing that renewables could replace fossil fuels is like believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.
https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/There are way more benefits to nuclear than just combating climate change. Nuclear is the safest kind of power generation in terms of impact to human health. It’s the cleanest on the environment. 7 million people die worldwide every year from airborne particulates. 1 out of every 8 deaths worldwide is directly attributable to airborne particulate pollution. On just this measure alone we should be replacing coal plants, which account for about half of those deaths, with nuclear plants as fast as we can.
https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/There are also substantial advantages to nations who use nuclear because then they can become energy independent. Nuclear fuel is cheap, abundant, and basically everywhere. That’s a huge win for national security. These are good reasons which even a climate denier would typically accept as compelling reasons.
Climate deniers are not a major impediment to nuclear power. Greens are. Greens are why nuclear is being shut down around the world. Greens are why nuclear power is expensive in the first place.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/09/anti-nuclear-bias-of-u-n-ipcc-is-rooted-in-cold-war-fears-of-atomic-and-population-bombs/http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/3/28/why-the-war-on-nuclear-threatens-us-allhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Masses:_Opposition_to_Nuclear_Power_in_California,_1958%E2%80%931978https://www.ohio.com/akron/editorial/michael-shellenberger-end-the-discrimination-against-nuclear-powerhttps://atomicinsights.com/evidence-suggesting-lnt-fabricated-purposeful-effort-hamstring-nuclear-technology-development/https://atomicinsights.com/petition-stop-wasteful-practice-of-using-lnt-as-basis-for-illogical-regulations/https://atomicinsights.com/opportunity-use-science-establish-radiation-standards/https://atomicinsights.com/reducing-nuclear-operational-and-capital-costs-by-improved-technology/https://atomicinsights.com/cost-increasing-results-of-accepting-the-linear-no-threshold-lnt-assumption-of-radiation-health-effects/https://atomicinsights.com/foes-manipulative-legal-strategy-closing-nuclear-reactors/https://atomicinsights.com/why-cant-existing-nuclear-plants-make-money-in-todays-electricity-markets/The consequences of all these factors mean that nuclear power is 4x to 8x more expensive than what it could be, as shown by South Korea, which has nuclear prices about 4x to 8x less than the West, and there has been a steady decline in the cost of nuclear power, year over year, for many decades.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106This price difference is almost entirely the fault of the Greens.
Don’t forget that many US states and many European countries have legislation that mandate a certain fraction of electricity must come from non-nuclear Green sources. Hard to compete when you’re legally forbidden from competing.
Yes. I have a chip on my shoulder. As I learn more and more, I hate Greens more and more. Just recently, I learned that Greens are also largely responsible for world hunger, especially in Africa.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/Greens are also the single biggest reason why we’re not going to fix climate change which has the real possibility to end human civilization. Greens are the scum of the Earth.
Hydro is great. The rest are basically large wastes of money. Depending on the details, maybe existing installations are better off being used compared to being scrapped, but when you can choose between new nuclear vs new solar, wind, tidal, wave, etc., it almost never makes sense to use anything but nuclear. And again, hydro is nifty, and in spite of the relatively large environmental impact of hydro and the relatively large threat to human health and safety,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_DamI still support hydro.
Waste is a non-issue. It’s a political fiction; a problem created and cultivated over 50 years by the Greens as part of their anti-nuclear crusade.
https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdfhttps://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/06/a-modest-proposal-for-nuclear-waste-disposal/The Greens have systematically lied to the public about the realities of the health effects of radiation.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-worldWe need energy, and nuclear power is the safest and environmentally cleanest form of energy (electricity and heat) production that we have by a substantial margin, safer and cleaner than even solar and wind.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/@12, I will read your resources and think on this. I don’t think your argumentation takes the best approach (optimization at the expense of allies is not optimization), but I appreciate your dropping of many citations. I will read them.
That’s just it. Greens are not my allies. Greens are the enemy. Greens are the largest obstacle when it comes to many goals, including fighting climate change, reversing world population growth, ending poverty, ending hunger. I don’t even think that the hardcore Greeners have their hearts in the right place after some of my recent engagements on Pharyngula and elsewhere, where I have seen Greens implicitly say that it’s better for Africans to starve than to use inorganic fertilizer. It’s absolutely sickening.
PS: This is the Pharyngula thread that I was talking about.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2019/04/23/the-authoritarian-profit-seeking-people-who-want-to-seize-the-commons-are-the-problem/comment-page-1/
Meanwhile, in the news: Britain passes one week without coal power for first time since 1882
To
How many times have you been suckered by suck news stories, only for me to look into the details and see how it’s lies or misinformation?
With a bit of time googling, it’s hard to find the full details. This is what I did find.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/u-k-sets-record-for-life-without-coal-as-green-power-grows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#Electricity_generation
So, 27% from wind, 25% from natural gas (methane), 24% nuclear, leaving 24% other. So, what is that 24% other? Given the data from Wikipedia, solar in that week period wouldn’t be more than 4% or 5%. That leaves some combination of burning oil et al, burning wood and farm waste et al (“Bio-Energy), and hydro.
So yea. They didn’t burn coal. Their wind and solar still didn’t exceed 30% of the total for the week. I’m not impressed. This is just marketing spin of a mostly non-event.
I mean, yeah, burning natural gas, oil, wood, farm waste, etc, is a lot better than burning coal, both in terms of airborne particulates and also in terms of CO2 emissions for climate change and ocean acidification. However, this is not evidence that renewables can scale to meet the demand. Not even close. The intermittent producers only reached about 30% or less of the total generation for the week. The bulk of it was traditional sources, specifically natural gas, methane, and some combination of hydro and burning other stuff like oil, wood, farm waste, etc. And yet you repeat it uncritically, just like dozens of easily google news sites repeat this uncritically, and they repeat uncritically the nonsense argument that this shows that sticking to the Green plan will result in drastic CO2 emissions. It won’t. It’s blindingly obvious to anyone who actually looks at the data and does the math. ~sigh~
PS:
Oh, of course. Country-interconnects, aka imports, could easily be a large portion of the 24% other. Using electricity which was made by burning coal somewhere else (or natural gas, etc.) -- that’s a distinct possibility IMO. I’d have to see better numbers to know.
Entirely a non-event of the burning of coal in Britain, for a week.
In the news, despite it being so non-eventful in your opinion.
It kinda weakens your basic premise that coal is necessary for baseload, and that only nuclear can possibly replace coal, but.
To John Morales
I don’t recall saying anything quite so foolish. I’m pretty sure that I said natural gas, hydro, and nuclear can provide the power for a country (hydro depending on available geography / topology), and what do you know -- that’s exactly what Britain is using, along with 27% wind, plus some unspecified amount of imports from other countries’ coal power.
Please learn to read already. Engaging with you is always tedious. I swear half of our engagements are you strawmanning me because you have a reading comprehension below that of a 5th grade level.
Hydro is great. The rest are basically large wastes of money. Depending on the details, maybe existing installations are better off being used compared to being scrapped, but when you can choose between new nuclear vs new solar, wind, tidal, wave, etc., it almost never makes sense to use anything but nuclear.
on Saturday, wind generated as much as 27 percent of the country’s power followed by gas at 25 percent and nuclear at 24 percent.
27% wind power seems quite a lot to me; over a quarter of the UK’s electricity. Can you explain then your claim that the money spent on wind was a “large waste”?
To file thirteen
I’d have to look up how much money was spent to achieve that number, but I think the odds are very good that the money would have been better spent on nuclear which could have provided reliable, dispatchable, load-following power for the entire year instead of just a single week.
Assuming I’m reading this right, and using my google-sheet kung-fu correctly, I learned a few interesting facts from here.
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php
During the claimed week of 2019 May 1 midnight (start of day) to 2019 May 7 midnight (start of day), we can use that site to look at the data for the entire island of Great Britain, as opposed to merely England. During this time, I see the following:
47.1% natural gas
22.4% nuclear
11.8% wind
6.7% biomass
6.9% solar
4.5% French connection
2.7% Netherlands connection
2.8% Belgium connection
1.1% hydro
Quickly eyeballing it, I see when wind power is high, power is exported to France, Netherlands, and Belgium. However, most of the time, aka more than half of the week, it seems approx 13% of total production was imported from France, Netherlands, and Belgium. That’s more than the total wind powered average over the week. I am no expert, and I am going out on a limb, but combining this with some of my other background knowledge, it looks like lots of the wind power produced during periods of strong wind are exported to other countries -- dumped on their neighbors who absorb it by scaling back their own natural gas, coal, nuclear, or hydro production, and when wind power is low in Great Britain during this week, comparable power is imported from other countries which would be from coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, etc., and not from wind or solar.
What it really comes down to is that every time someone tries to model this with historical data, they show that renewables plus storage cannot match the hour-by-hour demand, or the paper is so full of holes that you have to conclude that the authors are dishonest, i.e. Mark Jacobson. I’m not going to be able to do a proper full analysis here. I can only do this basic examination of the data, and refer to you the existing proper scientific work which makes the obvious conclusion: You cannot power a country on renewables.
It’s a pipedream. That’s what all of the real analysis says. Again, to almost directly quote James Hansen, believing that renewables can power the world is just as silly as believing in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. And yet, our news media uncritically reports this false news misinformation because of their unscientific Green bias. It’s really quite depressing. The Green movement is the pseudoscience cult of the left who are the primary impediments to fixing the damn problem, and they also cause a bunch of other problems, like world hunger.
I haven’t properly vetted these sources, so apologizes if people find problems. It takes a lot of time to vet sources. They’re the first I found through google.
https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/340-the-total-cost-of-subsidies-to-renewable-electricity-in-the-united-kingdom-20022016
That source says that the United Kingdom has spent about 23,156 million £ on subsidies for renewables on 2002 to 2016, or about 30 billion USD. Electricity demand in the United Kingdom is about 37 GW. This news story is impressed about something like 3.3 GW production average from wind for a week. 30 billion USD easily buys you 3.3 GW capacity of nuclear which produces reliable and that’s good for the entire year in all conditions instead of an outlier week in the year, and you don’t need large interconnects with neighboring countries to absorb electricity for the hours that you have too much electricity, and to import electricity for the hours that you don’t have enough electricity.
Apologies for the imprecise numbers. Wouldn’t be surprised if I made some mistakes here and there -- sorry!
@EnlightenmentLiberal
23,156 million £ on subsidies for renewables
That £23 billion is for all renewables, not just for wind though.
30 billion USD easily buys you 3.3 GW capacity of nuclear
Such comparisons are often used by pro-nuclear groups, but they’re misleading. If you compare startup costs only, nuclear always wins. To be fair to renewables you need to compare running costs, and it’s there that nuclear looks a lot less attractive because you have to buy the fuel (often from overseas) and dispose of the (extremely toxic) waste.
you don’t need large interconnects with neighboring countries to absorb electricity for the hours that you have too much electricity, and to import electricity for the hours that you don’t have enough electricity.
That can also be seen as a feature though, the trading of electricity.
I’m fine with nuclear, for now. I’m not afraid of meltdowns and it’s greatly preferable to fossil fuels, and as you pointed out low startup costs means that it can be built to replace fossil fuel plants now, which is what we need. So in the short term, I’m all for it.
In the long term, my biggest concerns are those of security and the disposal of the waste. I hate seeing the crap dumped at sea, particularly because I know that high level waste will inevitably be snuck into the “low level” dumps. A bit like the way recyclables have been shipped off to other countries but certain shoddy traders have discovered it’s just all around more profitable to dump them in the ocean.
But I am certainly willing to forgo those concerns until after all the coal plants (at the very least) are decommissioned. There is a climate emergency going on after all.
To file thirteen
No, they’re not. That’s 9 billion USD per GW capacity. That’s basically more than any other price estimate in the world. If we start doing things properly, i.e. like in South Korea, it’s closer to 2 billion USD per GW capacity.
What are you talking about? Nuclear costs are dominated by upfront capital costs, which means nuclear looks the worst in this sort of analysis. After you build the nuke plant, it’s almost free, comparatively speaking, to operate it for its lifetime.
Nonsense. Fuel costs for nuclear are a tiny fraction of the overall cost of nuclear power.
Grossly exaggerated by the lying Green movement.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-worldhttps://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdfI think a quote from one of the comments of the second link is very instructive:
>>
It is highly instructive to note how anti-nuclear activists seek to discredit the science here. They may well know that even using highly pessimistic assumptions about e.g. the copper canister and the bentonite clay, there is an overwhelming probability that any doses caused to the environment or to the public will be negligible. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps simply because they themselves honestly believe that any leakage results to immediately horrendous effects, they completely ignore the crucial question: “so what?”
What would happen if a waste repository springs a leak?
What would be the effects of the leak to humans or to the environment?
Even if you search through the voluminous material provided by the anti-nuclear brigade, you most likely will not find a single statement answering these questions. Cleverly, anti-nuclear activists simply state it’s possible that nuclear waste can leak – which is not in doubt, anything is possible – and rely on innuendo and human imagination (fertilized by perceptions of nuclear waste as something unthinkably horrible) to fill in the gaps in the narrative.
Whether you go along with this manipulation is, of course, up to you.
<<
Electricity is not a commodity. It’s a service. People don’t pay for a lump sum of electricity to be delivered on the first of the month. People pay for electricity to be delivered every millisecond, with frequency and voltage regulated constantly.
The problem with the import/export situation that I outlined above is that if everyone tried to do with England was doing, then the grid would collapse. There is this thing called weather and weather systems, which means that if it’s not-windy in England, it’s probably not-windy in its neighbors. Combine that with night, and there will be frequent periods that you don’t get any electricity from solar or wind, and then the grid collapses, and then people freeze to death in winter. Example of where it almost happened:
https://atomicinsights.com/performance-new-england-power-grid-extreme-cold-dec-25-jan-8/What do you mean “security”? You cannot make a nuclear bomb from nuclear waste (or at least it would be vastly easier starting from scratch). The dangers of so-called nuclear dirty-bombs are grossly exaggerated.
But ocean “dumping” is actually one of the best, most foolproof, most environmentally-friendly, and cheap ways to permanently dispose of nuclear waste.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/06/a-modest-proposal-for-nuclear-waste-disposal/https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/31404684750.pdfOf course, that’s assuming we want permanent disposal. We probably don’t. That “waste” will likely be very valuable in the future.
The fundamental difference in this discussion is that of energy density. Because nuclear fuel is a million times more dense than gasoline, which itself is many times more “energy dense” than solar cells and wind turbines, the volume of high level nuclear waste compared to the volume of toxic waste from solar and wind is massive -- many orders of magnitude. The toxic waste from solar and wind is simply being dumped into the environment because there’s so much of it which makes it too expensive to safely dispose. If it was cheap to properly dispose, then we would already be properly disposing of it. Because there’s so little nuclear waste, it’s cheap to properly dispose of it, and that’s why we will properly dispose of it. Nuclear waste is the best kind of waste because there’s so little of it.
I really do believe that conventional nuclear fission reactors, and especially next-gen breeders, will be the foundation of human society going forward. I don’t see them as a necessary-evil temporary stop-gap. I see them as amazing leaps forward that are safer and cleaner by a lot compared to everything that has come before. Rather than half-heartedly accepting them for a temporary period, I embrace them as the next leap forward in human civilization.
EL:
I put it to you that however insubstantial you find the infrastructure for and enterprise of mining, refining, operating and managing fissile fuel and its waste, solar and wind require none at all.
None.
So you imagine.
Me, I think it should be about energy availability whilst decarbonising power generation.
You want to keep the system as it is, merely replacing the kind of centralised power plants now common. But the system can be changed, too — distributed generation and smart grids and storage and management is quite possible.
But sure, keep advocating that the only change needed is to tear down every coal and gas power station worldwide and build a fission power station to replace it. Build enough breeders to keep generating fuel from low-grade fissiles. Problem solved, right?
PS
You can grind it fine and disperse it over a wide area. Even a populated one.
(It’s not just the boom that’s deadly)
Bolding added:
Lols
Oh wait, you’re serious? Let me laugh harder.
Solar and wind require about 100x more materials compared to nuclear, which can be explained by the simple mental model of energy / power density.
That is not one of my goals.
However, this is an aspect of the only currently available plan.
Tangent: Did you know that solar and wind are also centralized power in the sense that you still need large centralized factories in order to produce the solar cells and wind turbines? The idea that it leads to energy independence, even if they worked as advertised, is another delusion. Don’t tell me that you think that you can 3d-print them or something ridiculous.
With some non-existent hypothetical technology, yes. In practice, no.
Only in delusional Green fantasy land, assuming your target includes about 1% or less of current CO2 emissions from the electricity sector, which it must if you’re serious about tackling climate change and ocean acidification. The only people who say this are ignorant fools -- or liars.
I’ve explained my plan ad nauseum to you, including several times in this thread. I invite you to read it and accurately portray it, instead of giving this poor rhetorical reply.
Please try to stick to the science instead of the Green pseudoscience. Here are some good sources to get you started:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-worldhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/09/the-reason-they-fictionalize-nuclear-disasters-like-chernobyl-is-because-they-kill-so-few-people/https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/04/25/chernobyl-truth-drowns-in-dramatized-movie/https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/en/https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/backgrounder/en/https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/Back in reality, the only people who died or will die from Chernobyl are:
* about 30 workers who died from acute radiation poisoning within the first few weeks
* another few dozen workers who died later in life from potentially radiation-related illnesses
* at most a few hundred persons or less who died from thyroid cancer which was entirely preventable had they been told to not drink milk, and/or if they were given potassium iodide tablets. The actual number may be substantially less.
By far the biggest health impact of Chernobyl are people like you who scared those people so badly that many live in clinical depression and associated illnesses. Don’t believe me -- believe the W.H.O.
And that is with fresh reactor fuel in like the worst accident imaginable. With spent nuclear fuel on the order of years or decades old, the impact would be substantially less because it’s simply less radioactive, i.e. the radioactive iodine will be completely gone. It’s quite possible that the only people that a dirty bomb would kill are the people who died from the explosive shock wave itself, or from depression and fear from news reports about it.
PS: Sorry, I think I skipped a few people who died from falling debris and from fire during the initial Chernobyl accident.
Ahem. You were talking about fuel, not about the construction costs — which you weirdly imagine to be two orders of magnitude greater for wind and solar than for fission per unit of energy produced.
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OK. Let me try.
You think fission power should be embraced, not shunned, and that all the objections to its proliferation due to consequences are spurious and hyperbolic.
You do not think it is the case that “that the only change needed is to tear down every coal and gas power station worldwide and build a fission power station to replace it. Build enough breeders to keep generating fuel from low-grade fissiles.”, so there’s that.
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PS that should be “ad nauseam“.
You don’t get it. I don’t refer to incidental nor to accidental exposure, I refer to terrorism, to the deliberate weaponisation of nuclear waste. It doesn’t take high-tech.
Why focus on the fuel? What an artificial measure. I’m focused on the solution, and not some arbitrary subset of the problem.
Regarding amount of materials and mining requirements. Here are the first 3 sources that I found via google:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08/we-dont-need-solar-and-wind-to-save-the-climate-and-its-a-good-thing-too/
“The dilute nature of water, sunlight, and wind means that at least 450 times more land and 10 -- 15 times more concrete, cement, steel, and glass, are required than for nuclear plants.
All of that material throughput results in renewables creating large quantities of waste, much of it toxic.
For example, solar panels create 200 -- 300 times more hazardous waste than nuclear, with none of it required to be recycled or safely contained outside of the European Union.”
https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/11/29/graphic-of-the-week-the-hidden-fuels-of-renewable-energy/
“16-148 times more concrete
57-661 times more steel
43-819 times more aluminum
16-2286 times more copper
4000-73600 times more glass.”
Same source also lists out mining requirements, and nuclear is the same as wind and like 4x smaller than solar.
https://www.climatecentral.org/news/renewable-energy-needs-huge-mineral-supply-16682
“They say that to match the power generated by fossil fuels or nuclear power stations, the construction of solar energy farms and wind turbines will gobble up 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminum and 50 times more iron, copper and glass.”
The claim that solar and wind require a magnitude+ more materials and also more mining compared to nuclear is not controversial to anyone who is paying attention.
Not all. I think that there are real concerns about operating plant accidents, albeit greatly exaggerated, and I also believe that weapons proliferation remains a large concern, albeit seemingly also exaggerated.
And you just don’t get that radiation and radioactive waste is not as dangerous as you think it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb
https://www.nature.com/news/2004/040505/full/news040503-3.html
https://www.remm.nlm.gov/rdd.htm
You need to stop getting your “facts” from Hollywood, TV shows like “24”, and Greenpeace et al. Any similarity of their “scientific claims” to reality is entirely coincidental. What you’re doing now is just as bad as citing Jack Bauer in an argument that torture is effective.
To what focus do you refer? If there was one, it was yours, not mine; I merely responded:
Again, you wrote about fuel, I wrote about fuel, then you laughed because of construction costs and now you wonder why I wrote about fuel.
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I get that I’ve already skirted the line where terrorism is concerned, so I shan’t elaborate other than to allude to area-denial weaponry. I’m sure you personally would have no problem living or working in a hazardous contaminated area, but not everyone is as sanguine.
PS
<snicker>
I’m highly amused by your ever-increasing eclectic citation bank of weird claims.
(Shellenberger is your authority, eh?)
Re: Fuel.
After looking over the history.
Someone else wrote that fuel costs are a large portion of nuclear power costs.
I corrected them. Fuel costs are a very small portion of nuclear power costs.
You jumped in, and issued a non-sequitir and said that solar and wind don’t have fuel costs. Not sure why I should care.
I responded quickly, and mentioned the correct facts that if you’re concerned about mining and material usage (which is a separate concern that you did explicitly raise), then solar and wind are worse.
Please stop spouting pseudoscience. Real people are actually dying because of the sentiment that you share here. 7 million a year to be precise, or about 1 out of every 8 deaths worldwide, from airborne particulates, that we could almost completely eliminate by moving to nuclear power.
Please also stop spouting this pseudoscience. Again, the W.H.O. said that the biggest health impact on the people living near Chernobyl has been the depression caused by people like you scaring them needlessly. Ditto with Fukushima. Ditto with many / most dirty bomb scenarios. You’re part of the “fake news” brigade that has caused real and substantial harm to the people of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Fuel costs for nuclear are a tiny fraction of the overall cost of nuclear power.
Did you factor in the environmental costs of extraction and transportation? They’re not just someone else’s problem, right? This is one clear benefit solar and wind do have.
If you compare startup costs only, nuclear always wins.
What are you talking about?
…I have absolutely no idea. I must have been hallucinating when I wrote that!
What do you mean “security”?
To clarify, I’m not talking about rogue nuclear bombs. But nuclear plants need more security than other power plants, because nuclear fuel and nuclear waste, both of which are insanely toxic, need far more security than other fuel or waste. There can be no pretense that’s not the case.
Also the security cost is present for the lifecycle of the fuel/waste, from extraction to disposal. Not just needed while in the reactors, in other words.
Whenever something costs, people always try to skimp on it (and pretend it doesn’t exist when it comes to pitching a case). But that can’t be allowed for nuclear fuel and waste, that stuff kills. Which reminds me, be sure to factor in the budget of the atomic energy commission into nuclear plant running costs. Seriously, I’m not aiming to be facetious here.
The toxic waste from solar and wind
John beat me to this, but on the offchance you’ll avoid replying since you said he has a “reading comprehension below that of a 5th grade level”, I’ll add my 2c. Toxic waste from wind? What on earth are you on about?
Nuclear waste is the best kind of waste because there’s so little of it.
It is also one of the most toxic things on the planet. We’re not going to agree on this because you seem to have pretty hardened views about it, but please consider that the issue of its disposal is not resolved, and may be just a little bigger than you want to believe.
And to clarify, that doesn’t mean I’m against nuclear. I just don’t want the cost of nuclear waste disposal, including proper security costs and the cost of ensuring that it’s being dealt with responsibly, ignored.
I am pretty sure that I asked this question to you earlier John in a separate thread -- do you want primary sources? I can find primary peer-reviewed sources for you. Do you dispute that claim? Or are you just being an obstinate ass? I think you’re just being needlessly difficult. You’re just finding anything that you can to attack. I believe that you’re not seriously disputing that claim. You’re just latching onto anything that your feeble brain can find in order to find comfort that your entire world view is wrong and the result of professional liars when it comes to a great many important topics, including climate change, energy policy, overpopulation, world hunger, and so forth. My style is not the accommodation style when confronting deluded religious believers like yourself. I’m a firebrand kind of guy. All I’ve seen from you is easily disproven claims and obtuseness that borders on dishonesty.
It is you who peddles pseudoscience in your denial of the toxicity of radioactive material.
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No particulates are emitted by either wind or solar, either.
(And no spent fuel rods, either)
Whatever it is, solar and wind have it worse, likely by an order of magnitude or two, because they require that much more mining and raw materials per unit of electricity produced.
We’ve seen what happens when they skimp on the safety and cost. Chernobyl. Fukushima. Some people think that Chernobyl and Fukushima show that nuclear is dangerous. No. They show that nuclear is incredibly safe. Here we have two of the worst possible imaginable accidents, and barely anyone died, and almost all of the deaths happened with Chernobyl, with no containment dome unlike every reactor in the west, with a reactor that was more or less designed to explode (a very positive void coefficient) which has never been built in the west, and even in this worst case scenario, just a few hundred people dead or less, and surprisingly little lasting contamination. Ditto for Fukushima. By far the majority of the real human health damage has been from depression because they’ve been given grossly exaggerated lies about the real dangers. Don’t believe me. Believe the W.H.O. and the hundreds of international scientists, and every reputable scientific organization that has ever looked at this.
No one has ever died from radioactive waste from civilian nuclear power. People like Michael Shellenberger have looked. Not even an accident where a dry cask fell on someone. To the best of my knowledge, it simply has not happened.
The brute fact is that because it requires more mining, more materials, more manufacturing, etc., it’s probably going to be worse for the environment. To the first degree of approximation, the volume of required materials is what determines how bad for the environment something will be.
For example, wind turbines require certain rare earth metals that only come from China (95% of them), and that’s not because China has 95% of the deposits or because they have cheap labor. It’s because they have the weakest practical environmental regulations in the world for mining rare earth metals. See:
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/
Waste from wind turbine manufacture has killed a lot of people, unlike spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors and other radioactive waste from civilian nuclear power which has never killed anyone.
Yes, but it’s not as dangerous as you think it is. Please see the plethora of sources that I’ve given else-thread, including especially this one:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world
“The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all -- by George Monbiot”
This is doubly true because there’s so little of it. Because there’s so little of it, we as a society can afford to safely dispose of it. Because there’s so much more by volume toxic waste for solar and wind, we cannot afford to dispose of it, and we won’t, unlike nuclear waste which we will dispose of safely because it’s cheap to do so because there’s so little of it.
We’re not going to be agree because you’re wrong, and you refuse to listen to the evidence. More people die roughly every 10 minutes or so from coal from airborne particulate pollution alone than have ever died from radiation from civilian nuclear power accidents and waste and disposal. The total number for nuclear is almost entirely Chernobyl, which is a few hundred or less. Probably less. The number per year for coal is around 3 million. Three. Million. Exclude Chernobyl, and coal kills more people every minute or two compared to the total number of people who have died from radiation from civilian nuclear power. You need to put things into perspective. Coal is incredibly dangerous, and kills millions every year. Nuclear kills like an average of 5 people every year, and near 0 if you exclude Chernobyl.
Nuclear waste is not as dangerous as you think it is. You have been lied to.
I have never said that radioactive material is non-toxic.
I have cited the World Health Organization and many others concerning the real dangers of historical nuclear power plant accidents and hypothetical dirty bomb scenarios, all of which flatly contradict what you’re saying. You are the one who is living in a delusion. I don’t see any citations provided by you, and that’s because you don’t have any.
EL:
If I were running a power generation facility, I would care, because running one which requires no fuel means zero fuel cost. Sell the power, pay nothing for the fuel. Not bad, eh?
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PS did you deliberately misspell non-sequitur due to #32? That would be droll.
Like any business operator or government planner or anyone reasonable at all, I care about total costs. I care about what the entire solution looks like. I look at the whole, holistic solution. I don’t fixate on some partial subset of costs and ignore the other costs, because that’s a perfect way to get completely unfounded conclusions.
No. Apologies.
We’re not going to be agree because you’re wrong, and you refuse to listen to the evidence.
And once you’ve resorted to hyperbole, there’s no point in continuing the conversation.
I once met a guy who described to me how good nuclear radiation was for the body, and he went on and on, and the more I argued the more strident he got and the more ridiculous anecdotes he told, until I resorted to nodding at everything he said because I became afraid of what he might do to prove its magic power to me if I didn’t. He was one of the two people I’ve met in my life that genuinely frightened me. You don’t want to be like him do you?
I have to admit, you’re causing me to doubt whether I should be considering nuclear power as safe after all. When I debate someone with so little concern as to the issue of nuclear fuel/waste toxicity that they start to strawman nuclear plant accidents into the discussion, my worry about security becomes heightened, not lessened.
That sounds very much like you have preconceived conclusions, and that you dismiss me because I object and argue against, with citations mind you, your preconceived conclusions. You’re sounding very much like a religious person.
Did you even read this citation that I provided which cites and describes a paper that does detailing modeling on what happens during a spent fuel rod leak in long-term geologic storage? Spoiler: No danger to human health.
https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/Did you even read the World Health Organization pages that describe how little damage Chernobyl actually did, and how the fear of radiation was a bigger harm to public health than the actual radiation?
https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/Have you considered that you’re just wrong and that you’ve been lied to for your whole life concerning the actual dangers of radiation, and that your friend might actually be right? No seriously. I won’t go so far as to say conclusively that slightly elevated levels of radiation are good for your health, but it’s consistent with the evidence, and some of the evidence is very weakly supportive of such a model. It’s called hormesis. The basic idea is that elevated levels of radiation cause an up-tick in the body’s natural repair mechanisms, with a net result that the body is even better at repairing DNA damage. Again, I’m not saying that it’s true, but it might be true, and I wish that they would run the experiments on mice that might tell us that.
Do you know about the MIT mice study that seems to show that 400x background levels of radiation are perfectly safe? For mice at least. I recall reading that the study has some minor methodological flaws, and I wish that it would be repeated by other sources, but as far as I know, this story of study is virtually unique in terms of actually exposing animals to highly elevated levels of (external) radiation and observing the complete lack of harm.
http://news.mit.edu/2012/prolonged-radiation-exposure-0515I’m loosely aware of similar animal studies, but I don’t have links handy. This is the best animal study that I know offhand. I recall reading about one done like 60 years ago.
Do you know about the Bernard Cohen radon study? According to the (pseudoscience) LNT model of cancer risk from radiation, radon is the number 2 cause of lung cancer, with smoking being number 1. And yet, when Bernard Cohen looked at the available data for lung cancer rates and radon levels in an epidemiological study, he found no correlation between the two, even after accounting for a multitude of possible confounding factors. This is also very strong evidence that slightly elevated low-level background radiation is not harmful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Cohen_(physicist)#No-threshold_and_plutonium_toxicity_debatesSo, your friend is probably wrong to advocate for radiation hormesis as proven fact, but it is a distinct possibility which warrants further scientific investigation.
You’re sounding very much like a religious person.
Ironic you should say that EL.
So, your friend is probably wrong to advocate for radiation hormesis as proven fact
No friend of mine, clearly, for someone with a reading comprehension of at least a fifth grade level anyway. Do you know him? Let’s call him your friend. One of your friend’s anecdotes was how his brother broke his leg, had a massive jolt of radiation to it, and next day it was healed. By all means, educate us ignorants on how hormesis could do that.
Ok. That is nonsense. I was referring to the slight possibility that maybe slightly elevated levels of radiation would slightly reduce cancer rates (and cancer rates would go up at higher levels of radiation, of course).
Yeah, it is of course nonsense, glad to hear you say it though. I’ll take a chill pill. You’re a hard person to chat with when you make a lot of presumptions about what I mean, assume ignorance on my part, and back everything you say up with a lot of links that you expect me to trawl through, but that often don’t relate to what we’ve been talking about. I tend to only follow links when I have a reason to; call me slack if you wish, but again that’s a presumption; it could be that I have limited time or, the sacred yak forbid, am already aware of the content.
Here’s what you said about hormesis again:
Have you considered that you’re just wrong and that you’ve been lied to for your whole life concerning the actual dangers of radiation, and that your friend might actually be right? No seriously. I won’t go so far as to say conclusively that slightly elevated levels of radiation are good for your health, but it’s consistent with the evidence, and some of the evidence is very weakly supportive of such a model. It’s called hormesis. The basic idea is that elevated levels of radiation cause an up-tick in the body’s natural repair mechanisms, with a net result that the body is even better at repairing DNA damage. Again, I’m not saying that it’s true, but it might be true, and I wish that they would run the experiments on mice that might tell us that.
Do you know about the MIT mice study that seems to show that 400x background levels of radiation are perfectly safe? For mice at least. I recall reading that the study has some minor methodological flaws, and I wish that it would be repeated by other sources, but as far as I know, this story of study is virtually unique in terms of actually exposing animals to highly elevated levels of (external) radiation and observing the complete lack of harm.
http://news.mit.edu/2012/prolonged-radiation-exposure-0515
I’m loosely aware of similar animal studies, but I don’t have links handy. This is the best animal study that I know offhand. I recall reading about one done like 60 years ago.
Do you know about the Bernard Cohen radon study? According to the (pseudoscience) LNT model of cancer risk from radiation, radon is the number 2 cause of lung cancer, with smoking being number 1. And yet, when Bernard Cohen looked at the available data for lung cancer rates and radon levels in an epidemiological study, he found no correlation between the two, even after accounting for a multitude of possible confounding factors. This is also very strong evidence that slightly elevated low-level background radiation is not harmful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Cohen_(physicist)#No-threshold_and_plutonium_toxicity_debates
So, your friend is probably wrong to advocate for radiation hormesis as proven fact, but it is a distinct possibility which warrants further scientific investigation.
whereas I might have said
Are you sure he wasn’t just talking about hormesis?
providing the opportunity to follow the link on the offchance you weren’t familiar with the term, but resisting the urge to presume otherwise and lecture you. Just saying.
I was responding to the larger claim where IIRC you said something like “because I’m not giving enough credence to the harms of radiation, you cannot take me seriously / you are becoming less pro-nuclear”. I was posting many of those links in response to that.
And yes, I did mean to use the word “hormesis”, just as the Wikipedia page describes.