Whoever came up with that stupid, cruel, “boil a frog slowly” story? It’s wrong at many levels.
Climate change is no joke, and it’s going to get less and less funny as it sinks in. I’m amazed that it’s not front-page news all the time, except “you are doomed” probably won’t sell any doomed newspapers. There’s also fear of aggressive denialism – the same jackasses who’ll shoot someone who tells them to wear a mask in a pandemic – they’ll shoot people for telling the truth: the water isn’t going to magically come back.
That, by the way, appears to be the attitude that prevails: “this is just a drought and when there are big rains the aquifers will fill back up and we can go back to using drinking water for fracking!” Might as well depend on intercessionary prayer, folks.
Temperatures are hitting 120F in some areas: [guard]
California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah
The reporting is from an angle of “people without air conditioning are going to be miserable” and “chances of wildfires increase.” What it doesn’t mention is that California is one of the three sources of agricultural produce for the US.
Do an image search for “lake powell water level”
Guess where else is drought? If you guessed “The midwest and Florida” you guessed correctly. Those are the other two main agricultural regions for the country.
Humans’ response, now that it’s thoroughly too late, is to attempt to manage the water supply, as it goes away. [guard]
Valley Water, the county district board that doubles as both policymaker and wholesale water provider in Santa Clara county, called on the cities and companies it serves to cut 15% from their 2019 levels. Much of the cuts focus on curbing outdoor urban water use, which sucks up roughly half of the water distributed to communities and is wasted on lush green lawns or clean cars and driveways.
The numbers are truly terrifying. A pound of almonds takes 1,900 gallons of water. A pound of corn takes 109 gallons. A pound of beef takes about 1,900 gallons. And the snow-pack that fed California’s agricultural miracle: that’s going, going, gone. It won’t be back; the only option humans can come up with now is to squabble over the leftovers.
Probably the only good news in all of this is that eventually someone will suggest we stop having golf courses.
The dark red and ochre areas are extreme drought. The areas that are merely yellow represent “severe drought” Basically, America’s agricultural heart-lands were balanced on a knife-edge and, just like the boffins said, that precarious balance can’t survive even a small shift toward warmer.
Food is going to get more expensive. Then, it will get a lot more expensive. Our desire to reproduce (7 billion and counting!) is going to collide violently with the damage all that CO2 is doing to the environment. Meanwhile, it’s “business as usual” and Biden is careful to say he loves coal and isn’t going to stop fracking, because the US is the New Saudi Arabia. I don’t think he meant that literally, because Saudi Arabia is a fucking desert.
I was born in 1955. As I got older I used to marvel at where we’ve been and how far we have come and I used to get kind of sad thinking about how I will miss seeing just how far we can go. Now, Im glad Im not going to see how bad its going to be.
Reading the novel ‘The Water Knife’ by Paolo Bacigalupi, and then the non-fiction book mentioned in that novel ‘Cadillac Desert’ by Marc Reiser was a real eye opener. In a very real way, it changed the way that I look at the world, and the way I planned my life going forward.
The fundamental premise underlying the two books is “You cannot live without water, and water is vastly expensive to transport”. Any effort to bring water to a place that does not already have it is likely to be expensive, prone to failure, and nothing but a temporary stopgap to allow the wealthy and well-connected in that area to sell out and move before the suckers find out what the real cost of living there is going to be.
An assertion made by Reiser is that the City of Albuquerque is simply going to run out of water sometime in the next couple decades. They have known for decades that they are drawing water from their aquifer faster than they are replacing it, and they simply have no plan to deal with it. Without a supply of water, the city will quite literally dry up and vanish. This is the problem with humanity in a nutshell – I’m sure that billions have been spent developing land in/around that city to sell to newcomers, while little to nothing has been done to ensure that the city will remain habitable for those people – whose very presence will hasten the inevitable abandonment of the non-viable settlement.
For myself, it caused me to start thinking of my living situation in terms of decades – as in “What will this property look like in 20-40 years”. I avoided buying low-lying property near the ocean, and actually researched the water source of the streams that run near/through my property. Hopefully I’ll still be able to access drinking water for the rest of my life, even while the rest of the species continues to suffer the effects of our addiction to unrestrained growth and profit without limit for the wealthy few.
Food is going to get more expensive.
In my 3 year plan I’ll be building a greenhouse with a gutter/storage water capture system. Being able to produce 1/4 of my food is the target. When food prices spike it’ll be good to have the infrastructure in place. You can’t get good tomatoes at the store.
My place is perfect for chickens, but I’ll need dogs to protect them.
Ontario is currently poised to allow Triton (who have purchased Nestle) 10 year access to two local aquifers. This amounts to 4.7 million litres per day of groundwater that will be turned into bottled water.
The areas are currently under Stage 1 drought status and the Ontario government has not yet consulted with First Nation communities who will be affected.
The Council of Canadians is leading a campaign to have the sale stopped. If you’re interested in helping, the Ontario government is accepting comments from the public until June 22nd. This is the Council of Canadians site to assist you to Make your voice heard.
https://canadians.org/action/bluetriton-water-permits?utm_source=Council+of+Canadians&utm_campaign=474d3f7790-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_06_11_07_40&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f477a42a0b-474d3f7790-383906716&mc_cid=474d3f7790&mc_eid=5b0afc5aa0
@ 5 voyager
Leave it to Doug.
I had not heard about this. I used to live in Perth (town,not county) years ago and there was a US company shipping tons of free water south. We were not overly impressed.
Thanks for the link.
Something else that is ridiculous (as I understand it, and before writing this I did try to research that what I am saying is more or less correct) is that the water rights are by volume (or sometimes flow rate). In other words, they assume that the amount of water at a given time is constant–they are not accounting for periods of drought. So if you sum up all the water rights (based on an “average” year), it’s very easy, particularly during a drought, for everybody’s water rights to add to up way more than 100% of what’s available. You would have thought that allocating by percentage would make more sense.
Also, while that is all exacerbated by climate screwing, don’t forget that a lot of Native civilizations (Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, Mayan) collapsed around 900-1,300 AD due to extended drought. (And they managed to do so without exhausting the aquifers.)
@2 snarkhuntr
It’s an uncomfortable prospect, but not an insurmountable one. A water pipeline is probably the least expensive method; if the U.S. were serious about needed long-term infrastructure, we would finish coastal desalination and water pipeline megaprojects before we have to use them. Water can then be priced accordingly; combine that with hard caps for residential and industrial(!) water use, and I think we could make it work.
It’s disingenuous to say the city of Albuquerque has no plan; it’s been managing its own water use just fine for over a thousand years. Communities in the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico found themselves in a predicament: Colorado and Texas are far more powerful states, so they get the lion’s share of water rights. The only practical thing Albuquerque could do, by violating federal law and at great cost to the river ecosystem, would be to dig massive diversion channels to fill up their local aquifers with river water. The outcome is predictable: Texas would invade New Mexico again, and they would probably succeed in annexing all land east of the Rio Grande like they originally wanted to. Water rights as they are written are a lose-lose situation for New Mexico.
@4 Marcus
If food prices spike, then you’ll probably want an armored greenhouse.
To make matters worse, what we consider “normal” – the 20rh century – was actually the wettest century in North America for at least the last 1,200 years. You’re now on track for probably the worst megadrought in that length of time too.
Thank god I am 58 and have no children. The mediocre Miller genetic line comes to an end!
Terrifying. (I live in California and it is DUSTY here.) Meanwhile, one of the main focuses of local government is to encourage MORE HOUSING.
Damn. Already tend to the gloomy and “avert the eyes” psychology. Yet I still click on that stdrr link on a regular basis.
But no worries, a Uncle Joe will give us a Climate Action Plan and we will all drive Teslas. That will solve the problem!
In your opinion, just how terrified should the rest of the world be that the predominant nuclear empire might be running out of habitable territory/water soon-ish (give or take a few decades)? That same empire also being lead by and supported by some of the dumbest and most aggressive people on this planet?
Related to the OP, good discussion at Charlie’s Diary.
—
bmiller:
As opposed to a plan that expedites warming and expansion of the fossil fuel industry and rollback of environmental standads, and everyone driving trucks.
And, don’t diss green energy. The environmentally best processes are hugely expensive up front in scale, but not unaffordable. Our technology now is significantly better than even a decade or two ago. So buying that time is not worthless.
Finally, re water, any coastal area can deploy large-scale desalination — and there’s more seawater than ever, as ice deposits worldwide disappear.
@John Morales
Even with some of the higher energy efficiency desalination options coming online right now, it’s a huge and energetically expensive process to employ. There is a fundamental minimum energy cost to remove x quantity of salt from y quantity of water. You also need to intake huge volumes of water, filter out objects and/or chemicals that are harmful to your process. All of this requires complicated and expensive pumping infrastructure – working with brine is a huge pain in the ass.
It also generates a large waste-stream of concentrated brine that needs to be disposed of. This can be diffused back into the ocean, but you either need massive (and expensive to build/maintain) effluent diffusion pipelines or be willing to live with a locally increased salinity – likely toxic to some or all of your marine life.
Then you have your end-product water – you will generally have something akin to deionized water, which is going to need to have minerals added back to it to prevent it leaching minerals out of the existing water distribution infrastructure (Think Flint Michigan) or out of the people drinking it. So that will also add to the cost significantly.
‘Deploy[ing] large-scale desalination’ is far from simple, and it’s not free – not in an environmental, economic or energy sense. That’s why even in places like LA, it hasn’t happened yet. The amount of water in the ocean was never a barrier to desalination – having more melted ice in it won’t make the process noticeably more efficient or easier.
We use a huge amount of water, and we use it poorly and wastefully. If we’re going to start producing it by desalination, we’re going to have to restrict it even further.
Marcus, I’ve been capturing rainwater from the roof for about 15 yrs.now. I bought three 1100 liter food-grade IBC tanks and the necessary accessories: downspout diverters and connectors, ball-valves with hose attachment, screening to filter debris, (you can use anything from a kitchen splatter-screen to nylon stockings), and a small transfer pump for when gravity-feed doesn’t provide enough pressure. It’s kind of mickey-mouse, but it works. I use the rainwater for the garden, (veggie and flower), and for any pressure washing I need to do. In winter, I use it to flush the toilet by filling the toilet tank before each use. I figure I’ve saved between one and two thousand gallons of fresh water a year– a drop in the global bucket, but it’s something. If I had my druthers, I’d install a 2500 gal underground cistern with filtration and chlorination for bathing and laundry, and emergency drinking. Then I’d put in a similar tank to capture graywater for use in the garden. But that remains a pipe dream for now. And, yes, the only good tomato is a fresh garden tomato. Good luck with yours.
snarkhuntr, yes to everything you note, but still. If the option is either desalinated water or no water, well.
BTW, all that stuff in the water, well, it’s sequestrable or even minable.
Costs more again, but I already mentioned “hugely expensive up front”.
(Less expensive than maintaining an international holiday industry? Armed forces? ;) )
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publicola, any rainwater you capture is, until you use it, water that is not going to the land. Water that is not going to be used by the ecological system, that won’t replenish aquifers, that won’t benefit rivers or riparian systems. Scale matters.
(Also, any water a farmer captures or diverts from an upper part of a catchment is water the down-catchment farmers can’t get — a small scale version of the problems nations face)
—
In passing, many many big cities have stormwater disposal systems that divert that water into either rivers or the sea. A sunk cost (sorry).
Harvesting that would make a big difference, but as usual, that costs a shitheap
Being done in places by richer countries, but nowhere near enough.
But the point, again, is that it’s doable.
Just not necessarily economically profitable, currently.
For anyone else having difficulty with the units: A gallon of water weighs 10 pounds (8 pints in a gallon * 20 fluid ounces in a pint); so if it takes 1 gallon of water to produce a pound of something, it takes 10 litres to produce a kilo of the same stuff.
@John Morales
I agree – we’ll see cities along the US’s south coast embrace desalination. Although the sceptic in me will always believe it’s nothing but a stop-gap measure intended to allow the elites to sell off their property holdings to incoming suckers while they still maintain value. This infrastructure will, naturally, be built with public monies, to ensure that when some incoming ‘conservative’ government privatizes it, their buddies can make bank selling a necessity to the locals at hugely inflated prices.This will be made ‘neccessary’ by a few years of underfunding and neglect, so that they can claim that a ‘private investment’ is the only thing that can make it work reliably.
Nobody with economic clout is going to voluntarily remain somewhere with the kind of severe water restrictions that sourcing their water through desalination is going to require – or to live with the massive disruption of the shorelines required to place the infrastructure. They will move on, while the politicians promise their citizens that the city will remain great and productive for the foreseeable future.
Stomwater capture is unlikely to be of much use to anyone who does need it, and not at all useful to those who can implement it well. If your area is routinely receiving enough precipitation that capturing it will provide for the needs of your citizens – you likely have access to other surface water sources. On the other hand, building and maintaining the infrastructure to be able to capture and store a storm’s output on the off-chance that you get one is going to require some cost-benefit calculations. As with desalination, it’s better than nothing, but not by a whole lot.
As for mining the effluent from desalination – anything’s possible. I’m not sure that the ratios of minerals in it would make it a competitive source of minerals for anything you’d want to harvest, unless you’re foreseeing a global shortage of Chlorine, Sodium, Magnesium, Sulfur, Calcium or Potassium. And you still have an effluent stream to dispose of. Anything you do to concentrate it makes it more environmentally risky to store and more difficult to handle. You could completely dry it out, but given that the current best practical recovery ratio for desalination is something like 60% brine to 40% desalinated water – every liter you provide to the people is going to require dealing with 1.5L of effluent. Getting the minerals out is a steep hike up the entropy gradient – maybe there is someone who can do it economically, but the only people I’m aware of who have claimed to do so economically (generally gold) are con-artists.
Instead of going with magic aka green energy, you could go with a proven and cheaper option – nuclear power.
@18 GerrardOfTitanServer
Nuclear power is all well and good, but comes with significant drawbacks. Claiming that green energy is ‘magic’, when its currently making up a significant portion of the world’s total energy output makes you sound like a crank.
Per the IEA, Renewables made up 28% of the world’s energy supply in 2020. But keep claiming it’s magic. That’s going to really sway some opinions. This magic is producing more of the electricty actually used in the world than Nuclear does, by a respectable and growing margin.
(IEA report https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2020/electricity)
So, Gerrard, you acknowledge that nuclear energy is not green energy.
snarkhuntr
This is a bait-and-switch that Green energy advocates do. At first, they’ll talk about the wonders of solar and wind. When pressed on the facts that solar and wind suck, they’ll revert to “green” in the more encompassing sense that includes hydro. A very large percentage of those numbers that you’re citing are hydro.
In other words, it’s a fallacy of conflation – pretending that “scalable” types of green energy, like solar and wind, are just as good as non-scalable types of green energy, like hydro.
The brute fact of the matter is that it’s impossible run the world on renewables. Listen to the leading climate scientists. Listen to the IPCC reports that say the same thing.
Four leading climate scientists have come out in favor of nuclear power: Dr James Hansen, Dr. Ken Caldeira, Dr. Kerry Emanuel, and Dr. Tom Wigley.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.htmlHere are some quotes from those scientists from a press conference and other sources.
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.pdfDozens more prominent scientists have also come out publicly in favor of nuclear power.
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 biggest obstacle to fixing climate change is not the deniers. It’s the Greens.
Inflation is worse than I thought. When I was young, a pint was only 16 ounces, making a gallon of water ~8 pounds. The Internet says a gallon is 8.34 pounds, which I guess is down to the difference between a weight ounce and a fluid ounce.
A pint’s a pound the world around
Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit
Gerrard –
Do you have any information less than 8-10 years old that talks about the inherent limits caused by intermittency? Or is this just an old copypasta you deploy – like a squid emitting ink – whenever you feel that someone is questioning the superiority and necessity of nuclear power?
There’s some odd stuff in the quotes you chose to post, and your insistence that Hydro isn’t ‘green’ or ‘renewable’ is, once again, making you seem like a bit of a crank.
I’m genuinely curious, though – do you believe that China’s relatively low uptake in Nuclear power is due to some kind of green conspiracy? They don’t seem like a government that’s much concerned about what environmentalists have to say – why do you think it is that they’re not building up nuclear generation, and instead working on renewables.
I don’t personally have any a priori opposition to nuclear, I’ve just noticed that utility-scale nuclear power production tends to require vast engineering projects that inevitably result in delays, cost overruns, and ultimately sacrafices of safety for the sake of completing the project. The difficulty in actually building and commissioning the things generally means that they either end up being built as a Public-Private Partnership (ie – way for the construction companies to siphon away free tax dollars), or being built with artifical price guarantees to ensure that they can be more profitable than the market would otherwise dictate.
There are also limited sites suitable for nuclear power – you require a site that is relatively geologically stable, but that can still supply the vast amounts of cold water that the plants require – and can safely absorb the vast amounts of warmer water that the plants emit.
Now, I’ve heard some things about SMRs that make me think they could solve some of these issues, but since none of them currently exist – and I’ve spent my life hearing about groundbreaking technologies that are ‘just 5-10 years away from market’, I won’t hold my breath.
Gods – I didn’t say that. I said that pointing at the limited success of hydro and extrapolating to solar and wind is fallacious.
Honestly, no idea. They’re mostly burning coal, and coal is pretty cheap to burn. Making nuclear power be cheaper than coal is hard, but possible, especially with unproven next-gen designs. This is why I’m also a big fan of a greenhouse gas emissions tax (a fee-and-dividend approach) plus tariffs on countries that don’t play ball. It’s a hard political sell, but it would be great if we could accomplish it in most countries.
You can build nuclear power plants wherever you like. As long as you use a modern design, it can survive a tsunami or earthquake just fine.
All thermal plants require plenty of cooling water. Nuclear’s not different in this regard. Nuclear would use the same amount of water as a coal power plant, and similar amounts to a combined cycle gas plant. Moreover, certain design decisions can slightly increase total costs to greatly reduce this requirement (not using once-through cooling), and going full dry cooling is possible but increases total costs by circa 50%, which makes it still cheaper than renewables. However, just put these things near the ocean. That’s good enough for a large majority of the world’s population. Plenty of cooling water from the ocean.
These concerns do not limit the necessary radical expansion of nuclear power worldwide.
What’s wrong with copypasta? I thought that’s a primary way that reasonable and informed people have a conversation – by citing the foremost experts in the field. That’s what I’ve done.
My sources from “8-10 years ago” are just as good now as they were then. Also, my sources primarily were a 7 year old press conference (not 8-10 years ago), and I also implicitly cited the 2019 or 2020 IPCC reports where all example scenarios include as much nuclear as we have today, and almost all of them include much more nuclear than what we have today. The latest IPCC reports say that any solution without nuclear is basically impossible.
Finally, the IPCC reports have a well-known anti-nuclear bias, which means that nuclear is even better than what the IPCC reports say it is. Sources for that are only 4 years old; see:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/…
Back to you:
The facts.
The only countries that have successfully transitioned electricity supply away from fossil fuels have done so because of an overabundance of hydro, or because of nuclear power (plus hydro).
Germany has already spent so much money on renewables that had they spent it on nuclear instead, even at Hinkley C or Vogtle prices, they would have enough nuclear for all of their electricity, and likely enough extra to electrifiy all of their cars too.
France converted half of their grid to nuclear in 15 years. Also faster than Germany’s failure of an energy transition.
Nuclear power is the safest and cleanest form of energy production. You’re under a gross misapprehension of the facts if you think otherwise. Most of the so-called exclusion zone around Chernobyl and Fukushima is not medically necessary. Even the food grown in much of the Fukushima exclusion zone is safe to eat and regularly tested. The deaths from Chernobyl involve a predicted few thousand excess cancer deaths which were entirely preventable had the USSR told people to not eat dairy for the next 3 months plus few hundred deaths from the cleanup workers on site. Fukushima has zero past or future predicted deaths from radiation. The waste disposal “problem” is a fiction pandered to people who believe in in modern-day homeopathy (“any radiation, no matter how diluted, is harmful”). Nuclear power is the best thing since sliced bread. For example, did you know that there were multiple reactors at Chernobyl, and after the accident, people came to work for the next 10 years to operate the other three reactors? “Uninhabitable” my ass.
The problem with renewables is not the cost of solar and wind. Solar cells and wind turbines could be entirely free and plentiful, and it wouldn’t be enough. Already, the other costs for a 100% solar wind grid are more than the costs of the solar cells and wind turbines. The extra transmission costs alone exceed the baseline solar cell and wind turbine costs. The storage costs alone exceed the baseline solar cell and wind turbine costs. There’s also the costs of grid inertia and blackstart capability to consider. These extra costs add up, and in spite of what some people say, these costs, including battery and other storage costs, are not coming down enough. A 100% renewables plan for most countries is easily 10x the cost of a plan based primarily on nuclear and hydro, assuming it’s even physically / economically feasible which is in doubt.
My preferred approach is R&D into all of the above, including solar, wind, batteries, etc., and also SMRs. However, in the meantime, we should do what France and South Korea did to get reliable and decreasing construction times and budgets, which is pick one good design, and build it again and again with the same work crews. That’s how South Korea has seen year over year overnight capital cost decreases for 30+ years for their nuclear power plants. Contrast that to the ridiculous designs of EPR, and using inexperienced work crews. No new technology is required for the 100% nuclear hydro plan. All we need is political will.
Having said that, I’m very hopeful in designs like ThorCon and other SMRs, and if they get proven prototypes and some years of commercial success, then we should switch new construction from the old gen 3+ conventional pressurized light water reactors to the new SMRs. I’m very hopeful that these will drive down costs further, but I must first point out that we don’t need them for nuclear to succeed.
PS:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/
Brazil is heading into extreme drought too:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/17/only-aggressive-environmental-measures-can-prevent-another-imminent-water-crisis-in-brazil/
Gerrard:
Dr. Hanson used to have a blog in which he demonstrated, time and again, that there were not enough of the specialized materials to go 100% renewable.
Myself, I as a non-expert gloomy Gus, think you underestimate the dangers of nuclear a bit. More seriously, I think the only “solution” is a massive die-off of the human race and a return to the lifestyle and population levels we had during 90%+ of human history. I don’t think all billion Indians and a billion plus Africans and 1.5 billion Chinese can live the lives of the material wealth demanded by spoiled westerners (particularly Americans).
bmiller
According to the W.H.O., airborne particulate pollution from coal kills a million people per year. Add in all airborne particulate pollution, outdoor and indoor (e.g. using wood or animal poop for heating or cooking fuel), and you get to about 7 million deaths per year.
You could have one Fukushima every year, and it still wouldn’t kill anywhere near as many people as 7 million per year.
I think I’ve seen people do back of the envelope calculations, and asked “what if we put all of our nuclear waste into fine particulate form and put it into the atmosphere, evenly spread?”, and it still doesn’t reach the numbers of people that die per year from coal.
I don’t get the extreme double-standard that you and everyone else seems to adopt when it comes to nuclear. It is based on this ill-founded and unquestioned unconscious belief that radiation is the worst thing imaginable, but it’s really not as bad as you think it is. Yes, it’s bad, but there’s so little of it that dilution comes into play. Homeopathy is not real. Also, there is a threshold response to harm to health health from radiation.
Gerald: You make some good points about the ongoing…holocaust…of death and destruction from carbon based fuels and their use. I don’t mean to come across as fervently anti-nuclear as some here.
My Mad Max scenario is based more on overall resource scarcity versus any opposition to nuclear power per se. And one can argue that a continued reliance on carbon based fuels will hurry along the rise of Humungus and his ilk in the sun blasted remnants of our ecosphere.
bmiller
That’s good to know.
More ranting: There are problems with nuclear power, but I think that the problems are solvable compared to alternatives.
I’ll grant that the weapons proliferation angle is a real concern which demands strong international oversight ala the IAEA. I will also soften that slightly by pointing out that no one has ever made a bomb from material from a civilian nuclear power plant, and that appears to be because it’s just cheaper and easier to make a different kind of reactor with higher costs, and operate it differently, to make bomb material, and because it’s just cheaper to just make centrifuges. Stopping nuclear power won’t put the genie back in the bottle, and we’ll need a strong international oversight regime either way to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
I think the farmland contamination angle from reactor accidents is also a real concern at the scale-up that we’re talking about. At that scale-up, the skill of the worst operators is going to be much less compared to today. However, the information coming out of Fukushima makes me slightly less worried. From the little research that I’ve done, the food is regularly tested, and most of it is safe to eat.
(This is one of the big reasons why I’m really excited about some of the next-gen reactor designs. ThorCon in particular really amazes me as being very “idiot-proof”. One of their selling points is that nearly any kind of operator malfeasance or negligence cannot cause a radiation release. There is no valve that they can close. There is no valve that they can leave open. The safety systems are always working, with no valves, no electronics, no motor, no moving parts, relying entirely on natural circulation. That’s a really big selling point to me.)
IMAO, everything else seems to be a nonsense concern or radically overblown concern.
ThorCon seems like pretty exciting technology. Not that I have any expertise, but….
I note green power (renewable, non-polluting) is just about perfect for the purpose of desalination. You know, the problem of insufficient potable water.
Not even for desalination?
PS [can’t resist]
Already, the other costs for a 100% nuclear grid are more than the costs of the nuclear power plants. More so than for solar cells and wind turbines, since they don’t need many kilolitres of water per megawatt-hour generated. Or even fuel.
(heh)
bmiller:
What?
Care to name but one person “here” who is “fervently anti-nuclear”?
Me, I do prefer nuclear thermal generation to coal or gas generation, but still…
https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/water-disruption-too-caused-power-outages-world-resources-institute-118011600560_1.html
(Feedback loops can be a pain)
John.
Put it on the ocean, or don’t use once-through cooling which slightly raises costs. This is not a showstopper. Pretending that it is – that’s dishonest.
What is the feedback loop here? WTF? Are you saying that nuclear power is making climate change worse and droughts worse? WTF is wrong with you? You anti-science, pro fossil fuel shill.
John
Your source doesn’t make any sense. It says this:
And this:
That’s inconsistent.
My best guess is that the article made a mistake, and their source says that 14 TWh losses were from water shortages for all plants, including hydro dams. That would make sense. Yearly differences in water supply make huge differences for hydro dams.
Gerrard,
Well, the OP is about water, so that’s my focus.
And yes, the sort of nuclear power generation relies on big gobs of water for cooling.
With centralised power generation (which you advocate) comes less water available for other uses.
Less water for other uses means additional need for water, and the bottom line is a need for desalination.
Which takes more power.
BTW, did you look at the adduced article?
“More than 80 per cent of India’s electricity is generated from thermal (fossil fuel, biomass, nuclear, and concentrated solar) power plants (CEA 2017) of which 90 per cent reply on freshwater for cooling. Another 10 per cent of electricity is generated from hydroelectric plants, which depend on water completely.
[…]
India lost about 14 terawatt-hours of thermal power generation due to water shortages in 2016, canceling out more than 20 per cent of growth in the country’s total electricity generation from 2015. Between 2013 and 2016, 61 per cent of the time programmed daily thermal generation targets couldn’t be met due to forced power plant outages, which included equipment failure, fuel shortages, water shortages, and other factors.”
Your acumen is duly noted.
—
Look, the thrust is that water is not exactly a scarce resource on Earth; potable water, well, that’s another thing. I’m pointing out that it may be expensive, but we’re not going to run out of it if we bother to invest in it. It’s affordable.
There’s a thing called the hydrologic cycle, which denotes the environmental cycling of water. Just pointing out that it need not be as “expensive” as it may cursorily seem to purify a sufficient amount of it where we exceed natural source supplies of it, and in particular, that it need not be necessary to waste it by cooling down big centralised thermal power plants, such as those you advocate.
—
For the umpteenth time, over multiple blogs here, I note that distributed power generation, demand usage shifting, smart grids, large-scale energy storage, and so forth are very very doable. But you’ve got it into your head that, whenever power generation is mentioned, it must (MUST!) be done with nuclear power plants.
(Nothing else will do!)
Why guess? Look it up yourself, I mean thermal generation lost due to lack of water.
<clickety-click>
https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/water-crisis-due-to-low-rainfall-hampers-energy-power-generation-in-india-117080300903_1.html
“For instance, water shortage related shutdowns in 2016 cost India roughly 14 terawatt-hours (TWh) of thermal electricity generation, enough to power neighbour Sri Lanka for an entire year, according to research by the World Resources Institute (WRI).
The Washington-based research organisation compiled and analysed over 1,400 daily outage reports filed with the Central Electricity Authority between 2013 and 2016 to arrive at this conclusion.
The loss of generation has significantly increased over the past three years from 1,258 million units in 2014-15 to 4,989 million units in 2015-16 and to 5,870 million units between April 2016 and January 2017, Energy Minister Piyush Goyal told Parliament in March.
In 2016, as many as 18 thermal power plants had to lie idle for various lengths of time due to water shortages. If these plants had water supply during the shutdowns, they could have generated 14 TWh of electricity, about one per cent of the country’s annual consumption, WRI’s analysis showed.
During the four years from 2013 through 2016, the thermal power sector lost more than 30 TWh of potential electricity due to water scarcity, Tianyi Luo, Research Associate at WRI’s Water Programme, wrote in a recent report.”
(My emphases)
BTW, the Himalayan glaciers are melting.
(Yay! More water for now. In India, even
but…
Woe! Less water thereafter, in India too)
That’s true no matter where you put the fossil fuel plants, hydro plants, or nuclear plants. Oh, there you go again, pretending that solar and wind are feasible replacements. Don’t mince words. Don’t distract us from this issue for your pet hobby of destroying the means of production.
Re cooling water. Again, just put these things on the ocean, or use dry cooling designs. Both are perfectly practical options.
PS:
Oh, I see my error here.
Sorry, reading that again makes a lot more sense. It’s 20% of the new energy generators, not 20% of the total. Rather, it was 1% of the total. That makes a lot more sense.
Gerrard:
Well, if you want to believe desalination can’t be powered by wind and/or solar, I can’t stop you.
Anything can be done on small scale if you throw enough money at it. That doesn’t make it practical to do so without loads of fossil fuels or nuclear power.
@GerrardOfTitanServer
Nuclear reactors (with their shitty fucking 1960s designs) require a crap-ton of water.
Which means you need to build them near coastlines or rivers. Rivers are progressively being privatized and forever-drained by global capitalism. Sea-levels are going to rise drastically in the next few decades because of a million reasons.
Nobody sane will invest in (shitty fucking 1960s) nuclear power plants that need to be decomissioned only ten years later. Which is the correct call. Doing otherwise would invite a thousand more Fukushimas or a thousand duds.
Water is one of those resources that is absolutely indispensible to human life. You can life without electricity. You can’t live without water. Wars will be fought over water, in the not-too-distant future.
I don’t fundamentally disagree that nuclear power could be helful in the fight against ever more deadly temperatures. The average carbon molecule takes approximately 10.000 years to cycle through and naturalize. Which isn’t significantly different from spent uranium/plutonium. Except there’s a whole lot more unbound carbon than there is uranium. So if the choice is between coal and shitty 60s nuclear, I’ll take nuclear. But it’s not up to me. It never has been. It is also not up to you, which makes your crusade all the weirder.*
One one hand, you are correct that this is a technological problem:
There are amazing concepts being worked on that use liquid-salt thorium magic or pebble-sized solid fuel magic which don’t require much cooling, nor do they carry nearly the same safety risks. They’re modular and scalable. Magically.
Yet, somehow they are not being built. They will probably never be built.
Consider why the particular reactor design we see all over the world is the predominant one. It has nothing to do with energy efficiency or waste minimization. On the contrary, it’s the waste we’re really intersted in.
Nuclear power has never been about power in the physical sense. It has always been about political power. A reactor that gives you both energy AND weapon’s grade fissile by-products? No imperialist/huckster/sociopath/capitalist is ever going to fight for an alternative. Shit, they’ll do do their darndest to make the alternative unviable. If you have nukes, what the fuck else do you need to be king of the playground?
The other hand is social:
We don’t need all this fucking energy. We really don’t. Instead of increasing efficiency, it would also help if affluent people simply consumed less. Be it less meat or less fossil fuels or fewer exotic vacations. Or simply having fewer/no children. Because even if you come up with some magical fusion reactor design that simply works™, it doesn’t mean anything if we keep polluting and shitting on our own carpets forever.
The world is dying. We’ve been promised amazing new tech that’s just on the horizon for decades.
Just stop it. Stop pretending that some magical tech is suddenly going to change everything.
The technogy for binding carbon already exist: It’s called trees.
Unless we fundamentally change the basic operating system of our collective human existence, EVERY possible future is going to be bleak for a hell of a lot of people.
Blindly trusting someone (who exactly?) to save us all with nuclear reactors seems like a sad and really pathetic way to deal with this crisis. It’s counter-productive and deluded.
* Maybe this is really my point: Who are you trying to convince? Not politicians or powerful moneybags. You’re talking to some random-ass idiots on some random fucking blog. What happens when you’ve succeded in convicing us all that nuclear is best? Personally, I’m certainly not capable of building my own backyard reactor. So what the fuck is it you’re after? If you’re looking for major change, I’m sure there are greener pastures out there, somewhere on the internet. Somewhere out there…
By constantly INSISTING on being enemies with the Greens™ you are effectively shutting out the only type of person that would ever be willing to listen to you. Because, do you have a billion dollars? If not, you’re not interesting to the people that CAN actually build a reactor.
Tpyos, I hail they.
To klatu
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Sea levels are not going to rise that fast in the near term. We’re talking a foot or two. We know how to make nuclear reactors near the ocean, last for 80 years, and be able to handle a few feet of sea level rise.
Half of the world’s population would starve without electricity. About 1-2% of the world’s total energy supply goes to making fertilizer, and without that, half of the world’s population would starve.
Next-gen nuclear reactors are going to use the same amount of water. They’re still heat engines, and they’re still subject to the same laws of thermodynamics and engineering as a coal power plant. They’re still going to use the exact same models of conventional combined cycle steam turbines as coal power plants, just like what they do today. Now, if someone bothers to invent and perfect the supercritical CO2 turbine, then water usage will decrease (not disappear) because again it’s going to be a combined cycle with a steam turbine sitting on there somewhere to increase thermal efficiency.
No one has ever made a weapon from material from a electricity-design nuclear power plant. Everyone who has ever made a bomb has done so with centrifuges or with custom design reactors that greatly sacrifice electricity generation in style and also in operation in order to make weapons material.
You only need to look at North and South Korea to see that it’s not as simple as you make it out to be. North Korea is the most isolated and sanctioned regime on the planet. They’re dirt poor. They have no nuclear power. They also have nuclear weapons. South Korea has loads of nuclear power, and no nuclear weapons. Yes we need a strong international regime to limit access to nuclear weapons, but trying to limit access to nuclear weapons by limited accessing to nuclear power is not an effective strategy.
Yes we do need all that fucking energy. The rest of the world is going to industrialize at least to some extent. It’s a matter of life and death. They need energy for fertilizer, irrigation, tractors, refrigeration, for food. They need energy for pumped water which is a hell of a lot safer than river water. They need energy for refrigeration and stuff for medicine.
Suppose you somehow make the western world use drastically less energy. Say 3 KW per capita. Over 10 billion people, a number we will have soon enough, and that’s 30 TWe, which is 10x more than the total world’s electricity usage today, and 50% more than the world’s total primary energy usage. Poor people want a healthier, safer, cleaner, better life, and they’re going to use coal to do it unless we give them a better alternative. You would keep them poor. It’s quite colonialist and racist.
I attack Greens because most of them spout this anti-human, anti-progress, neo-Malthusian, Luddite mindset that you’re spouting. You’re not my ally. You’re not my potential ally. You’re my enemy. You’re the enemy of humanity with your misinformation. You’re standing in the way of both fixing the climate and raising the poor people of the world out of abject poverty, which should be one of the highest moral imperatives that we should have. Instead, like most other Greens, you have this entitled, racist, colonialist mindset that you know better, and that they shouldn’t get what you have.
Let me end with a quote from the greatest human being to ever live.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/
PS:
Do you know the solution for overpopulation? For reducing birth rates? It’s raising people out of poverty. It’s poor subsistence farmers that have lots of kids. Most / all western and industrialized countries already have birth rates that are below breakeven. Rich people don’t have a lot of kids. Projections for the whole world have total human population capping out at around 10 or 11 billion and then decreasing because they’re based on projections of continued industrialization around the world.
I also think that other factors are important. A rich country can “afford” the emancipation of women, and combined with easy access to birth control and opportunities for women besides being mothers, and that’s also how you get a lesser birth rate.
Your neo-Malthusian “ideas” would take us in the entirely wrong direction. The fixes to our problems is not to make everyone poor and live in harmony with nature. The fixes to our problems are to make everyone rich, and remove people from nature. Humans cannot live in harmony with nature. The best that we can do is live in cities and leave as much of the natural world untouched by human hands, and that requires energy.
PPS:
Trees are a net carbon sink? Gods you’re ill-informed. The biggest permanent sink of carbon in the world by far is the oceans and ocean floor. Most trees decompose readily when they die, releasing that carbon back into the air. Only a very small number are petrified or otherwise buried deep enough to prevent decomposition. It is true that increasing the total number of trees will be a carbon sink compared to less trees, but only as long as that forest level is maintained, and it’s not sequestering additional carbon per year. Instead it’s just a temporary constant store. Again, unlike the ocean floor processes which actually does sequester additional carbon every year.
Trees are not the answer. If we want to hit reasonable climate and temperature targets, we need to do some geo-engineering. My personal preferred approach is something like the brute force carbonate approach. Basically, get a bunch of nuclear power, and dig up a bunch of limestone, use the nuclear power to heat the limestone to release a concentrated stream of CO2 and also get a lot of quicklime, put that concentrated stream of CO2 into basalt deposits where it will quickly form chemical bonds with the rock that are stable on geologic timescales, and take the quicklime, grind it up, and spread it over the oceans’ surface, where it will react with carbonic acid in the ocean, thus increasing CO2 uptake from the atmosphere to the ocean, and thus decreasing atmospheric CO2 levels.
We only need like 10 TW running for many decades for the plan to work, plus mining capacity comparable to today’s coal mining capacity. I doubt it’ll happen because I don’t think society is willing to spend like 1% of GDP on it, but if there was political will, there’s no technical or economic issue that would stop this plan.
[oblique]
Wooden thrusting spear, Schöningen, Germany, about 400,000 years old
Honestly… I was this close to reporting you.
I said:
Was I really being so unclear? I’m confused because you replied with some non-sequitor about me wanting poor people to suffer. Some screed about how I’m standing in the way of fixing the climate crisis and advocating colonialism. About me being your enemy and the enemy of humanity itself?
This is you failing at reading comprehension. This is you projecting all the bad qualities you imagine your enemies to have on a strawman with the handle ‘klatu’. So I’ll… let that slide this time. Maybe you’re just having a bad day.
Let me just say that it takes a bit of determination to respond to someone so hell-bent on pissing off people.
With that out of the way…
I will admit: I am not a fucking expert, okay? Nor do I have the patience or inclination to shower you in a wall of out-dated citations from “leading climate scientist”. Just saying: A dozen scientist is not a lot of scientists.
I know that and I never claimed otherwise. It’s funny how you keep finding arguments where none were present. The point being: Can you create new oceans or cool them down? No. Can you plant new trees and conserve existing forests? Yes, with relatively little effort. All you really need to do is nothing; let nature be nature. I admit I was being kind of flippant. My point was that there are readily available things the human race COULD do to avert disaster. Things that are not as preposterous as desalinating the oceans or blotting out the sun. This disaster could be averted with a change in behavior, not technology.
Correct. So what the heck are you disagreeing with? A finite measure permanently upheld is a permanent measure for all intents and purposes. What is your problem here? What are you actually disagreeing with? Are trees bad because they’re not nuclear? Is it the “additional carbon per year” part? Because if you can understand that issue, I really don’t understand why I’m the one you’re having an issue with. Capitalism and the fable of eternal growth is your enemy.
Right. Just get a bunch of nuclear power… It’s a really neat answer to all of life’s problems. Just get a bunch of nuclear power.
You treat it like its’s an infinite power source. It is not. At best, it can delay our doom. Unless we solve the actual issue underlying it all.
To me, it sounds like you are reflexively lashing out at people for even slightly disagreeing with you.
I’m apparently one of the Greens™ that want to kill people for fun or whatever. Let me tell you a secret: I have no fucking idea what your history is or who you made enemies with. But I generally don’t spend my days plotting ways to thwart the progress of nuclear power.
Honestly, I’m fine with nuclear if the alternative is coal.
AS. I. SAID.
Asshole.
That is a point: it’s probably too late for nuclear power to save us. If we had started a programme of building a safe nuclear infrastructure and figuring out how to manage nuclear systems safely, back in the 70s, that would have helped.
With the heat we’re going to experience, water cooling nuclear reactors may be a problem. I guess it’ll be a dry heat.
“I attack Greens because most of them spout this anti-human, anti-progress, neo-Malthusian, Luddite mindset that you’re spouting. You’re not my ally. You’re not my potential ally. You’re my enemy. You’re the enemy of humanity with your misinformation. You’re standing in the way of both fixing the climate and raising the poor people of the world out of abject poverty, which should be one of the highest moral imperatives that we should have. Instead, like most other Greens, you have this entitled, racist, colonialist mindset that you know better, and that they shouldn’t get what you have.”
Wow – given that nobody here has espoused any malthusian ideas, nor has anyone explicitly rejected nuclear power as an option in this discussion – you once again come off as a ranting crank.Maybe if you spent less time on insults, you’d have more time to make effective points.
What really doesn’t work is this: People who disagree with you online aren’t just people with different opinions, they’re your enemies. Heck, that’s not melodramatic enough, they’re *humanity’s* enemies. If they don’t agree with you, whollly and without any reservations, they’re racists, colonialists, or whatever words you can think of that mean ‘bad’ in your personal moral landscape.
I’m generally in favour of nuclear power, though I think there are systemic problems that make execution difficult. I find myself less in favour of it with every one of the paragraphs you write about it.
This level of grandiose pomposity does give me a nostalgic feeling, reminds me of forum arguments I had when I was 15. It’s nice to see that there’s someone around maintaining that level of discourse – do you do this as a hobby?
@GerrardOfTitanServer:
I actually agree with many of the things you say, but I’d appreciate a bit less aggressive fanaticism. As snarkhuntr says, it’s possible you’re talking with people who are, in principle, in favor of nuclear power but remain skeptical that it’s a solution that can be deployed quickly, safely, and cheaply. I don’t think that you actually have enemies, here, though you’ve made some progress toward making a few.
GerrardOfTitanServer@#46:
Suppose you somehow make the western world use drastically less energy. Say 3 KW per capita. Over 10 billion people, a number we will have soon enough, and that’s 30 TWe, which is 10x more than the total world’s electricity usage today, and 50% more than the world’s total primary energy usage. Poor people want a healthier, safer, cleaner, better life, and they’re going to use coal to do it unless we give them a better alternative. You would keep them poor. It’s quite colonialist and racist.
Those sort of calculations are premised on the idea that humanity will pull itself together before it runs off a cliff and experiences a massive die-off. Personally, I think massive die-off is the more likely future than a massive nuclear build-out. Humanity, collectively, is too nasty and selfish to survive. Like with everything else in this problem solutions would have to break down nationalist interest (e.g.: the interests of the oligarchs who control pieces of humanity) and that’s not going to happen; I think it’s as naive to think that humans will suddenly get sensible and do massive nuclear deployments as that they will successfully have a “green revolution.” Yes, I think Malthus was right and that humanity successfully pushed its collapse back, particularly during the 1900’s, with the Haber-Bosch process for extracting nitrogen from air. Collectively, humanity was over-using its fertilizer supply at that time and mining out guano islands, etc., even Lord Kelvin was making statements of concern that we might be unable to continue modern agriculture (then-modern) and experience a Malthusian collapse. We dodged that particular axis of collapse (and, in return, had enough high explosive to make WWII particularly horrible) but all that did was push the time of the collapse back. Maybe this is the collapse. Or maybe it will come when humans try to support 9 billion on the planet. Or 12, or 20. It doesn’t seem to matter – if we improve agriculture and energy, it just means more humans.
I don’t see anyone here recommending a malthusian strategy; but there are some (including yours truly) who think a malthusian collapse is the course humanity will set itself upon, because choosing something better would require goring too many sacred cows, and whatnot. In my case, I’ll say I am experiencing despair not counselling it. If there is a better option, we should have taken it 30-50 years ago. If the collapse is inevitable, as I think it is, that doesn’ t mean I approve of it, any more than someone can non-jokingly approve of the planet getting hit by a giant asteroid. Yes, a malthusian collapse will be racist and classist as all fuck; that’s partly the point: it’s our stupid racism and classism that may be making the collapse inevitable, not the other way around. (I consider nationalism to be a form of fanaticism with no objective substance, so it’s not quite racism and it’s not quite classism – but it’s some kind of stupid)
Marcus
The amount of harm that these viewpoints have caused is incalculable. I’m not exaggerating when I am firmly convinced that the Greens political movement in the current circumstances is the most dangerous political movement ever exist. They’re the group primarily responsible for the deaths of millions per year from coal power, and the deaths from millions more from hunger in Africa, and the deaths and poor life quality around the world from keeping much of the world poor and dirty, and also for climate change and the rest including ocean acidification, sea level rise, etc. This is why I called klatu my enemy and the enemy of humanity. I see absolutely no reason to place nice with the most dangerous political movement in the world today.
Le me try to back up some of those assertions and respond to some of the other things you said.
Yes. I’m very well aware of the facts around fertilizer. However, I see it in exactly the opposite way. We didn’t just stave off collapse. For the first time ever because of that invention and the rest of industrialization, humanity finally had its first opportunity to escape from nature and escape from the inevitability of collapse.
Malthus was fundamentally wrong because Malthus predicted that more food, more industry, better standard of living entailed more kids. He was completely, unequivocably, wrong on that matter. As a result, the entire argument falls apart. By raising people out of poverty, they voluntarily by themselves have less kids. As a result, energy and resource reuqirements will not continue an exponential increase, and with proper government policy, we might eventually one day see a decrease total resource demands and our negative impact on nature.
Really? Because I see it right here from klatu:
I see a complete rejection of technological progress, of optimism for the future. I believe in the vision of Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek. I believe that we have hope to overcome our social and technical problems, and that progress is not a dirty word. Progress politically, culturally, socially, and also technologically. They view globalism as a bad thing. These Green people have lost hope for the future. Instead, they pin their hopes on microgrids, self sufficiency, going back to nature, and destroying the means of production because the means of production are inherently evil. They assert that technological progress is inherently evil, as klatu did just here. So, the means of production have to go, and they’re kind enough to volunteer the non-white parts of the world to go first by staying poor – promising that they’ll join them in being poor soon enough.
We would have, but the Greens stopped us.
The birth of the anti-nuclear Green movement can be traced back to a single person at a single moment in history – when David Brower left the Sierra Club to found Friends Of The Earth. At the time, the Sierra Club was pro-nuclear, for all of the arguments that I’m making now; you preserve nature by keeping people out of it, and lots of cheap clean energy would prevent the need for pit mining coal and the burning of coal. David Brower and his allies, including Amory Lovins, were explicitly against nuclear power because it was clean, cheap, and safe, making explicitly neo-Malthusian arguments that clean, cheap, abundant, safe power is the worst thing that could possibly happen. They wanted to keep people poor in the mistaken notion that this is how you protect nature (and because they valued nature and their personal enjoyment of nature more than the life quality of humanity – selfish pricks). We see very similar views being described here by klatu, and much of the Green movement today.
At that time, we in California had enough nuclear power plants being built or approved and in the planning stages that if they finished, California today would be near 100% nuclear electricity. David Brower and his allies stopped it. They killed nuclear power in California. Within a few short years, he pushed almost all of the enviromental movement to be anti-nuclear by publicly spreading misinformation about the dangers of nuclear power, including greatly exaggerating the dangers of nuclear waste, and constantly conflating nuclear weapons with nuclear power in his public messaging. They shut down most of the planned nuclear power, but complete victory would only come later when his ally Jerry Brown became governor for a second time decades later.
The Greens are “useful idiots” to the fossil fuel industry. David Brower got his initial funding for Friends Of The Earth from the Rochefellers. One of his most useful allies was California governor Jerry Brown – a man whose family had huge financial investments in continued use of fossil fuels.
As an aside, I’ll also mention that the foremost Green energy academic in the world is a certain Mark Jacobson at Stanford, who publishes all sorts of nonsense about how green energy is good and nuclear power is bad, publicly lying about hsi opponents as making up data when he himself is the one making up data in his papers, and suing his academic peers for defamation when they take apart his paper in a rebuttal paper in the same peer reviewed journal. Why do I mention him here? Because his university program is funded by Precourt (natural gas tycoon), and he sits on some think tank funded by Precourt. Is Mark Jacobson a true believer in neo-Malthusianism willing to lie to advance his cause? Or is he just a shill in it for the money? I don’t know. The effect is the same. All of these claims of academic misconduct are public knowledge, any one of which should be enough for Jacobson to be removed from Stanford, and especially for him to be ostracized, but the Green movement is inherently a religious cult with no care for what is actually true, and it’s not just me who thinks that. For example, preeminent climate scientist James Hansen also describes Greens are quasi-religious.
Finally, David Brower and his allies succeded only due to the worst stroke of luck. David Brower had another ally, actress Jane Fonda, star of the movie The China Syndrome. They appeared on stage at anti-nuclear rallies together IIRC. This movie premiered mere days before the minor accident at Three Mile Island. Due to simple human psychology, the release of that movie colored practically all reporting of that minor accident. I know of anecdotes of an editor in a meeting saying to his staff “Ok, who has seen The China Syndrome? Ok, you get to cover Three Mile Island”. Along with Chernobyl (a severe accident), that was the beginning of the end of nuclear power. If not for that coincidence, nuclear power would be much better off today. It’s no accident that the capital costs of nuclear power tripled overnight after these accidents, and it was because certain governments caved to pressure and put in place excessive regulations – not useful safety regulations and regulations that allowed expensive delaying tactics by Greens – which largely killed the nuclear industry in the West.
Again, we had a better option 50 years ago, and places like California were doing it for reasons utterly unrelated to climate change, and they were going to do it if not for the Green movement which is inherently anti-human, Luddite, and neo-Malthusian.
Yes, and? These are the facts of the matter. I have some hope, but it’s getting harder as the years go on and the Green neo-Malthusian Luddites keep winning.
Of course. I’m planning and hoping for success, but I’m also half-resigned that the world will fail and we will have huge negative consequences on nature. There won’t be a sudden massive die-off barring extreme and unlikely consequences of climate change, humans are really ingenious creatures, but there will be more war for food and water, localized die-offs, and worse living quality around the world, and a trashed biosphere with many species going extinct.
“inevitability” — I do not think it means what you think it means.
I don’t see that. What I’m reading is more like: “Instead of shitting on the carpet and then coming up with a brilliant new technology to clean it up, how about if we just don’t shit on the carpet at all? How about if we use the bathroom, which is already there and fully functional?”
It’s not anti-technology to point out that if we weren’t so fucking stupid, we wouldn’t need all these technological fixes. A doctor isn’t pro-heart attacks when he suggests that a change of diet is preferable to a triple-bypass.
Malthus was fundamentally wrong because Malthus predicted that more food, more industry, better standard of living entailed more kids. He was completely, unequivocably, wrong on that matter.
The human population now is higher than it was when Malthus made his prediction, and is expected to keep rising. I don’t see how that does not contradict your statement.
Gerrard – if you want to keep blaming the Green movement (never more than a fringe in North America) for the death of Nuclear power, I certainly can’t stop you. But I do think you’re woefully misguided. As you allege, some anti-nuclear advocates are funded by fossil fuel companies. I have no data on that, but would not be surprised in the slightest.
But I don’t think that’s it either. I believe that the dearth of nuclear power generation is mainly due to capitalism. Nuclear is a losing proposition for capitalists generally (though some may try to extract some money from the government with public-private partnerships or guaranteed energy rates). Fossil fuels have been allowed to externalize their waste streams to a degree that no newer industry would be. The plants are fiendishly expensive to build, subject to strict regulation, take ages to construct and have to compete on an energy market dominated by highly-subsidized fossil fuel generation. You can rant and rave about how it’s all the environmentalists fault that nuclear isn’t our only energy source now, but the reason nobody built plants is that nobody with the money to do so cared to. None of those people are environmentalists, they just saw better value propositions elsewhere. You can, of course, feel free to insist that this is the sole fault of people with little to no social power, but you’d appear foolish and fixated.
What really baffles me is the outrage and hostility that you demonstrate to even the hint of renewable power. First you insist that it’s magic, and when I provided numbers you then decided that Hydro doesn’t count as renewables and therefore you can continue to write-off that entire sector as irrelevant and unworthy of consideration. My own country (Canada) generates about 7% of its electricity from non-hydro renewables – the same share as coal at the moment.
For a guy who is convinced that technology is going to save humanity, you seem oddly fixated on Nuclear as the sole and only solution. Solar is interesting to me, because as light harvesting technologies get more sophisticated, we can start building stuff *out of* solar panels, instead of just covering things with them. Solar roofs, solar shades for water canals – something the US southwest is going to have to do sooner or later, solar roads will likely not be practicable, but there are a lot of places where we can harvest light, and especially those where the light is already incident and making heat that we’re otherwise going to have to reject using a heat pump.
A personal anecdote: I recently purchased an off-grid property, currently running on propane. I just bought, but have not installed, 3x450W solar panels. These are high-quality commercial grade panels, Canadian Solar monocrystalline bifacials. 1x2M in size. They cost about $370 each (Canadian). Each is slightly larger than a sheet of plywood. I also purchased some sheets of plywood. They cost me about $90 each. Solar panels are reaching a stage where they’re economically comparable to utility sheet goods. For every four or so hours of full sun they receive, they will provide about as much electricity as a liter of propane run through my generator.
I have a nice exposed roof on the forge building – 600sf on a side. I’m a bit embarrassed to say this but a friend of mine and I were discussing putting a server rack and batteries and panels on the building and making a self-sustaining cryptocurrency mine. Said friend is a bitcoin multimillionaire so the setup would be pocket change to him, and I’d provide the roof. It’d actually keep heat off the building roof which would be nice in the summer.
I hate cryptocurrencies but I don’t mind real money.
Marcus @59, sounds good.
Will need an inverter, too, unless the racks are set up for DC only.
Bonus: If you leave it off-grid, you’ll also have a power source if the grid goes down.
Marcus
Come on Marcus. Your analysis is overly simplistic. Total world population size is growing, but it’s predicted to cap out at about 10 or 11 billion because of the factors that I’m talking about. Have you seen the birth rate per woman for every country? Again, for nearly all industrialized countries, the rate is below breakeven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rateMalthus has it completely wrong. His core central idea is that as you give people more food, security, and life quality, they have more kids. This is exactly wrong. It’s poor hungry subsistence farmers who have lots of kids, and if you give lots of food and life quality to people, they have less kids.
Worldwide population is still growing because certain parts of the world, e.g. Africa, are still hungry and poor (and that’s because of the Greens), and it’s still growing because there’s a delayed effect from drop in birth rates to drop in total population size. Dropping birth rates doesn’t immediately lead to drop in total population size. It takes a while for the kids to grow up and reach child-bearing years for it to be visible at the level of total population size.
…
LykeX
In your terminology, you see it as “shitting on the carpet”. I see the things that they’re complaining about as having a high quality of life. klatu said that we should try to consume less energy. Worldwide, this is false. We need to consume more total energy worldwide in order to raise people out of poverty in order to reduce birth rates. We also need to do it for the simple ethical benefit of raising people out of poverty. Quality of life is highly correlated with energy consumption per capita, and for good reason. Yes there is some amount of consumerism that could be reduced, but it’s a wildly inaccurate understanding of the world to think that we could drastically reduce our total energy usage in the rich countries and keep the same standard of living. What klatu wrote effectively leads to the rich countries becoming poor, and the poor countries staying poor.
…
snarkhuntr
There’s lots of evidence that the modern Green renewable energy transition is based in large part on the earlier work of the American Greens such as Amory Lovins.
You say nuclear is slow. I say that renewables are slower. France converted half their grid to nuclear in 15 year.
I think you have a typo in there, and you’re saying that nuclear power is allowed to externalize its waste stream. This is nonsense. Your understanding of the dangers of radiation are exaggerated a million fold. If you want, we can dig into the science here, but the simple fact is that you’re apparently a victim of the 50 year long misinformation campaign by the Greens and almost everything that you know on this topic is wrong. If you want to start somewhere, start here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-worldI spout rhetoric against renewables because, with the exception of hydro, practically all renewables are too expensive, harmful to the environment, and harmful to human health. (Hydro is also relatively bad for the environment, and certain tropical hydro dams produce as much greenhouse gas emissions as an equal power coal power plant – a fact not included in the latest IPCC reports.) I’m also against renewables because too many people are painting renewables as a substitute for fossil fuels and for nuclear, which is a ridiculous pipedream, and that is being used as part of the justification to avoid the necessary action that must be taken, which is a massive worldwide rollout of nuclear power.
Re your solar panels, right now most of them are being diverted to the electronic waste stream, where we polute poor countries, and poison the people in those countries who take these apart by hand. Solar panels are pretty toxic, and unlike nuclear waste from power reactors, they actually hurt a lot of people. There’s also recent evidence that suggests that the very cheap solar panels coming out of China are so cheap because they’re being built by Uyghur slave labor. Solar and wind are atrocious, and if not for the gross market distortions that I’m about to talk about, no one would ever build them.
Again, I say that even if solar panels and wind turbines were entirely free – I mean completely free – it wouldn’t be cheap enough for a 100% renewables plan in most countries. The extra transmission costs alone are already more expensive than nuclear. The extra storage and backup costs are already more expensive than nuclear. There’s also the need for synthetic grid inertia and blackstart capability.
You say that nuclear is expensive. I say that renewables are more expensive. France spent less on their nuclear transition than Germany has on their renewables transition, and France succeeded and Germany failed. In places that haven’t been exposed to Green nonsense, we see nuclear costructed on time and on budget, such as France and South Korea historically, where they make conventional nuclear power plants at roughly 20% the overnight capital cost as today in the west. This is no accident. Look at at the overnight capital costs of nuclear power, and you see that they basically tripled right after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It was these accidents, and the highly inflated fear of these accidents stoked by the Greens, which directly translated into increased construction costs for nuclear.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106Practically no one is building nuclear in the West because of the massive market distortions that have been put in place by Greens and their fossil fuel allies.
But you know what – even at today’s highly inflated prices, Germany would still have been better off building nuclear instead of renewables. Had Germany spent their money on nuclear instead of renewables, even at today’s highly inflated prices, they would have enough nuclear to cover all of their electricity, and also enough to electrify their cars too.
Regarding the market distortions. I’m not just excessive safety regulations, although that is a big part. Solar, wind, and natural gas benefit from a wide variety of carefully crafted regulations at the detriment of nuclear. If the markets were fairly structured, nuclear would crush it. I’m talking about:
– Penalizing or forbidding long term purchase agreements and requiring purchases on hourly energy spot markets.
– Some areas have complete legal bans on nuclear power.
– Many areas have partial legal bans on nuclear power aka renewable energy portfolio standards.
– Massive direct money subsidies to green energy producers, even when they’re making useless electricity aka selling at negative prices. Aka renewable energy credits. Many solar and wind operators earn more money from these direct money subsidies than they do from selling electricity.
– Massive indirect subsidies to green energy producers in terms of passing on incurred costs for capacity payments to end consumers. Also, many natural gas operators earn more money from capacity payments than they do from selling electricity.
– Massive indirect subsidies to green energy producers in terms of passing on incurred costs for transmission costs to end consumers.
– Massive indirect subsidies to green energy producers in terms of freeloading on the synchronous grid inertia of other generators.
– Massive indirect subsidies to green energy producers in terms of freeloading on the blackstart capability of other generators.
– Massive indirect subsidies to green energy producers in terms of storage costs (batteries, hydro) in places where storage is utilized.
– All of same massive indirect subsidies to homeowners who install solar and use rate metering, thereby leaching on all of the other essential services that I just named.
– Straight up market manipulation that leads to changes in prices to negative, forcing nuclear power plants to shut down, allowing solar, wind, and natural gas to earn profits. You see, nuclear in America and in some other places, nuclear plants were designed without strong load following capability, and if they rate their power down too much for too long, then they have to stay shut down for days because of a xenon transient. You can design around this like they did in France, but they didn’t in America. So, solar, wind, and hydro can coincidentally overproduce to shut down the nuclear power plants, and once they shut down, they stay shut down for a day or two, and during that time, solar, wind, and natural gas can earn a lot of money with their major competitor out of the market. Worse, Greens have gotten regulations passed that whenever a nuclear power plant shuts down, it has to submit a report and wait for approval from the NRC before restarting, even if the cause is entirely known and trivial e.g. “purposeful shutdown to avoid negative prices created by an excess supply of solar, wind, and nat gas”.
Keep in mind nuclear power plants have basically fixed operating costs. Unlike coal and nat gas, nuclear power plants don’t save money operating at 50% power rating compared to 100% power rating. So, any unfair cut into their revenue stream hurts their bottom line that does not apply to other operators. All of the factors that I’ve talked about above pretend that energy is a commodity and not a service – electricity is a service, not a commodity – and it all combines together to make it very difficult for what is the cheapest source of energy to compete.
Whenever you look at price comparisons, nuclear doesn’t look as cheap as I’m claiming it is, and that’s because of more shenanigans.
The cost comparisons of solar and wind vs nuclear never include all of the indirect subsidies that I named above, such as transmission, storage, capacity and backup, grid inertia, blackstart capability, overbuild factors on solar and wind to reduce transmission and storage costs (approx 2x in most Green academic papers), etc.
The cost comparisons of solar and wind vs nuclear use financial accounting tricks to make nuclear look much more expensive than what it really is. I’m speaking about discounting / interest rates. Nearly every cost comparison is talking about which is cheaper from the perspective of a short-term time-horizon capitalist investor, and that’s absurd. Here are some pretty graphs that show this:
https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/11/05/decarbonisation-at-a-discount-lets-not-sell-future-generations-short/What is happening is that the same people, the Greens, who complain every day about consumerism and capitalism, are more than happy to use a cost measure that is narrowly tailored to serve the benefits of the same rich capitalist investors that they rightly complain about.
Instead of using levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), we should be looking at instead is 1- how long will it take to build, and 2- what is the upfront capital costs, and 3- what is the yearly recurring costs to maintain the solution, including fuel costs, maintenance costs, decommissions and rebuilding costs, etc. On all 3 metrics, nuclear is way better than a solar + wind plan. Nuclear is much quicker to build, as seen by comparing France and Germany. Nuclear is about an order of magnitude cheaper on upfront costs and on yearly recurring costs.
Ack, missed this:
> There’s lots of evidence that the modern German Green renewable energy transition is based in large part on the earlier work of the American Greens such as Amory Lovins.
Let me post a few sources for some of my claims.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-really-could-go-nuclear/That article is based on this paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124074German energy transition is based on the work of Amory Lovins:
https://energytransition.org/2015/04/german-energiewende-made-in-the-usa/Forgot about another subsidy of homeowners with solar panels and rate-metering. The complex transformers that the grid use are not bidirectional by default, and making them bidirectional would be a further cost
https://www.csemag.com/articles/designing-substations-and-transformers-for-bi-directional-power-flow/Most Green papers pretend that emissions are proportional to electricity produced. This is false. Like all other industrial equipment, frequent ramping up and down at coal power plants and natural gas power plants cause more emissions for the same amount of electricity produced. This partially offsets CO2 emission gains, and in some place, adding solar and wind has produced a net increase in total sulfur emissions.
https://www.americanexperiment.org/2019/08/solar-power-increasing-pollution-north-carolina-according-utility-data/Re: Jerry Brown.
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/1/11/jerry-browns-secret-war-on-clean-energyMy apologies, it was oil baron Anderson and not the Rochefellers that funded the creation of Friends Of The Earth, and started the publicity to make college dropout Amory Lovins somehow into a world reknown expert at the source of most of the Green movement today.
https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/https://atomicinsights.com/how-important-has-oil-money-been-to-antinuclear-movement/Re former German Chancellor who killed nuclear power in Germany is now receiving money from Russian nat gas company.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/08/he-used-to-rule-germany-now-he-oversees-russian-energy-companies-and-lashes-out-at-the-u-s/https://atomicinsights.com/russia-is-a-primary-beneficiary-of-well-marketed-illogical-effort-to-slow-nuclear-energy/Wind energy is just as toxic as solar. However, it’s out of side, affecting primarily poor people in a certain area of China, and so it’s out of mind. There’s a reason that China controls 95% of the supply of rare earth metals, and it’s not because they have 95% of the deposits. It’s because only China allows the mining and refining of them on the cheap. It’s a horribly, horribly toxic and polluting process which is critical to the expansion of wind power.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earthhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollutionhttps://bccrwe.com/index.php/8-news/9-are-wind-turbine-rare-earth-minerals-too-costly-for-environmenthttps://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/Some fun choice quotes from allies of David Brower:
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/1/11/jerry-browns-secret-war-on-clean-energyhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/14/the-real-reason-they-hate-nuclear-is-because-it-means-we-dont-need-renewables/https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/11/if-nuclear-power-is-so-safe-why-are-we-so-afraid-of-it/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/Here’s a bunch of Green advocates saying that solar and wind are finally feasible, starting 50 years ago, and continuing to today. This brings to mind a certain story about a boy crying wolf. These Green energy advocates are hucksters, frauds, and clearly so, and yet so many people still listen to them. (Forgive me for some of the sources, but I’ve checked some of the citations, and they are legitimate.)
https://www.johnlocke.org/update/renewable-energy-has-been-almost-there-since-the-1970s/https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2017/09/26/how-can-your-almost-there-industry-still-need-several-decades-worth-of-tax-creditshttps://www.americanenergyalliance.org/2015/07/wind-fail-20-quotes-for-30-years-of-false-hopes/https://www.masterresource.org/romm-joseph-climate-progress/joe-romm-solar-wind-competitive/https://robertbryce.com/guru-or-fakir-amory-lovins-is-americs-favorite-green-energy-advocate-does-his-rhetoric-match-reality/[hopefully with Marcus’ indulgence]
Gerrard, I here indulge your need.
No. They raise more kids. At the time he wrote, infant mortality (and other mortality) was through the roof. It was an observation, even an extrapolation, not a prognostication based on abstracta.
Actually, a range of values based on differing scenarios.
Demographics is quite an interesting topic.
For example, China’s is in a position where their “window” to Make China Great Again will only last another decade or two at most; after that, problems.
Interestingly, the USA would be in a similar state, were it not for immigration.
Hm.
Has it occurred to you that patriarchal culture and primitive contraception might have a significant effect? I don’t think Malthus imagined 21C lifestyles and mores.
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“We don’t need all this fucking energy. We really don’t. Instead of increasing efficiency, it would also help if affluent people simply consumed less. Be it less meat or less fossil fuels or fewer exotic vacations. Or simply having fewer/no children.”
Point being, a huge proportion is not spent wisely. Surely you don’t think stuff such as jetsetting holidays or NASCAR racing or even a multiplicity of decorative lighting during Xmas are necessities of life.
Why do you imagine not deliberately wasting energy makes a country poor?
—
Leading to:
And energy consumption per capita is highly correlated with GDP.
(I’m pretty sure poor countries would like to consume more per capita, but to get there they would need a better quality of life)
—
“Fossil fuels have been allowed to externalize their waste streams to a degree that no newer industry would be.”
When it comes to this, your hobby-horse, your reading is often jaundiced and apparently impressionistic.
—
This, to a normal, educated person, comes across as loony ravings.
(Are you aware of the global extent of fossil fuel subsidies in proportion to renewables subsidies? I think not)
It could not possibly be that it’s actually the case that it’s not as cheap as I’m claiming it is?
(Heh. No need to answer that. “The election was rigged!”)
You’ve claimed it’s magical, that it can’t be implemented, that it’s not economical, and that it’s toxic.
Were it not that you believe that there’s a worldwide Green cabal that secretly runs the energy industry, you’d likely find it odd just how very quickly the industry and the uptake is growing. How many projects are already or are planning to provide on-site power to mining and industrial sites using that technology.
But, sure — it’s possibly all a conspiracy by the Greens, who have the political and business world in their pocket.
Meaningless verbal diahrea. I don’t know what utterly useless pedantic point that you’re trying to make.
That’s not a “huge proportion”. Every Green, including you, is grossly ignorant where most of the energy goes. They only know about or care about what immediately faces them. They don’t think about alumininum refining, the Haber process, and other uses of industrial heat. Direct residential energy consumption is only a small portion.
And even if we dropped total per capita consumption in half in Europe, and dropped the US to the same standard, we still need massively more energy spent worldwide to get us out of this mess to raise people out of poverty, and to power a negative emissions scheme.
Claims shared by the leading climate scientists. See quotes above.
They demonstrably do. That’s why they’re wasting money on solar and wind and shutting down nuclear, instead of building nuclear.
It’s not a conspiracy in the typical sense. The better comparison is to a religious cult, just like preeminent climate scientist James Hansen described them above (“quasi-religious”). We don’t need a wide-ranging conspiracy to explain Catholicism, and we don’t need a wide-ranging conspiracy to explain Green. Instead, the same sorts of self-delusion, group-think, naturalistic fallacy, etc., that can be used to explain Catholicism can also be used to explain the worldwide Green movement.
““You’ve claimed it’s magical, that it can’t be implemented, that it’s not economical, and that it’s toxic.””
“Claims shared by the leading climate scientists. See quotes above.”
That’s interesting. I’m aware that that the scientists you reference have criticised 100% variable renewables, but I was hitherto unaware that they criticised any degree of renewables at all. Please would you be so kind as to point to the relevant text supporting that?
[further to previous comment, a correction just to add clarity]
[…]”they criticised any degree of variable renewables at all”[…]
Admittingly, that is a less popular position. I think that if one really accepts that nuclear must be a substantial part of the solution, and then removes the needless political barriers to its adoption, then it will dominate for most countries.
However, one of the leading climate scientists I cited above did say what you are asking for. Repeating quote from above:
Dr. Kerry Emanuel
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1956
Same guy in July 2020:
“Fortunately, much of our climate risk may be averted by technical innovation. While 100% renewable energy is neither desirable nor financially viable at the moment, combining wind and solar power sources with more reliable energy sources, such as hydro power, nuclear, and gas with carbon sequestration makes a great deal of sense. And not just for averting climate risk but for reducing the staggering death toll from air pollution resulting from coal and oil combustion and for providing inexpensive, abundant energy for lifting many societies out of wrenching poverty.”
[by Kerry Emanuel]
(https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/mit-climate-scientist-kerry-emanuel-on-energy-and-shellenbergs-apocalypse/)
Not exactly claiming there should be zero renewables, or that they’re bad, is he?
So, he said something different in a different context. Ok.
The context (as per the quotation) is averting much of our climate risk via energy policy.
And, in that context, the difference is that he says combining wind and solar power sources with more reliable energy sources makes a great deal of sense.
As opposed to saying, back then, that 30% is the brick wall top maximum possible penetration, which is basically where we are now.
Sure, he says 100% renewables, is neither desirable nor financially viable at the moment.
Note he does not say it’s not doable, rather he says it’s a bad idea and too expensive. At the moment, that being July 29 2020.
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As with every other expert, he’s basically saying that renewables should be part of the energy mix. My own stance.
(I know, I know. For you, every dollar, every cent spent on renewables could have been spent on a nuclear power plant, and that is another reason they should be eschewed)
—
You should be aware that the import of your hoard of citations is ageing badly, as technology advances.
Transmission and storage costs are advancing nowhere near as quickly as is necessary. Again, solar cells and wind turbines could be free, and it wouldn’t be cheap enough for them to contribute significantly.
I don’t know why he says 100% nuclear plans are not possible / desirable, but I voted a recent paper above which shows that it is feasible and relatively cheap.
I don’t know why he seemingly changed his mind in the lat few years. There hasn’t been significant technology changes to warrant that.
Gerrard,
Relax. He didn’t say that.
To the first, consider whether perhaps you misapprehended his earlier claim.
To the second, you might be surprised.
Not just advances in energy generation, but also in transmission, in storage, in management, in economy of scale. All synergistic.
I think we’re at the beginning of the upward inflexion in an S-curve.
—
See, that’s a particularly silly claim.
That you make it in all seriousness demonstrates your delusional state of mind regarding this topic.
Water can be cracked into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis.
Solar cells and wind turbines generate electricity.
Hydrogen can be stored and burned as a thermal fuel, with water as the by-product.
So, with those free plants, generate power during the duty cycle (i.e. when the sun shines and/or the wind blows) whilst feeding the grid and also generating and storing hydrogen, then burn the hydrogen during the off-duty cycle.
The problem was never the cost of the solar panels and wind turbines. It was always the extra costs for reliability and dispatchability, transmission, inertia and frequency control services, blackstart capability, etc.
The problem was never the cost of the solar panels and wind turbines. It was always the extra costs for reliability and dispatchability, transmission, inertia and frequency control services, blackstart capability, etc.
The extra transmission requirements are already more expensive than the nuclear plan.
Batteries are currently a no go. Not enough lithium, not enough lead, and not enough nickel for a worldwide plan. Everything else is experimental and lab scale. I see vaporware reports of new battery tech every year, and then I never hear of them again.
The storage is incredibly more expensive than the nuclear plan. You’re citing experimental unproven technology. No one is building it at scale, and there are reasons for that. Electrolyzers and methane synthesizers take horrible efficiency hits when you constantly turn them on and off. Fuel cells at scale are impractical, and so we’re stuck with gas turbine burning, meaning roundtrip storage efficiency is around 30%, meaning you need 3x more solar and wind, and depending on locations, a lot expensive transmission too. There’s a reason no one is actually building this at scale. It doesn’t work.
That’s 30% roundtrip efficiency assuming you’re running the electrolyzers all the time. If not, they incur significant wear and tear and efficiency reductions on top of that.
Gerrard, I guess enough is enough.
So, unless you want to talk about the OP itself, I’ll stop enabling you.
Still, since you really seem to think green hydrogen is uneconomical (not least because you don’t appreciate the difference the steep fall in PV energy costs over the last decade or so, where the cost per KWh is now around half what it was in 2015), I think you would be surprised and annoyed at how much and how quickly investment is flowing into it.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hydrogen#Economy
John
People like you have been saying the same things for 50 years straight. They weren’t right then, and they aren’t right now. If money is being spent on these things, it’s because it’s being propped up artificially by distorted markets created by government regulators in exactly the same way that solar, wind, and grid batteries are being propped up by distorted markets created by government regulators. It’s a scam. Green energy is a scam, and you’re one of its biggest victims.
Gerrard
I won’t engage with your alleged facts, because John seems to be doing as well or better than I could. I’d rather speak with you about tone and tactics. What is your goal with all of this? Do you intend to change minds, to convince more people of your viewpoint, or is this some kind of intellectual masturbation for you – a game you play only with yourself?
If you actually want to engage with other people, you should probably start by listening to what they actually say (or reading what they write, here). When you foist off extremist positions onto other people, ascribe views and comments to them that they may not hold and did not say, you alienate them. People get tired of trying, vainly, to explain to you that they don’t believe the things you’re telling them that they do. Try to respond to the people you’re dealing with, not to some imagined opponent that you’d like to be debating with. Or go find the person whose actual views correspond with your fantasy ‘Green’ and harangue them.
I do not have much of a dog in this fight. I work in industrial energy, and am quite familiar with a lot of the things you assert (without evidence) that ‘Greens’ do not understand. When you make blanket statements about whole large groups of people that are factually incorrect – people are entitled to assume that any or all of your other alleged facts are also incorrect, as I have been doing. I’m not going to waste time following the links provided by someone who has demonstrated dishonesty out of the gate.
As to tone – you genuinely sound a bit ranting and manic here. The combination of big blocks of apparent copypasta interspersed with shrill insults and allegations of conspiracy are pretty familiar to most internet users by now. They are the rantings of a loon, and only worth engaging in for humor value. The frequent use of ad homenim to dismiss or denigrate the people you’re talking to is likely to bias a neutral observer against your position. You are so focused on your opposition, as opposed to the words of your opposition, that you seem incapable of actually engaging with what they say. Take me, for example. In talking about the non-green reasons why Nuclear has had trouble competing in the past, I mentioned that the Fossil Fuel industry benefited from externalizing its waste streams in ways that no other industry would be allowed to. Because you appear to need to have all people either wholeheartedly agree with you or be complete enemies, you chose to misread my comment – assume that I made a typo and that my statement was about nuclear power and argue on that basis. This is either massively ignorant, or massively dishonest – and either way makes me question the value of engaging with you at all. I suspect it would do so for anyone who read it.
The use of terms like “Leading Climate Scientists” makes your comments sound like something cooked up by one of those FUD ‘merchant of doubt’ PR firms. Seriously, you sound like a cigarette ad from the 60s. “Leading Climate Scientists claim that only Camels can soothe your T-zone and slow the pace of global warming”. “Leading” is a meaningless buzzword, literally an impressive sounding noise without any value or use to people engaged in a real discussion. I’d suggest you stop using it, but if you must do so: justify it. Don’t just assert ab nihilo that your chosen mouthpiece is ‘leading’. Show how they lead, how do their publishings rank compared to other climate scientists? Are they well cited? Do they actually lead teams of scientists in their field? Are they invited to present or keynote at climate conferences? What makes a climate scientist a leader in your mind? Other than the obvious criteria, that they said something once that you agree with. Or is that all it takes, for you?
GerrardOfTitanServer #61
But that doesn’t translate into “technological progress is inherently evil”, as you stated.
I suspect it’s that kind of thing that’s bothering people.
LykeX
I still think it does.
snarkhuntr
John is a troll who can barely string together a coherent sentence without going off on an indecipherable pedantic side-tangent.
I fail to see klatu repudiating anything that I’ve said. If they did so, I’d be more open to it. Rather, others are disagreeing with my take about what they said and implied and thought. Not the same thing.
If you could point out another instance where I’ve done that, I’d like to know.
Yes you do. You live on this planet, and you have loved ones on this planet.
I fail to see any time where I’ve been dishonest. Can you please point that out please?
Ad hom is calling someone a name in place of a proper argument. I’ve been making a proper argument, and then explaining why my opponents are failign via accurate descriptions of their belief systems. That’s not ad hom.
Basically, we’re having the accommodationist atheist vs firebrand atheist discussion all over again. It’s less likely that you would be telling me these same things if I was ripping into creationists. Basically, you don’t like me saying that Greens are the most dangerous political group in human history because you think that’s outrageous and wrong and over the top. You think my tone is unreasonable because you think I’m wrong. You’re making a tone argument.
Also, as I hope was well established in the accommodationist atheist vs firebrand atheist debate, it takes all types. Some creationists are better swayed by friendly, gentle, tactics, and some creationists are swayed by firebrand tactics. The really annoying part was when the accommodationist atheists were always tut-tut-ing the firebrands as being too hostile and off-putting, just like you’re doing to me here.
You’re also able to spin “having lots of citations” into a negative. Seriously? What kind of fucked-up rhetoric is that?
And I’m trying to explain why it’s really Green-caused.
Re leading climate scientists. I’m sorry – would it make you feel any better if I said “most climate scientists” or “nearly all climate scientists”? That might avoid your concern that I’m cherry-picking. The IPCC reports themselves agree that 100% renewable plans are pipedreams, and I’ve cited more evidence that these already pro-nuclear reports contain substantial anti-nuclear bias. Finally, I think that the name James Hansen doesn’t need further explanation about how they’re the preeminent climate scientist.
PS:
snarkhuntr
I’m mad that you implicitly compared me and my sources to the hired experts of tobacco. I’m especially mad because you have it exactly ass-backwards. The most prominent expert on the Green energy side is a hired expert of natural gas. Near demonstrably. See my citations above about Mark Jacobson. And if you need further citations that Mark Jacobson really is the foremost expert in the Green energy community, that can be arranged too.
What I am saying sounds outrageous because (slight exaggeration) everything you know about this is wrong.
Oh wait, didn’t include citations. Sorry it took a little bit to post it. I had to re-find some of them. Here I go:
Jacobson is the foremost expert in the Green energy community.
Offhand, I have this video. I can get more if you really need it. From the 350 dot org organization I have this video which says that Mark Jacobson (and his team) have done the most academic work showing that a Green energy transition is feasible.
https://youtu.be/cPV_coPAkCE?t=232I have a bunch of additional personal anecdotal evidence. I’ve seen (heard) Jacobson also described in this way several times by NPR.
Jacobson is being paid by natural gas money.
https://atomicinsights.com/stanfords-universitys-new-natural-gas-initiative/https://atomicinsights.com/following-the-money-whos-funding-stanfords-natural-gas-initative/https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28/the-dirty-secret-of-renewables-advocates-is-that-they-protect-fossil-fuel-interests-not-the-climate/Jacobson is also guilty of several counts of academic misconduct, and by rights he should be removed from Stanford, but far from that, intellectual dishonesty is rewarded as long as you find the conclusions desired by the Greens and their hidden fossil fuel allies. I can go more on this if you want with primary sources of Jacobson’s work. That I have prepared. It’s truly outrageous what he’s done.
Gerrard,
When I said that I don’t have a dog in the fight, I’m not referring to the climate. I’m referring to the argument that you appear to be perpetually engaged in with anyone you percieve as not fully agreeing with you about (a) nuclear power being the only thing that can save us from climate change and (b) that ‘Green’ movements are nothing but astro-turfed projections of the oil industry being used to discredit the One True Option in favour of renewables that cannot ever, under any circumstances, save us from the coming catastrophe.
I am ambivalent about nuclear power, concerned about the climate, familiar with industrial and grid-scale energy generation. I also have a deep distrust of large instututions and the corrosive role of money in public discourse. I find ‘Greens’ as a movement to be cloying and prone to rampant superstition and nonsense (our federal green pary leader is a WiFi hater, for example).
Logically, I should be someone that would be easily swayed to your side of the discussion if presented with evidence. There is no emotional bar holding me back from believing your contentions – I already hate oil companies and distrust the greens. I am not afraid of nuclear power plants, and would have no qualms about living near one that I would not also have about any other major industrial infrastructure.
The reason I bring up tone, and the reason I asked you the questions at the beginning of my last comment was this: you are not convincing me, not even coming close. Do you wish to? I have a hard time getting past your tone and manner of delivery to examine the evidence you present to support your claims. I was initally put off by your off-hand derisive dismissal of 40% of my country’s energy supply as magic. When challenged, you explained that you don’t consider hydro to be a renewable, and that in fact only 6-7% of my country’s electricity comes from something you believe is magic. Those were not your exact words, but that was the sentiment conveyed. Not a fantastic start.
Whatever – maybe you’re just a bad communicator. So I’ll follow your links for a bit. I’ll concentrate on one specific claim, as you’ve now made it a couple times. I will judge the rest of your body of work by how that claim pans out.
Your claim, a direct quote: “Jacobson is being paid by natural gas money.”
So let’s see what your first listed citation under that point has to say:
The strongest claim you can honestly make from that evidence is that Jacobson is being paid by an institution that also receives gas money. Anything stronger does not follow from the evidence you offer. That’s dishonest, or a serious misreading of your own source material. The ‘Money Is Fungible’ is particularily telling. Stanford is a huge institution, receiving massive donations from all sorts of people and organizations. We can just as strongly assert that Jacobson (or any other researcher at that university) is in the pocket of Nike, a wealthy Silicon Valley real estate developer. This isn’t a good start, and seems like strong evidence of intellectual dishonesty on your part. If you are consistent in your logic, I assume you’ve also vetted your sources to ensure that they too are neutral, not receiving monies from either the fossil fuel or nuclear industries? Let’s go have a look at the about page for your favorite source here ?
Last: I did not meant to compare your sources to Tobacco industry PR. I meant to explictly compare your language to that used by those people. Because it’s absolutely apt.
Last Last: How the hell do you format comments in this thing? I’m trying basic HTML, but all I see on my end is wall-of-text. The only things that seem to work in preview are bolding. Quotes/citation don’t appear for met at all, nor line breaks.
Formatting. It’s basic html, I think. Stuff like
<blockquote>stuff</blockquote>
Also use the preview button. It’s your friend.
I never claimed Rod as a disinterested party. He is still in my opinion the best pro-nuclear investigative journalist on the planet.
Also, Jacobson is a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute For Energy. I didn’t see you mention that.
The second citation has more evidence.
Also, quoting Adams: “It is virtually impossible to get an educational institution to understand something when its revenue depends on its audience not understanding it.”
Is it? The tone? Or the fact that I have nearly all of the professionals and the UN organization on my side, and you have a bunch of special interest groups which historically have been funded by fossil fuel money, and perhaps today are still funded by fossil fuel money (most Green NGOs don’t release donor lists), and a small token list of academic experts, and the leading expert is in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.
PS:
Re Jacobson’s academic misconduct. Yes this is a copy paste written by me.
Jacobson’s most famous work, his “100% Wind Water Solar” paper, is grossly flawed. It is so obviously flawed and fatally flawed that I refuse to believe that it is possible that Jacobson could publish it without knowing about the error. In short, Jacobson’s paper is all about arguing that the US can transition to entirely renewables, and it would be cheap, and the power supply would be reliable. To do that, he ran a simulation using hourly wind and solar data to show that supply could meet demand. However, his simulation had a gross error – it did not bound hydro energy capacity. We see in his paper that during part of the simulation, hydro produced 15 times the maximum rated power for a period of 8 hours. Over 20 prominent scientists called him out on this error (and other severe errors) in the paper, publishing a paper in the same peer-reviewed journal.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/06/19/151141/in-sharp-rebuttal-scientists-squash-hopes-for-100-percent-renewables/In response, Jacobson lies and invents an excuse, saying that the plan in the paper calls for adding 15 times the number of turbines to existing hydro facilities. This is a ridiculous lie because: 1- The paper mentions nothing about this, and makes no attempt to cost it, and 2- That water flow rate would be a severe flood and destroy everything downstream, and 3- I’m betting most reservoirs don’t have enough capacity to even run the dam at 15 times max rated capacity for 8 hours.
https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ReplyResponse.pdfWhen those critiquing his paper did not retract their critique paper, Jacobson sued them for defamation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientistsEventually, when it became apparent that the other authors would not surrender to this obvious abusive SLAPP lawsuit, Jacobson retracted the suit. Later, a judge ruled that Jacobson must pay attorney fees, which is far from typical in America for the loser, and it’s basically an indictment from the judge saying that Jacobson’s case was meritless.
Jacobson wrote an article for the public magazine “Scientific American”. In it, he claimed without context or citation that nuclear produces 25 times as much CO2 as wind.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdfHe is quoting his own academic work where he writes that nuclear produces 9 to 25 as much CO2 as wind.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdfThat paper is a horrible quote-mine of another one of his papers.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/ReviewSolGW09.pdfBasically, in this paper, Jacobson evaluates plans according to a very short time horizon, claims nuclear takes a very long time to build, assumes coal will be used until the nuclear construction finishes, and attributes the CO2 emissions from this coal power to nuclear power. Imagine reading the Scientific American article, which presented the claim matter-of-factly, heavily implying it was emissions from actual nuclear during steady-state operations, and later learning that it was really coal power plant emissions. Worse, in this paper, Jacobson practically assumes that increased use of nuclear power will lead to a periodic recurring limited nuclear war, and starts calculating how much CO2 is released when a whole city burns. He has an entire long paragraph listing out the constituent materials of a city and how much CO2 that they release when burned. He then adds these emissions to the nuclear power column, which makes up a portion of the “25 times as much CO2 as wind” claim in the Scientific American article.
In an entirely other situation, someone pointed out unflattering data in one of Jacobson’s published papers. In response, Jacobson silently deleted the data in the live version, and he accused the other person publicy of making it up (calling him a “data faker”. Later, Jacobson admitted that the data in question was indeed in an earlier version of his live paper, and that he did silently modify the paper to delete the data in response to the critique, and admitted that the other person was using data as it appeared in the earlier version of his live paper. Forget just academic misconduct. That’s quite possibly criminal defamation. Sources:
https://naturalgasnow.org/charlatan-fractivist-mark-jacobson-caught-coverup/https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/684435537323675648https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/687345063437795328PPS: To explain myself, you have claimed to be acting basically in devil’s advocate mode against my arguments, and you really claim to be undecided. I am highly dubious of this fact, which is why I wrote above about Greenpeace et al being on “your side”. My apologies for letting my (partially substantiated) assumptions getting away from me. I still maintain as a broader point that the only reason to be informed and undecided is if one believes too much of the lies coming out from the broader Green movement.
PPPS:
Also, if you had even half of equivalent dirt on any of my important pro-nuclear sources that I have on Jacobson, you would (correctly) eviscerate me. However, here, you seem quite willing to overlook the fact that the leading Green expert by far is a hack at Stanford, who sits on a Precourt think tank, whose university receives Precourt money, and who guilty of at least 3 severe cases of academic misconduct. You complained about my pro-nuclear source, and yet you’re willing to give a pass to someone who is that deep in the pocket of Precourt. Unbelievable.
You immediately call out a source who openly discloses his investments in nuclear, and yet. I assume you wouldn’t call out someone who has significant incentives in solar and wind. Anyone who wants nuclear to succeed is contaminated, biased, untrustworthy. Someone who sits on a Precourt think tank? They get a pass. A ridiculous double-standard.
Sorry, that should read: “Anyone who has financial incentives in nuclear is contaminated…”.
[meta]
snarkhuntr, this platform uses a subset of HTML.
The text box input is pre-processed, with some interesting glitches, among which is that preview does not show paragraph spacing. It also stuffs up normal methods of enumerating and adding asterisk footnotes, but those are trivial.
Blockquote, italics and bold work just as you’d expect.
Also the <code>
code</code> tag, which Gerrard uses because on most blogs on this platform, comments with more than 5 links (anchor tags) get caught on the spam trap. It’s monospaced and accepts more whitespace, and here is coloured differently.Oh yeah, and naked links to youtube auto-embed, so for those, anchor tags are recommended.
Meta: Thanks guys for the formatting help. I had tried [quote] [cite] and [q] for quote tags, as those were the most common ones I found on wordpress help sites. Apparently I neglected [blockquote]. Will correct in future. (brackets adjusted for readability, I used the correct < ones.)
Meta: If FTB is looking for usability suggestions, a short primer on the commenting system would be helpful. I haven't done html since high school, and most of my recent commenting has either been on Reddit or PhPbb boards with their own esoteric comment markup system. If FTB has a good FAQ for this, I didn't find it tonight while looking. Maybe I'm spoiled by sites that have markup tools built into their comment system, but that's going to be a common thing for newbie commenters.
Gerrard – I don't care what you claimed about Rob. Rob appears to believe that someone who belongs to an organization that has received money from a party interested in their subject of study cannot, a priori, ever produce unbiased work. Robs own financial incentives therefore render him, by his own calculus, unable to comment on Nuclear energy in a fair or trustworthy fashion. If you have better sources for your claim that Jacobson is not only receiving (indirectly) fossil fuel money, but is actually influenced by it, I’m all ears. Otherwise, I have trouble understanding if Jacobson is a shill for Big Gas, Big Sneaker, Big Property Development, or whatever other high-value donors Stanford is currently beholden to. Can you show me where the research institute/university is that doesn’t accept any money from anyone connected with any industries? Surely those are the people we can all trust on this.
I’m being snarky here, but I think my point is valid. If you’re going to say that any Stanford researcher must be biased because their university has received funding from industry, then you must accept that any researcher is therefore equally biased by their funding sources. It would follow that bias would be pro-rated by the percentage of funding that the institution derives from any specific industry, so given that stanford is not 100% funded by Gas interests, but your friend Rob appears to derive his entire income from association with the Nuclear industry, shouldn’t Rob be considered a more biased source?
You also make a great deal of the idea of “open disclosure” of one’s funding sources. Rob’s mention on his about page apparently having been sufficient for you. What disclosure do you think Jacobson should have made that he did not? Was his disclousure less open than Rob’s? Did his university attempt to hide the funding it received from the Gas industry, because Rob’s articles seem to indicate that they were quite open about it.
If you could name a researcher to whom I’ve applied this double standard, I’d be all ears. I’m not aware of anyone in this thread commenting on any pro-renewables researchers at all, much less arguing about the degree of bias implicit in their work. The only one talking about researchers is you, and as I mentioned above, you seem to have one set of criteria that applies to academics whose conclusions you disapprove of, and another one entirely for Venture Capitalists who blog about a topic you like.
Be dubious all you like. While there are greenpeace campaigns I agree with, their opposition to Nuclear Power isn’t one of them. I remain ambivalent about it – I can see it’s power and utility, but lack understanding of the risks sufficient that I would base an opinion on them. Nuclear waste seems scary, but then again when you understand what Fly Ash can do, is it really so bad? I am not reacting to your opinions, I am reacting to your method of expressing them. Understanding this difference might make you much more effective at changing minds.
I do hold a completely reasonable fear of liquids capable of criticality. I will not work with a substance that becomes lethally dangerous if you put it into the wrong shape of container. You can blame that particular fear on the really excellent CSB incident videos on Youtube (and Plainly Difficult’s work). If you have evidence that those actors are taking Gas money to slag off the nuclear industry, feel free to present it.
I do not believe your assumptions are at all warranted. By making them, your argument has less force than it otherwise would have. When someone tells me what I think, and is wrong about it, any subsequent argument gets fed repeatedly though the ‘known bullshitter’ filter before review.
I don’t think you undersand where we’re coming from here. I don’t have any ‘dirt’ on your sources. Because I have no attachment to any side of this argument. I have not pre-reasearched pro-nuclear academics with the intention of refuting their conclusions. You clearly have done so in the opposite direction. That’s fantastic.
What I’ve drawn from your posts thus far is that you believe that a conspiracy of oil and gas companies created the Green movement to prop up the useless ‘renewable’ technologies as a foil to prevent societies from investing in nuclear power. This happens despite the clear and unrefutable superiority of nuclear generation, and somehow the O&G industries have been able to convince countries with wildly different academic and political systems of this lie.
Your entire argument seems to rest on your evisceration of articles published by ‘leading climate scientist’ Jacobson. Your sole evidence that he’s responsible for the Green movement is apparently some segments of a video you didn’t like. That’s great and all, but I didn’t watch it, and I’m not going to. Can you provide some kind of metric that I can use to decide that this one particular Stanford researcher is single-handedly responsible for the death of Nuclear power? I’m really confused as to why you think that criticisms of him in particular should cause me to decide that solar and wind power cannot ever work as a replacement for fossil fuels.
As a (possibly) interesting factoid, I would note the following (merely as an observation, as I do not intend to extrapolate anything in particular from this).
In 2017 Christopher T M Clack published “Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar” – which, as Gerrard correctly notes, offered a strong rebuttal to Jacobson’s 100% WWS paper.
One of the coauthors of Clack’s rebuttal was James Sweeney. In 2017, when the rebuttal was published, Sweeney was serving as Director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center.
Another coauthor, John P. Wynant, was also a fellow of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (and, I believe, at the time Deputy Director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center).
Just thought this was interesting.
Cutty Snark
Very interesting. Thanks.
Ok. I guess I overestimated the strength of my evidence re conflict of interest re Mark Jacobson. I was wrong.
I still think his gross academic misconduct is enough to damn him and the entire Green movement though.
snarkhuntr
See my previous retraction and apology. I believe that I have nothing more to say, and I accept many of your critiques.
Gerrard,
Assuming for the sake of argument that Mr. Jacobson is in fact academically dishonest, and even that he is directly paid by and works for the Natural Gas industry – how do the publications of an academic who started his work in the early 1990s dam the ‘entire Green movement’, when even your own analysis of the history of that movement turns on events that happened before his professional career started? Are you asserting that he began corrupting the green movement while still an undergraduate or high-school student?
Is Jacobson the only Green academic? Are his problematic publications well-cited amongst green academics and pursuasive to them? Cutty Snark (no relation) noted that some of Jacobson’s equally petro-funded colleagues published a refutation of at least some of his problematic claims. As I’m sure you’ve devoted more time to studying this issue than I have, surely you would be able to tell us, offhand, who the most cited and influential researchers are in the field of renewable energy. As you’ve repeatedly asserted that Jacobson is a ‘leading researcher’, I assume you know who the other ‘leading researchers’ are in that field. Do they all agree with him and follow his conclusions?
He’s the most prominent one purporting to show that solar and wind work by a country mile. If you talk to most Green people online long enough, they’ll cite him. I’ve seen it again and again. It seems to be that whenever I see a Green person on the internet, or in the news, or on NPR, etc., cite a Green energy expert, at least 50% of the time it’s Jacobson. I listen to NPR daily, and whenever they have a Green expert come on, from my (biased) recollection, it’s usually Jacobson. 350.org also says that Jacobson is the leading expert (see video link above).
There’s a few others in the space who I see cited occasionally. One in particular, Sovacool, seems to be almost as dishonest as Jacobson. There’s a few others that I’ve seen cited, and their work seems to always have outrageous problems with it, but these problems seem to be merely the “academic incompetence” kind instead of the blatant “academic misconduct kind”.
It’s hard to define the field. If you includ the IPCC, then the IPCC disagrees with Jacobson’s conclusions. If you include climate scientists who contribute to the IPCC, then see the news conference above with James Hansen et al; in it, they’re asked about Jacobson’s work, and one of them says roughly “his work just shows that if you make unreasonable assumptions, you can get unreasonable conclusions”.
I’m aware of a lot of pro 100% renewable papers, and I’m aware of exactly two papers arguing for the feasibility of 100% nuclear (both cited above), but I haven’t really looked as hard as I might. I personally prefer having arguments about the facts instead of “cite-a-paper” games because in this game, there are papers on both sides, and thus just citing a paper will get us nowhere.
I am aware that James Hansen has said that by far a large majority of climate scientists say that any solution requires large amounts of nuclear. It seems that only a small minority (openly) say that it should be mostly nuclear, but there are some. I personally suspect that more don’t say it should be mostly nuclear not because it’s what they really believe, but because it’s politically expedient, and because they’re trying to take the accommodationist approach to persuasion instead of the firebrand approach, e.g. “Look, I like renewables too, but have you considered that maye we need a little bit of nuclear power too?”.
In particular, one of the academic work that I cite above says that the latest IPCC reports put in place artificial limitations on the availibility of nuclear fuel, and if you remove this arbitrary limitation, then nuclear power dominates the IPCC scenarios.
For emphasis, I have a newspaper article interviewing Christopher Clack (I have the url somewhere), where Clack says that he and his fellow scientists didn’t care about Jacobson and friends publishing 100% renewable nonsense in peer-reviewed journals because they assumed it was just someone publishing a paper as part of the standard academic game of getting papers published. However, Clack and his fellow scientists observed that Jacobson’s work started to have a huge impact on politicians and public policy, and that’s when they became concerned, and Clack and 20 other scientists co-authored the take-down of Jacobson’s primary 100% renewables paper.
My position is that because I see Jacobson cited by practically all of the Green orgs and leaders as a reliable academic expert, I know that the entire movement is intellectually rotten. I don’t see that on the pro-nuclear side. I’ve read many, many technical arguments between both sides, and by far pro-nuclear side comes out looking reasonable, and the renewables side comes out as relying on hopium, ridiculous fearmongering over all stuff nuclear, and a surprisingly high amount of reactionary conservatism and regressivism driven by neo-Malthusianism and nature-worship nonsense.
Here’s another news article trying to explain the impact that Jacobson’s work has with (American) politicians and Green lobbyists.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/06/26/debunking-the-unscientific-fantasy-of-100-renewables/I used to have some other random link that purports to have identified the top 15 or something climate / energy scientists, and the large majority were pro-nuclear, with Jacobson and one other being pro 100% renewables, but I cannot find it now.
Oh, here’s that other article.
https://sparkoffreedomfoundation.org/2018/01/17/climate-scientists-support-oppose-nuclear-power-reduce-emissions/No idea as to the reliability of the source, website, or content.
I don’t actually take issue with your criticisms of Jacobson, by the way, your evidence that he is dishonest seems pretty compelling. Your earlier assertions that he’s “paid by natural gas companies” aside, it is still entirely possible that he’s a naive ideologue, dishonest careerist or any of an infinite number of other biases that cause him to work in this fashion. Attributing, without evidence, corrupt motives to someone you disagree with, absent evidence, violates the principle of charity. Nothing you have thus far presented precludes the possibility that he’s just a bad scientist who lets his ideological biases influence his work.
How such a man comes to prominence and keeps his job in Academia is a bigger problem, and certainly not one that’s limited to climate science.
The only thing you’re saying now that I actively disagree with is that Jacobson’s folly/dishonesty damns the whole green movement. He is a single person, who has had some influence – that does not mean that he is representative of an entire class. It would be like PZ saying that Richard Dawkins or Bill Mahr damns the whole atheist movement with their rampant racism and intellectual dishonesty. Individual athiests do not become ‘enemies of humanity’ just because they happen to have been influenced by someone who is wrong – they are people who can be reformed, and the broad goals of their movement are in humanities best interest. If you intend to be effective, focus on changing minds – not throwing off grandiose insults at any perceived disagreement. It just puts people off from talking with you, and by the principle of reaction, they may be less inclined to consider views that align with yours in the future as a result.
With all that out of the way, I’ll tell you what I actually think about this – because you do seem knowledgeable and intelligent and might be able to help me spot some errors in my ideas.
I don’t believe that any solution to any large-scale human problem is going to be 100% anything. Conditions vary so much from region to region that local variables will be more influential than general trends in determining what power sources make the most sense. There are considerations beyond just LCOE and carbon emissions to contend with.
The first thing to point out is that we already have a power grid with various energy sources connected to it. It’s not as if one day we’re going to suddenly switch off everything but Nuclear, or everything but WWS renewables. Any change to the grid composition will be incremental and evaluated on its effectiveness and drawbacks as it is implemented.
The grid itself is also not without its flaws. Power transmission lines are not free. They are not free to construct. They are not free to use, even VHVDC has transmission losses, and as you increase the power being transmitted you increase the losses as well. As many unfortunate people in California would tell you, power transmission lines are also not risk free. Lines go down, and sometimes they start fires or cause injuries when they do.
I think we all agree here that the world is warming, and that people are already suffering the consequences. Ameliorating those conseqences and reducing carbon emissions (and eventually starting to decarbonize the environment) are going to be the big jobs of the coming decades. I believe Nuclear has an important role in this, but that other renewables do as well. Let me explain:
Air conditioning/hvac is the biggest residential power draw, and will likely become (if it is not already) the biggest commercial one as well. Process heating is presently a massive consumer of natural gas, and transitioning those systems over to electrical will bring massive new loads online as well. It is not at all clear to me that the grid-as-constituted could handle those loads, even if we could supply them at this point. Just one plant that I manage, that provides support services for the asphalt industry, uses a fearsome amount of natural gas to produce steam to heat asphalt in railcars. This is an essential service, if we’re going to have roads and runways, and there is no way whatsoever that we would be able to get 300BHp (around 5MW) in electrical energy delivered to that site without running new high-voltage distribution lines and installing our own substation – at a cost of millions of dollars. Just for one operation.
As things get hotter, more and more powerful AC and heat-pump units are being installed. In cold-climate regions, heat-pumps are added in addition to gas/oil furnaces. Some of the new systems auto-transition between gas/electricity when the prices balance out against the efficiency of the heat pump. All of these systems use electricity, and more and more of them will require more electricity. As a happy coincidence, residential solar can not only help meet some of that demand – it can do it while also reducing the demand. Solar shading of roofs reduces heat gain, especially on large flat-roofed commercial buildings, simultaneously reducing electrical demand and reducing cooling demand. Thermodynamically, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for efficiency improvements in cooling systems, so we need to determine the best way to power them. AC is increasingly a necessity, not a luxury. Heat waves kill people, mainly the elderly and already vulnerable, and we should be protecting them.
More happily, the need for cooling tracks very well with the amount of sun available in most regions. Adding solar energy generation to offset power consumption makes sense to me, and would allow the existing grid to carry more power to some of the big new consumers I’d like to see in the future (like electric transport and electric alternatives for process heating).
Local conditions may also suggest that other sources of energy are available. For example, the City of Vancouver currently runs a sewage heat recovery process in some neighbourhoods that recycles waste heat from wastewater to provide building heat and domestic hot water. This may not be a practical add-on in all areas, depending on the design of local sewerage systems, but makes sense here.
The city of surrey runs a biomass methane plant that powers all the garbage trucks that collect the waste that runs it. Decaying waste produces methane in any case, a powerful greenhouse gas, so we might as well harness that energy source while it exists.
A lot of industrial and commercial sources produce large quantities of ‘low-grade’ waste heat and invest heavily in systems to reject that heat into the environment around them. There are situations where this heat can itself be put to use. I toured a facility that uses waste heat from a datacenter cooling loop (around 60c) to power LiBr chillers and heat exchangers that provided all the heating/cooling needs for an office tower.
I think it’s only sensible that we take all steps to reduce the waste of energy that our society revels in. This is a multifaceted approach, from upgrading insulation requirements in building standards through to planning our municipal utilities with a zero-waste approach in mind. Forcing consumers to pay the actual costs of the things they consume would be a good start, stop letting companies externalize effluent streams and heat losses. Incentivize research into heat recovery. Start charging more for the water that companies evaporate in cooling towers to dispose of unwanted heat. All heat is energy, and to the extent that we can, we should be using it.
I also want to address something you said much earlier in this discussion: that greens want to prevent the third world from attaining the kind of lifestyle that we have here, a racist, colonialist inclination. I cannot speak for anyone else, but for myself this is flatly untrue. I want to prevent us from having that lifestyle. We need to decarbonize and reduce waste in our own lives before we demand that people who are literally starving to death or cooking in the heat do. We have to lead by example.
Aside from the issue of energy – waste of materials is also a huge problem. Were I elected Dictator of Canada, I would put an immediate halt to the nearly-free subsidized garbage pickup that most Canadians (urban ones at least) take for granted. Garbage is a cost, if you want to throw something away, you should be paying the actual costs of doing so. Unsorted garbage would still be accepted at landfills, but at a cost sufficient to pay a very good wage to the people who have to sort it. Nothign should be put into the ground that could otherwise be composted, recycled, or burned for energy at a last resort. Garbage dumps should become the headwaters of a new resource stream, a key part of the circular economy that we’re going to need to survive in the future. Any waste with metal in it should be set aside for reprocessing – metal is not renewable. Sooner or later, we’re going to be mining garbage dumps as if they were high-grade ore seams. Might as well start sorting that stuff out now to improve that efficiency.
I want to digress more on Garbage. We in the West have a completely unsustainable addiction to convenience and an out-of-site-out-of-mind approach to garbage that is destroying the planet. In my ideal world, every consumer purchase of a physical item would come with two taxes/tariffs on it – imposed at the manufacturer level and passed down to consumers from there.
These would be first a packaging tariff, which represents the cost of recovering the energy and resources in the item’s packaging. This creates an incentive for companies to reduce the amount of packaging, or choose options that can be easily recycled or composted. There is an industry now forming to harness mushroom mycelia to produce alternatives to styrofoam and cardboard in packaging, and that is the kind of thing that would benefit from such an incentive. Walk down the aisle of your local grocery store and marvel at the wonder of ‘tetra-pak’ packaging. It’s a miraculous thing, but it’s nearly completely unrecyclable. I’m not saying we should ban it, but if people need it they should be paying the actual costs that it imposes. Sending your child to school with a tiny box of juice should cost more, much more, than sending them with a reusable container of juice poured from a larger recyclable container.
The second tariff would be a disassembly tariff. This would represent the actual cost of stripping the item itself down to recyclable/reusable parts. Companies would therefore have a financial incentive to design items with ease of disassembly in mind. Companies like apple that deliberately make their items nigh-impossible to disassemble would still be free to do so, but their customers would bear the costs of paying someone a first-world good wage to take it apart at end of life. This might add tens or hundreds of dollars to the costs of some items, and it should. We currently deal with this particular problem by shipping our trash to poor countries so that starving people can endure hazards and risk to take them apart for us. This must stop.
Lastly, I would impose a deposit – similar to bottle deposits – on all items containing nonrenewable resources. This deposit would be charged directly to the end-user, and would be redeemable by anyone returning the item in a sorted condition to a waste transfer station. Rich/lazy consumers who can’t be bothered to sort out their own trash would become a very viable income stream for individuals or entrepreneurs willing to get their hands dirty.
Imagine that 50% of the time when you asked an atheist “why don’t you beleive in god?”, they would explicitly cite a clearly fallacious argument by Richard Dawkin. That’s comparable to the level of influence of Mark Jacobson today. No one in the atheist movement ever reached that level of influence.
For the sake of comparison, I think it’s fair to say that Nazis are enemies of humanity. Not all Nazis circa 1944 knew entirely what the Nazi machine was doing. Not all Nazis circa 1944 knew the full extention of the slave labor camps and death camps. Many Nazis could be redeemed. A lot of Nazis just wanted to achieve reasonable goals. They were still Nazis supporting the Nazi political movement.
Greens are like that. A lot of Greens are well-meaning, but they support absolutely abhorrent NGOs, political parties, and other organizations, and they support absolutely abhorrent rhetoric. A surprisingly high number of them are explicitly anti-human with explicit rhetoric that technological advancement is inherently evil and we should roll back the clock to when everyone was poorer.
Maybe you think I’m going too far by comparing them to Nazis, but let me one-up you and say that I think that Greens are worse than Nazis in some significant ways. Specifically, Green dogma is arguably more dangerous in the current political circumstances, and they’re controlling the political maneuverings of more countries than the Nazis did. Greens are the primary cause of world hunger, and they’re also the primary cause of continued global warming, ocean acidification, sea level rise, etc.
My ideal solution is continued R&D into everything, including a dozen next-gen nuclear projects, but also a dozen energy storage projects, various types of solar cells, wind turbines, etc. I would stop most spending on actual roll-out of solar, wind, and storage, and I would instead take that money and start craning out conventional gen3+ nuclear reactors until I had a better option.
I agree completely in the sense that no one is seriously talking about shutting down all current non-nuclear generation overnight. It would take 50 years to achieve that goal, which assumes that this is the ideal goal, which I’m not entirely convinced. Hydro may have a place, but it does have significant environmental impact, especially tropical hydro dams which often emit ginormous amounts of greenhouse gases. Likely we’ll keep a lot of hydro to help balance the day-night demand swings. I’m sure that isolated uses of geothermal, solar, and wind probably make sense too, but they’re the 1% of the solution, like maybe Hawaii or other small islands. However, if we get a good small modular nuclear reactor like NuScale working, then the space for solar and wind further shrinks.
Of course. Just build nuclear near to where it’s needed, but also preferrably on the ocean coast. Use transmission lines to get it to where it needs to go. That works for like IIRC 80% of the world’s population without stuff like UHVDC transmission.
Going on what you say later, yes the current grid is insufficient. We will need more power plants, and we will need more transmission capacity.
For off-grid users of energy like certain large construction equipment and vehicles, we should be able to figure something out, whether it’s transmission lines, portable small modular nuclear reactors, or just synthetic hydrocarbons created from seawater and nuclear electricity. Note that all of my answers are directly or indirectly based on cheap clean abundant nuclear (and hydro) power.
For your use case of 5 MWe offgrid, I wonder how the costs compare of transmission vs synthetic hydrocarbons vs a NuScale on site (roughly 77 MWe). The NuScale is probably way too expensive for a mere 5 MWe need, but I’m brainstorming right now, and the cost of transmission probably isn’t cheap either. Offhand, I have no idea which would be more expensive. I might guess that creating hydrocarbons from seawater might be the best bet for your off-grid use case.
PS:
I like your idea of a packaging / disassembly tax. As a related mini-rant, let’s do something similar for planned obsolescence, and specifically consumer items that are purposefully designed for short lifetimes, like most electronics.
“Maybe you think I’m going too far by comparing them to Nazis, but let me one-up you and say that I think that Greens are worse than Nazis in some significant ways. “
Which of Atte Harjanne’s positions would you say are worse than those of the Nazis?
https://rinconeducativo.org/contenidoextra/jornadas2019cataluna/ponencias2019cataluna-atte.pdfsnarkhuntr
Nice discussion of recycling tarrifs as a way to encourage positive behaviours. I like this, as it also emphasises the burden on companies and might start making them reconsider using 50,000 layers of packaging for a pair non-degradable socks…
Judging from that person alone, the Green party of Finland is apparently a very different beast from nearly all other Green political parties and Green NGOs with which I’m familiar.
Take a look at this paper:
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/hdb2g/
I love it.
The paper correctly identifies the instrumental role that Amory Lovins had to change the earlier environmental movement from pro nuclear power into anti nuclear power, and change the environmental movement to the “soft path”, which really just means energy poverty and therefore poverty in general.
The paper also correctly identifies Jacobson as the foremost expert pushing the narrative that 100% renewable plans are feasible (along with some other guy that I’ve never heard of, which is probably a damning indictment of me).
This paper takes a giant dump all over green energy.
The paper also rightly points out that different green energy tech should not be conflated (which unfortunately it often is, even by experts like Sovacool, with extremely fallacious results). The author specifically calls out the common conflation of the limited success of hydropower with other renewables, which is grand. Yes, a small number of countries have enough hydro that they can do it, but it says nothing about the feasibility of other countries using solar and wind to do the same thing. (Sovacool recently wrote a paper where he makes precisely this mistake. That paper has been cited to me more than a few times.)
The paper cites several cases of natural gas companies loving solar and wind because adding more solar and wind locks in more natural gas use. Loving it.
Paper also points out that western solar and wind policies tend to favor the middle class and rich at the expense of the poor. Amazing.
See also:
https://www.foronuclear.org/en/sector-values/featured-voices/atte-harjanne/
Very pro-nuclear, and from the first source and this one, very anti 100% renewables. This is almost indistinguishable from my position and the positions of many leading nuclear advocates, such as James Hansen, Michael Shellenberger. There’s still some olive branches being handed out to renewables, saying “don’t worry, you have a place too”, but at this point, I suspect that he’s saying that more for political persuasion reasons and less because he really believes that we need – or even want – significant amounts of solar and wind.
Is the author really a Green party member in the Finnish parliament? My mind is blown. If this person is indicative, then the Green party of Finland is not like any Green party that I’ve ever heard of. This is definitely not the Green party of Germany, nor the Green party of the US, nor NRDC, Greenpeace, Friends Of The Earth, or almost any other major self-identifying Green NGO.
snarkhuntr@#91:
Meta: If FTB is looking for usability suggestions, a short primer on the commenting system would be helpful. I haven’t done html since high school, and most of my recent commenting has either been on Reddit or PhPbb boards with their own esoteric comment markup system. If FTB has a good FAQ for this, I didn’t find it tonight while looking.
Good idea. I will make that happen.
BTW, the owner(s) of a blog see different editing constraints from the reader/commenters. For example, I don’t think you can use the <div> tag in a comment, but I can. So I may have to do some research on this. But it’s a good idea.
I’ve evolved toward a standard of how I do things (e.g.: I head replies to the usernym and comment #) but it’s specific to each blog. One of the fun things we have to do is standardize our postings (if we want to) – when I started out, I used asterisked footnotes instead of a divider-bar and comments, and in-line comments in [ ] but – there are no standards. “Do as thou will, shall be the whole of the formatting options.”
I’ll see what I can do and maybe I’ll run it by the secret FTB committee and anyone else who wants to link it is welcome to.
mjr.
AGAIN, I said:
“Instead of increasing efficiency, it would also help if affluent people simply consumed less. Be it less meat or less fossil fuels or fewer exotic vacations. Or simply having fewer/no children.”
I said, it would HELP. As in: It sure couldn’t hurt if we tried {x}. Where x is a thing.
My specific proposals for {x} were:
– Consume less meat.
– Consume less fossil fuel (oil, coal, or whatever else the sun has given us)
– Don’t vacation
– Don’t have children, maybe. (If you can help it. I’d thank you!)
Out of this, you’ve spun a very dramatic yarn:
– I hate humans.
– I’m a malthusian.
– I want rich people to become poor.
– I want poor people to become even poorer.
Can you justify any of your claims based on anyting I’ve actually said?
The above is my only question. Good luck!
@John Morales
You can be an incredible PITA, but you can also be an amazing ally. Thanks!
klatu,
Earlier, you said this:
Your assertion that we need to use less energy is simply wrong. Worldwide total energy consumption needs to go up up up. Any talk about worldwide total energy consumption going down is grossly ill-informed, and often downright neo-Malthusian.
You also implicitly asserted that clean cheap abundant energy is the same thing as “shitting on the carpet”. You explicitly said that clean cheap abundant energy won’t solve this problem, which is quite silly and very wrong.
You’re spouting the same rhetoric as Amory Lovins and his “Soft Path”.
Klatu
You also ignore the brute fact that more energy usage leads to people having less kids, and less energy usage leads to people having more kids.
And specifically this:
This right here is what I’m talking about. You view modern industrial civilization as an evil that cannot be fixed, which is pure nonsense. We don’t need to radically redesign human society in order to fix climate change, ocean acidification, sea level rise, etc. We just need clean, cheap, abundant energy, and regulations to fix some of the more extreme excesses of unfettered capitalism. The Green New Deal is not about fixing climate change. It’s about this burning need that some people have to radically redesign society because of their insane beliefs.