I wish we could just transfer some of the extreme wealth of the wealthy and put it into infrastructure, jobs, sustainable energy, free education, free healthcare, etc. Because fuck them, they have way too much money and I certainly haven't seen anything good come from the elites in this country having that much money while the working class has remained stagnant for the last 40 years.

>> ^VoodooV:

It's less dirty coal, but it's still dirty, yet they get to call it CLEAN for some reason.
cold fusion, solar, hydrogen fuel cells or GTFO


Name 3 things that won't work in time for it to matter!

Go gen4 reactors, lots of them, and now! I recommend David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" as to why I believe this. Available for free at http://www.withouthotair.com/

Video reference here:

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


But ya, coal needs to go, but you have to remember, 2 billion people live in abject poverty. They try to bridge the gap using as cheap a source of energy they can...like coal. Until you make energy cheaper than coal, your never going to displace the use of dino fuels around the world. The physics on fusion, solar, and hydrogen can't answer that call for quite awhile (we have been trying to make fusion work for decades, same with solar, and fuel cells are just terrible right now and only work for transportation fuels not baseload power generation). I do think we can answer a large number of these problems with new generations of nuclear power, with passive safety and no emissions, gen4 reactors have a lot of great points if people give them a chance!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/

In relation to the direct content of the video, your NEVER going to get China and India on board with giving up cheap energy...they are BOTH x3 the population of the US, they have to care about cheap energy WAAAAY more than us, for population and standard of living issues. The only way to win this isn't through regulation, it is through technological innovation...and China has been buying up our AP1000 Gen3 for all the reasons I just mentioned.

To say that dino fuels are "Destroying us" is a little bit of a misnomer, you don't get food without hydrocarbons, you don't have refrigeration without hydrocarbons, you don't get heating and cooling without hydrocarbons. Energy isn't the enemy, any attempts to price out energy will only hurt the most reliant on its low price...if you doubled the price of gas via taxation, you aren't helping the little man. Cheap energy prices, even if they are oil based, aren't the devil, any attempts to make them so is a misunderstanding of the energy crisis. More oil drilling isn't even going to lower costs, at best, it will keep them the same, but peak oil in the US has already come, more drilling in more exotic places is just going to tow the line...and it isn't even going to do that.

Talking about clean coal is just so "we" can talk about how much we need cheap energy without talking about the health effects. Coal does kill, without a doubt, but so does electricity so costly you can't afford heating or cooling. You can't call for an elimination of coal without talking about what is going to replace it, and at what cost. This is even MORE relevant with the recent spout of weather, imagine if that area was packed full of solar and wind...it most likely be completely destroyed, and those are already very cost heavy forms of energy.

Anyway, I will end the rant. I really recommend the book above if you wish to delve down the rabbit hole of energy solutions. It isn't as easy as you think, it is why we are still using dino fuels. Any path you choose is challenging, and VERY capital and R&D intensive. Were are talking multiple trillion dollars to role out replacements on a national scale. Now, oil does a trillion a year, so this isn't outside the realm of possibility, but it is going to take a technical answer to solve, not a political one.

Safe nuclear refers to many different new gen4 reactor units that rely on passive safety instead of engineered safety. The real difference comes with a slight bit of understanding of how nuclear tech works now, and why that isn't optimal.

Let us first consider this, even with current nuclear technology, the amount of people that have died as a direct and indirect result of nuclear is very low per unit energy produced. The only rival is big hydro, even wind and solar have a great deal of risk compared to nuclear as we do it and have done it for years. The main difference is when a nuclear plant fails, everyone hears about it...but when a oil pipeline explodes and kills dozens, or solar panel installers fall off a roof or get electrocuted and dies...it just isn't as interesting.

Pound per pound nuclear is already statistically very safe, but that isn't really what we are talking about, we are talking about what makes them more unsafe compared to new nuclear techs. Well, that has to do with how normal nukes work. So, firstly, normal reactor tech uses solid fuel rods. It isn't a "metal" either, it is uranium dioxide, has the same physical characteristics as ceramic pots you buy in a store. When the fuel fissions, the uranium is transmuted into other, lighter, elements some of which are gases. Over time, these non-fissile elements damage the fuel rod to the point where it can no longer sustain fission and need to be replaced. At this point, they have only burned about 4% of the uranium content, but they are all "used up". So while there are some highly radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods, the vast majority is just normal uranium, and that isn't very radioactive (you could eat it and not really suffer any radiation effects, now chemical toxicity is a different matter). The vast majority of nuclear waste, as a result of this way of burning uranium, generates huge volumes of waste products that aren't really waste products, just normal uranium.

But this isn't what makes light water reactors unsafe compared to other designs. It is all about the water. Normal reactors use water to both cool the core, extract the heat, and moderate the neutrons to sustain the fission reaction. Water boils at 100c which is far to low a temperature to run a thermal reactor on, you need much higher temps to get power. As a result, nuclear reactors use highly pressurized water to keep it liquid. The pressure is an amazingly high 2200psi or so! This is where the real problem comes in. If pressure is lost catastrophically, the chance to release radioactivity into the environment increases. This is further complicated by the lack of water then cooling the core. Without water, the fission chain reaction that generates the main source of heat in the reactor shuts down, however, the radioactive fission products contained in the fuel rods are very unstable and generate lots of heat. So much heat over time, they end up causing the rods to melt if they aren't supplied with water. This is the "melt down" you always hear about. If you start then spraying water on them after they melt down, it caries away some of those highly radioactive fission products with the steam. This is what happened in Chernobyl, there was also a human element that overdid all their safety equipment, but that just goes to show you the worst case.

The same thing didn't happen in Fukushima. What happened in Fukushima is that coolant was lost to the core and they started to melt down. The tubes which contain the uranium are made from zirconium. At high temps, water and zirconium react to form hydrogen gas. Now modern reactor buildings are designed to trap gases, usually steam, in the event of a reactor breach. In the case of hydrogen, that gas builds up till a spark of some kind happens and causes an explosion. These are the explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Both of the major failures and dangers of current reactors deal with the high pressure water; but water isn't needed to make a reactor run, just this type of reactor.

The fact that reactors have radioactive materials in them isn't really unsafe itself. What is unsafe is reactor designs that create a pressure to push that radioactivity into other areas. A electroplating plant, for example, uses concentrated acids along with high voltage electricity in their fabrication processes. It "sounds" dangerous, and it is in a certain sense, but it is a manageable danger that will most likely only have very localized effects in the event of a catastrophic event. This is due mainly to the fact that there are no forces driving those toxic chemical elements into the surrounding areas...they are just acid baths. The same goes for nuclear materials, they aren't more or less dangerus than gasoline (gas go boom!), if handled properly.

I think one of the best reactor designs in terms of both safety and efficiency are the molten salt reactors. They don't use water as a coolant, and as a result operate at normal preasures. The fuel and coolant is a liquid lithium, fluoride, and beryllium salt instead of water, and the initial fuel is thorium instead of uranium. Since it is a liquid instead of a solid, you can do all sorts of neat things with it, most notably, in case of an emergency, you can just dump all the fuel into a storage tank that is passively cooled then pump it back to the reactor once the issue is resolved. It is a safety feature that doesn't require much engineering, you are just using the ever constant force of gravity. This is what is known as passive safety, it isn't something you have to do, it is something that happens automatically. So in many cases, what they designed is a freeze plug that is being cooled. If that fails for any reason, and you desire a shutdown, the freeze plug melts and the entire contents of the reactor are drained into the tanks and fission stops (fission needs a certain geometry to happen).

So while the reactor will still be as dangerous as any other industrial machine would be...like a blast furnace, it wouldn't pose any threat to the surrounding area. This is boosted by the fact that even if you lost containment AND you had a ruptured emergency storage tank, these liquid salts solidify at temps below 400c, so while they are liquid in the reactor, they quickly solidify outside of it. And another great benefit is they are remarkably stable. Air and water don't really leach anything from them, fluoride and lithium are just so happy binding with things, they don't let go!

The fuel burn up is also really great. You burn up 90% of what you put in, and if you try hard, you can burn up to 99%. So, comparing them to "clean coal" doesn't really give new reactor tech its fair shake. The tech we use was actually sort of denounced by the person who made them, Alvin Weinberg, and he advocated the molten salt reactor instead. I could babble on about this for ages, but I think Kirk Sorensen explains that better than I could...hell most likely the bulk of what I said is said better by him



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw

But the real question is why. Why use nuclear and not solar, for instance?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

This is the answer. The power of the atom is a MILLION times more dense that fossil fuels...a million! It is a number that is beyond what we can normal grasp as people. Right now, current reactors harness less that 1% of that power because of their reactor design and fuel choice.

And unfortunately, renewables just cost to darn much for how much energy they contribute. In that, they also use WAY more resources to make per unit energy produced. So wind, for example, uses 10x more steal per unit energy contributed than other technologies. It is because renewables is more like energy farming.

http://videosift.com/video/TEDxWarwick-Physics-Constrain-Sustainable-Energy-Options


This is a really great video on that maths behind what makes renewables less than attractive for many countries. But to rap it up, finally, the real benefit is that cheap, clean power is what helps makes nations great. There is an inexorable link with access to energy and financial well being. Poor nations burn coal to try and bridge that gap, but that has a huge health toll. Renewables are way to costly for them per unit energy, they really need other answers. New nuclear could be just that, because it can be made nearly completely safe, very cheap to operate, and easier to manufacture (this means very cheap compared to today's reactors as they are basically huge pressure vessels). If you watch a couple of videos from Kirk and have more questions or problems, let me know, as you can see, I love talking about this stuff Sorry if I gabbed your ear off, but this is the stuff I am going back to school for because I do believe it will change the world. It is the closest thing to free energy we are going to get in the next 20 years.

In reply to this comment by ReverendTed:
Just stumbled onto your profile page and noticed an exchange you had with dag a few months back.
What constitutes "safe nuclear"? Is that a specific type or category of nuclear power?
Without context (which I'm sure I could obtain elsewise with a simple Google search, but I'd rather just ask), it sounds like "clean coal".

Hehehe thanks for that. Guess I need to buy some points!
In reply to this comment by eric3579:
*promote

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

+ just note that the solar is expected to hit “grid parity” sooner than they projected in 2009 and the true cost of solar isn’t actually used.
-Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/13Ovp)

>> ^bcglorf:

@NetRunner,
The difference is I stated that we don't have a high confidence in projections of temperature change due to increased CO2 when all other factors are taken into account.

The research done either ignores all other factors but CO2, or lacks a high confidence level, in no small part owing to a lack of quality long term data and understanding of H2O's role. The research done either ignores all other factors but CO2, or lacks a high confidence level, in no small part owing to a lack of quality long term data and understanding of H2O's role.

But again, that's not true. Look at the very paper I linked. Seriously.

My more general point is that what you're saying these papers say is different from what the people writing the papers say these papers say. IMO, that should make you think you missed something, rather than make you start implying that the scientists are misrepresenting their work.
>> ^bcglorf:

Translating that to what should we do means we don't have a good idea how much lowering CO2 emissions will help, what we do know is it will be expensive to do it on a large scale today.

Here's another thing I think you should reconsider. Let's say you're right, and we have no idea how much reducing CO2 will help. Maybe it'll help a little, maybe a whole lot.

I think we have a pretty good grasp on the "cost" of moving off CO2, but I think your economic analysis is faulty too. The "cost" is not some deadweight loss we'll never recoup. It's also not as if fossil fuels will last forever, so it's a matter of when we switch, not if.

So the matrix of possible actions and their consequences are:

1. We switch now, but the CO2 effect was small: It costs us a bit more, but we get a more sustainable energy system that creates less pollution, and stave off whatever damage CO2 would've had to the environment. Probably a net positive, but it's possible it could wind up being a slight net negative.
   
2. We switch now, and the CO2 effect was big: We save ourselves from a major catastrophe that would've wrecked our economy. Big net positive.
   
3. We make no attempt to switch early, but the CO2 effect was small: We save a little money from waiting, but we also do some damage to the environment, and our economy. Maybe it's a slight net positive, maybe it's still a net negative.
   
4. We make no attempt to switch early, and the CO2 effect was big: We save a little money from waiting, but the damage to the environment wrecks our economy. Big net negative.
   

So basically the choice boils down to whether we like options #1 and #2 better or worse than options #3 and #4. I like #1 and #2 better than #3 or #4 by a wide margin.

And that's without even factoring in the idea that a massive fiscal stimulus right now might actually help our economy out of its current depression. In that case, not only would the costs be small, they'd actually be a net positive to our long-run economic growth, without even factoring in the environmental damage prevented.

This shit has got to stop. Oil, gas and coal are a fucking joke. We need a full blown 3rd industrial revolution, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

It's not only possible, despite what the fossil fuel industry will scream at you if you suggest it, it's the only wise decision left to make. 7 billion people, climate change, and a legacy of inequality and human suffering, and fossil fuel corporations keep telling us we "need" this shit.

Awesome! On top of proving that popular protest is not just the stuff of developing countries, they're providing an on-screen model for sustainable energy. Lets hope the media picks up on this (yes, that is very optimistic I know).

Well said raverman. The simple fact is that not enough people are willing to sacrifice their oil dependency. Technology is slowly moving in the right direction, but we'll need to have a critical mass of popular demand that will probably only happen when sustainable energy sources become as cheap as oil. I'm hoping that the Age of the Hummer was the last hurrah for oil waste, but only time will tell.

And in regards to oil, here is Rachel Maddow's take on oil independence: http://videosift.com/video/Oil-Independence-is-a-Myth

Sustainability would be a great choice for a new channel..
& ask dag to run the channel (or even better, the whole site:)) on an energy efficient server running on sustainable energy..
(BTW: I don't know the specs of the current VS server and its energy sources)

In reply to this comment by DavidRaine:
Wind turbines kill birds, and now we see their operation is unsafe and causes wanton destruction to nearby wildlife. We ought to outlaw these dangerous turbines and move to clean, safe, nuclear energy!

I'm not sure if wind turbines can be accurately categorized as causing "wanton destruction", though I will second your notion for nuclear energy (still I'm pretty sure your comment was made in jest). Those fucking baby boomers and their fear mongering back in the '80s has put a damper on new nuclear power plant development in this country. Yet another reason to hate the hippies! Stop fucking in the bushes, cut your hair and get a job, hippies!

It's a shame we don't embrace nuclear power, because it's really a clean and sustainable energy source. A lot better than fossil fuels, in my opinion. I want every car to be equipped with the Flux Capacitor and your very own Mr. Fusion to power it with banana peels and refuse.

What's described here is often called a smart grid or supergrid. It could be built right now using high-voltage DC current to transmit power. In the future superconducting wires may be used for lossless transmission.

Bucky was one of the fathers of sustainable energy; it's a shame that his ideas are pasted into this video without being updated for the 21st century.

As time rolls foward, the more money these corporations pump into pseudo-science bullshit to stem the flow of renewable, sustainable energy forms from taking foot, the more emboldened it makes those who are in the business of ridding humanity from its oil/coal dependancy.

Non-energy corporations are waking up to the fact that once initial investment capital has been paid off from an economical energy source, the fuel for the energy thereafter is 100% free, and virtually unlimited, with extremly low maintenance and upkeep costs. Long term, switching over is far cheaper than keeping the status quo.

So to all those asswipes who think we have no control over global warming, who have no idea about the physics thats seated behind the theory of global warming (which by the way, in scientific nomenclature, a 'theory' is the highest level of prestige awarded to human understanding, theories explain facts under observable and crucifiable situations), who have had no formal education in even physics 101 where thermal dynamics is taught, who have never read a book in their lives, and have a slippery, astro-glide encased grasp on any concept of economics, I give you, a big shut the fuck up, sit down, and accept that renewables are the way of the future, wether you fucking like it or not.

So sick and tired of these stall tactics that are continually pushed in the face of humanity for no other reason than to promote corporate greed, all at the expense of the humanity they sell their shit to.

/rant

To appeal to the corporate, democratic, industrialised capitalists out there still on the fence about global warming and our need to act or not. Put the whole debate out of your head, and think from your hip-pocket.

Imagine a world where the energy required to run everything in your house, is literally, free.
It is uninterrupted, enviornmentally friendly, unlimited, free energy.

From a business point of view, even if this energy, after investment capital was paid off (read: wind, concentrated solar thermal, geo-thermal or wave power), was sold for 3c/kwHr, you would still be making a huge proffit. And, worst case scenario on maintaining status quo, you would be save near total annihilation of the human race.

There is no sane argument against going to electrical cars, powered up by a grid that sources it energy from 100% renewable and sustainable energy, anyone who claims otherwise is a fruitcake.