Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
His website is here: Cyprus: the Environment _________________ --------------------------------
| Whose reality is this anyway!? |
--------------------------------
(-------< Temet Nosce >-------)
____________________________
Last edited by EnviroEngr on Fri Jul 02, 2004 12:45 pm; edited 1 time in total
Thanks I will check that board out. I had a good friend who used to post on yahoo boards I believe. This man knew literally everything about everything. To a shocking and scary degree.
Our job we were testing software so we would just post on message boards and read online. He was pro-nuclear and had a library at home about nuclear things. Plus hardrives full of information so he could link it for debate. His main reason for supporting nuclear wasn't futurism like myself but instead for the environment.
As for building enough it is a good question. The first thing is as oil rapidly rises in price these things become more economical so money gets deployed towards it. Think of how many war ships America was able to build in world war 2. And that was with 1940's technology!
I estimate we would need about 500 more reactors of the size currently in the united states. IMO you would have to massively change the regulations and the approval process. I know from having friends in the energy business plants take only 1-1.5 years to build, and for these I am talking massive hydro dams for example. However the approval process takes 10-20 years before you are allowed to start building!
Also the reactors right now are for some bizarre reason custom built. I guess because demand hasn't been high enough to justify mass factories that build them. I would say build massive factories to churn out the reactors. Trust me if there is tons of money on the table and no risk of the regulators screwing you over people will jump at the profit potential.
Unfortunately I believe it is too sensitive politically to do something like this. However once oil starts to massively rise in price people all of a sudden aren't so worried about things.
As for the waste it is an issue, but this is a massive planet. For the city of Toronto's power in one year, 5 million people western living standards, you fill up one 25 meter swimming pool a year. I believe 8 feet deep but not 100% on the depth.
So with many reactors and many years it would add up. However we shouldn't stop developing the technology, for example being able to pull more energy out of the fuel, or new types altogether.
It might be an issue in like 10,000 years all the waste, but lets face it in 40 years at the rate we are going with technology we will have insanely powerful new things to work with, let alone 1000.
Good links I agree with some of his points. Except banning cars I do not like. I am a libertarian:). Btw if anyone can link the yahoo energy resource board I would thank you! I can't seem to find it.
You can view the posts without joining the group but won't have access to the many references and charts in the files section.
Another item to consider regarding building nukes is when......if it is too far into the downside of peak of oil then how can we spare the remainder of the resource building them ?
Regarding banning cars ( or effectively banning their use through price & availabilty of gasoline ): if you ( not just you ) are serious about not being willing to give up this mode of transportation ( this will very difficult for our car culture oriented society ) after coming to terms with the ramifications of Peak Oil, then Matt Savinar may be proven right. Public pressure will force any government in power to do whatever is necessary to maintain this unsustainable way of life up until the bitter end. Western society will need to redesign the way we live and the only hope of avoiding a chaotic and painful crash landing will be through understanding of what must be sacrificed. Operating an automobile will become a luxury few will have. Until I became enlightened regarding the oil depletion issue, I was going to spend most of my free time restoring vintage cars. I have come to the realization that this will not be possible now or ever. There are much more important things to consider.[/url]
You raise an interesting point, that perhaps you could expound on in different thread:
You had a hobby (a passion?) tied into an energy abudnant society. You then realized that pursuit is not practical/possible to maintain in the world we are moving into.
How have you dealt with that emotionally? Have you picked up any "replacement" interests?
This is the type of issue that is key to us dealing with it. How do you people have something to be excited about when thinking about the future, when the only things that have excited us in the past were usually very energy intensive?
It's an issue I've been grappling a good deal with personally.
Again, this would probably be best for another thread.
Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 309 Location: Ontario, Canada
Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 9:09 pm Post subject:
Another issue with nuclear is, just how much talent is there in the world? In North America, certainly, with no new plants having been built in so long many firms have their build experts retiring or already moved on, and there are only so many firms or consultants out there with the skills. It's not like anyone can build a nuke plant, and they take a damn long time to build.
For example, I asked my dad (who's a nuclear engineer) how many plants Canada could build at a time, employing all personell in a rush. He said two at first. So I pushed, "what if it was a national emergency, you spread the nuke-people out and paired them with normal build firms, etc. etc." and he said maybe 4, otherwise you'd have to recruit out of country. (This is a top-of-the-head judgement, BTW).
Even if the money's there for 100 plants there just might not be the expertise to do it. And if each plant is going to take 7, 10 years to build... _________________ "Our forces are now closer to the center of Baghdad than most American commuters are to their downtown office."
--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, April 2003
Whitecrab: Nuclear expertise is a big concern. Mainly because all of those people are getting older and retiring.
Luckily many asians are learning how to do it, but still they want to build plants too.
This is why you have to allow it on a mass scale. You see you get the engineers to design massive factories making reactors. And use the exact same design for each plant.
That was the mistake before making custom designs. You see that makes jobs for many engineers so they will always recommend it, but for the nations standard of living it is an idiotic idea.
Can you imagine if we built airplanes custom each time? Do you know how much they would cost and how dangerous they would be?
Notacor: now ge and other major companies have nuke plants that will be much cheaper. Mass produced. And mark my words here. The chinese are coming out with a reactor in a couple years that will change the world energy picture. It is going to be insanely cheap. Chinese are very intelligent people and have awesome leadership at the moment.
What this will mean is much cheaper energy costs. We will electrolize hydrogen most likely as the fuel. The problem and why we dont' have it now is one thing: storage. The thing we need to be able to store hydrogen is nanotechnology. We are about 7-10 years away from nanotechnology storage devices for the hydrogen. Once we have that, fuel costs could actualy dramatically drop.
You put massive nuke plants + electrolizers on rivers or lakes or even on the ocean. Then you pipe the hydrogen fuel around the country.
Another thing I just read about. Nanotechnology is going to finally allow us to build batteries with WAY more capacity. In 10 years we could be looking at batteries that could make just fully electric cars viable. That would be even better.
Joined: May 23, 2004 Posts: 276 Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posted: Sat Jun 12, 2004 6:32 am Post subject:
AA wrote:
What this will mean is much cheaper energy costs. We will electrolize hydrogen most likely as the fuel. The problem and why we dont' have it now is one thing: storage. The thing we need to be able to store hydrogen is nanotechnology. We are about 7-10 years away from nanotechnology storage devices for the hydrogen. Once we have that, fuel costs could actualy dramatically drop.
You put massive nuke plants + electrolizers on rivers or lakes or even on the ocean. Then you pipe the hydrogen fuel around the country.
I don't believe this will happen so easily. It took yonkers to retrofit Natural Gas networks within cities, and Natural Gas doesn't leak out of pipes and tanks as consistently as Hydrogen does (Hydrogen is after all a very small molecule). The logistics of building grids like this in every city would be, well, extraordinarily unlikely.
It might be possible to use small scale electrolyzers at fuel stations themselves, assuming there is sufficient power and water grid capacity. There'd be a lot of wastage though, however (grasping at another unlikely straw here) they could double as off-peak electricity storage.
But quite simply, none of this can come online prior to an economic collapse, and the chances of it happening during or shortly after a collapse would be highly unlikely.
Oh, and I've not yet seen an affordable or sustainable model for producing Hydrogen cars of the type that the market would be willing to part with tens of thousands of hard earned dollars for.
The saner option is to cut car usage down to essential trips only, through the establishment of useful urban and intercity transit systems. Razing the occasional house in suburbia to link the cul-de-sacs and allow buses to run through neighborhoods or to allow pedestrians to get from cul-de-sacs to bus stops on the nearby main road are far more likely than ¼bn nouveau-unemployed people finding $50k for a Hydrogen or Battery powered car to get them to job interviews or around the countryside to their new jobs as farm labour. _________________ The purpose of human life revolves around an endless need to extract ever increasing amounts of carbon out of the ground and then release it into the atmosphere.
Nuclear Fission is a technology that is not compatible with long-term sustainability of human life. Please check out this site http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/DDoverV.html There are many other similar sites around. The problem with nuclear waste for instance is that though the volume of waste is small, it is exceedingly lethal and cannot under any condition be allowed to escape and disperse. Failure to do that will inevitably lead to a degradation of the human gene pool to the point that our survival is threatened over time. There is no way around that. Another issue with nuclear technology is that the main product plutonium presents a very serious risk of abuse by dangerous individuals. Continued production of such a material is thus against the best interests of humanity. Remember, the current nuclear weapons can without doubt, annihilate all life on earth several times over. It is actually better for the welfare of all resident life on earth that we scale down our impacts (population reduction and reduced energy consumption) and forget about the nuclear path which simply represents an alternative path to the demise of civilization. Peak oil for all its problems is unlikely on its own to kill all humans on earth even under the worst scenario. What makes peak oil dangerous is the combination of terrible conditions with the means to conduct warfare at a genocidal scale (principally nuclear weapons)
In any case, from an economic point and energy point of view, several alternatives already perform better than nuclear. I can list wind, geothermal and biomass as already beating nuclear by at least a factor of 2. Wind is especially attractive given the speed with which it can be implemented and the quick energy payback (6 - 9 months) Even using natural gas in cogeneration mode will beat nuclear. Remember, a big advantage of many of the renewables is that they are located close to point of use hence avoiding the need to ship energy (hydrogen) far. Nuclear hydrogen generated 100's of miles from point of use cannot and will not compete with hydrogen generated locally or regionally given the very expensive cost of hydrogen transmission.
The argument that only nuclear is of a sufficient scale to help the coming crunch does not stand up to scrutiny. I can think of three renewable technologies that on their own could theoretically deliver all energy needs of civilization with appropriate political will and resources. They are wind, Ocean thermal energy and solar thermal. Solar photovoltaic is a potential fourth. Each of these, on their own accord could replace our needs and if used in combination with other lesser renewables like biomass and sparing use of fossil sources for carbon (petrochemicals) could allow us to continue especially if we reduce demand (population and energy use) eventually.
Of course, failure to reduce population and demand eventually will lead to its being done for us any way, just more catastrophic and painful. War, starvation, disease and eventual anniihilation from the nuclear sources.
Joined: May 21, 2004 Posts: 158 Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2004 4:14 am Post subject:
MrPC wrote:
I don't believe this will happen so easily. It took yonkers to retrofit Natural Gas networks within cities, and Natural Gas doesn't leak out of pipes and tanks as consistently as Hydrogen does (Hydrogen is after all a very small molecule). The logistics of building grids like this in every city would be, well, extraordinarily unlikely.
We don't need to reticulate hydrogen anywhere. If hydrogen is available, it can be converted into methane in a straightforward piece of 19th century chemical engineering.
The reaction in question is exothermic: that is, no energy is required to drive it.
Then we can reticulate the methane, assuming we can produce enough of it.
Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2004 7:18 pm Post subject: Go Nuke
I like the nuclear option and I strongly disagree with those who think it's not viable. Whenever someone raises the waste disposal problem, remember the alternative is coal which has known environmental and greenhouse issues. The waste disposal problem is mainly a NIMBY problem. Sorry, but it's hard to get worked up about problems that are centuries in the future and/or likley to have comparatively marginal effects like higher cancer rates when you are facing a dieoff in the next 50 years. Yes alternatives such as wind and solar should be fully developed; the problem is, I don't think we can meet more than 30% of our needs from those sources; throw in whatever else you want from conservation (20%, heck 40%) and you still come up short.
In another thread I did a calculation regarding uranium supplies, and there is a problem. The world's 3.1 million metric tonnes of known uranium reserves would only last about 4 years if we used nukes to power our entire civilization (they'll last over 100 years at our present low utilization of nuclear power). 4 years is so short, it's simply not worth the hassle of building the plants and storing the resulting wastes; by comparison, there is 15 years worth of "total civilization" power in the remaining oil, and 60 years in the remaining coal. To make nukes look even remotely attractive, we need to breed plutonium. This would bring us out to 250 years, enough time to figure something else out.
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 3429 Location: California, USA
Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 3:36 am Post subject:
Re. Andy: I worked on engineering designs and financial projections for a utility-scale wind project for over a year. This was for the first two installations (48 MW and 180 MW respectively) in an area where there's 4.5 GW of wind resource (about 4 large nukes' worth). It happens to be about a thousand miles from where it can all be used, and that's an awful lot of transmission line construction to get the power to market. Now we can use some of that wind (the offshore sites) to make hydrogen from seawater, but then comes the problem of hydrogen storage & transport.
Based on what I know from my experience in the wind industry, and from another year on R&D for new power sources generally (e.g. thin-film polymer photovoltaics): Yes we should deploy all the wind and solar we can get our hands on. But yes, we still need three or four times more power from somewhere.
So choose: coal or uranium & plutonium? Even a clean coal plant puts more radionuclides into the air than a nuclear plant. Not to mention atmospheric CO2, which will crash the ecosystem in its own particularly cruel manner. Understood about radioactive waste, but the stuff can be reprocessed and reused, so that won't be a problem.
AA, what's your basis for the claim about the Chinese reactor? Please say more. If this turns out to be true it will be a Godsend. I'm still concerned about China from a national security standpoint, e.g. they're still nominally a communist regime and authoritarian as well. On the other hand, at least they're rational, which the Saudis et. al. are not.
BTW, India's about to become a major producer of multi-megawatt wind turbines.
Re. the engineering talent shortage: Training nuclear engineers takes maybe five years, but for technician-level workers, maybe a year or two. While we're training the first crop, we can still build wind capacity as fast as possible. This isn't an either/or, it's an and-both. In any case, when demand kicks in, the price (salary level) will go sky high and that will bring more talent onboard.
Now I hate to raise another pessimistic forecast, but... it appears there is also potential for a significant shortage of portland cement (the gray powder that goes into concrete). Demand from China this year has caused a shortage in the residential housing construction sector particularly on the East coast: not only an increase in price for concrete, but actual construction schedule delays.
Now you factor in all those hypothetical new wind turbine foundations (as much as a few hundred cubic yards each, depending on foundation design), and all those reactor domes (thousands of cubic yards each), and this gets to be a serious issue. You can add rice-hull ash and other pozzolanic admixtures to stretch the batch: lower cost, lower embodied energy content, higher strength. But we have to assume the concrete producers are already doing this for their own reasons (i.e. economics) and there's still a cement shortage. Hmm...
Assuming that's true and there's plently of limestone and clay to go round (I guess limestone must be subject to a peak too?) then a drop in demand from China, or sustained demand leading to more supply ships being built would solve the problem.
It does appear though, that as the world's economy is growing in ways never seen before, there is problems keeping up with demand in many raw materials. Even if we solve our energy problems from Peak Oil, it appears that will be just one part of a huge supply/demand crisis that will not easily go away.
I think many people will agree that resource shortfalls can easily lead to war. Do we really want more Nuclear power stations in the event of war? That's a weak association of argument, I admit. But the question is still valid, especially if we start producing plutonium is vast amounts. Any kind of war would be far more likely to result in some form of nuclear attack involving plutonium. I'm not totally happy about that idea.
I think I'd rather take my chances in a die off, thanks very much!
Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 309 Location: Ontario, Canada
Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 10:47 am Post subject:
There's also the fact that a nuclear grid (or any big-plant system) is more susceptible to attack. If you have all your power coming out of 2 nuke plants, it's a lot easier to cripple supply then to go knock down each and every wind farm that's spread all over the region to soak up the best breeze.
Plus, even barring the plutonium issue, what happens if a bomb or a plane smacks into a plant? They're built damn tough, but they aren't designed for that kind of punishment. Now the plant will shut itself off of course, but if enough damage is done to the containment they may have to just pour cement over the thing and call it a loss? _________________ "Our forces are now closer to the center of Baghdad than most American commuters are to their downtown office."
--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, April 2003
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