NASA’s James Hansen Says Nuclear Is Safer Than Fossil

[wtmusic]

"In a Treehugger interview on Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice, NASA’s James Hansen says it is very unfortunate that 'a number of nations have indicated that they’re going to phase out nuclear power… The truth is, what we should do is use the more advanced nuclear power. Even the old nuclear power is much safer than the alternatives.'

<>

"Consider the United States, for example. We had one nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. The National Academy of Sciences has indicated that the people in Pennsylvania who were exposed to the radiation could suffer one or two deaths over the next several decades from cancer caused by radiation, in addition to the 40,000 people who will die from cancer in that same population.

In fact, the safety record of nuclear power has been exceptional, even taking account of Fukushima, which hasn’t, as yet, killed anyone from radiation, and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union. A million people a year die of air and water pollution, most of which is associated with fossil fuel use. But people are frightened by radiation because it’s something that’s harder to understand."

http://theenergycollective.com/jcwinnie/60103/social-and-decision-sciences-and-engineering-and-public-policy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=The+Energy+Collective+%28all+posts%29

Education:
BA with highest distinction (Physics and Mathematics), University of Iowa, 1963 MS (Astronomy), University of Iowa, 1965 Visiting student, Inst. of Astrophysics, University of Kyoto & Dept. of Astronomy, Tokyo University, Japan, 1965-1966 Ph.D. (Physics), University of Iowa, 1967

Research Interests:
Analysis of the causes and consequences of global climate change using the Earth's paleoclimate history, ongoing global observations, and interpretive tools including climate models. Connecting the dots all the way from climate observations to the policies that are needed to stabilize climate and preserve our planet for young people and other species.

Professional Employment:
1967-1969 1969 1969-1972 1972-1981
1978-1985 1981-present 1985-present

Project Experience:
1971-1974 1972-1985 1974-1994
1977-2000

Teaching Experience:
NAS-NRC Resident Research Associate: Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), NY NSF Postdoctoral Fellow: Leiden Observatory, Netherlands Research Associate: Columbia University, NY Staff Member/Space Scientist: Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS),
Manager of GISS Planetary and Climate Programs Adjunct Associate Professor: Department of Geological Sciences, Columbia University Director: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Adjunct Professor: Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University
Co-Principal Investigator AEROPOL Project (airborne terrestrial infrared polarimeter) Co-Investigator, Voyager Photopolarimeter Experiment Principal Investigator (1974-8) and subsequently Co-Investigator, Pioneer Venus
Orbiter Cloud-Photopolarimeter Experiment Principal Investigator, Galileo (Jupiter Orbiter) Photopolarimeter Radiometer Experiment
Atmospheric Radiation (graduate level): New York Univ., Dept. of Meteorology & Oceanography Intro. to Planetary Atmospheres & Climate Change: Columbia Univ., Dept. of Geological Sciences

Awards:
1977 Goddard Special Achievement Award (Pioneer Venus)
1978 NASA Group Achievement Award (Voyager, Photopolarimeter)
1984 NASA Exceptional Service Medal (Radiative Transfer)
1989 National Wildlife Federation Conservation Achievement Award
1990 NASA Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Executive
1991 University of Iowa Alumni Achievement Award
1992 American Geophysical Union Fellow
1993 NASA Group Achievement Award (Galileo, Polarimeter/Radiometer)
1996 Elected to National Academy of Sciences
1996 GSFC William Nordberg Achievement Medal
1996 Editor’ Citation for Excellence in Refereeing for Geophysical Research Letters
1997 NASA Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Executive
2000 University of Iowa Alumni Fellow
2000 GISS Best Scientific Publication (peer vote): ‘Global warming - alternative scenario’
2001 John Heinz Environment Award
2001 Roger Revelle Medal, American Geophysical Union
2004 GISS Best Scientific Publication (peer vote): ‘Soot Climate Forcing’
2005 GISS Best Scientific Publication (peer vote): ‘Earth’s Energy Imbalance’
2006 Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
2006 GISS Best Scientific Publication (peer vote): ‘Global Temperature Change’
2007 Laureate, Dan David Prize for Outstanding Achievements & Impacts in Quest for Energy
2007 Leo Szilard Award, American Physical Society for Outstanding Promotion & Use of Physics for the Benefit of Society
2007 Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award
2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility
2008 Nevada Medal, Desert Research Institute
2008 Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Science
2008 Bownocker Medal, Ohio State University
2008 Rachel Carson Award for Integrity in Science, Center for Science in the Public Interest 2009 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, American Meteorological Society 2009 Peter Berle Environmental Integrity Award
2010 Sophie Prize for Environmental and Sustainable Development
2010 Blue Planet Prize, Asahi Glass Foundation

What a shill.

[RoccoR5955]

1. Shill, my ass...

The man probably knows more about climate change than ANYONE on the planet!

[kristopher]

6. He isn't talking about climate change, he is talking about energy systems.

Sci Eng Ethics (2009) 15:19–23 DOI 10.1007/s11948-008-9097-y
Data Trimming, Nuclear Emissions, and Climate Change
Kristin Sharon Shrader-Frechette
Received: 9 September 2008 / Accepted: 17 September 2008 / Published online: 21 October 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract
Ethics requires good science. Many scientists, government leaders, and industry representatives support tripling of global-nuclear-energy capacity on the grounds that nuclear fission is ‘‘carbon free’’ and ‘‘releases no greenhouse gases.’’ However, such claims are scientifically questionable (and thus likely to lead to ethically questionable energy choices) for at least 3 reasons. (i) They rely on trimming the data on nuclear greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGE), perhaps in part because flawed Kyoto Protocol conventions require no full nuclear-fuel-cycle assessment of carbon content. (ii) They underestimate nuclear-fuel-cycle releases by erroneously assuming that mostly high-grade uranium ore, with much lower emissions, is used. (iii) They inconsistently compare nuclear-related GHGE only to those from fossil fuels, rather than to those from the best GHG-avoiding energy technologies. Once scientists take account of (i)–(iii), it is possible to show that although the nuclear fuel cycle releases (per kWh) much fewer GHG than coal and oil, nevertheless it releases far more GHG than wind and solar-photovoltaic. Although there may be other, ethical, reasons to support nuclear tripling, reducing or avoiding GHG does not appear to be one of them.


To repeat:

...iii) They inconsistently compare nuclear-related GHGE only to those from fossil fuels, rather than to those from the best GHG-avoiding energy technologies. Once scientists take account of (i)–(iii), it is possible to show that although the nuclear fuel cycle releases (per kWh) much fewer GHG than coal and oil, nevertheless it releases far more GHG than wind and solar-photovoltaic. Although there may be other, ethical, reasons to support nuclear tripling, reducing or avoiding GHG does not appear to be one of them.

[sabbat hunter]

2. he is 100% correct

how exactly is he a shill?

[wtmusic]

4. .

:sarcasm:

[bananas]

120. No, he's 100% wrong

He says "Even the old nuclear power is much safer than the alternatives" and that is 100% wrong.
The alternatives are efficiency, wind, solar, and other renewables,
unless by "alternatives" he's talking only about fossil fuels,
which would be extremely misleading.

He's not an expert on nuclear energy (or engineering in general),
unfortunately he's fallen for hype and PR from the nuclear industry.

[SpoonFed]

3. Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Expertism

A physicist thinks nuke power is great. Surprise. Who would have guessed that one?
He's got a nice, impressive CV... that doesn't make a valid argument.
Just as much as anyone on here saying "it's so", makes "it so".

You're really starting to grasp at straws,
it's entertaining, tho'

[Confusious]

13. You're using it wrong

On the other hand, arguments from authority are an important part of informal logic. Since we cannot have expert knowledge of many subjects, we often rely on the judgments of those who do. There is no fallacy involved in simply arguing that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy only arises when it is claimed or implied that the authority is infallible in principle and can hence be exempted from criticism.

I know some anti-nukes around here who claim that their person of authority is infallible and then use the "shoot the messenger" excuse.

In your case, if someone claimed Al Gore said there was global warming, you could say appeal to authority, even though Al Gore is an expert on the subject.

I figure you're going to say it only applies to people who support nuclear.

[SpoonFed]

61. Thanks for your lecture...

on how I was correct in calling this for what it is.

Maybe you want to RTFA (or interview in this case) and get back to me.

If well-respected "Internet poser" or "Al Gore" or "NASA Physics Duderino" is just shooting off his mouth and isn't providing a sound argument backed up by reliable sources when asked, then that's just another case of this fallacy. Call it appeal to authority if you want. It's still BS.

[intaglio]

15. It is a fallacy, it's called "appeal to authority"

In this case the authority has cited another authority to say that the would only be a few cased of deaths attributable to radiation from TMI as against a vast number of other deaths in the same population.

What studies is he basing this on, and who initiated and funded the studies?

[wtmusic]

20. Nope.

I'm simply relating what a leading expert says about nuclear...it's up to you to draw your own conclusions.

Or go to bat against him. Best of luck. :D

[SpoonFed]

62. Yep... wow... surprising...

You reject the notion that using NASA Physics Duderino to make a point is an Appeal to Expertism when you're the actual OPer. That's just as surprising as NASA Physics Duderino supporting nuke power filth. I'm so surprised. :sarcasm:

[TheWraith]

65. Right. Much better we should listen to people who don't understand a subject at all.

:eyes: :wtf:

[SpoonFed]

73. Yea the word be truth, lest ye all disbelievers be sinners! n/t

[PamW]

85. ..so instead are we to listen to clueless idiots?

A physicist thinks nuke power is great. Surprise. Who would have guessed that one?
He's got a nice, impressive CV... that doesn't make a valid argument.
Just as much as anyone on here saying "it's so", makes "it so".
======================================================

Studies by physics professional societies like the American Physical Society,
and the Institute of American Physicists tell us that nuclear power is highly
supported by physicists to a 98-99% degree.

I believe that's because they actual understand how this technology works, and
what it can and can not do. One hears ridiculous claims of how nuclear power is
going to destroy the planet or kill multitudes from a sensationalizing media.
Physicists know enough science to dismiss this crap as meaningless sensationalism.
Those that are ignorant of the science have no such sanity-check, and these gullible
simpletons are stampeded into fear.

When someone of such esteemed scholarly achievement advocates policies contrary to
the ones we believe in; it should give one pause to reexamine one's beliefs.

Of course, idiots don't do that. Some only listen to scientists when it befits
their political agenda. They think with their politics and not with their brains.

PamW

[SpoonFed]

102. Blah blah blah...

How is it possible for you to not understand, make a valid argument, instead of the specious appeals to expertism, with which you are so enamoured?

The fact that the priests like the pope isn't at all fascinating to me and alot of others.
The fact that the pope claims to be the only person who hears the true word of god, isn't all that fascinating either.

Substitute your religion in there and get back to me with something worth discussing, like a valid effing argument.

[PamW]

107. How come your sentence construction is so poor?

How is it possible for you to not understand, make a valid argument, instead of the specious appeals to expertism, with which you are so enamoured?
==================================

How come your sentence construction, punctuation and spelling are so poor.

I'm not substituting a religion or just a belief system, I'm quoting scientific experts.

There's nothing wrong with quoting an authority; the fallacy is quoting a misleading authority
or an authority that is not really an authority. See:

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html

We must often rely upon expert opinion when drawing conclusions about technical matters where we lack the time or expertise to form an informed opinion. For instance, those of us who are not physicians usually rely upon those who are when making medical decisions, and we are not wrong to do so.

"...and we are not wrong to do so". It is not a logical fallacy to rely on the expertise of a true expert, like the
physicians in the above example.

Like the physicians, Dr. Till IS an expert in the relevant field. Like the physicians, his title is "Doctor".

Additionally, he lead an entire team of such experts with the resources of one of our national laboratories; in this
case Argonne National Lab. We have these national labs to provide the best possible scientific advice to our federal
government.

You don't like it because I'm quoting a true expert, while all the anti-nukes quote activists and pseudo-experts.

There's nothing wrong with good scholarship.

PamW

[Kolesar]

111. "How come" LOL

"How come your sentence construction is so poor?"
For that matter, your first attempt at a sentence is not a sentence. :rofl:

[wtmusic]

5. Hit-and-run unrec attacks from the nuclearphobes...

not to much to come back with, is there? :shrug:

[SpoonFed]

7. There is plenty...

but why should I bother to repeat what has been said here in the forums to exactly the same fact-free talking points.

I admire his anti-coal and anti-fossil fuel stance and getting arrested at that demo but frankly his statements come off as an Chornobyl casualty denier and strong believer in "technology will save our sorry asses from ourselves" camp. He puts out the tired "people are afraid of nuclear" argument. No. It's just an economically and environmentally stupid course of action to slow down climate change. He makes the claim that new tech reactors can just "burn" old nuclear waste. Unproven. He vary carefully qualifies his statements on Fukushima as having "not as yet" proven radiation related deaths, that smacks of nuke industry appologist to me. He makes some tired assertions that non-nuclear, non-fossil-fuel technologies are not ready for prime time. False.

I can't be bothered to continue, but it's pretty lame that you try to prop up his weak claims for nuclear for your continued pro-nuke posts, while in the interview he comes off much more anti-fossil-fuel than pro-nuke... but like I said keep trying.

Maybe stick to somebody with a strong, valid argument for your position instead of a big CV. Just saying.

[txlibdem]

32. There are conflicting numbers, please tell us exactly how many people have/will die from Chernobyl

I keep hearing/reading different numbers. Can you give us a figure of how many deaths can be attributed as caused by Chernobyl. I don't mean just the workers at the site but also the civilian population in the area.

Much appreciated.

[Karenina]

33. Figures of deaths are irrelevant. That's the wrong question.

25 years later, 20% of Belarus children are HEALTHY. The damage is GENERATIONAL. Birth defects, retardation, rare cancers...

[txlibdem]

37. Such a tragedy. Surely you could come up with a link to back up those statistics?

[Karenina]

41. The first time I heard that spread was from an oncologist

Who has worked in the area for a decade and was a speaker at this exhibition when it came through town:

http://www.ibb-d.de/index.php?id=411&L=2

I've since heard it quoted in documentaries (There's a good one on LinkTV) and seen it in articles.

However, at that same exhibition I was able to meet the human face of the disaster. The main speakers were 2 women from my generation, one from Ukraine and the other Belarus; both had lost their husbands as a direct result of radiation, they were sick, their kids are sick and the grandkids ain't doin' all that well either. Both were shocked at the extent when briefed on the meticulous research that went into the project but not surprised. It confirmed what they are "time witnessing" to this day. Belarus, in particular, is not known for its free flow of information.

[wtmusic]

42. Chernobyl made everyone sick in the Ukraine

Chernobyl fraud checks reveal abuses
Dec 5, 1997 at 01:00
Thousands lose benefits

"...(con)fiscated nearly 4,000 cards identifying their holders as Chernobyl clean-up workers because they were issued unlawfully or forged, officials said Thursday. In a campaign set to end by next May, Ukraine is checking on nearly 400,000 cardholders who are entitled to state benefits as 'liquidators' of the 1986 accident at the nuclear power plant. The government had checked three-quarters of the cards and confiscated 3,819 as of December 1, the Emergencies Ministry, which handles the aftermath of Chernobyl and its victims, said in a written statement. More than 70,000 other cardholders have been asked to provide additional proof that they worked at or near the site of the world's worst civilian nuclear accident, and thus were exposed to radiation. 'The verification process has shown that entire collectives, not just individuals, received documents without the corresponding foundation,' the Emergencies Ministry statement said. It named one construction outfit whose managers received liquidator status after convincing a court they worked on buildings near Chernobyl that 'are not there and never existed.' The ministry said most of the confiscated cards were received 'by coincidence, misunderstanding or mistake.' Liquidators themselves say many were purchased by bribing bureaucrats. In cases where cards were allegedly forged, the state has pressed charges in order to get its money back. Those who received the documents by error will not be prosecuted, the statement said. Chernobyl clean-up workers receive higher-than-average pensions and other benefits, although inflation since the Soviet era has eroded the entitlements and there have been cutbacks. Ukraine has a 10 percent 'Chernobyl Tax' on payrolls to help fund the benefits, which an Emergencies Ministry official said Wednesday cost the state 4,000 hryvna ($2,120) per person annually. Many liquidators received doses of radiation working at or near Chernobyl after the accident. Thousands have died or committed suicide.

Read more: http://www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/1930/#ixzz1QPKGqIKi

Waste, fraud plague Chernobyl programs

The government says Paladiy Safarov is a victim of Chernobyl, and it pays him Hr 43 ($23) a month to prove it. Safarov accepts the money, even though the nuclear disaster he escaped as an 11-year-old boy has yet to seriously affect his health. He and his neighbor, fellow evacuee Maria Kolyadina, sometimes spend the money on CDs. Safarov and Kolyadina qualify for government compensation not for any documented medical reasons, but because they were living in one of the four designated evacuation zones when reactor number four exploded on April 26, 1986. They are well aware of the resentment among Ukrainians at the less-than-scientific manner in which the government decided who deserved official “victim status,” and the benefits that go with it. And they empathize with the many Ukrainians who suffer serious illnesses as a result of the world's worst nuclear accident, but get no help from the government because they were not residents of the official evacuation zones. “I know I don't deserve privileges,” said Safarov. “It's just life, it just happened.”

Read more: http://www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/2267/#ixzz1QPLelbnB

[txlibdem]

48. Money = Greed = Fraud = Scamming the system

Thanks for that tale of outright thievery while the truly suffering go un-aided.

Hmmm. Sounds like the American "health care" system...

[SpoonFed]

60. Some of the weakest BS you've posted...

Your crappy, incorrect (il)logical argument clearly goes like this:

There are fraudulent survivor claims
Thus there are no casualties

Weak, lame, fail.

[bananas]

99. It's a right wing talking point - and very transparent. nt

[txlibdem]

46. I've seen documentaries that say the exact same things... about coal and coal mining

Are you aware that the death toll in Japan from the earthquake and tsunami? And it keeps rising as they clear away rubble and debris.

Known dead so far: 15,500. Another 7,306 people remain missing. There it is: probably close to 23,000 people dead from an earthquake followed by a tsunami.
...source: http://en.rian.ru/world/20110626/164853700.html

"More than 90,000 people are remaining in evacuation centers three months after Japan's devastating March 11 quake and tsunami disaster"
...source: http://en.rian.ru/world/20110611/164570041.html

"Even amid the carnage and despair of Japan's tsunami victims, the plight of the 30 children at Kama Elementary School is heartbreaking.

"They sit quietly in the corner of a third-floor classroom where they have waited each day since the tsunami swept into the town of Ishinomaki for their parents to collect them. So far, no one has come and few at the school now believe they will."
...source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366898/Japan-tsunami-earthquake-30-children-sit-silent-classroom-parents-vanish.html#ixzz1QOlZCbxj

All of that human pain, suffering, and death is the result of two natural disasters. How many deaths attributed to the nuclear power plants? Zero.

[PamW]

86. Really???? How was that documented???

both had lost their husbands as a direct result of radiation, they were sick,
=======================================================

Really?? How was that documented???

What type of test shows that the death was due to radiation??

Is it a blood test like a toxicology panel? Is it a scan,
like an X-ray??? How does one show the death was from radiation??

The point is that there is no test that can show that death was due
to radiation. Additionally, no test can distinguish between man-made
radiation and the radiation that we are all exposed to everyday.

Evidently you ran into anti-nuke that just happens to be an oncologist,
and you fell for his missives "hook, line, and sinker".

BTW - the animals that live within the Chernobyl exclusion area are doing
just fine. Evidently a lot of this is just plain fear instead of somatic
effects.

PamW

[SpoonFed]

104. How about you learn some Russian, Ukranian or Belorussian...

and maybe check out something not handed down from on high from your nuclear-filth purveying overlords.

The animals inside the exclusion zone are not doing fine. They're dead and buried. They were all slaughtered and put into mass graves, including childrens' favourite pets.
It is not possible for your fantasy viewpoint to destroy your credibility any further, but you try so hard.

Your paycheck has clearly paid for your conscience, too.

[txlibdem]

116. Animals slaughtered? How barbaric.

I suppose such a sickening atrocity would be documented somewhere, right? You're so fond of documenting your unproven and outrageous statements... please do so now.

Also, I wonder how they got to all the squirrels, wolves, wild boar, bats, etc? Surely there must be a few who escaped the hangman's noose and fled into the forest. With all that radiation floating around everywhere in that area there must be hoards of three-headed this or 8-fingered that running around???

No? (crickets)

[wtmusic]

38. Possible, but not well-understood.

"Heritable genetic alterations, although individually rare, have a substantial collective health impact. Approximately 20% of these are new mutations of unknown cause. Assessment of the effect of exposures to DNA damaging agents, i.e. mutagenic chemicals and radiations, on the integrity of the human genome and on the occurrence of genetic disease remains a daunting challenge. Recent insights may explain why previous examination of human exposures to ionizing radiation, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, failed to reveal heritable genetic effects. New opportunities to assess the heritable genetic damaging effects of environmental mutagens are afforded by: (1) integration of knowledge on the molecular nature of genetic disorders and the molecular effects of mutagens; (2) the development of more practical assays for germline mutagenesis; (3) the likely use of population-based genetic screening in personalized medicine."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17174354?ordinalpos=2&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

[Terry in Austin]

47. You're identifying as a nuclearphile, then?

Good luck in your crusade... you'll need it.

Personally, I'm more of a folly-phobe.


B-)

[txlibdem]

49. So you are anti-fossil fuels then? They're the biggest folly in the history of Mankind!

It's wonderful to have another sane person who knows that use of fossil fuels will kill us all long before the zero carbon energy sources like solar, wind, tides, waves, geothermal power, and nuclear power will.

Good to have you on board!

[Terry in Austin]

54. Stated with a commendable grasp of the obvious!

I'm on board at least to the next stop. Where I get off is before this happy bs about how we can have all the energy we "need," if only it comes from the magically correct sources.

Sorry, but the party is over -- per-capita energy levels will be regressing to the historical mean one way or another, so the sooner we grow up and start managing contraction, the less painful it will be.

How about getting on board with that?

[GliderGuider]

57. +1

Most trends regress to the mean eventually. I'm hoping this one will do that sooner rather than later.

Phasing out both nuclear power and all fossil fuel use world-wide is the way to start. Let's set timeline on it. 5 years is probably a bit too ambitious. Maybe 10 years? We'll have all the wind power we want just a decade or so later, so we should be fine. I'm on board... :evilgrin:

[txlibdem]

63. Reduce energy consumption, yes. Return to a pre-1900s lifestyle? Not a chance.

We screwed up big time in 1980. Or should I say you all did, whoever voted for that imbecile traitor corporate stooge Ronald Reagan. We wouldn't even be having this conversation if Ronnie hadn't worked tirelessly with the help of under the desk persuasion of key congress members to kill President Carter's energy independence plan -- which included electric cars, efficiency mandates in everything including homes and commercial buildings, grants to the wind and solar industries that were starting to really take off until the traitor stepped in to kill both industries. Carter had all this started in 1979! His only failure was in telling the American public that they need to help a little too, turn down the thermostat a couple degrees and put on a sweater.

But history is history and here we are. Still, there are a few things that we can do that will drastically reduce our energy usage while the magic energy sources are being built up.

• Passive House building techniques reduce heating and cooling bills by 80-90% http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/06/14/115767/want-to-reduce-your-heating-cooling.html
  
• Electric vehicles, which use 20% the energy that a gasoline or diesel vehicle would
  
• LED lighting in every place where it's practical - LED light bulbs use only 15% the energy of incandescents and last up to 20 years
  
• Concentrated solar used in manufacturing where heat is needed
  ...Drying of harvested Coffee Beans http://energy.caeds.eng.uml.edu/coffee.html
  ...Industrial Process Heat--India beats us to it, could save 6% to 10% of their oil imports http://www.ircc.iitb.ac.in/~webadm/update/archives/Issue1_2006/solar-concentrator.html
  ...Same thing here www.iea-ship.org/documents/papersofnewsletterNo1.pdf
  

My view is that there's no reason to "downsize" our lifestyle. We need to stop doing things the stupid way and start doing everything the smart way. With all the free energy that is being ignored today (aka renewables), the entire population of the world could live an American or European lifestyle with the same amount of energy generation. Less waste is all it takes.

[Nihil]

66. That is a very good point:

> We need to stop doing things the stupid way and start doing everything
> the smart way. With all the free energy that is being ignored today
> (aka renewables), the entire population of the world could live an American
> or European lifestyle with the same amount of energy generation.
> Less waste is all it takes.

:toast:

(Not sure about the use of "all" but totally agree with the spirit of it!)

[txlibdem]

75. I know it can be done, I just have doubts that it can be done in a Capitalist system

When profit is your only goal you cannot make logical and rational long term decisions. Thanks for the brewsky.

[Terry in Austin]

68. Ah, the myth of progress

You seem to have bought into it thoroughly. "Tomorrow will always be better than today," 1900 is worse than 2020 -- if it's later, it's automatically going to be better.

With that goes the belief that the whole world can live at what we fancy to be our entitled first-world lifestyle. It's a nice belief, but maladaptive.

Not that anything is going to dissuade anyone who holds that belief, unfortunately. But there it is. It's been a good ride for 250 years, but historically brief and transitory.

Thing is, it's not under our control -- it's not about our choosing to "downsize." It's going to be put on us, like it or not, and by orders of magnitude more than just whether to use an LED bulb or not.

[txlibdem]

76. You see doom, I see a call to action

I'm not going down without a fight, I don't know about you. There are close to 7 billion people in the world and we need all those terrible technology thingies to keep people from dying by the millions (or billions) when the "orders of magnitude" downsizing starts to hit. I won't have all those deaths on my head. When I die I want to be able to say that I made things at least a little bit better. That is the difference between you and I it seems.

There are far more than enough resources in the world to bring 10 or 20 billion people up to a European standard of living, possibly even an American standard. Artificially created scarcity and the global ponzi scheme that is the money system are the only thing standing in the way of it. Wasteful practices held over since the early 20th century are obstacles to be overcome, not inevitable harbingers of doom.

[Terry in Austin]

80. Got the right attitude, but those expectations!

Yes, we'll need every bit of smarts we can muster, including select technologies and a keen awareness of how wasteful and exceptional the industrial era was. At least you know that extreme downsizing is in fact coming, so you're ahead of most of the pack.

There are far more than enough resources in the world to bring 10 or 20 billion people up to a European standard of living...

Whoa! This is way over the top, I'm afraid. If you're looking to support such a claim with anything like fact, you've definitely got your work cut out for you. Not that it really matters much, in terms of what's doable -- just an observation.

Besides, those elevated expectations about standard of living are what got us into this mess in the first place. Can't cure excess with excess. We're talking downsizing that's much more in line with the historical mean.

"Doom" is overstated -- realistically, population can decline by half in a hundred years with a fairly non-catastrophic shift in birth rates, mortality rates and life expectancies. Meanwhile, life goes on for most people in a normal way, albeit a "new normal." Post-Soviet Russia was kind of a preview of how this works.

Come to that, it's hard to see what's particularly "doomy" about the passing of television, Wal-Mart, the automobile, plastic packaging, air travel, and US empire -- just to name a few toxic features of our industrial-age lifestyle. We shouldn't be afraid of the upside!

[txlibdem]

81. Who decides which people get the lower life expectancies and who do not?

The same goes for mortality rates. It's all fun and games talking about reducing the excess population until you actually have to look someone in the eye before deciding if they live or die. Who decides? Who gets to live a long and healthy life and who is destined to die before being able to procreate? If the world comes to that then I won't be a part of it.

What's "doomy" about the passing of television? You are probably too young to remember when the evening news actually gave you the news, not whatever the approved corporate line is. If you do away with television then you surely will also axe the internet and cell phones, despite the fact that both have recently helped spread freedom in parts of the world that hadn't seen it for generations.

Walmart, plastic packaging and fossil fuel automobiles can all go if you ask me, we need sustainable local food, goods and electric vehicles. Replace air travel with electric high speed rail and I'm on board with that as well. US Empire: kill that too.

But when you cross into discussions of life expectancy and quality of life, I just can't agree with that morally or from a technological standpoint. You glossed over my most salient point:
"Artificially created scarcity and the global ponzi scheme that is the money system are the only thing standing in the way of it. Wasteful practices held over since the early 20th century are obstacles to be overcome, not inevitable harbingers of doom."

[Terry in Austin]

82. Mama Nature takes care of that one

"We" don't decide. This is way out of our hands. Any population policy that would matter is beyond our power, and we need to admit it.

This stuff happens at a whole different scale: populations behave according to their own rules and dynamics, well beyond the influence of any individuals or even large groups of individuals.

One of those behaviors is to grow or shrink in direct proportion to the energy input. That's just ecology. It's unflattering to our own sense of humanity, but there it is.

We're probably not that far apart in our views. I've gotta say, I will miss the internet if it goes. Assume nothing about me, though, nor my age -- the TV I watched as a kid had Howdy Doody and Milton Berle. And perhaps "the news" was in fact harmless at some point.

I'm with you on the global ponzi-like money system, which is central. The rest, well -- whether "progress" will prevail or not is probably not too hard to predict. That whole paradigm is a 20th century holdover, and very ripe to be a casualty of this particular shift.

Keep hanging in there, though -- most people still think it's Morning in America (or at least, not much past noon).

B-)

[txlibdem]

83. Morning in America - right up there with Hitler's Big Lie

The outcome that you describe in the title and first 3 paragraphs of your post ring true, if we do nothing to stop it. It's happening as we speak, thousands of children die of starvation each day. The wealthy and the powers that rule them (agreed: centralized) have been aware of this for well over a century and still nothing has been done to stop it. Prezzy Bush the 2nd actually cut off funding to any third world clinic that talked about birth control or abortion (even just mentioning the word) so it seems like the rich are just fine with the chaos that reigns in Africa and other poverty stricken areas. That way we (or some other member of the elite) can swoop in, steal their natural resources for just the price of a bribe to corrupt officials, and make off with Billions from the region.

So, we are causing the very energy deficit you describe by allowing the current ponzi-scheme to continue, by allowing the unchecked accumulation of wealth with no backlash for their actions while clawing, maiming and killing their way to the top. I think that we have the knowledge and skills worldwide to fix the damage that has been done, educate people so they know the costs of having too many children, improve living standards. The efforts on that front are working in many areas.

Morning in America: I voted against that particular moron so I have no black marks on my soul. There was no Morning in America. It was more like clinking champaign glasses and playing shuffle board while the Titanic began to sink. The band played on. Now we're 30 years into global climate change starting out at zero instead of being 30 years into President Carter's energy independence plan. I only want there to be a cop on the beat, arresting those responsible for the destruction we see all around us (and the even worse destruction that is to come). But while the current moneyed powers are pulling all the strings, there will be no recompense, no justice, no long arm of the law, none of them will be held accountable for their crimes against humanity.

[wtmusic]

64. Why that will prove impossible to achieve, until it's too late.

The situation is in many ways analogous to the tax situation in the U.S.

Over the last thirty years, we as a nation have demanded lower and lower taxes. Raising taxes has come to be viewed as a poison pill in politics, and states are at the brink of bankruptcy (the federal government would be too, if they didn't have all of those printing presses down at the Treasury). We're starting to see the effects of not having enough money to get the job done, and support is growing for increasing taxes, one way or another.

Now imagine we're budgeting for 25 years out, not next year. By the time we figure out we're in trouble, the train's already left the station - no turning back. We're fucked.

That's where we are with climate. It's all well and good for us sitting in our air conditioned homes to put those little squiggly bulbs in the socket and pat ourselves on the back, but there are millions of Chinese who are just getting their first dishwasher, or their first air conditioner. You, as an energy-munching American, are going to tell them they don't "need" it?

Good luck.

[Terry in Austin]

69. Right you are, alas

Realistically, there's probably not much chance that there will be any proactive head start on managing contraction. We'll likely be scrambling around in mad reaction well after it's too late to manage with any degree of comfort and order.

As for the Chinese, they will find out that they don't "need" their dishwashers all on their own -- we certainly won't have to tell them!

[txlibdem]

77. Not my intent at all -- see posts 75 and 76

The Chinese are just as deserving of a safe and comfortable living space as you or I. That goes for each and every Human on the planet as far as I am concerned.

I agree with your point about unsustainably low taxes being one cause of the trouble we find ourselves headed for. But it is the rampant ignorance and wasteful thinking that permeates America that is the biggest source of the climate situation and the financial troubles we now face. Businesses have carried over their mindset from 80 years ago: profit at any cost. The amount of resources we Americans waste would be enough to bring all Chinese up to a European living standard. We don't have to reduce or destroy our lifestyle, we all (worldwide) just have to begin to rethink how things are done and end the wasteful practices of last century, use our technology wisely and --you got it right-- think and plan farther ahead than the upcoming fiscal quarter.

One of the Native American tribes had a policy that any actions they take must be weighed against the effect it will have on the next 7 generations. We need to do more of that and have less wasteful practices, end our idiotic short term thinking.

[TexDevilDog]

8. Some would rather have mercury fallout everyday than the chance of radiation

[PamW]

88. Actually it's worse than that...

Some would rather have mercury fallout everyday,
as well as 100X as much radiation instead
of a small chance of radiation release.

Courtesy of the scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory:

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

...Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to
higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants
that meet government regulations...
Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is
100 times that from nuclear plants.

PamW

[Kolesar]

93. False choice

Emissions technology, solar generation, windpower, and efficiency methods can largely eliminate the mercury emissions. Americans don't have to resort to nuclear generation to solve the mercury problem.

[PamW]

94. Oh BROTHER...

Emissions technology, solar generation, windpower, and efficiency methods can largely eliminate the mercury emissions. Americans don't have to resort to nuclear generation to solve the mercury problem.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You need to read the report by the National Academy of Science that says that renewables
like solar, windpower ... can only supply about 15% to 20% our our electric demand.
They know how to do the calculations - do you??

Environmentalists love to say that "efficiency improvements" will solve energy problems.
Unfortunately, they are totally unaware of the Laws of Physics that prohibit the
efficiency improvements that they are so depending on. For example, the 2nd Law of
Thermodynamics and the efficiency limit it imposes as derived by Nicolas Carnot (1796-1832)
have been limiting the efficiency of our steam engines and steam turbines for over two
hundred years; ever since we've had them.

The "environmentalists" ignorantly wave their hands and say that we will get around those
limits with "new technology". It just shows that they don't understand the problem. It's
not a technical problem that yields to new technology, it's an absolute prohibition
wrought by the Laws of Physics. We don't get around those; witness the fact that we've had
over two hundred years of wanting to get around Carnot's limits, but we never have.

No nation is going to make their industrial sector dependent on the vagaries of Mother Nature
in supplying energy via solar and wind. There's been a lot of bandwidth wasted on report of
various new storage systems. However, all that means nothing unless they can be scaled to
store the amounts of energy we require. Just to give one an idea of the scale, in a single
day, one typical 1 Gw(e) electric power plant generates, by definition, a Gigawatt-Day of
energy. The product of a power and a time is a unit of energy. As such, it can be converted
to any other unit of energy. A Gigawatt-Day is equivalent to 20.6 Kilotons, or the energy
produced by the atomic bomb that vaporized Nagasaki. When energy storage systems can store
that amount of energy, let me know. Until then, it's dirty coal or nuclear.

PamW

[spin]

9. Nuclear is safe until something goes wrong ...

and occasionally something REALLY GOES WRONG!

Who would have ever predicted a earthquake followed by a tsunami would every hit a reactor complex located right on the shore of Japan? Who would have ever predicted that the tsunami would damage the backup generators? :sarcasm:

It seems to me that a little risk analysis could have produced a better design that might have survived.

Tokyo Faulted for Crisis Readiness
JUNE 20, 2011

***snip***

In their report, the IAEA officials said Japanese nuclear officials conducted adequate safety reviews in anticipation of events they had faced in the past, such as handling equipment failures in the nuclear plant's control room, but failed to conduct safety reviews for less familiar threats, including earthquakes and tsunamis. "No probabilistic safety assessments for external events were required" by Japan's NISA, the IAEA experts wrote.

The IAEA concluded that Japanese regulators underestimated the earthquake risk because they primarily relied on "recent historical seismological data." Instead, nuclear regulators also should have considered "paleoseismic and archaeological information on historical and pre-historical earthquakes," as recommended in IAEA guidelines, the report found.

The IAEA said it also found "insufficient defense-in-depth provisions for tsunami hazards" as per the recommendations of a review conducted by an IAEA-led team of experts in 2002. "Moreover, those additional protective measures were not reviewed and approved by the regulatory authority," the IAEA report says.

Asked about IAEA criticism of Japan's preparations for the tsunami threat, NISA's Mr. Morita said, "The latest tsunami was unprecedented in its scale. We acknowledge that we are not fully prepared for such large-scale tsunamis and intend to strengthen tsunami countermeasures.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304887904576395673460547438.html

[kristopher]

10. In hindsight every "accident" is predictable.

The problem isn't hindsight, it is foresight and the human element in complex. extremely dangerous systems.

MIT 2003 "The Future of Nuclear Power" Pg 47 (preFukushima of course)

...A number of events have occurred at reactors that were headed for an accident but stopped short. Such an event6 came to
light during an inspection of the Davis-Besse reactor vessel head in March, 2002, during reactor shutdown. The inspection disclosed a large cavity
in the vessel head next to one of the reactor control rod drive mechanisms, caused by boric acid leakage and corrosion. The cavity seriously
jeopardized reactor vessel integrity. Fortunately, the fault was discovered before restart of the reactor. This event discloses a failure on the
part of the plant owners to respond to earlier indica- tions of an issue and to look for problems in an early stage at their plant. It is still an
open question whether the average performers in the industry have yet incorporated an effective safety culture into their conduct of business. The
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission shares responsibility in the matter, as it accepted delay of scheduled surveillance and inspection of vital
primary system components. A major nuclear power initiative will not gain public confidence, if such failures occur.

With regard to the mandate of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for safety of nuclear plants in the U. S., the Davis-Besse incident also raises
questions about whether nuclear reactor safety goals are compatible with the transition to competitive electricity markets. On the one hand some
observers suggest that unregulated generators will be more concerned with maximizing plant output and less willing to close plants for safety
inspections and corrective actions where necessary. On the other hand, owners groups have long stated that nuclear plant operation conducted to
ensure a high level of safety is also economically beneficial. Further, nuclear plant accident costs are not financially attractive for plant
owners. While there may be some accident costs that are not fully internalized into decisions made by individual nuclear plant owners, the owner
of a plant that has a serious accident would face very significant adverse financial consequences...

Read that carefully. If it could happen in Japan it can happen anywhere.

[wtmusic]

11. And when it goes wrong, it's still safe.

Did someone just die at Fukushima? I hadn't heard.

[AtheistCrusader]

12. Safe is relative.

Chernobyl and similar RBMK reactors are CLEARLY not safe.
GEN1 BWR's are clearly not safe either, from common environmental risks.

After all, it's a pretty good bet that reactors 1-3 lost cooling pre-tsunami, the tsunami just made restoring cooling more difficult, and then came the explosions, as the extraction tower idea didn't work.

Will standing or travelling wave reactors ever come to fruition? Is the AP1000 safer? Will a working Thorium reactor ever go live? There's a LOT of money riding on those bets. Would like to see similar money riding on tidal, commercial wind, etc.

[PamW]

89. the scientists say that is not the case

After all, it's a pretty good bet that reactors 1-3 lost cooling pre-tsunami,
====================================================

It's not about "betting". Is "betting" your area of expertise?

It's about science to me. The scientists say, and the radiological record
supports, that the Fukushima reactors survived the quake just fine, and were
being cooled with the coolant pumps, with power supplied by the diesel-generators.

The tsunami took out the diesel-generators, their fuel supplies, and switchgear
because these vital facilities were not protected from a tsunami that got past
the seawall.

PamW

[Name removed]

55. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[txlibdem]

17. Fukushima diesel backup generators were at ground level

Had they been mounted on top of the building or in some similarly elevated position they would have functioned properly. The USA does not allow this sort of "blue sky" thinking; diesel generators are not prone to inundation by flood/tsunami/hurricane etc.

[AtheistCrusader]

26. Indicators point to a failure of the coolant system during the quake itself.

Not due to the loss of generator capacity. Generators are useless if the coolant pipes have broken.

[txlibdem]

30. I haven't heard that from official sources

Seems like we'll learn the sequence of events only after the experts sort it out.

Both the magnitude of the earthquake and the size of the tsunami exceeded the power plant's design limitations.

[PamW]

87. Where did you hear that??

All indications are that Fukushima survived the quake just fine.

The 3 operating reactors were shutdown, and were being cooled just
fine - until the tsunami hit.

Additionally, if you look at the releases of radioactivity, there
are none until after the tsunami. If there were broken pipes, one
would see that much earlier.

PamW

[bananas]

96. At Least Two Nuclear Reactors Were Damaged by the Earthquake, BEFORE the Tsunami Hit - reported by

reported by Bloomberg and others: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1159296

A radiation alarm went off at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima nuclear power plant before the tsunami hit on March 11, suggesting that contrary to earlier assumptions the reactors were damaged by the earthquake that spawned the wall of water.

A monitoring post on the perimeter of the plant about 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) from the No. 1 reactor went off at 3:29 p.m., minutes before the station was overwhelmed by the tsunami that knocked out backup power that kept reactor cooling systems running, according to documents supplied by the company. The monitor was set to go off at high levels of radiation, an official said.

<snip>

[bananas]

97. TEPCO knew this immediately and with-held it while creating a false narrative.

They even fooled nuclear physicists at national laboratories.
Or at least people who claim to be.
(edit to remove snark)

[bananas]

98. Even the tree-hugging commie liberals at BusinessWeek reported it!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=296423&mesg_id=296428

[diane in sf]

14. The choice is not just nukes and fossil fuels, efficiency, wind and solar are the best choices.

[intaglio]

16. The nuclear industry has problems

Wind and photovoltaic are already cheaper, per installed watt than nuclear.

Over here there is a new pv plant being built near me. From planning to approval to completion the installation of this 5 MW facility will have taken less than 1 year.

[txlibdem]

18. 5 MW in a year, that means 20 years to build as much power as a 1GW nuke plant

A more useful comparison is the Blythe concentrating solar power plant in CA, which will be just shy of 1 GW (964 MW), will cost $6 billion, and will take 6 years to complete.

But your post is still comparing a 24/7/365 nuclear power plant to a <8 hour per day solar plant with optimum output for only 300 days per year. When you add the cost of energy storage and excess capacity to make that 5 MW solar plant a reliable 24/7/365 energy source, the costs may be even higher than the "expensive" nuclear power plant.

When anti-nukes tout wind power they forget that wind is greatly reduced for entire seasons, months at a time, according to the government wind charts.
Available here: http://rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/maps.html

What energy source is going to "pick up the slack" if there is no large scale energy storage in place to overcome the variations in wind power output? Can you say "coal and natural gas" and can you say Cha-Ching right into the pockets of the fossil industries that are killing us as we speak.

Cheaper "only when the wind speed is highest" is not cheaper. Nor is "cheaper for 8 hours or less per day" actually cheaper. Fair comparisons will give you a guide to the path we must take: 30% of our energy from the newest, latest designs Thorium nuclear plants and 70% from renewables (with extra capacity and energy storage of adequate size) -- 0% Coal, 0% Oil, 0% natural gas and fracking. Once we achieve that level then --and only then-- can we start to phase out the nuclear power plants to reach the goal of 100% renewable energy.

[intaglio]

21. No-o-o, I'll try to keep this simple

I don't want to over stress your nuclear fixated mind

Say 450 workers are required to build a 1 GW nuclear plant over at least 5 years (I am being very generous to the nuclear industry). Add to that design (because every nuclear plant is different), geological surveys - you couldn't build a nuclear generation facility in Cornwall because of the mine subsidence problem - planning enquiries, subsequent design modifications and consent. This would be at least 10 years total (being generous again) and at least another 450 people.

That makes 4,500 man years.

Employ 450 men for building solar plant and you could build 30 in one year. That's 1.5 GW and there is plenty of waste land in Cornwall especially in the St Austell area. There would even be room for pumped storage. Gyroscopic storage is also feasible on the same land as the pv. Perhaps you don't want to hear about flow batteries which can store in excess 2 MW per unit at 92-96% efficiency.

What you dinosaur lovers also fail to understand is that a distributed supply network has massive economic and social advantages. For example less susceptibility to power outage due to transmission, transformer or (Heavens Forfend!!) plant failures. You also seem blind to the blight that a nuclear plant places on an area, buying a house that comes with a local evacuation plan tends to drop the prices.

[wtmusic]

22. Your post is remarkably deficient in references

Can you post a source for any flow battery which is 92-96% efficient?

Can you explain how flow batteries would be cost efficient in a distributed network?

Can you provide an assessment of resistance losses in a distributed network?

Can you explain what's going to back up your panels when it's cloudy?

Can you explain who's going to clean your panels when they're dirty?

Can you provide any backup at all for your ridiculous nuclear/solar construction scenarios?

Cam you provide any backup for your contention that solar is less susceptible to power outage due to transmission failure?

Can you explain how a distributed supply network has "massive social advantages"? :crazy:

Didn't think so. Next...

[kristopher]

23. I've seen desperate blather before, and your post is what it looked like.

Suppose you just back up with real analysis the claim that renewables are not superior to nuclear at meeting climate change goals.



Mods, this is a single paragraph abstract (see original form below) that I’ve broken apart for ease of reading:

You can download the full article at his webpage here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/revsolglobwarmairpol.htm

Or use this direct download link: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/ReviewSolGW09.pdf

You can view the html abstract here: http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Download slide presentation here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/0902UIllinois.pdf

Results graphed here: http://pubs.rsc.org/services/images/RSCpubs.ePlatform.Service.FreeContent.ImageService.svc/ImageService/image/GA?id=B809990C

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c

Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

Abstract
This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

As originally published:
Abstract

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition. Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85. Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge. Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs. Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs. Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs. Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85. Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations. Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended. Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended. The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85. Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality. The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss. The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs. The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73 000–144 000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300 000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15 000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020. In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[intaglio]

25. Firstly an apology max 92% efficiency recorded for Zn/Ce

my mis-reading of wiki.

2) Now how do you imagine flow batteries or flywheels could smooth power? Some of your generated current goes to the grid and some goes to the battery or flywheel. When it is needed the battery is moved from storage to output. This is the system currently used in the Canaries and by the Glenrothes installation. The batteries or flywheels are comparatively small units and can be placed on site with the renewable resource.

3) Panel output drops when it is cloudy but it does not fail entirely. Do you need a torch on an overcast day? This is why you build overcapacity into the system

4) As to resistance losses in a distributed network the generation is nearer the consumer and resistance losses are lower than for a centralised network. Until recently a lot of the power for Cornwall was wasted heating Devon. I'm sure one of the people supplying you with talking points has a handy-dandy calculator. See also item (7)

5) Cleaning panels, you are reduced to "Who's going to lean your panels when they're dirty?" The answer is a small maintenance crew probably about the same numbers per GW as are in place at a nuclear power station. Sorry to disillusion you but the shiny science fantasy world of unmanned, automatic nuclear power stations has not yet come to pass - for which I give great thanks.

6) Backup, you really do not get it. You look out of the window and you assume the weather you see is what is happening 50 miles away. If you actually bothered reading you would notice that I was careful to add wind into the mix and I assume that some tidal and wave will also become cost effective within 5-10 years. It's why we have Wavehub down here to test these things. Oh, 50 miles is a very short distance in generation terms.

7) Susceptibility to power outage. If you have few power stations the transformers power lines and breakers are under more stress if any one part of this fails. Remember the Northeast blackout in 2003? Power as it is now is in a "large world" network few routes for the electricity to follow. With distributed power you live in a "small world" network where loss of one line does not place others under exceptional stress because the routing of the power can follow so many more paths. Check the maths of small world networks - they're easily available.

8) Social advantages are provided by the neighbourhoods producing power not large utilities. Feed in tarriffs help both the individual and local governing bodies who provide placement sites for wind and pv. In the rare instances when communities are cut off the local power generation supports all. Local cut-off, although much more rare, will have less effect when the at least some power will still be available for them to use.

9) Finally I come to your request for back-up regarding nuclear/solar construction scenarios. Well my original post was about the Manor Farm site near St Austell, It is a fairly typical small construction site, if a lot less messy. The staff included a couple of civil engineers, site manager, site foreman, at present only 2 electricians, quantity surveyor, a couple of digger drivers so I guessed about 6 general operatives - navvies. As of last week the racking was in place waiting for the cabling, switchboxes and panels. One of the alternators was being delivered on that day as well. The PDF planning application was submitted in Oct 2010 and representations to the planning authorities closed early December. The farmer admitted he had been approached early in September.

In the UK planning enquiries for power stations take 2-3 years, partially because nobody wants to live within 20 miles of one. Prior to such an enquiry the Government and the power company spend considerable time and money looking for suitable sites in the area chosen . Once chosen, but before the planning enquiry, a detailed geological and topological survey is carried out. Once this is done plans can be finalised in time for the enquiry, so up to the end of the planning procedure you are looking at 5 years. Construction of the monstrosity you estimated at 6 years so I rounded the total time down to 10 years.

[wtmusic]

28. Still no references.

Not that I don't trust every stranger I meet on the internet.

But that's really beside the point. He/she who makes the claim is in charge of backing it up - with references.

"They're easily available" = amateur.

[intaglio]

29. Do you have a computer?

If you do try searching for "Manor Farm St Austell Cornwall" one of the main hits is from such a search is the PDF submitted along with the planning application.

If you are too lazy to do searches regarding "Small World Networks" here is a primer http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v393/n6684/full/393440a0.html

Not searching = lazy or scared

At the time I completed my long reply to your foolish post it was near 1 am locally and I had been working that day.

Now I repeat nuclear power is a dinosaur; a dangerous dirty, old technology dinosaur. From an earlier OP of mine I add that until just after the Japanese earthquake I would have been in full support of your position http://journals.democraticunderground.com/intaglio

[wtmusic]

35. Do you have any training in science?

If you did, and you were accustomed to reading the work of scientists who publish professionally, you might notice little numbers at the ends of sentences in their articles, with a long list of sources at the end to which they refer.

There's a reason for that. For any written claim to be taken seriously in the realm of science, the author is responsible for specifically substantiating his own claims.

Throwing out the name of an article which requires payment is one of the oldest (and laziest) tricks in the book (if you can't provide free sources, what makes you think I'm going to waste my money on paid ones?)

That and your hyperbole firmly establish the fact that you have nothing credible to back you up. And I've already gone on far too long explaining something you should have learned at age 12. :eyes:.

[Name removed]

39. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[kristopher]

45. That is internet trash-talk trying to divert from the excellent points made by intaglio in post 25.

You use garbage to obstruct more discussion on this forum than almost any other poster.

[txlibdem]

51. I seem to recall you asking for links on numerous occasions. Why the change now?

I think it's fair to ask a poster who makes a claim but does nothing to back it up to put up some links to credible sources (or at least ones that the poster believes to be credible).

It's not trash talking, it's just good scientific method.

An example: Kristopher, I am telling you that the moon is made of green cheese. A lot of people have seen it and they say the same thing. Now prove me wrong...

In this ludicrous example the poster claims something preposterous yet provides zero backup to his or her claims. No intelligent discussion can continue when posters can just throw out garbage like that. Have a little perspective, even if you disagree with someone the rules of good discussion should be maintained.

[Nihil]

67. For anyone who is interested ...

I just did a quick Google (used "manor farm solar site near st. austell" to
trim out the camping/caravan/holiday cottage sites!) and the following two
seem to be useful:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:CTVDbv4RyhQJ:planning.cornwall.gov.uk:8181/rpp/showimage.asp%3Fj%3DPA11/00670%26index%3D11122503%26DB%3D8%26DT%3D4+Manor+Farm+site+near+St+Austell&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgs9G_Fx25X7ShxUBEg4R2T5kgqfwC3S2LHwzR4RzA6934rJcM6jZavNdl3BmmlqdZ-MK_Wte-d5BkYMzLiiz6y0AJFzk72vkTyJi3lvPQN6XenTHbpwmspMmDzhUQWScs4WI8Z&sig=AHIEtbR5CYPF-s6WFOokCnnz2NP1uFoQrQ


http://cprecornwall.org.uk/Applications-in-Cornwall/Solar-Farms-in-Cornwall.html

72.2011 - Manor Farm, St Mewan, St Austell (NR/11/00670) - 62,500 panels in three
fields covering 8.2 hectares (20½ acres) - the equivalent of 10 football pitches.
Objection submitted on 14 03 2011. Approved with conditions on 14 04 2011.

From scanning the rest of the CPRE page, it looks as if they are actively
objecting to a number of the proposed sites (along with their objections
to proposed wind farm sites) but this is getting off the topic a bit ...
I thought I'd provide the links for those who couldn't be bothered to do
even the quickest search.

:hi:

[SpoonFed]

59. Hahahahahaah

You are seriously racking up the funny points in this thread.
+1 hilarious
+1 pot/kettle black

[SpoonFed]

56. Hahahahaah

Your post is remarkably deficient in references

That is some hilarious stuff. Keep it up.
Maybe you can trade references on a 1:1 basis... hahaahahaha

[txlibdem]

24. "every nuclear plant is different" - that is exactly the problem

Why are they different? Who made that the de facto standard? Obviously the nuclear construction industry rakes in huge profits by making a custom monstrosity. I have posted against this ripoff of the American consumer for ever.

I do not and have never supported anything but mass produced nuclear reactors, built from an approved design and with streamlined approval process and environmental impact process.

Any product can be made fantastically expensive and impractical by "custom" production or construction. Have you compared the price of a hand-made Lamborghini to a mass produced sports car like the Corvette? Custom made solar cells would be far more expensive than what you can buy off the shelf today. It's simple economics. Just as in home construction, if you let the construction contractor make all the decisions and never hold them accountable for achieving milestones and staying in budget, it will cost triple and take double the time than it should.

The stupidity of the utility companies to allow the nuclear construction industry to call all the shots and absorb none of the costs of work stoppages, construction delays, etc., is a problem at the utility company that needs to be fixed -- as in fire the idiots who can't negotiate a contract and get someone who can.

I've stated my preferred solution to our energy mix: 30% nuclear from new design Thorium reactors, 70% from renewables, 0% from Coal/Oil/Natural Gas. And once this is achieved we start decommissioning the nuclear power plants and adding more renewables as needed to keep up with demand.

PS, researchers in Europe have completed a prototype 20 MW pumped hydro storage that is 99.5% efficient, work will start on a GW scale unit in 2013 IIRC.

[wtmusic]

27. There's no pump in the world that's 99.5% efficient.

Most are about half that.

There's no turbine in the world that's 99.5% efficient.

Most are about half that.

Neither takes into account thermodynamic losses such as water friction with the chamber itself, etc.

Pumped storage means throwing about 80% of your energy away.

[txlibdem]

31. Here's the text and link

The first phase of a renewable energy storage project shows that a full scale plant will have very high energy efficiency

Two engineers from southern Jutland, Asger Gramkow and Jan Olsen, have successfully carried out the first phase of a project concerning storage of renewable energy, reports regional newspaper Jyske Vestkysten and Energy-supply.dk. The test of the technology was carried out in a hall, and the first results were very uplifting, says Jan Olsen:

"The first tests showed that it is practically possible to carry this out. It was said that we would lose 30-40 percent of the energy, but the tests showed that in a full scale plant, we will only lose around 0.5 percent."

The idea is to place a giant balloon underground and put millions of tons of soil on top of it. Electricity from for example wind turbines is then used to pump water into the balloon which lifts the soil. When energy is needed, the water in the balloon is released and the many tons of soil press the water through turbines which generate electricity.

http://www.denmark.dk/en/servicemenu/news/environment-energy-climate-news/promisingresultsfromrenewableenergystorageproject.htm

I'm not a physicist, just a proponent of renewable energy generation and storage. But I think I know enough math to say that if you lose only 0.5 percent then it can be said to be 99.5% efficient. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong on that.

[wtmusic]

36. Your math is flawless, and that's either a typo or marketing BS.

I would have no way to non-empirically calculate the energy lost in the displacement of millions of tons of soil, but intuitively they will need a nuke plant to even make the "efficiency" of this idea a positive number.

[Yo_Mama]

44. I think I figured it out!

I've been puzzling over that for a while.

They must be figuring water in/water out vs power in/power out. The journalist might not understand what they were talking about. Usually errors in these types of articles come from journalistic misunderstandings.

That is, obviously, not the power losses in the system. A 75% efficient turbine is very good.

TXLib - what this article is telling us is that of the water pumped into the bladder, 99.5% comes back out. That has nothing to do with the net loss of power inherent in converting energy from one form to another.

[txlibdem]

52. You could be right. Which leaves a further question... where does that .5% of the water go?

Thanks for your "two cents" on the matter. I'll have to think about that for a while.

The real truth will probably have to wait till they create the "full scale" unit they plan. I'd love it if they are proven to be right but now you've got me thinking it might be a little too optimistic. Oh, well.

[kristopher]

58. You aren't correct.

The 99.5% is an efficiency rating related to energy. The 0.5% loss is probably attributable to friction in the pipes; and the 99.5% is the comparison of energy that goes into storage vs energy that comes back out of storage.

The larger picture of system efficiency is, as you note, affected by where the energy comes from and what happens to it after it exits the storage medium.

There is no problem with the verbiage in the article, it is accurate if not fully explanatory.

As to system efficiency, if you have an electric pump running off of a generator, it is easy to see that the energy to run the pump is a debit against system efficiency. However I suspect that with this concept they are limiting the discussion to the in/out of the storage medium itself because the potential exists to run a mechanical pump directly off of the force the wind exerts on the rotors. In that case, you'd have to compare these two systems to determine the energy penalty involved.

1) Wind>rotor>generator>pump>storage>generator
vs
2) Wind>rotor>pump>storage>generator

I couldn't predict which would ultimately produce more power per dollar invested, but there are companies marketing #2 as an economically viable approach with compressed air.

[Yo_Mama]

70. You mean I'm right?

"However I suspect that with this concept they are limiting the discussion to the in/out of the storage medium itself"?

The most efficient turbines known are close to 90% efficiency due to high head falls, and those are types referred to in the article.
However I suspect that with this concept they are limiting the discussion to the in/out of the storage medium itself. Technical paper:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CC4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.7.9800%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&rct=j&q=efficiency%20limits%20water%20turbines&ei=4LYITvakNKHe0QH_q525Cw&usg=AFQjCNHQbP3gM7luEbhDDz6ceYYnj66P8Q&cad=rja

What matters from the point of view of figuring usability is the power in/power out equation. But at over 80% net in/out, wind power becomes a totally different economic proposition.

I am literally bouncing with enthusiasm over this. To date, the costs of handling power variability in wind, especially, have overwhelmed all other factors for end-grid pricing. Heavy wind contribution is jacking up end-user costs everywhere it is tried.

It is not that wind doesn't produce power efficiently (provided the siting is done right). It does. It is our lack of ability to store that power for long periods of time in an efficient manner that increases end user costs so much, because the very high cost of covering the slack periods kind of chomps up the wind efficiency.

This approach has huge benefits. It is safe - very little risk to human life. The storage should be durable. It is not that geographically limited, so we probably could dot these around relatively close to production and usage centers. That would limit transmission losses (and it provides the benefits of a distributed grid approach you were postulating).

An approach like this could be a complete game changer for wind - for what it can do. And that means that the cost of installation almost becomes a negligible factor, especially given how incredibly safe a strategy this probably is. The whole reason that effective capacity of wind on grid uptake problems drops with larger percentages of wind is that as you add wind capacity, the ability to store the large excess of power not needed by the grid actually reduces average contribution to power consumed per wind turbine. But these times are when wind turbines are running very efficiently, so the loss of that generation is what jacks up wind net price to the grid.

But an approach like this could absolutely turn that around. Admittedly, you'd have to build a lot of these, but provided you figure out the bladder composition, these would be cheap to build.

Take Scotland. The low contribution there is only because those turbines have a high correlation for when they are running at high power outputs. Build a bunch of these for storage, and you could see Scotlands 22-26% feed in go to 32 in a couple of years. Wind power would become baseload power, and the ability to take and store the electricity generated at peak wind periods would so greatly cut the net cost of the wind turbine per kwh contributed to the grid from original source.

The very highest cost for power fed into the grid of course comes from spinning reserve; there is also a grid problem of stabilizing points; these types of installations could serve both purposes.

This is extraordinarily promising.

Gravity helps you pumping into the storage system a bit, and there would be just about no water loss. Also you could stick the turbines underground with natural insulation, so it would be very suitable indeed for northern areas with cold winters.

[kristopher]

72. Your enthusiasm is misplaced.

First, though, there is this quote: "Heavy wind contribution is jacking up end-user costs everywhere it is tried."

The integration costs of wind are minimal; on the order of tenths of a cent. Your desire to fit wind into the "baseload" model is proof that you really do not have a grasp of the current state of knowledge on the subject. I'd suggest you start with the article below.

FWIW I conceived of and designed this same earth-weighted bladder storage approach more than 6 years ago together with the same principle using pressure in deep water offshore wind farms. I discarded the terrestrial idea as a significant technology due to the energy density and system efficiency of rock batteries and ice storage. I'm not claiming to have "invented" it, since it is an obvious solution that would inevitably occur to many people. I'm just saying that it isn't a new idea and I've looked at it in some detail in the past.

Does Wind Need Storage?

The fact that “the wind doesn’t always blow” is often used to suggest the need for dedicated energy storage to handle fluctuations in the generation of wind power. Such viewpoints, however, ignore the realities of both grid operation and the performance of a large, spatially diverse wind-generation resource. Historically, all other variation (for example, that due to system loads, generation-commitment and dispatch changes, and network topology changes) has been handled systemically. This is because the diversity of need leads to much lower costs when variability is aggregated before being balanced.

Storage is almost never “coupled” with any single energy source — it is most economic when operated to maximize the economic benefit to an entire system. Storage is nearly always beneficial to the grid, but this benefit must be weighed against its cost. With more than 26 GW of wind power currently operating in the United States and more than 65 GW of wind energy operating in Europe (as of the date of this writing), no additional storage has been added to the systems to balance wind. Storage has value in a system without wind, which is the reason why about 20 GW of pumped hydro storage was built in the United States and 100 GW was built worldwide, decades before wind and solar energy were considered as viable electricity generation technologies. Additional wind could increase the value of energy storage in the grid as a whole, but storage would continue to provide its services to the grid—storing energy from a mix of sources and responding to variations in the net demand, not just wind.

As an example, consider Figure 7 below, which is based on a simplified example of a dispatch model that approximates the western United States. All numerical values are illustrative only, and the storage analysis is based on a hypothetical storage facility that is limited to 10% of the peak load and 168 hours of energy. The ability of the system to integrate large penetrations of wind depends heavily on the mix of other generation resources. Storage is an example of a flexible resource, and storage has economic value to the system even without any wind energy. As wind is added to the system in increasing amounts, the value of storage will increase. With no wind, storage has a value of more than US$1,000/kW, indicating that a storage device that costs less would provide economic value to the system. As wind penetration increases, so does the value of storage, eventually reaching approximately US$1,600/kW. In this example system, the generation mix is similar to what is found today in many parts of the United States. In such a system with high wind penetration, the value of storage is somewhat greater because the economic dispatch will result in putting low-variable-cost units (e.g., coal or nuclear) on the margin (and setting the market-clearing price) much more often than it would have without the wind. More frequent periods with lower prices offers a bigger price spread and more opportunities for arbitrage, increasing the value of storage.

In a system with less base load and more flexible generation, the value of storage is relatively insensitive to the wind penetration. Figure 8 shows that storage still has value with no wind on the system, but there is a very slight increase in the value of storage even at a wind-penetration rate of 40% (energy). An across-the-board decrease in market prices reduces the incentives for a unit with high fixed costs and low variable costs (e.g., coal or nuclear) to be built in the first place. This means that in a high-wind future, fewer low-variable-cost units will be built. This reduces the amount of time that low-variable-cost units are on the margin and also reduces the value of storage relative to the “near-term” value with the same amount of wind.

The question of whether wind needs storage ultimately comes down to economic costs and benefits...

You can download the full document by clicking the pdf link below and you'll be able to see figure 7.


Wind Power Myths Debunked
november/december 2009 IEEE power & energy magazine
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2009.934268
1540-7977/09/$26.00©2009 IEEE

By Michael Milligan, Kevin Porter, Edgar DeMeo, Paul Denholm, Hannele Holttinen, Brendan Kirby, Nicholas Miller, Andrew Mills, Mark O’Malley, Matthew Schuerger, and Lennart Soder

http://www.ieee-pes.org/images/pdf/open-access-milligan.pdf

[txlibdem]

78. You are exactly right about the cost of renewables without storage

When the wind stops blowing across the wind farm, the utility that relies on those electrons has to immediately start up a natural gas "peaker" plant to cover the lost generation and maintain energy output matched precisely with demand. Peak energy generation is the highest cost energy on the planet and too much of the savings you get from having "free" wind energy is eaten up by the ultra high cost of those natural gas plants.

The reasons are many but mostly because they are not used 100% of the time so they sit idle, which means that the full cost of the plant and its workers must be passed on to the utility who buys energy from that plant only a fraction of the time. Second reason they are so expensive is that they need to be "cold started" which burns the natural gas very inefficiently, until the entire plant comes up to whatever temperature level it was designed to operate most efficiently at.

Posters who try to deflect the discussion away from these facts are, in my opinion, not doing any good for the future of renewable energy.

There is no truth to the statement that wind energy needs no storage. All intermittent renewable sources (solar, wind, tidal, wave) need energy storage if we are to end the tyranny of Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Fracking.

[Yo_Mama]

43. There has got to be something wrong with that figure

In the article it says that efficiency with the new process (a very interesting idea) is as good as pumped hydro, but the highest efficiency I ever saw on one of those was 85%, and that did not seem to be accounting for transmission losses (which should generally only be a few percent).

It's a great idea, but I don't believe those figures.

Storage is the essential, though, to pull this all together. And we need masses of it, so a project like this is wonderful.

[PamW]

90. Actually....

Why are they different? Who made that the de facto standard? Obviously the nuclear construction industry rakes in huge profits by making a custom monstrosity. I have posted against this ripoff of the American consumer for ever.

I do not and have never supported anything but mass produced nuclear reactors, built from an approved design and with streamlined approval process and environmental impact process.
================================================================

Actually, the reactors themselves are pretty standardized. Westinghouse, GE,
Babcock & Wilcox, and Combustion Engineering all made standardized reactors.

The hoops that you have to jump through to obtain NRC certification for the
reactors are very stringent and expensive. They require lots of calculations
and experiments for certification. It would be really prohibitively expensive
to do all that for a single plant. No - the nuclear reactors themselves have
always been standardized.

In the USA, the part that is unique to each power plant is not the nuclear steam
supply system (NSSS), but is the balance of plant. Each of the general contractors,
be it Bechtel, Stone & Webster, .... offered "off the shelf" designs. However,
they also allowed one to customize.

It's a little like buying a guitar from a luthier. Each luthier offers a basic
package, but because each guitar is built to order, the individual customer gets
to customize their order. You get to add inlays to the fretboard, fancy wood
purfling, whatever...

That was also how we got one-off copies of nuclear power plants in the USA. Each
utility selected features that they wanted for that particular plant.

Contrast that with EdF, the national electric utility for France. There one has
one utility for the entire country, so they order multiple copies of the same design.
You only have one utility to please. In the USA, we have a diversity of electric
utilities, like guitarists; and each orders a plant (modulo the reactor) to their own specs.

PamW

[txlibdem]

19. Efficiency improvements was a major part of President Carter's Energy Independence Plan

You know, the one that Ronald Reagan worked tirelessly to castigate and eventually killed every provision of (except a very watered down "Energy Star" program). Reagan canceled the regulations that would have doubled fuel economy for cars and light trucks. Reagan went under the desk, Lewinsky style, for Big Oil and look what we got for it in the end: 3 oil wars and a destroyed economy -- and we're twice as dependent on foreign oil as we were when Ronnie Raygun took office.

Needless to say, I agree with your post whole heartedly.

Gasoline vehicles waste 85% of the energy in that fuel. Electric vehicles will soon have a 200 mile range and still be affordable to a middle class family, and they use 20% of the energy that a gasoline vehicle uses.

Incandescent bulbs waste 80% of the energy. LED light bulbs use 15% of the energy, produce very little waste heat, and last 20 times longer. Even though they are currently much more expensive, the extra cost will be paid off in just a few years, then it's sweet energy savings for 15 more years.

Buildings and Houses waste energy like mad. A recent OP detailed the SmartHome, at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, uses only 10% of the energy that a "standard construction" home does. Other designs of "Passive House" save about as much on energy costs but this one looks like a "regular house" and will fit in at any locale.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/06/14/115767/want-to-reduce-your-heating-cooling.html
http://www.cmnh.org/site/AtTheMuseum/OnExhibit/SmartHome/Wall.aspx - a more detailed look at the plans and construction details here

Industrial users (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction) consume about 37% of the total 15 TW. Personal and commercial transportation consumes 20%; residential heating, lighting, and appliances use 11%; and commercial uses (lighting, heating and cooling of commercial buildings, and provision of water and sewer services) amount to 5% of the total.<58>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#By_sector

I think it's conservative to say that we can cut our energy use by 30% by switching to electric vehicles, LED lighting, and efficient homes and buildings.

[joshcryer]

34. Note that Hansen's proposal is to research and build new Gen IV reactors.

Which would destroy waste and which would arguably be safer.

[wtmusic]

40. +1

and that's been his position since long before Fukushima.

[txlibdem]

53. +100

Let's get serious about ending climate change. Without nuclear power the job is twice as hard as it could be. But everyone agrees that those 50 year old nuclear plants are not as safe as any Gen III/III+ even, let alone the passively safe Gen IV reactors. I agree that all the old plants must be replaced with Gen IV power plants.

The anti-nukesters want to block any new Gen IV power plants and then just wait for the inevitable tragedy -- then go post-crazy as they did with the Fukushima 50 year old design nuclear plants. Just so they can support their agenda.

[Yo_Mama]

71. If you consider safety issues

No nuclear power will be as safe as wind with an efficient and very safe storage system.

In fact, very few types of power would be.

Regarding nuclear, I am not sure. A lot depends on siting and investment there. Nuclear power is very safe as long as the site conditions can be controlled. It is not safe in terms of waste, ever.

There is a relatively high cost in building and maintaining nuclear power, and the bottom line is that you need to bring a lot of factors together to get the utility/safety combination we are looking for. I'm not saying it couldn't be done - just that there are real limitations, and that a country needs to make a very high commitment to get the benefits while minimizing the risks. From my perspective, nuclear power has a limited global contribution to make.

The older nuclear plants need to be dismantled. That much we can all agree on. There are much safer modern plants we can build, but in a high-risk area? How safe will it ever be?

I'm not claiming that nuclear power won't be a factor in the future. I assume it will be. But I doubt that it can be so for all that many countries, so when you step back and look at it with a global perspective, I don't think it really will replace coal around the world. We need something else to do that.

[txlibdem]

74. Nuclear alone cannot replace coal everywhere in the world.

Exactly right. Especially here in America, we've been thinking of our energy mix as a series of small projects; one here, one there, two over there. We need to stop thinking small scale. The world needs a unified plan to take best advantage of the correct power source(s) where they will do the most good at the lowest cost.

Electricity is quite vital to our civilization and our survival. It should be treated like the life's blood that it is.

The so-called "free market" is abysmally bad at putting energy resources in their proper place, but is excellent at siting them at the "most profitable" place. I think it's time to take our energy supply out of the hands of the profiteers.

[joshcryer]

79. It's true that no energy at all is 100% safe, but Gen IV would arguably be magnitudes more safe...

...than the ancient nuclear technology we're using now. I am afraid of Gen II/III and even III+. They're a bad technology because they are designed to contain thermal energy actively (even the passive III+ designs require active structural integrity monitoring though their fail safes are passive).

[Terry in Austin]

50. Safety is beside the point

It could be safe as mother's milk and that still wouldn't keep nuclear from being an all-around foolish idea.

Costs too much, does too little -- just for starters.

Mostly, it's a shiny distraction from what we really need to face: getting our grotesque levels of energy addiction down to something sane and sustainable!

[robert_13]

84. Geological Myopia & Nuclear Waste

Our planet has about 5 billion years left before we're crisped by the sun ballooning into a red giant and engulfing us. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. If we assume failure to eliminate ourselves, even if the contrary sometimes seems more evident, there will be human life or even more highly evolved descendants around for close to that length of time.

Our planet has undergone radical change since its birth. Even in the relatively short time after complex plant and animal life sprang forth and propagated all over the planet there have been huge geological shifts in the oceans and land masses. The Indian subcontinent broke off from Africa and slowly slammed into the Asian continent to form the Himalayas relatively recently, etc.

I think any intelligent reader can already sense where I'm going here. Unless we don't think it's at all criminal to obliterate billions of our highly evolved even if distant descendants with nuclear waste, nuclear waste represents a grave problem we have yet to come close to solving in any but the most extremely myopic way in terms of geological time. There simply is no safe place on earth to dump nuclear waste and there never will be.

Beings we can reasonably call human have inhabited this planet for roughly 200,000 years. The Neanderthals lasted about 400,000 years. We should be so lucky! We're so smart we're about to commit collective suicide by virtue of random, so-called "free market" incentives built into corporate structures, many of which bear no relationship whatsoever to the quality of human life even in the short run, not to mention the long run. As most here must know, corporations function legally as having individual rights despite the structure of their incentives remaining typically and utterly unrelated to any human values that are other than strictly short-term financial gain for the specific corporation's executives, shareholders, and hopefully, its employees and clients. History has demonstrated clearly that even this kind of short-term, narrowly focused benevolence on the part of corporate entities is rather Utopian.

Ideally, money is an accounting tool for individual human contributions to the long-term well being of society as a whole. There is nothing in the typical corporate structure that provides any but the narrowest, short-term incentives toward that end. Scientists should have better sense than to blindly serve the kind of myopic, fundamentally non-human incentive structure that provides obscene bonuses for people who make the corporation look good for the next quarter and the devil take the hindmost when it comes to the rest. In terms of geological time, the very idea of safe nuclear waste disposal is an oxymoron of the highest order. It shouldn't take a scientific genius to FIGURE this out unless s/he has SOLD out and so naturally tends to suppress such an inconvenient, even if otherwise blatantly obvious, practical reality.

[PamW]

91. That's why we should burn it...

There simply is no safe place on earth to dump nuclear waste and there never will be.
===================================================

That's why we shouldn't be burying long-lived nuclear waste; we should burn it.

First, remember that not all components of nuclear waste are long-lived. The fission
products that are the true nuclear waste are short lived. It's only the actinides,
which are really the result of incomplete nuclear burning that have long multi-thousand
year half-lives. We should be reprocessing and recycling spent fuel.

From a PBS Frontline interview with Dr. Charles Till, nuclear physicist and then
Associate Director of Argonne National Laboratory:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is
only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens
of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

PamW

[Kolesar]

92. Reprocessing is done in France and it certainly does not dispose of all of the waste

And they don't end up with ".... fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. ". They have a large amount of radioactive material that has to be sequestered for a long time.

The technology for a "fuel cycle" that uses up the radioactivity from the moment of enrichment through several reactor uses does not exist. It has never been demonstrated on a commercially feasible level. I doubt that the Department of Energy will demonstrate that in the next one hundred years.

[PamW]

95. BALONEY!!

And they don't end up with ".... fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. ". They have a large amount of radioactive material that has to be sequestered for a long time.

The technology for a "fuel cycle" that uses up the radioactivity from the moment of enrichment through several reactor uses does not exist. It has never been demonstrated on a commercially feasible level. I doubt that the Department of Energy will demonstrate that in the next one hundred years.
===============================================

From the vapid comments above, we can tell that you are no nuclear physicist.

The amount of material the French have to store fits in a single building at La Hauge.
Since they recycle actinides like plutonium, they don't have the multi-thousand year
problem. What is your definition of a "long time"?

Dr. Till is explaining what has already been developed by Argonne National Lab.
The technology and the processes developed by Argonne already exist.

One-hundred year forecasts of what DOE can / can not do from someone of such
limited expertise and limited knowledge of what has already been accomplished
are nothing short of laughable.

PamW

[PamW]

100. Continuing...

And they don't end up with ".... fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. ". They have a large amount of radioactive material that has to be sequestered for a long time.

The technology for a "fuel cycle" that uses up the radioactivity from the moment of enrichment through several reactor uses does not exist. It has never been demonstrated on a commercially feasible level. I doubt that the Department of Energy will demonstrate that in the next one hundred years.
===============================================================

It never ceases to amaze me how readily the anti-nukes discount science and scientists.

What are your scientific credentials, and what do you think the French end up with if
discount the words of Dr. Till.

In response, I offer the words of Dr. Till, a nuclear physicist, who was a high-level
official of Argonne National Lab at the time of the interview. He worked for the
Government, and was not some industry shill as some would claim. He was praised in
the US Senate on the occasion of his retirement:

http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/Argonne_News/news97/crtill.html

So we have an acknowledged expert in the field that tells us that all the waste
ends up as fission products that "...fission products that have, most have lives of hours,
days, months, some a few tens of years. ", and the anti-nukes casually dismiss that since
it doesn't fit their politics. Again, the syndrome of thinking with one's politics instead
of one's brain that is the hallmark of the anti-nuke.

As far as demonstrating the IFR reprocessing technology on a "commercial level", the IFR
reprocessing process is not a chemical process at a large chemical processing plant like
the French have at La Hague. IFR stands for "Integral Fast Reactor". One of the reasons
for the term "integral" is that the reactor has its own reprocessing facility on site.

As opposed to Light Water Reactors (LWRs) which are fuel with uranium dioxide ceramic, the
IFR is fueled with uranium and/or plutonium metal. Argonne developed a metallurgical process
for the reprocessing of IFR fuel. The process is simple enough in its implementation that
one can have on site reprocessing of IFR. It doesn't need to be transported to a
central chemical processing plant like La Hague.

Therefore, when Argonne built the IFR prototype at the Argonne-West campus of the Idaho
National Engineering Lab using the facilities of the EBR-II reactor plant, they also built
reprocessing prototypes at the neighboring facilities of Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF)
North and HFEF-South. Because these facilities served a single reactor, but in the IFR
nuclear fuel cycle concept, a recycle plant also services a single reactor in a commercial
implementation, then the facilities demonstrated at HFEF-North and HFEF-South were, in
essence "full-scale" facilities, or "commercial scale" facilities.

It is so typical of the anti-nukes to not do their homework, and make vacuous claims that
facilities need to be "scaled up" to "commercial scale" when they were actually demonstrated
at full-scale. This is one reason the anti-nukes are 99.9999% of the time.

Why any thinking person listens to, or believes anything the anti-nukes say is beyond me.

PamW

[Kolesar]

101. Prepare to "be amazed" Ms. Nuclear P.R. Person

What you cited in post 100 is a prototype. Read your paragraph nine.

The French system creates a huge quantity of highly radioactive waste and it is a huge disposal problem. It is chock full of of plutonium.

You cannot state that there is a demonstrated process to fully use the radioactivity in the fuel. (Actually you could state it, but you would be lying.)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=102552#102895

2007: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/nuclear-wasteland/0

The downside is that spent MOX fuel is even tougher to transport, store, and reprocess than regular used fuel. Spent MOX fuel contains four to five times as much plutonium, increasing the risk of unexpected nuclear chain reactions, called accidental criticalities, within reprocessing plants. Spent MOX is also three times as hot as spent uranium fuel, thanks to an accumulation of transuranic isotopes such as americium and curium, making it less fit for underground storage.
Therefore, according to a 2000 consensus report on reprocessing prepared for France’s prime minister, spent MOX must cool for 150 years before it can go into an underground waste repository such as Yucca Mountain . Meanwhile, spent MOX fuel is piling up quickly in La Hague’s cooling ponds: the 543-metric-ton accumulation grows by 100 metric tons every year.
The bottom line is that burning MOX fuel makes economic sense only as the beginning of a larger process that ends with incineration in a breeder reactor, and no sense at all as an end in itself. Most of France’s reprocessing customers, seeing little future for nuclear energy amid the antinuclear demonstrations of the 1980s and 1990s, accordingly saw no future for breeders either. In that context, Bertel says, pulling away from reprocessing and MOX fuel made perfect sense. As she puts it, ”If you are stuck with the spent MOX fuel, why bother?”

[SpoonFed]

103. Zing! n/t

[PamW]

106. Here's Zing right back at you.

Here's Zing right back at you.

We have another anti-nuke that doesn't do their homework, and signs on with
another post, only to find that the earlier post is a "straw man" loaded with
ERRORS due to the poor scholarship of its author.

One can generally count on anti-nukes to follow each other off the cliff like
a bunch of lemmings.

Thanks for playing.

Ho-hum; it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

PamW

[Kolesar]

110. anti-nuke that doesn't do their homework (sic)

ERRORS poor scholarship off the cliff lemmings.Ho-hum

[SpoonFed]

131. And here I was waiting for...

some valid argument in rebuttal, or some citation of a working economically-feasible environmentally-friendly 100%-fuel-burning plant actually in existence...
I would have settled for even just something that wasn't a whiny "you're all a bunch of anti-nukes!" fluster, but alas...

[PamW]

105. Classic Straw Man..

The French system creates a huge quantity of highly radioactive waste and it is a huge disposal problem. It is chock full of of plutonium....
==========================================

What we have here is the classic "straw man" argument:

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/strawman.html

Imagine a fight in which one of the combatants sets up a man of straw, attacks it, then proclaims victory.
All the while, the real opponent stands by untouched.

My comments and those of Dr. Till refer to the IFR fuel cycle, not the French MOX fuel cycle; although both
are referred to as "reprocessing". They are NOT equivalent. You don't think that a Boeing 777 is equivalent
to a Piper Cub because they are both called "airplanes", do you? Perhaps you do, I can't say.

Now to demolish the straw man. Once again we see that the anti-nukes don't do their homework and don't
know about the issues and technologies about which they attempt to speak.

All the references to the problems with the French MOX fuel cycle due to the presence of plutonium and other
actinides is not germane or applicable to the IFR fuel cycle because there are no residual actinides.

Dr Till tells us in the PBS Frontline interview:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products
that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years.

You must remember this line since you quoted it when you disputed it.

Do you understand what Dr. Till means when he says, "...you wind up with only fission products"? Dr. Till didn't
say that the spent fuel in the IFR cycle ended up with fission products and some actinides. No - Dr. Till stated only
fission products. Do you understand the concept of "only"? Merriam-Webster defines it thus:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/only<1>

In the IFR fuel cycle, you don't have plutonium and other actinides in the ultimate waste.

Again the typical anti-nuke didn't do his/her homework to discover that the IFR is an "actinide burner":

http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/20/052/20052975.pdf

(Courtesy of the IAEA; conference report CONF-890218--3) See page 23 of Yoon I Chang's
presentation where it says:

The IFR spectrum is most ideal as actinide burner

In other words, this reactor "eats actinides for breakfast". Therefore, you can take all those obsolete objections
due to problems with plutonium and other actinides and stick them....in the trash can.

Additionally, the demonstrated IFR recycling technology is done at the reactor site, so there is no problem with
transporting the spent fuel. Again, that's why the IFR is called "Integral", the recycling process is integrated
with the reactor.

Again, the recycling technology was demonstrated at "full-scale" as is stated in the IAEA report in the last
paragraph on page 1 where it states:

The next major step in the IFR development program will be the full-scale pyroprocessing demonstration to be
carried out in conjunction with EBR-II.

Therefore, NONE of your points are left standing.

You have utterly FAILED at disproving any of the statements made by Dr. Till.

Of course, how could one expect otherwise? Dr. Till is an EXPERT, a scientist, and the leader of the
development of the IFR technology.

Kolesar is just some anti-nuke that doesn't do his homework, which is why he is 100% WRONG again, as always.

PamW

[Kolesar]

109. You are citing a technology that is not used & you don't get another fifty years

...and a trillion dollars of public money to develop your dangerous toy. You might claim that IFR works, but it is no more valid than that "white elephant" breeder reactor at Clinch River.

[PamW]

113. Evidently you didn't read or understand...

You are citing a technology that is not used & you don't get another fifty years
...and a trillion dollars of public money to develop your dangerous toy. You might
claim that IFR works, but it is no more valid than that "white elephant" breeder reactor at Clinch River.
====================================================================================

Evidently you didn't read and/or understand the interview with Dr. Till:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

The IFR technology isn't being used, but there is absolute no reason why it couldn't be used.

Evidently you don't understand that the technology is already developed. It didn't
take 50 years, and a trillion dollars is 4 orders of magnitude greater than the usual level
of anti-nuke exaggeration when it comes to costs.

If you had read the article, you would know that Argonne had an operating IFR since the
middle 1980's. Unlike Clinch River, which was never build, the IFR was built and worked.

It's more than my "claim that IFR works", we have scientific evidence. Argonne
actually operated and tested a working IFR for nearly a decade. I don't
see how anyone can claim that the IFR didn't "work".

It worked superbly. As Dr. Till stated, two weeks before the Chernobyl accident, the
Argonne scientists set in motion the events that triggered Chernobyl to blow its top.
However, with the IFR, they just stood back and let the reactor handle the situation
without human intervention. The IFR quietly shutdown and cooled itself. It's all
there to read in Dr. Till's interview.

The IFR didn't cost a trillion dollars either. The IFR was shutdown by the Clinton
Administration. The year before it was shutdown, the DOE budget for IFR was $27.8 million.
That and some money from the Japanese and the domestic nuclear power industry was all
that IFR needed to keep the research / testing going.

The reactor was built, had fuel, ....all that was really needed was the money to pay
the scientists and technicians that were putting IFR through its paces. Argonne had
nearly a decade of flawless operation of the IFR reactor, and expectations for more
of the same, when the Clinton Administration lobbied Congress to shut it down.

Read Dr. Till's account of the shutdown and the raw politics involved:

http://www.ourenergyworld.com/IFR.htm

DAMN Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry to HELL.

PamW

[Kolesar]

115. Don't tell me. Tell the financial sector who run from your technology

God bless Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry

[bananas]

118. "DAMN Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry to HELL." PamW

You used boldface and uppercase for extra emphasis:

<snip>

DAMN Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry to HELL.

PamW

[bananas]

119. PamW, you linked to articles from "REPUBLIC MAGAZINE | THE VOICE OF THE PATRIOT MOVEMENT"

Your second link is to excerpts from "a series of articles in THE REPUBLIC News and Issues Magazine":

http://www.ourenergyworld.com/IFR.htm

PLENTIFUL ENERGY, THE IFR STORY, AND RELATED MATTERS
by
Charles E. Till

(Excerpted from a series of articles in THE REPUBLIC News and Issues Magazine,
June-September 2005. Preface by Terry Robinson.)

<snip>

But that's a right-wing conservative conspiracy-theory publication:

http://www.republicmagazine.com/

<snip>

REPUBLIC MAGAZINE | THE VOICE OF THE PATRIOT MOVEMENT

From the DU rules:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/forums/rules_detailed.html

<snip>

Do not quote or link to "conspiracy theory" websites, except in our September 11 forum, which is the only forum on Democratic Underground where we permit members to debate highly speculative conspiracy theories. A reasonable person should be able to identify a conspiracy theory website without much difficulty.

Members are permitted to link to highly partisan conservative websites, provided that they are doing so in the proper context.

<snip>

[PamW]

124. Thanks for tell me....

But that's a right-wing conservative conspiracy-theory publication:
=======================================

Thanks for telling me. I had no idea that the operators of this website were
so intolerant of free expression.

The words in "The IFR story" are Dr. Till's alone, and not some right-wing
publication. "The IFR story" was originally published in the journal of the
American Nuclear Society, which is the professional society for scientists
and engineers working in the nuclear field. That's where I first read it.
After that, it was picked up by the more general, non-technical press,
including Republic Magazine.

I didn't know the operators of this site practiced guilt by association.

A few years ago, I ran into an individual who was so shallow-minded and believed
in guilt by association. We were discussing a topic which centered on the
applicability of a certain law to the situation at hand. Whether the law applied
or not came down to the interpretation of some words and phrases in the text of
the law. Some interpreted those phrases to their own ends.

The woman who authored the law, and who wrote the very words in question; wrote
and testified as to their proper interpretation and meaning. Now here was the
person that actually wrote the words telling us what those words were intended to
mean. If the case reached a Court, it was this type of information that the Court
would seek in examining the "legislative history" in order to deduce the proper
legal interpretation.

Unfortunately, the woman who authored the law also agreed to an interview on
Fox News. Because of that, this shallow-minded individual declared that she
was a "Foxpert, and therefore nothing she said was to be taken seriously,
even in regards to the words that she authored. I thought I'd never
meet anyone else so shallow-minded.

However, now we have the operators of a website that practice the same principle.

If some right-wing publication reprints the text of the Declaration of Independence,
even though the words are Jefferson's, the Declaration now becomes "contaminated"
material because it appeared in a right-wing publication?????

I'm going to have to reconsider my association with this community / website,
if that is the way it operates.

PamW

[bananas]

128. You should learn the purpose and rules of this website if you're going to post here

In the row of icons at the top of every page you'll see a "Help" icon:

Help

It links to a page with lots of information,
including:
"Discussion Forum Rules" http://www.democraticunderground.com/forums/rules.html
"About Democratic Underground" http://www.democraticunderground.com/about.html

The "About" link says:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/about.html

About Democratic Underground, LLC

Democratic Underground (DU) was founded on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2001, to protest the illegitimate presidency of George W. Bush and to provide a resource for the exchange and dissemination of liberal and progressive ideas. Since then, DU has become one of the premier left-wing websites on the Internet, publishing original content six days a week, and hosting one of the Web's most active left-wing discussion boards.

<snip>

This website exists so our members and guests are assured that there are many others across the country who share their outrage at the unilateral, arrogant, and extreme right-wing approach taken by George W. Bush and his team, the conservative Republicans in Congress, and the five conservative partisans on the Supreme Court. We address the right in harsh terms, and we fully intend to make the word "conservative" absolutely radioactive. In that spirit, DU has already gained countrywide notoriety as the originator of the weekly Top Ten Conservative Idiots list, which is published (almost) every Monday.

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Among the Discussion Forum Rules:

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These are the basic rules. For a detailed explanation of how we enforce these rules, please click here.

<snip>

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<snip>

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How We Enforce The Discussion Forum Rules
This is a detailed explanation of how we enforce the basic message board rules.

Last updated February 1, 2006.

Who We Are
Who is Welcome on Democratic Underground, and Who is Not

Democratic Underground is an online community for Democrats and other progressives. Members are expected to be generally supportive of progressive ideals, and to support Democratic candidates for political office.

We ban conservative disruptors who are opposed to the broad goals of this website. If you think overall that George W. Bush is doing a swell job, or if you wish to see Republicans win, or if you are generally supportive of conservative ideals, please do not register to post, as you will likely be banned.

<snip>

Constructive criticism of Democrats or the Democratic Party is permitted. When doing so, please keep in mind that most of our members come to this website in order to get a break from the constant attacks in the media against our candidates and our values. Highly inflammatory or divisive attacks that echo the tone or substance of our political opponents are not welcome here.

You are not permitted to use this message board to work for the defeat of the Democratic Party nominee for any political office. If you wish to work for the defeat of any Democratic candidate in any General Election, then you are welcome to use someone else's bandwidth on some other website.

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<snip>

Obama: "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=4422945&mesg_id=4422945

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[PamW]

130. You still didn't anwer my question....

In the row of icons at the top of every page you'll see a "Help" icon:
======================================================================

You still didn't answer my question from my previous post.

In the forum rules, as you interpret them; if a right-wing publication
like Republic publishes a verbatim copy of Jefferson's Declaration of
Independence, does that mean the Declaration is "contaminated" and
ineligible to be cited here, because it appeared in a right-wing publication?

PamW

[diane in sf]

108. So what, it's still too expensive and toxic compared to efficency, wind and solar.

[robert_13]

112. Good point...

When are we going to get off our addiction to limited resources? There is no question that nuclear fuel is a limited resource. Again, we have temporal myopia going on here big time. Also, our planet ultimately has an energy input and output. These must always remain in equilibrium. So increasing the input means increasing the output, which means the equilibrium temperature goes up even without greenhouse gases. If we keep pretending we can just indefinitely increase our energy use exponentially, we're not being at all practical or realistic except for the very short term.

Not only do we eventually use up limited resources in some finite time that is relatively short. We eventually reach a point at which direct thermal pollution becomes a problem. All this is so unnecessary, since there have been multiple technological breakthroughs in hydrogen generation from sustainable sources, safe, dense storage, and fuel cell technology that eliminates the need for platinum catalysts while demonstrating superior performance and vastly superior immunity to degeneration. These technologies are being mostly developed by private entrepreneurs with only a dabble of government help.

Much of the lack of cost competitiveness attributed to alternative energy is simply a product of our collective lack of commitment to it and the lack of any sense of need and consequent demand owing largely to general public ignorance. It's essentially no different from all the obese people who keep eating useless, fake food at McDonald's, flavored by offshoots from the perfume industry, because that's just the way their world view is structured. It's what they see as "normal" and anyone who behaves differently is just a little weird. It's no different in principle from the people who take care of their high blood pressure with expensive drugs from the pharmaceutical industry instead of leading a healthy life. These people are amazing in their ability to deny any connection between what they eat and how they live and their health problems.

Sustainable energy is already naturally distributed. However, industrial interests are such that the alternative solutions being presented and publicized most intensively consist mostly of large, centralized plants. The energy industry thinks and behaves much like the pharmaceutical industry and medical establishment, both of which hate cheap, effective, self-administered remedies. They even outlaw them when they think they can get away with it. Diamond brand walnuts had to remove references to scientific studies from their Website that confirmed the health benefits of walnuts because the FDA threatened to shut their sales down as peddling an illegal pharmaceutical agent (drug) if they didn't. Many of the natural things people once used to address minor traumas and sickness aren't even available any more. However, the do-it-yourself enthusiasts around the world are working via the Internet to get around this when it comes to energy.

So the bottom line for me is that nuclear energy is just another high-tech "magic pill" at the collective level. It's just another pain killer that does nothing to address the fundamental problem. In that regard, it is very dangerous for the long term health of the planet and its inhabitants because it creates the illusion that everything's alright while delaying a legitimate solution. So the problem continues to become increasingly severe.

If we expand our view to understand that the evolution of the entire universe, including human technology, exclusively consists of restructuring the environment with energy flow, we have a much better chance of understanding this issue more deeply. This means that the bottom line of economics is energy flow modulated by intelligence, whether human or the intelligence represented in the interaction of natural laws. Human intelligence restructuring the environment can be either productive or counterproductive, as modern creature comforts and wars respectively demonstrate in starkly obvious ways.

This is important to understand! Ultimately, economic activity ultimately boils down exclusively to two things: energy and the intelligence with which it is directed to restructure the environment. In communications technology, this is called modulating energy with intelligence (signal). So money is really just a proxy for energy and intelligence. All material resources are limited until we develop means to exploit off-planet material resources. This morally obligates us, in my view, to conserve to the highest degree possible any material resources, and most especially those most scarce. Energy should not come from these resources. We have plenty that originates off-planet at the only successful hydrogen fusion plant whose products are available to us on earth, and that is the sun. It is already naturally distributed. This generates an intrinsically persistent and therefore ultimately invincible economic pressure, despite short-term industrial pressures to contrary stemming from a myopic sense of self-preservation, for already locally available energy to be tapped locally for local use.

[Kolesar]

121. Energy policy is controlled by the state "public utilities commission" and uninformed legislators

Government is designed to support and maintain the existing distributed public utilities system. It is assumed that the utility will add more generating capacity and that the rate payers will pay for it in higher electricity costs.

In Ohio, the system is so bad that the state constitution requires taxpayer support for the coal industry.

The legislators don't have any training in physics. They don't know what ohms law is. The newspapers write editorials and articles that are absolutely in support of their friends in the utility. In return, the utility buys advertisements to keep the newspapers in business.

Welcome to our forum :hi:

[PamW]

114. Typical lack of critical thinking skills

Diane,

Instead of lapping of the lame propaganda from the anti-nukes; why don't
you really investigate how much nuclear costs.

You will find that nuclear power is 2nd only to coal in terms of low cost.
Coal is about 1.7 cents per kw-h at the bussbar, while nuclear is 1.9 cents.
That's with many of the costs of coal externalized, i.e. not paid for like
the health costs. The nuclear costs include funding for waste disposal and
decommissioning.

Talk about expensive power - wind and solar are the expensive contenders.
They're about an order of magnitude more expensive per kw-hour than nuclear.
Yes nuclear power plants are very expensive to build, and wind and solar
are relatively cheap. But nuclear power plants provide so much more energy
that it more than makes up for the differential in cost.

Again I think you should read Frontline's interview with Dr. Till:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

or read Gwyneth Craven's book, "Power to Save the World"

Get a real education.

PamW

[robert_13]

117. Critical thinking skills?...

"Instead of lapping of the lame propaganda from the anti-nukes" - PamW

A little aside: It's "lapping up"; not "lapping of".

Now, Pam, why don't you address my points instead of indulging in the useless polemic as illustrated in this quote from you and for which you have criticized others in your previous posts? Instead of useless, pejorative labeling, why don't you point out specifically what makes the points in my last post "lame", specifically those in the last paragraph? If you're a nuclear engineer, you should understand the ideal scientific attitude well enough to do some critical thinking of your own, or are you just the typical cookbook engineer knowledgeable only in your specific discipline, but without any real scientific depth beyond reams of data and the standard mathematical routines in your field?

That kind of engineer is the norm in this country, you know. There are notable exceptions, of course, but Richard Feynman observed that even most university professors of theoretical physics were quite shallow in their understanding, unable to think deeply about the knowledge their education had offered them and that they apparently acquired mostly by rote rather than by any kind of intellectually luminous insight into underlying principles.

If you claim NOT to understand anything about communications theory, also known as information theory, that's a big hole in your ability to think about much of anything very deeply. If you do understand it even at a sophisticated lay level, then you know that radio, television, and any other kinds of telemetry or data transmission signals consist of electromagnetic energy modulated by whatever information and/or intelligence the transmitting parties desire. You also will find it easy to understand that:

1) this is a simple, special case that perfectly embodies the mechanics of change throughout the entire universe, namely that all structural modification anywhere in the universe, whether by natural evolution or intelligent beings, boils down to structural or human-like intelligence modulating the flow of energy

2) material resources are intrinsically limited unless or until we become capable of cost-effectively utilizing off-planet material resources

3) we have 5 billion years before the earth becomes engulfed by the sun's having become a red giant

4) we have no moral right to assume that human beings or their more evolved descendants will cease to exist before that time and #%&@ them over with our stupidity in having used up valuable resources they will need for uses more intelligent than wantonly burning them

5) the preceding, simple facts directly imply that we need to conserve to the maximum degree possible all material resources, especially considering our recent technological ability to consume them rapidly and the need to do so because of failure to employ intelligent alternatives together with the unprecedented and growing size of our human population

6) it is not impossible, even if it requires investment that naturally and normally makes them initially more expensive, to develop energy technology and methods of consumption that preserve material resources by using what is already energy all around us

7) the investments we already make in old technology are vastly greater than the amounts we could productively invest in more intelligent use of what is already the vast energy in our environment and available everywhere locally.


Now, if you want to pan others' ability to exercise critical thinking, then do some yourself. Attack these points intelligently, with no name calling, no pejorative labels, but simply and clearly demonstrating, point by point, any flaws you feel you detect in them. I may be wrong, but I feel your "lame" label is a way to skirt around addressing the issues these points bring up. Prove me wrong, please. I would like that very much.

[robert_13]

122. Well...?

[PamW]

123. Patience - I don't visit here every day.

[PamW]

125. You need to learn some science.

I really think very little of what you posted. You really need to learn some
science so that you can think quantitatively about these issues.

For example, you seem to believe that the waste heat and energy that humans discharge
will upset the heat balance of the planet. It does only to a trivial degree. Humans
don't produce enough heat to seriously affect the planet's heat balance. If you knew
enough to do the calculation, you would see that the waste heat that we discharge is
not the problem. You'd also know that the heat output goes as the fourth power of the
temperature via the Stephan-Boltzmann Law, and hence the factor by which the temperature
goes up is proportional to the fourth root of the factor by which we increase heat output.

No - our effect on the heat balance of the planet comes from changing how the Sun's energy
is absorbed / dissipated. That is what the greenhouse effect is about. It's not our
minuscule contribution to the heat balance, but how we affect what happens to the energy
input by the Sun.

Evidently, you've also fallen "hook, line, and sinker" for the propaganda that there's not
enough nuclear energy to sustain us for very long. The people who say that only look at the
sources of "cheap" uranium and say it won't last long. However, uranium fuel cost is only
about 1% of the cost of running a nuclear plant. If we increase our cost by 1% - so that we
now have 2% to spend on uranium - doubling the uranium cost - that opens up huge amounts of
uranium to be potential fuel.

Uranium is not the only substance that we can get nuclear energy from. We can also use thorium,
and there's a huge amount of that. Fairly soon now, we should have controlled thermonuclear fusion.
(LLNL's National Ignition Facility is expected to reach fusion ignition as early as next year.)
Then the water in the ocean will be our fuel source.

When we harvest energy, we are tapping the differential in energy between two energy states.
Take hydropower as an example, Hoover dam as a case in point. Hoover dam has an upper
reservoir called Lake Mead. It has an outflow called the Colorado River. There is a difference
in height, and hence gravitational potential energy between Lake Mead and the lower Colorado.
It is the differential in gravitational potential energy that is harvested by Hoover Dam's turbines.

Likewise, all matter is held together with nuclear energy. The lowest energy state a group of protons
and neutrons can exist in is Iron. If we fission elements heavier that Iron, so the remnants are
closer to Iron; we can harvest energy. If we fuse elements that are lighter than Iron, so the
daughter is closer to Iron, we can harvest energy. That's why both fission and fusion, seemingly
opposites, can both give you energy.

Additionally, the release of energy via the nuclear force is one million times more powerful
than interactions based on the Coulomb force; i.e. all chemical reactions, photon reactions,...in short
anything that isn't gravity or nuclear.

If you do the calculations, there is absolutely ZERO reason that the human race has to limit itself
to only the energy that it can harvest from renewables like solar and wind. You also mentioned the coming
death of the planet after the Sun consumes all its hydrogen fuel, and starts burning helium. If mankind is
to escape that destruction, then our only hope is nuclear power. We aren't going to find another home in the
cosmos using solar and wind.

You comment that the even dispersal of solar is a good thing. Actually, as I explain above, the laws of physics
allow us to harvest energy from non-uniform dispersal. Take any lump of material, and the fact that it is sitting
at ambient temperatures much greater than absolute zero means that there is a lot of energy represented. However,
because it is uniformly distributed, all at the same temperature, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us that
the efficiency with which we can harvest that energy is limited to 0%. We can't use it.

All your talk about "modulating energy with intelligence" and "restructuring the environment with energy" to
a scientist sound like so much New Age gobbledygook".

PamW

[robert_13]

126. Scientist?

Dear Pam,

Thank you for complying so nicely with my request by starting your reply with a scientifically worthless, disparaging remark. By the way, I didn't say anything about thermal pollution NOW! I simply said if we keep on EXPONENTIALLY and INDEFINITELY increasing our use of energy from other than renewable sources, EVENTUALLY we will even have thermal pollution. That is clearly a long way off and I'm quite aware of that, but it is still a no-brainer, or should be even to a robotic science digester who has problems thinking critically instead of simply regurgitating data and memorized routines for calculation.

My talk about modulating energy with intelligence should also be a no-brainer to anyone with half a truly scientific brain. It is not "new age" anything. It is a simple, scientific fact that anyone with a good high school physics education and some intelligence should easily grasp. If you think any structural change occurs without energy, you are no scientist. If you are really a scientist, you don't need to get lost in arcane, useless calculations about what's going on now, but can see the big picture. You apparently know that energy is NOT created, and understand that matter and energy are jointly conserved. However, you don't seem to follow through to the implications of that. Yes, it just flows or converts from matter to energy or the reverse, but that flow is uniquely determined by the structure of that within which it flows.

Since the structure of energy flow is uniquely determined either by natural laws or humanly devised conduits, which are ultimately just an evolved example of natural laws, including those that govern the evolution of intelligent life, it is completely analogous to the modulation of electromagnetic energy. ALL our economic activity, housing, food, energy "production", transportation, moving around the living room, is energy flow that is directed by some kind of structure. It is in principle no different from modulating a carrier frequency (energy flow) with information content that can direct other energy flow somewhere else, whether that might be a remote robotic device or someone responding to an advertisement. Electromagnetic media represent a cosmically comprehensive principle embodied in its most essential form. If you cannot think deeply enough to see that, you lack even one ounce of real understanding or any ability to think independently of whatever your professors and textbooks taught you. The world is full of overspecialized robotic engineers and technicians who do everything by rote and are unable to think intelligently outside their own discipline or within them, for that matter.

As to your entropy argument, it is indeed lame. There is enough energy of sufficient quality available locally everywhere to allow most to potentially satisfy their energy needs independent of any central provider. There will always be a need for central providers, however, especially for industrial complexes with multiple customers who require large amounts of energy. The extremely high concentrations of heat that are currently used are unnecessary for most local applications with more appropriate technology. A case in point are the new Chinese air conditioners using absorption chillers run with solar energy. This is much more efficient than using photovoltaics to run an electric unit. It is a lovely example of using the energy most available when it is most needed.

You need to sit down and think about this one, simple fact that should be self-evident to anyone who deserves to be called a scientist. If you don't get it, this is truly a hopeless case. The entire cosmos evolves at the fully comprehensive level by a completely recursive process. Energy flow within the cosmos is uniquely determined by the structure of the cosmos at every local instant within it ("local" since we probably should take relativistic non-simultaneity into account). That energy, in turn, modifies that structure. The new structure redirects the flow of energy. This recursion is the bottom line of the economics of evolution at the cosmically comprehensive level. (And please don't accuse me or anyone else of "new-age" thinking just because you don't think beyond the walls of your little box.)

There is NO difference in principle between structurally determined energy flow and energy modulated by intelligent communications signals. BOTH are simply modulated energy flow. The latter is just a highly distilled, simple instance of the former that I thought ANY scientist worth his or her salt would understand instantly. It's utterly trivial. That you call it "new-age" is downright ridiculous. Every kind of human economic activity involves structural change to our environment. I'm not talking about ecology here. I'm talking about taking cotton, baling it, making thread from it, weaving it into cloth, and making a dress. That is a structural change in the environment that required energy every little minuscule step of the way. You name one thing that doesn't boil down to this one simple fact. Then, and only then, have you earned the right to talk about "new-age gobbledygook", but then, you will have disqualified yourself even further as a real scientist.

It's too bad you bothered to waste your time with all the arguments based on energy flowing from lower to higher entropy. Yeah, OK, it's the second law of thermodynamics. I don't need your attempts at providing a scientific education. You are apparently unable to recognize anyone who understands anything about scientific principles when you find one. Scientific understanding doesn't consist of encyclopedic knowledge of facts and formulas, but a deep insight into underlying principles. That you would characterize my very precisely applicable analogy, no, EXAMPLE, of modulating electromagnetic energy with information is a blatant case in point.

In the end, you have utterly failed to comply with my request. You've simply continued to indulge in ridiculous characterizations of facts that should be self-evident to anyone with any real scientific depth. You have not addressed each of my points, one by one, by demonstrating their flaws. You have simply dismissed them with gratuitous, disparaging remarks. How scientific! I'm not impressed with names of thermodynamic laws and calculations. I'm not impressed with memorizing the encyclopedia of nuclear technology. Show me you understand principle. All you've done so far is show me you absolutely don't.

[PamW]

127. Where does on begin with this?

Where does on begin with this?

The equations and math are not just "memorized".

One can not have a complete understanding of physics and
physical law unless one can "do the math".

You "think" you are "precise"; then just what is this
"...structure of energy flow..." Does it model rest energy,
or just energy that is flowing....

Somehow you seem to have dismissed the need for high
energy concentration merely because old "swamp coolers"
are more efficient than air conditioners run with photovoltaics
( which are not all that efficient all by themselves ).

I know that we can modulate energy, and do it in an intelligent
fashion ( which I consider different than modulating energy
WITH intelligence. Intelligence doesn't modulate energy. )

If one shows someone a dog, and they call it a cat, then you
know they know neither dogs nor cats. (If they knew what a
dog was, then they wouldn't call it a cat. If they knew
what a cat was, then when shown an animal that is not a
cat ( like a dog ), they wouldn't call it a cat.)

One can tell you don't know your science in your statement
about my example where you speak of "flowing from lower to higher
entropy". The Hoover dam example was NOT about entropy
and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. It was an example of energy
being extracted from the difference in gravitational potential
energy. Just as in the dog / cat example above, you evidently
don't know about either gravitational potential energy, on one
hand, and entropy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics on the other.

The purpose of the Hoover dam example was as an example of
differing energy states, wherein we can harvest energy from
the difference. The difference in gravitational potential energy
is analogous to the difference in nuclear binding energy that
I referred to later in the post.

With the aid of a rope and pulley, we could use the gravitational
potential in a bucket of water at the top of the dam to lift a
heavy weight. We could then use the gravitational potential
energy of the weight to lift the bucket of water back up to the
top. Modulo the friction in the pulley bearings, the process is
reversible, hence no gain in entropy, and no effect from the
2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Contrast that with having two metal bricks, a hot one and a
cold one. We touch them together and heat flows from hot to
cold, until they equilibrate at some intermediate temperature.
However, given two bricks at equal intermediate temperature,
we can't recover the hot brick / cold brick situation. Here,
we have increased entropy, and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
precludes the reverse reaction.

You claim that I don't know someone that knows scientific
principles. On the contrary, I surely can recognize scientific
principles, and I also recognize when someone doesn't understand
the scientific principles and is just blowing hot air.

If you said that you didn't understand the relevant physics,
I'd be happy to take the time to instruct you on the subject.

Instead, you claim that my example is lame, when it evidently
has gone over your head.

If someone claims to know everything, but from their statements
it is evident that they don't have clue one, why would anyone
want to bother with that?

You took the test, and you flunked.

Thanks for playing. Don't call us, we'll call you.

Over and out.

PamW

[robert_13]

129. Intellectual Entropy

You take the second law and incorrectly apply it to ENERGY MERELY STORED AS POTENTIAL ENERGY and later recalled from different states of gravitational potential? You act like the second law applies only in the domain of its origin, thermodynamics. This is a mere example of stored energy being taken out of storage, and even so, there are significant losses, so entropy still increases without doing anything useful with it. To do any useful work at all it also has to move to a state of increased entropy.

Your brand of narrow, fragmented, intellectual entropy, incapable of perceiving the underlying theoretical unity of pretty much any scientific concepts at all, is just silly and makes my point beautifully. You only appeal to authority, try to establish yourself as an authority with attempts to impress us all with detailed technical babblings that are so far off the mark they completely miss the essential points, or make useless, disparaging remarks. You really can't see the forest for the trees, can you?

You have completely failed to address intelligently any specific flaws you think you detect in the points I outlined. You have only addressed either points I didn't even make, incorrectly signaled as flaws points like the one above that I did make, or simply made very unscientific, disparaging remarks about them. I have done here exactly what I've asked you to do. I have addressed the flaws in your points very specifically and directly, and you have ended the discussion having either refused to reciprocate or perhaps simply because you're incapable of doing so.

The arrogant, condescending empress is wearing no clothes. Yes, you're right. Game over. Ciao!

[SpoonFed]

133. You sir, or madam, are my new hero. n/t

[PamW]

135. Great minds think alike...

Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ.

---Anonymous.

[PamW]

134. WRONG WRONG - ERROR, ERROR, ERROR!!!!

robert_13 states:

This is a mere example of stored energy being taken out of storage, and even so, there are significant losses, so entropy still increases without doing anything useful with it. To do any useful work at all it also has to move to a state of increased entropy.

WRONG!! You state that the energy must move to a state of increased entropy in order to do useful work!
That is 100% INCORRECT. You can still get useful work without an increase in entropy, and in fact
an engine works more efficiently in the limit of no increase in entropy. (I hope you understand
the concept of taking a limit. I'm betting that you don't, since I'm anticipating a certain response
that will demonstrate that you don't know what it means to take a limit. We'll see if I'm correct. )

Consider the following from the Physics Department of Georgia State University:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/carnot.html

The most efficient heat engine cycle is the Carnot cycle, consisting of two isothermal processes and two adiabatic processes. The Carnot cycle can be thought of as the most efficient heat engine cycle allowed by physical laws...In order to approach the Carnot efficiency, the processes involved in the heat engine cycle must be reversible and involve no change in entropy.

Although the Carnot cycle is an idealization, and in real engines there always is an increase in entropy, we can
approach as close as we like to this idealization by performing the processes as reversibly as one can.

I don't see how you've addressed any of the points I made, because you don't understand them. So how can you address
them? You think that they are

First, you are again incorrect that I'm attempting to establish myself as an authority or to impress anyone here.
As far as establishing myself as an authority, evidently you don't know that on the wall beside me is a diploma
reading "Doctor of Philosophy" issued by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I have no need to attempt
to establish myself as an authority here. I cleared that hurdle decades ago, and have the certificate to prove it.

My technical discussions are not an attempt to impress; it is an attempt to educate. At that, I must admit
that I'm failing. You haven't learned a damn thing.

I addressed your points, and completely demolished them. It's just that you don't realize that. Whether you realize
it or not is immaterial, as they have been demolished.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is a law of physics or a law of nature, law of the Universe, and it is applied by
"Mother Nature". It's like the law of gravity.

When you say that the 2nd Law applies beyond thermodynamics, that is like saying the law of gravity applies
beyond the laws of physics and nature. REALLY?? Does Mother Nature know that she should be applying these
laws to other realms than thermodynamics and physics? It's called the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, because technically
it is subset of a larger group of physical laws called thermodynamics.

Now, the principles of the 2nd Law can be derived from information theory. ( not to be confused with the pseudo-science
of "communication theory ). Entropy is a measure of the "disorder" or "randomness" of a system.

As far as being "narrow", I call it precise. Evidently you don't know many scientists, or at least any good ones,
because we are all precise. That's because Mother Nature and Physics have one and only one answer to any physical
question. Even when the system is stochastic, there is still precision in the mean. That is, if we take a collection
of molecules forming a gas, if you pick a molecule at random, I can't tell you a priori what its energy / velocity will
be. However, if we take a statistically significant sample of those molecules, I can tell you what the average energy
will be a priori if I know the temperature. There is one and only one temperature for the system if it is in equilibrium.

A lot of people can't handle a field of study where the answers are precise. They need a bunch of "wiggle room". They
can't hit the bulls-eye; so they can only get close. In many fields, the non-scientific fields, close is OK.

However, one of my Professors told my class a story where he gave a student partial-credit on an exam question. The
student argued with him saying he deserved more partial credit. The Dean passed by, and said to the Professor,
"Dave, when you and your student figure out how much a WRONG answer is worth, let me know"

PamW

[SpoonFed]

136. Dear PamW...

Your bublahbuhblah tl;dr diatriabe is just another example of how you do not understand what you are talking about. Furthermore, the fact that you even respond clearly indicates that you have failed to understand how bad of a public intellectual smackdown you have just received. If you really did understand... you would be shamefully cowering in the corner, embroiled in the inner turmoil of an existential crisis from pondering over the uncomfortable truths just laid out before you.

I can hear the wooshing sound of what was said as it flys over your head, while I am standing way over here.

[PamW]

139. On the contrary...

Actually it's the other way around.

You are like someone who "thinks" he smackdowned a University Mathematics Professor
who claimed that one can take the square root of a negative number. You "think"
you proved that you can never take the square root of a negative number because
your calculator displays "Error" when you try to do that.

All the while you are totally clueless of the theory of complex numbers.

I showed your posts to my lunchtime colleagues - fellow PhD level Physicists.

They said it was obvious that your level of science comprehension was pre-Junior
High School; and asked why I bothered attempting to educate someone of such a low
level.

PamW

[SpoonFed]

141. This is what the whoosh sounds like when it breaks the sound barrier... n/t

[SpoonFed]

137. How...

Anyone would believe that someone who has clearly no understanding about the difference between accuracy and precision could be a scientist let alone hold a PhD from MIT, I surely do not know.

It is akin to the argument robert_13 brought up about the difference between being a robotic science digester and an actual scientist.

PS. You do not sound smart or educated when you awkwardly throw a priori into your sentences.

[PamW]

140. How would you know.

Anyone would believe that someone who has clearly no understanding about the difference between accuracy and precision could be a scientist let alone hold a PhD from MIT, I surely do not know.
==========================================

How would you know? I don't see anywhere where I have confused the difference
between accuracy and precision. Unless you can explain where I made such an error,
I can only chalk it up to your lack of understanding of same.

PamW

[SpoonFed]

132. Epic!

...or should be even to a robotic science digester

[robert_13]

138. For everyone else...

I'm not addressing PamW here, since I find it futile to debate intelligently with an arrogant, condescending representative of severe intellectual entropy complicated by mental myopia, so this is just for anyone else here now or who happens by in the future. Pam may well have a PhD from MIT, but I can guarantee that MIT's best professors would not be proud of her attempts at demonstrating her understanding here.

There is no indication that PamW has any significant depth at all in her own field. Lots of technical information and the ability to manipulate data with mathematics is important technical grunt work and is indispensable to modern technological reality, but in and of itself it in no way implies much if any ability to think deeply about scientific principles. Such technical work lies well within the ability of well-educated technicians even if they lack much understanding of it. Although scientists must have this ability as well, a scientist must possess a much greater depth of understanding.

In fact, Pam has indicated she thinks I don't know what approaching something in the limit means or what a limit-case phenomenon is. This is apparently an a priori assumption that nothing I've said is able to undo, despite all evidence to the contrary. This is such an elementary and fundamental concept for dealing mathematically with issues involving continuities that would otherwise be beyond mathematical analysis that she should have easily concluded from what I've already written that I would understand such a basic concept. That she fails to is amazing and once again only indicates a total lack of depth and even the technical perceptiveness to recognize technical intelligence and understanding when she runs into it.

I make these statements because they are so true of so many. Our political dilemma in the U.S. is a perfect of example of large masses of people who are utterly incapable of critical thought. They don't go for accuracy in their appreciation of reality, but are only motivated by their need to feel better about their own ignorance by listening to those who cleverly exploit this together with their narrow little fears, like xenophobia. Once the gullible audiences of these charlatans have committed to an idea that helps them feel superior to smart people because they have "common sense", there is no breaking them loose from it. They simply justify their already firm conviction with whatever wild arguments they feel might justify them. They are unconcerned with reasoning ability, since they feel right makes right and they're right, so their "reasons" are justified by the assumed "rightness" of their conclusions. The justifications are just afterthoughts, after all, so why are we making such a big deal about the flaws in their thinking? They repeat flawed reasoning over and over, since they really have no idea what a truly rational process is in the first place.

I really like this quote from one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman:

"I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way...by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"

That sums up what's been going on here extremely well. And by the way, he said that about physics professors he met in major universities all around the world. Pam has admitted that the concept of entropy exists in both thermodynamics and information theory. She calls "communications theory" a pseudoscience, apparently so unaware of the field that she's clueless we're not referring to any kind of psychology, but rather to a precise technical field that is loaded with information theoretical concepts, and that requires engineering choices based on these. At first she attacks the idea that the second law could apply to anything outside a narrow piece of physics like the field of thermodynamics. Then she admits it actually does exist in information theory. Even though they are expressed in different terms, it is universally acknowledged that these concepts of entropy are equivalent.

Perhaps she's unaware of Stephen Hawking's brilliant use of information theory in the analysis of black holes and even how that involves and connects mathematical concepts from holography. She doesn't look at the unifying aspects of what she knows. She puts everything in separate little boxes categorized neatly on her mental shelves. With the mindset she demonstrates, Hawking's idea is certainly something she would never have thought of. There was no possibility to appeal to authority, since no one had previously looked at the black hole phenomenon that way. That ignorant fool Hawking just didn't care about that, did he? Pam cites lots of little pieces she's learned a lot about, apparently by rote, a process signaled by Feynman as a symptom of sadly lacking intellectual independence in the typical human.

I'm going to illustrate my points with a specific, original example that I've never seen anywhere. It's just an example of the way I think, and is quite opposite of Pam's mindset. I suspect that Pam is sufficiently clueless that she would not only find this unintelligible, but might even find it untenable as well and perhaps call it "new-age gobbledygook". Here goes:

The scientific method is a social noise reduction system that enhances the reliability of communication between humankind and nature to facilitate practical, successful interaction with natural structure. By communication, here we mean the ability to acquire reliable information regarding natural structure and use it in turn to successfully engineer practical means of employing natural structure in our attempts to satisfy human needs and desires. Information theory indicates clearly that if we wish to communicate information reliably, whatever signals or media we use to transmit it must either have a sufficiently high signal/noise ratio to make the information intelligible to its recipients or use noise reduction techniques to improve this.

In communications, the actual engineering techniques employed involve two fundamentally different but complementary approaches. One is to filter noise out by designing filters that discriminate against it while preserving the signal sufficiently well to improve the signal/noise ratio. The other is to build redundancy into the communications themselves. In digital technology today, you digitally encode the information with enough redundancy to ensure reliability for the amount of noise in the communications channel, whatever physical incarnation it might have. That's why digital TV yields video images of vastly superior quality with relatively low signal levels and narrow bandwidth requirements so several channels fit where only one did before. The scientific method does the filtering with experimental design, tests and controls, and statistical methods. It builds in redundancy by insisting on experimental replicability as an essential criterion for acceptability of the results in the scientific community at large.

So those are my original thoughts on the nitty-gritty of what scientific method really is and why it works, all in terms of information theory. To think this way, you have to think across disciplines and not be married to previous definitions to the point of not seeing the underlying principles that make whatever it is work and that illuminate the essential processes. Very unfortunately, we live in a society in which only a very elite few really understand what's going on technically and scientifically. Biologists, even the interdisciplinary ones like biochemists, often have no clue about theoretical physics and its cosmological implications. They're basically still stuck in the classical world of the 19th century. So even most scientists, not to mention laypeople, are out of touch with fundamental issues such as those of cosmologically significant scope.

This places almost everyone in a position of having to appeal to authority, and often people make poor choices about whose authority. The most brilliant theoreticians like Einstein, Schroedinger, et al do not appeal to authority, but instead revolutionize understanding and upset the apple cart of the existing authorities' positions. This is true independence. You don't have to be an Einstein to do this. You just have to have a broad vision and the mental freedom to be original and independent. You also have to have the breadth, openness, and rationality to perceive and understand others' thoughts and critically review them; even launch new ideas from them by seeing interrelated aspects from diverse sources of information.

The last century or so of theoretical physics has been very successful in illuminating natural structure by assuming that nature is fundamentally unified. This is a kind of tacit axiom underlying the history of modern physics, hence the famed search for a "theory of everything". If your perspective is narrow and fragmented, how can you ever hope to even begin to understand much about fundamentally unified nature? The best you can do is sew together little pieces of the big picture that work for you because you're repeating what you've been taught without really understanding what ties it all together. Sad...and not that much fun either.

P.S. An interesting case in point concerning fragmented thinking:

In the potential energy example Pam proposes, some mass, whether water or a lead weight doesn't matter, is raised by energy to a higher level so that we can later use this energy by making the weight do work as it lowers. Now this potential energy is exactly that. Where is it? Is it in the weight? If so, why does how much energy it "contains" depend on where the weight ends up? The potential energy it allegedly "contains" is some arbitrary amount, even negative if we live above it. So tell me, where is the energy? The simple truth is that it is potentially energy, and how much if any is a function of how it moves, up or down and how far. That's why we call it POTENTIAL energy.

Now we can use gasoline as an example, since it doesn't matter where it is. However, it is still potential energy stored chemically from solar energy harvested by ancient algae and again by modern humans as the oily residue from fossilized algae. Again, we can pretend the energy is "in" the gasoline, but even here that depends on what state moves to what state, analogous to the positions of the gravitational example. All potential energy is determined by a change between different states, whether gravitational, chemical, or atomic. It doesn't do anything and there is no entropy increase until it is no longer merely potential, but actually energy flow generated by a change of state. Uranium represents potential energy from the residue proved by a supernova explosion. There is a huge density of energy because of the massive energy that created it, but it is that much more technically difficult to exploit it. It is in principle no different from fossil fuel except in terms of its vastly greater potential per unit mass.

The difference in quantity between uranium and fossil fuels like coal and petroleum is enormous. Uranium is very scarce, relatively speaking. That we can recycle it and its huge potential energy density, however, compensate this enough to make it a sufficiently attractive candidate that we're using it now. Nonetheless, it is a limited resource. If you can wrap your head around 5 billion years left on this planet, are we sure it will last that long if we just use it wantonly and short-sightedly to meet our current and future demands? It has other valuable uses. Why burn it all? It's the same story except it doesn't generate greenhouse gases if we eliminate the carbon costs of transportation, construction, etc. How smart it is to burn it is a simple function of how short-sighted or not you decide to be. Five billion years is a pretty long time.

If you think that since we're all going to go bye-bye anyway in five billion years and that makes it alright to mess over a few billion people before that time, well, that kind of moral reasoning is interesting. You can test the viability of any philosophical or moral principle by using extreme examples that preserve precisely the same parameters and are only extreme in the scope of their identical parameters. So to assume that it's OK to mess over a few billion people a long time from now before their normal expiration at +5 billion years, then why ins't it OK to plant nuclear devices timed to blow up the world for our great grandchildren by the time they're grown? Or why not now, or are we suddenly being a little more selfish?

So when are we going to hatch from our egg shell earth and start digesting fuel that comes from outside the shell? We're not even baby chicks yet, but we're counting ourselves before we hatch and discounting later chicks, condemning them to much scarcer natural resources of every kind.

[PamW]

142. Oh BROTHER...

Perhaps she's unaware of Stephen Hawking's brilliant use of information theory in the analysis of black holes and even how that involves and connects mathematical concepts from holography. She doesn't look at the unifying aspects of what she knows. She puts everything in separate little boxes categorized neatly on her mental shelves. With the mindset she demonstrates, Hawking's idea is certainly something she would never have thought of.
===================================================================

I see we have more of your predilection for misinformation. I am quite aware of Hawking's use of information theory
in the analysis of black holes. I have the background in Physics to fully appreciate Hawking's work. Information theory
is also useful for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Without information theory, entropy would be uncertain to a constant
of integration. We can use information theory to give us the proper constant of integration. After all, entropy is
a measure of disorder and information theory gives us a handle on same.

You really have unmitigated gall. You do not know me, yet you "think" ( term used loosely ) that you somehow
know how I think. I can assure you that you do not.

Your diatribe is rife with ERRORS. For example, Uranium is one of the most uniformly distributed and common
in the Earth's crust. If you excavate a football grid sized area to a depth of 6 feet, you can get a few kilograms
of Uranium from the diggings. It's not a common as oxygen and silicon, but I wouldn't call Uranium "scarce". Uranium
that is very cheap to mine is scarce, but if you double the price ( which adds 0.1% to the cost of running a reactor ),
there's lots of Uranium to be had. Then there's thorium...

The human race may not have to die when the Sun fries the Earth. Perhaps we will be able to make it off this planet,
and find a new home in he cosmos. However, if we do, our starships won't be powered by solar arrays and wind turbines.
Most likely they will be powered by some type of nuclear power, or thermonuclear power.

What do you mean we can "pretend" that there is energy stored in gasoline or that it all "depends" on what moves where.
No it doesn't. There is chemical potential energy in gasoline. We harvest that energy when we burn the gasoline.
There's no need to "pretend" anything.

I seem narrow to you because I insist on the interpretation of physical laws the way Mother Nature interprets them.
Mother Nature wrote those laws, and there is only Mother Nature's way. Even when Mother Nature is behaving in a
stochastic manner, the averages and/or moments are well defined.

Do you want to talk science, Mother Nature's science; or do you just want to foolishly hand-wave.

BTW my MIT professors are very proud of me.

PamW

[robert_13]

143. More data...

Well, I ask anyone who ventures by, why do we keep getting such lame arguments that TRY to make others wrong? For example, Pam uses a practically unrealizable limit case of the Carnot cycle in a ridiculous attempt to establish that entropy doesn't increase when energy actually does something. What about her other attacks on my statement that energy flows from lower to higher entropy, which is, by the way, an idea that Pam introduced, but when it comes from me suddenly it's wrong because entropy doesn't increase for POTENTIAL energy?

Then she wants to argue about how potential energy is in the gasoline when in fact it is no more in the gasoline than it is in the weight of the gravitational example. They both represent POTENTIAL for changes of state, and the POTENTIAL for energy FLOW is inherent in the POTENTIAL for a change of state, as Pam herself had already uselessly pointed out to me in a previous post. The energy is generated by the change of state. Before that, it's ONLY POTENTIAL. Burning it is a change of chemical states just like allowing the weight to move and do work. The energy is not any more IN the gasoline than it is in the weight. If we accept her view, your house is loaded with potential energy, but you have to burn it down first. However, we hope you do that only after figuring out how to get a heck of a lot of useful work out of it and not just insurance money or a jail sentence. She's the one who picked the silly weight example in an extremely lame attempt (along with the Carnot weirdness) to make me wrong. I did her a favor by providing what SEEMS to be a stronger argument for her "position" (whatever that is besides opposing anything I say, including information that merely references or restates for convenience information from her own posts).

Oh, and what about the plentiful supply of uranium just because it's abundant only if you count the highly dilute form in which it exists under your basement? She even talks about doubling the cost of extracting it as if that were realistic. There's a lot of gold like that in the earth, too, and googols of iron in the earth's core. I'll let her engineer the cost effective ways to mine any of that, since she's so incredibly competent. Talk about lame! All I can say is, "S/he that accuseth..."

She also lamely argued that the sun's energy is not economically viable because it is distributed too evenly all over the planet. This was her brilliant rebuttal to my having stated that it was already distributed and that this implies long-term economic pressure for harvesting it locally for local use. That is when SHE introduced the theme of needing entropy differentials to economically apply energy flow and in which the same information became wrong when I repeated it later. She's aware of Hawking's work, but doesn't seem to be aware that there is a company (Nanosolar) that can print a gigawatt of thin-film solar cells per year with nano-tech ink on a single, high-speed press at a capital equipment cost for that product of under $1/watt! (Please note that this is the cost of the solar cells as capital equipment, and very different from cost per kilowatt*hour of delivered energy, which is also very competitive NOW.)

Please also note that whatever I say, she focuses on picayune points she wants to make all-important only because she only deals with trees, and even then only as in the brilliant examples above. Notice how she never addresses the issues that relate to the forest. I don't think she even knows the forest exists, so for her, anything that refers to a forest is "new age gobbledygook". If she wants to really address the flaws in my thinking, why doesn't she pick apart my example of scientific method viewed in terms of information theory? I'd like to see her try to deal with that in any kind of rationally coherent way.

I would like to know how any really scientifically intelligent person could think I am scientifically ignorant just because I don't happen to specialize in her particular field? Pam knows a lot about physics. That's obvious. Now I'd like to see her actually demonstrate a rational mind that can see beyond tiny, local, special-case perspectives. She might even know what "special-case" means, just as I know what a limit-case phenomenon such as an ideal Carnot cycle is. I'll be more magnanimous and give her that. However, knowing that Newtonian mechanics, for example, is a special case of General Relativity, absolutely does NOT imply any ability to generate general-case perspectives from local, special-case observations. Now that's real science!

[PamW]

144. more misunderstanding...

robert_13 writes:

Then she wants to argue about how potential energy is in the gasoline when in fact it is no more in the gasoline than it is in the weight of the gravitational example. They both represent POTENTIAL for changes of state, and the POTENTIAL for energy FLOW is inherent in the POTENTIAL for a change of state, as Pam herself had already uselessly pointed out to me in a previous post. The energy is generated by the change of state. Before that, it's ONLY POTENTIAL.

I now see some of the source of robert_13's misunderstanding and ignorance on potential energy. He's using
the WRONG definition of the word "potential". He's using the common everyday usage of "potential"
meaning:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/potential/

existing in possibility:capable of development into actuality <potential benefits>

The adjective "potential" in potential energy comes from the mathematical definition as defined by
potential theory:

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

The term "potential theory" was coined in 19th-century physics, when it was realized that the fundamental forces of nature could be modeled using potentials which satisfy Laplace's equation. Although more accurate theories than for example classical Electrostatics and Newtonian gravity were developed later, the name "potential theory" remained.

Courtesy of the Mathematics Dept at University of Wisconsin:

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~robbin/951dir/electro.pdf

Courtesy of the Mathematics Dept. at Stanford:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/math220b/handouts/potential.pdf

However, mathematics is evidently not your forte` We can consider a simple example of
a ball ascending in a gravitational field. Let's have the ball contained in a vacuum vessel
so we don't have other interactions. The ball is traveling upwards, so we must agree that
the ball has kinetic energy. As the ball ascends, it slows down due to the action of gravity,
stops momentarily at its apex, and then starts to fall downward.

Consider the ball at the apex, where it is stopped. It is no longer moving, and hence has
zero kinetic energy ( all within our Lab frame of reference. ) But it previously had energy.
When it starts to fall it will have kinetic energy again. However, when it is stopped, there
is no kinetic energy. One of the fundamental principles of Physics is that energy can neither
be created nor destroyed, but only altered in form. Under your interpretation, we arrive at
a contradiction. The ball had energy while it was ascending. Then the ball momentarily had
no energy thus implying the destruction of some energy. As the ball falls down, it once again
has energy, thus implying the creation of some energy as it had none at the apex.

Your interpretation of physics leads to an unworkable, self-contradictory, mess. The proper
interpretation is that potential energy is real; as real as that kinetic energy, and the kinetic
energy the ball had as it ascends is being transformed from kinetic to potential, until it is
all potential energy at the apex, and as it falls the potential energy is converted back into
kinetic energy. At all times the sum of kinetic and potential energy is a constant as required
by the principle of Conservation of Energy. My interpretation, and the interpretation of all
intelligent scientists, is not unworkable, and is logically self-consistent in blatant contrast
to your interpretation.

You might attempt to swallow that undeserved ego and undeserved pride, and learn a little basic
junior high school physics courtesy of the Physics Dept. at Georgia State University:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/pegrav.html

robert_13 states:

In communications, the actual engineering techniques employed involve two fundamentally different but complementary approaches. One is to filter noise out by designing filters that discriminate against it while preserving the signal sufficiently well to improve the signal/noise ratio. The other is to build redundancy into the communications themselves. In digital technology today, you digitally encode the information with enough redundancy to ensure reliability for the amount of noise in the communications channel, whatever physical incarnation it might have.

Actually, I'm really glad that we have a cadre of technicians that can handle the transmission of information in a
reliable and relatively noise free manner. Without technicians such as this we would not have the bandwidth for all
the "flotsam and jetsam" of the unintelligent ramblings of fuzzy thinkers without any mental discipline. Thanks to
our technicians, we can all experience their random missives.

PamW

[robert_13]

150. Potential, potential

I understand the physical concept of potential perfectly well. I understand the continual shift from potential to kinetic when something falls and vice versa when we throw it up. It's a simple and perfectly workable definition of potential. The point is this. Where is the potential energy? It's always with REFERENCE to something else. When you burn gasoline, is the potential energy you claim is in the gas really there? Why is it not in the oxygen? Or is it in both? I say neither. The potential energy absolutely HAS to reference two states. It's a very useful mathematical abstraction that allows general-case manipulation of special-case data. The potential is defined by the difference in terms of energy available when there is change FROM one state TO the other. You said so yourself in so many words. Potential energy refers even in the technical definition to the energy potentially available by virtue of this difference. This DIFFERENCE is neither in the gas nor the oxygen, is it now?

So those who assigned the previously non-technical term "potential" to this situation made an intelligent choice. The mathematical potential you reference is simply a convention that makes sense, but you seem to take it naively and literally as energy "in" the materials under consideration. Actually it is not anywhere physically, but represents the energy potentially available as a result of the difference between states and utterly depends on which two states you reference between. But that's probably a little abstract for you. I guess all of theoretical physics must be pretty abstract for you, since the history of modern physics is that of an asymptotically disappearing distinction between the laws of nature and what they govern. Indeed, this distinction has already virtually disappeared.

In the limit, it looks very much like the distinction utterly disappears and the fully general-case reality of nature is that it is fundamentally unified and ultimately consists of nothing more than the set of all natural laws interacting recursively with itself to generate all local, special-case phenomena. So take that and munch on it for a while, if you can even begin to think in such terms. The way our senses process and present our physical environment to us is relatively arbitrary. Different species do this in sometimes radically different ways, so the "reality" we see is intrinsically local, relatively arbitrary, and special-case. It is consequently deceptive. The fundamental nature of reality is not accessible to the senses. Physics clearly demonstrated this long ago and it's not over yet. Some of the most famous physicists alive today are expecting a neo-Copernican revolution with regard to our fundamental ideas concerning the nature of reality.

So why didn't you address the examples of your silliness outlined in "More data"? The introduction of potential energy was yours, in your lame attempt to pretend that my statement that energy flows from lower to higher entropy was false. My point with regard to that is simply that energy has to do something before entropy increases, whether what is does is useful or not. The energy represented in a chemical bomb is chemical potential. When it changes state, energy flows, destroys things, and entropy is vastly increased, both in the bomb and its environs. This is an extreme example for sure, but it makes the point. Your introduction of potential energy in an attempt to make my statement wrong after having made the same argument yourself in attributing uselessness to the distributed nature of solar was just plain absurd from any point of view. The Carnot limit-case weirdness attempting to demonstrate the same "error" was also not something I would expect from anyone who had any real depth as a physicist.

So even your last post is just one more example of picking at details that you perceive to be off-base and ignoring the global issues more central to the topic. You have not addressed intelligently even once how you can possibly justify the idea of continuing indefinitely our exponential increase in energy use for five billion more years using nuclear technology or any other than indefinitely sustainable resources. Instead, you constantly pick at details that are essentially off-topic.

[robert_13]

146. One more example of energy potential...

If the potential energy is really "in" anything, then your toilet bowl represents a ton of potential energy according to E=mc^2. The problem here is there is not a whole lot of potential for a change of state that would yield anything like the amount of energy represented in converting all the matter constituting your toilet bowl unless we can find an identical toilet bowl made of antimatter. Good luck with that! I think that whole idea might be a very substantial conceptual stretch for defining what potential energy is.

With this view, we're also painting ourselves into a corner that insists that all matter is potential energy, which is only true as long as there is a potential change of state that could convert at least part of it, which still doesn't quite cut the mustard with respect to the whole of whatever matter is representing potential energy in this very theoretical view. The famous weight we use energy to lift so we can use the potential energy its newly gained altitude represents with respect to its original position is now in addition to the pure potential energy there by virtue of E=mc^2.

EVERYTHING then becomes potential energy whether we can use it or not. Now is this really a productive way to look at energy? If so, why do we bother to call matter matter and energy energy? They can be converted under the right conditions, at least partially, but matter is matter until it changes and energy is energy. We can call matter concentrated energy, but that's only useful in understanding the theoretical principle embodied in the equation E=mc^2. It has no real practical significance in terms of any current technology or even for the foreseeable future except in particle accelerators that use massive amounts of energy to generate comparatively small conversions. (Yes, I know you can combine an electron and a positron to emit a photon and that this is only one of many examples. But antimatter doesn't last very long in our environment, does it now?)

So we don't usually call matter potential energy. We have to lift it first, and the potential energy this represents is only with respect to its original position and is NOT in the matter itself. No one is referring to converting the matter in the weight to energy when we talk about the energy the potential for change in its position represents. Even in this instance, the distance it must move through to yield that energy is totally dependent on the strength of the gravitational field. The same mass on the moon would represent much less energy than it would on earth for the same distance, even though the energy to lift it would still all be represented and we could use the same energy to lift if much further. So the energy comes strictly from the potential for a change in state in a particular environment. Once more, how we say there is any energy in the weight itself if we don't resort to impractical, futile invocations of E=mc^2.

The gasoline analogy initially looks better because the potential for change of state is chemical and essentially independent of its environment unless there is nothing with which it can react. However, that is an important consideration, isn't it? If we have no reagent in the environment with which we can burn it, where is the energy? Equally important is whether the energy is in the gasoline or in the reagent. Now is that really a stupid question? Let's consider it seriously. If the energy is "in" the fuel, why do we need anything else with which it can react and why is the energy not in that instead of in the fuel? Or is it in both? Duh! Don't we think it just might be more productive and intellectually consistent to consider that the potential for generating energy flow that can do work is in the potential for initiating the reaction itself and neither in the fuel nor the reagent?

The case is essentially no different for uranium or other fissionable material, since heavy matter was all created in a supernova explosion. We can only get the energy back out by allowing it to form new material structures that total slightly less mass. The difference gets converted according to E=mc^2. Here we can legitimately talk about this equation with regard to potential energy, since we have the means to convert it. However, these means are much more technically complex than exposing gasoline to heat and air. Again, the energy is only generated by that change in state. Fusion is nicer and represents the opposite process, in which we would imitate the process occurring in stars to generate energy flow. However, we're still converting matter to energy by losing some small mass. The speed of light squared is a big deal, so a little mass goes a heck of a long way in terms of providing energy.

So again I ask, how can we pretend it makes sense to continue indefinitely exponentiating our use of energy? With five billion years left, that should be an absolute no-brainer even for those who don't understand exponential increase over time. The use of nuclear energy just masks the issue by removing any incentive to conserve material resources and use renewable sources that are either ultimately solar or geothermal. It's just mindless procrastination of the inevitable. The longer we procrastinate, the bigger the dues our descendants will have to pay. I'm sure they'll remember us well for our brilliant forethought and our compassion for their welfare. Of course, maybe that doesn't matter for some folks, since we'll be long gone by then. I guess it's just like collateral damage. As long as it's not us, it's just fine!

[PamW]

151. Back to basics.....

If the potential energy is really "in" anything, then your toilet bowl represents a ton of potential energy according to E=mc^2.
===============================

Actually that would be "rest" energy; not "potential" energy.

Perhaps it would be instructive if we took a simple example. The University of Colorado
Physics department calculates the binding energy of Carbon-12:

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/periodic_table/amu.html
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/isotopes/binding_energy.html

The mass of the proton is 1.00728 amu and the neutron mass is 1.00866 amu.
So 6 protons and 6 neutrons in C-12 have a mass of 12.0956 amu.

But the mass of C-12 is our reference used to define the amu such that
C-12 has a mass of exactly 12.0000 amu. So the sum of the parts is
greater than the whole. This mass deficit is converted to energy.

Because 1 amu represents 931.5 MeV of energy; that deficit of 0.0956 amu
represents about 89 Mev of energy. So the synthesis reaction is:

6 protons + 6 neutrons --> C-12 + 89 MeV

and is an "exoergic" reaction; i.e. it releases energy.

Now suppose we have just the C-12. It can't spontaneously fall
apart into its constituent protons and neutrons because the total
mass would then be 12.0956 amu. It would have created mass. The
Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy doesn't all that.

Or totally equivalently, if we look at it in terms of energy, if
the C-12 falls apart, it would be creating 89 MeV of energy.
Again, energy can't be created, so the C-12 is bound and stable.
The binding energy is 89 MeV, because that is what you have to
add to break the C-12 apart.

Suppose we do add the 89 MeV of binding energy, and we are able
to separate the C-12 now into 6 protons and 6 neutrons. Were
did our 89 MeV of binding energy go? It went into the mass of
the free protons and free neutrons.

Clearly the binding energy ends up in the particles; because the
masses of free protons and free neutrons are greater than their
bound counterparts inside a C-12.

So clearly the binding energy is in the particles. It doesn't
disappear or only show up when something changes. It's there
all the time.

Perhaps you can study some more physics and learn why your
conceptual model of physical law is all wrong.

Now for the political question you raise. First, I don't
believe that we are going to exponentially grow our population
and energy use for the next 5 billion years; so that's a false
premise.

Shouldn't we just use energy as it comes to us in a sustainable
manner is what I believe you are asking. My response is why
would we do that if we don't have to.

Consider the following analogy. Bill and Melinda Gates have said
that they are going to give about $10 Million to each of their
children and the rest goes to charity. So each child has $10 Million.

Evidently, you would say to each child that they should only spend
what they earn. That way they don't need to touch the $10 Million.
But why the hell do it like that. That $10 Million is more than
most people make in a lifetime; so why not let them live as millionaires?

Likewise, if we use nuclear power, and thermonuclear power which we should
have proof of principle shortly; we have the analog of that $10 Million.
The anti-nuclear propagandists say that we will run out of uranium in a
few decades. However, that's just propaganda since they only count reserves
that can be mined very cheaply. If you pay a little more for the fuel, then
lots more uranium is available for the increased price. If we use breeders,
we can use 100% of our uranium and not just the 0.7% that is U-235. We can
also use thorium. When we get fusion, in addition to using water as fusion
fuel, there are a whole host of fuel combinations for fission-fusion hybrids.
There will be plenty of energy to last that 5 billion years; and hopefully
enough to get off this planet in time before being incinerated.

Your ill-considered policy dooms the human race. As I said before, we aren't
going to power our starships with solar panels and wind turbines.

PamW

[robert_13]

152. Finally, but still off-point on potential energy...

The whole point of my previous post is that rest mass cannot be considered potential energy. Maybe I should thank Pam for unwitttingly uderscoring it. Again, for the clear, simple reasons already provided in my previous posts, potential energy is neither in the fuel nor the oxidant, but in the potential for a reaction between them. The energy is "in" the difference in state measured in terms of how much energy their reaction WOULD yield...a fairly abstract idea with no specifiable physical location until the reaction occurs. After all, the difference doesn't exist "in" either one, does it? Oh, but I must be silly for saying that, since we were all taught by some science teacher long ago that potential energy is "in" something. It demands less abstract thinking, but it's a bit naïve.

But finally Pam has addressed the 5 billion year issue. MAYBE, just MAYBE, what she says is do-able. I think totally unnecessary, however. She also assumes fusion is just around the corner. Well, maybe she knows something others don't. She seems to be uniquely optimistic about a possibility that many in that field still feel is quite remote. We've seen an awful lot of money poured into mammoth, brute-force solutions like Tokamak, lasers, etc., but precious little fusion that doesn't remotely repay the energy input.

It would be nice if she could demonstrate knowledge about alternative energy sources that amounts to even a small fraction of the quantity of information she provides about nuclear power. Then MAYBE, just MAYBE we could actually conduct an intelligent dialog. However, I still have to question even that possibility, since she danced all around Cock Robin's barn with truly nutty, essentially off-topic stuff even in her last post before FINALLY addressing the central issue. All the statements she has made regarding sustainable energy alternatives have instead demonstrated abysmal ignorance about that option. I guess if your career depends on ideas that even perceiving these alternatives as viable might threaten politically, you find reasons to throw up at them and remain ignorant enough about it so that it doesn't mess up your world view too badly, or your potential for a future in the same career. However, she has already made indignant remarks at the mere suggestion that there could be any viable alternatives represented in these puny wind turbines and solar systems. Wonder why so much investment capital is going that way? Must be some really stupid venture capitalists out there. Maybe she should google on Vinod Khosla in Silicon Valley and find out for herself.

[PamW]

153. Fusion is being attempted right now...

But finally Pam has addressed the 5 billion year issue. MAYBE, just MAYBE, what she says is do-able. I think totally unnecessary, however. She also assumes fusion is just around the corner. Well, maybe she knows something others don't. She seems to be uniquely optimistic about a possibility that many in that field still feel is quite remote. We've seen an awful lot of money poured into mammoth, brute-force solutions like Tokamak, lasers, etc., but precious little fusion that doesn't remotely repay the energy input.
============================

We may have fusion ignition fairly soon. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab is a laser fusion facility that should have enough energy to create fusion ignition; that is to get more energy out of fusion than one puts in via the laser. The scientists at LLNL are right now working up to a demonstration of fusion. Last year, the LLNL scientists did a test on the laser to see if it could deliver the energy needed, and it passed the test. Now the scientists are firing the laser at actual fusion pellets and making measurements so that they can tune the laser for an ignition shot.

https://lasers.llnl.gov/

Since I am a government-paid contractor scientist; I can't have any financial interest in the energy field. That would constitute a conflict of interest. It really annoys me that people are so shallow minded that they think that the only way someone would every support nuclear power is if their career depends on it. My career will go on whether nuclear power does or not.

What I am interested in is that we base our energy policy on science and not "greenie" dreams. I'm familiar with Khosla and others in Silicon Valley working to develop better renewables. However, it doesn't matter how efficient they are; the amount of energy that one can get per unit area is limited by Mother Nature.

The National Academy of Sciences; you know them, the TOP scientists in the USA; did a study a few years ago as to how much energy we could get from renewables. Their answer was about 15% to 20% of our present electrical capacity. So according to the
National Academy of Sciences, based on the science, we either have to cut back our energy usage by at least a factor of five, in order to sustain on renewables alone. Or we have to find a carbon-free alternative for the other 80% to 85%

Sorry but you don't know what your are talking about with regard to potential energy. The energy IS in the field, and we know that from field mechanics and by experiment.

If you claim that the energy is in a potential for a reaction; what physical form is that energy in?? Energy doesn't just come and go out of nothing ( violation of Conservation of Mass / Energy ). So how is this energy stored while its waiting around to see if a reaction is going to take place?

PamW

[kristopher]

155. Sorry to intrude , but Pam, you know that claim about the NAS is false.

Union of Concerned Scientists: Nuke Subsidies Exceed Value of Electricity Produced
See posts 68, 70, 72,73, 74,75 for the entire exchange but I'll post the refutation here:

You wrote, "That's one of the reasons the National Academy of Science and Engineering says that renewables should be only about 15% to 20% of our electrical capacity. For the remaining 80% to 85%, we need energy sources that are dependable and not dependent on the whims of Mother Nature."

There is no 2004 report as the project was launched in 2007. The 2009 report doesn't make any recommendation couched in the "should" language you present, nor do the numbers you've offered reflect the potential they see in the relevant technologies.

Pegging current US consumption at 4,000TWH they tell us that deploying existing energy efficiency technologies is our "nearest-term and lowest-cost option for moderating our nation’s demand for energy", and that accelerated "deployment of these technologies in the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors could reduce energy use by about 15 percent (15–17 quads, that is, quadrillions of British thermal units) in 2020, relative to the EIA’s “business as usual” reference case projection, and by about 30 percent (32–35 quads) in 2030 (U.S. energy consumption in 2007 was about 100 quads)."

They state that more aggressive policies and incentives would produce more results and that most of the "energy efficiency technologies are cost-effective now and are likely to continue to be competitive with any future energy-supply options; moreover, additional energy efficiency technologies continue to emerge."

The authors offer that renewable energy sources "could provide about an additional 500 TWh (500 trillion kilowatt-hours) of electricity per year by 2020 and about an additional 1100 TWh per year by 2035 through new deployments."

They are less optimistic about increased contributions from nuclear plants writing that they might provide an additional 160 TWh of electricity per year by 2020, and up to 850 TWh by 2035, by modifying current plants to increase their power output and by constructing new plants." However they are very specific with warnings that nuclear powers economics for Gen3 plants are significantly worse than predicted by the 2003 MIT nuclear study. They further opine that failure to prove the economic viability of at least 5 merchant plants by 2020 (it used to be 2010) would probably rule out nuclear as a viable option going forward.

Since the report was penned we have seen a complete collapse of the very idea that US merchant reactors are even possible and it has become very unlikely that few, if any, new plants will actually be built. If any ARE built it is extremely unlikely that they will be able to demonstrate the economic viability that is called for in the Report. This means that if their caveat about proof of concept is accurate, new nuclear is unlikely to play any significant role in carbon reduction in the US.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x275881

And to show that it is a pattern of behavior, you also misrepresented the content of this California Energy Commission study.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x296568

[PamW]

157. Sorry kristopher - but it is TRUE

By your own admission you NEVER looked up any of
the reports prior to the 2007 NAS report.

The National Academy of Sciences has been doing studies on US Energy Policy for decades. They didn't
just begin in 2007. They've been analyzing US energy policy for years.

The report I am quoting precedes the one that you've been quoting.

If you ask me, I think you FOUND the earlier reports, but you don't like what they say,
so you do as you always do and "cherry pick" only the report(s) that you agree with.

I didn't misrepresent the California Energy Commission report. I quoted it verbatim and gave
the link to the report so that people could read it for themselves. You erroneously claim that
I misrepresented the report only because you "think" ( term used loosely ) that I should have
included one more line in my quote. I gave people the link to read the whole report, including
the line you wanted me to quote. So I hardly think I was misrepresenting anything.

If anything, you misrepresent / cherry pick / distort the truth so much that any criticism coming
from you is laughable.

PamW

[kristopher]

158. As before, here is the list (back to 2000) of NAS publications on the energy issue

Feel free to provide a proper citation if you aren't fabricating your statement.

http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/library/

[PamW]

159. Your online list only goes back to 2000

Your online list only goes back to 2000. There have been a number of studies by the National Academy of Sciences with differing calculations. Unfortunately, the one that I believe is most comprehensive does not appear to have an online version ( and if it's not online, then it doesn't exist for kristopher, because he won't go to the library. )

However, some of the more optimistic for renewables studies are online including a very recent
2010 study on the prospects for renewable energy in the electric sector:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12619&page=R1

From the summary section:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12619&page=4

Please note that I am reproducing here portions that were highlighted by the reports authors.
This is what the authors wish to highlight, not me; and I will not accept any of kris' BS
criticism that I am "cherry picking" in the conclusions:

It is reasonable to envision that, collectively, non-hydropower renewable electricity could begin to provide a material contribution (i.e., reaching a level of 10 percent or more, with trends toward continued growth) to the nation’s electricity generation in the period up to 2020 with such accelerated deployment.

So for non-hydro renewables, the NAS states that up to 2020 we can see up to about 10% or more ( but that "or more" doesn't mean 90%, 80%...)

They go on to say:

In the period from 2020 to 2035, it is reasonable to envision that continued and even further accelerated deployment could potentially result in non-hydroelectric renewables providing, collectively, 20 percent or more of domestic electricity generation by 2035. In the third timeframe, beyond 2035, continued development of renewable electricity technologies could potentially provide lower costs and result in further increases in the percentage of renewable electricity generated from renewable resources. However, achieving a predominant (i.e., >50 percent) level of renewable electricity penetration will require new scientific advances (e.g., in solar photovoltaics, other renewable electricity technologies, and storage technologies) and dramatic changes in how we generate, transmit, and use electricity.

Beyond 2035, they conclude that a non-hydro renewable contribution >50% will require new technologies that we do not
have as yet, and dramatic changes in our use of electricity.

This is one of the more optimistic reports for renewables from the NAS, and even this one doesn't contemplate the
100% solar and wind future that kristopher likes to promulgate.

I'll see if I can find some of the more pessimistic assessments online, but even the optimists don't go as far as
kristopher's unrealistic utopian fantasies.

PamW

[kristopher]

160. In other words you falsely claimed that the NAS wrote something that they did not.

Your posts are characterized by overtly false claims.

[PamW]

161. NOT AT ALL!!!

There have been a number of assessments by the National Academy of Science, with somewhat differing specifics
as to the degree non-hydro renewables can be a part of our electric generation infrastructure.

Kris has for some time now stated that the National Academy of Science has NEVER put ANY limits
on the degree to which renewables can factor into the electric generation infrastructure. He believes that
the USA should be 100% solar and wind.

The NAS study that I think is the most comprehensive takes a more pessimistic view, and states that renewables
can only provide about 15% to 20% of the total generation capacity. Unfortunately, this study, like a lot of
NAS studies, is not available online, but is in scientific libraries. Kris evidently won't go to the library,
and if it doesn't exist online, it doesn't exist.

However, the National Academy did a study in 2010 which I referenced in my previous post that claimed that
for renewables won't be >50% of our generating capacity unless some very ambitious new technologies are
developed and we make some significant changes in the way we use electric energy.

So even this very optimistic study places limits on what non-hydro renewables are able to do.
This completely contradicts kristopher's contention that the NAS never placed any limits
on what renewables could do.

Now he has to sell the readership another lie to cover his own.

PamW

[kristopher]

167. Provide the name of the study

You've been repeatedly given the chance to prove you aren't dishonest so at this point failing to provide a proper cite (with page) is tantamount to an admission that you fabricated your attribution.

You can't get out of this by doubling down and making false statements about me, either.

You just wrote: "The NAS study that I think is the most comprehensive takes a more pessimistic view, and states that renewables can only provide about 15% to 20% of the total generation capacity. Unfortunately, this study, like a lot of NAS studies, is not available online, but is in scientific libraries. Kris evidently won't go to the library, and if it doesn't exist online, it doesn't exist."

[PamW]

162. It's a wonder....

I don't see why anyone would have such a difficult time believing that the scientists at the
National Academy of Science would say there are limits to what we can do with non-hydro renewables.

Suppose we had kris' dream system that was 100% solar and wind.

During the recent "hot spell" that engulfed much of the nation, a large high pressure super-cell
essentially "parked" over the eastern part of the continental US. If you check the NOAA wind reports
for those days, you will find that we had very little wind in the eastern half of the USA, for several
days. A stagnant super-cell means that one will have essentially zero wind power in the affected area.

Then we have the solar capacity. Of course, land-based solar has an essentially 25% duty cycle. For
50% of the 24 hour day that is night time, you get no energy from solar since it can't see the sun.
Then the first few hours of the morning, the solar power is quite low because of the angle at which
the sun's rays hit the Earth. Solar arrays develop the bulk of their daily energy output in the 6 hours
centered on the local noon - 9 AM to 3PM.

So if wind capacity is diminished and solar only gives your about 6 hours when working properly;
how does one provide the necessary power to run the nation?

For months, Kris said all that was needed was to network the solar plants together; that redundancy
increased the reliability of power plants. That is normally true, because failures at most power
plants are random failures and redundancy can help with random failures.

However, the night time outage of solar is not a random failure, it is a systematic one. Networking
solar power plants together is useless to solve the night time problem because if your power plant is
down because it is night; any power plant that you can network to will also be down for the night.

We do not have the capability to network to the other side of the globe. In order to transmit power
long distances with out losing all the energy in line resistance requires high voltage / "low" current.
The line loses are the product of the square of the current and the line resistance.

Large transmission lines use many feet of air as the insulator; material insulators breakdown at the
hundreds of kilovolts that are used in transmission lines. We've all see the high tension electric
transmission lines. Image what it would take to put one of those in a tunnel under the ocean.
Image a "Chunnel" type tunnel, but not one that just spans the English Channel, but one that spans
the ocean. That for just one transmission line. One would need quite a few if one wanted to back-stop
solar power plants in the USA with solar power from the other side of the planet.

We also don't have the storage technology that would be needed. The typical power plant in the USA, be
it a large coal facility or a nuclear facility is at least 1 Gw(e) - 1 Gigawatt(electric). By definition,
in a single day, a 1 Gw(e) plant produces 1 Gw-day of energy. ( The product of a power and a unit of
time is always a unit of energy. ) Since 1 Gw-day is a unit of energy, one can convert it to any other
unit of energy, just as one can convert a unit of length like inches into any other unit of energy like
feet.

It turns out that 1 Gw-day of energy is about 20.6 kilotons, or about equal to the energy of the
nuclear bomb that vaporized Nagasaki. That is the scale of the energy produced by a single large
electric power plant of which we have several hundred. That gives you an idea of the size of the
storage problem.

Our nation runs on a continuous supply of electric energy. Our food distribution system is centered
on refrigeration. We can't just refrigerate our food supply for the 6 hours a day that we have solar
power and expect that the food supply will be free of disease-causing pathogens.

When you get your power from Mother Nature, you can only get what Mother Nature is offering at any given
time; and there's no way to guarantee that Mother Nature is offering enough.

It's a wonder why people wonder about this.

PamW

[robert_13]

164. Off-base, basic assumptions...

Pam's comments assume storage and generation problems that are quickly disappearing as we speak. The problem with these nuclear religious fanatics is they don't understand anything about other energy cultures...a social analog for religious fundamentalists who still believe the world was created seven thousand years ago in six days and have to know nothing about the size of our own galaxy and how many years light has been traveling from its other side to reach us. This is not to mention our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, whose light started toward us about 2.5 million years ago. This is out of hundreds of billions of galaxies available to current observation, each with hundreds of billions of stars.

Alternative sources include wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and ocean waves and/or currents. Solar and wind power can be stored and the technologies to do that are progressing by leaps and bounds as we speak, mostly by private initiative with only a small part subsidized by government grants. Hydrogen is the technology of choice, since it is basically a carrier of electricity in its simplest and most common form, a single proton and electron. I've already mentioned that on a number of fronts direct solar generation of hydrogen from water by processes that intrinsically isolate the hydrogen from the oxygen are already proven in the lab. At least one of them is already scaled up and running on a trial basis at industrial levels in Europe. These approaches are running better than 30% efficient conversion without electricity as an intermediate step. (That's what direct solar conversion means.)

There is one individual who uses the same technology that the H-bomb uses for highly dense hydrogen storage. He even uses inefficient solar cell technology and electrolysis to generate hydrogen and still can go hundreds of miles on a single refill of small tanks in his trunk using a modified conventional engine (also very inefficient compared to fuel cells). He doesn't have to pay for gas and he's using vastly less efficient technology compared to what is going to be commercially available in the next very few years by the most pessimistic estimates.

Ammonia is another possible carrier that is just one more stage removed, since it is a hydrogen carrier. As previously mentioned, hydrogen is in turn essentially an electricity carrier. The infrastructure for ammonia distribution is already in place. All we need to do is provide ammonia from renewable sources instead of natural gas. Cheap catalysts for ammonia production from hydrogen that is much more efficient than the Haber–Bosch process have been developed in several labs, including one at a major firm in Denmark. Fuel cells for direct use of ammonia with no need to split it first to separate the hydrogen have been around for a while. Platinum as a catalyst in fuel cells has been replaced by plentiful, cheap materials that perform as well and better and do not degrade with exposure to carbon monoxide as platinum does.

There is also thermal storage using a variety of methods, including phase change in salts, and a well-tested technology, again in Denmark, that uses huge balloons buried under tons of earth and inflated with water pumped by wind turbines for later conversion to electricity with hydro-power technology.

So we don't have the hydrogen generation problem for long, nor that of storage, nor of the fuel cell technology. The rest is well-proven technology in use for a very long time. So why can't gung-ho nuclear fanatics get that into their heads and quit basing arguments on utterly obsolete assumptions about these sources' limited availability either in terms of time or abundance? It's just plain ignorant! There are just too many people around with their heads stuck in a sack, including the nuclear one.

[PamW]

166. A foolish consistency....

Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Well robert_13 is certainly
consistent...consistently WRONG! He states, "This is not to mention our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, whose light started toward us about 2.5 million years ago." Andromeda is NOT our closest galactic neighbor, and in
fact it is not even in the top 10. It's number 35:

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

I am so amused by the irony that in the middle of his rant as to how stupid other people are, as he condescends to point out
his own supposed intellectual "superiority", he gets the facts WRONG!. It appears that robert_13 knows as much about
astronomy as he does about physics, mathematics, energy systems...

robert_13 also states, There is one individual who uses the same technology that the H-bomb uses for highly dense hydrogen storage. Really??? You and this individual evidently purport to know the design of H-bombs??? Reportedly, H-bombs store
lithium and transmute it into hydrogen; tritium during the operation of the device. So where does this individual get the
neutrons to transmute the lithium?

There's no storage system that is operating at the scale needed to supply our electric needs. Yes, there are pilot plants
for hydrogen and flywheels or whatever, that all work at the few Megawatt-Day level. As I reiterated a few posts back, a
typical large fossil or nuclear power plant is 1 Gigawatt or more, and puts out 1 Gigawatt-Day of energy daily. These
pilot systems all have to scale up by a factor of roughly a thousand.

Suppose you have a 9 foot wide chasm in your back yard, and you bridge it with a few 10 foot long 2x4s. Now suppose you want
to provide a pedestrian walkway that parallels the Golden Gate bridge, and provides a new way for pedestrians to traverse
the 9000 foot distance from San Francisco to the Marin headlands. You have to scale your wooden simple beam bridge up by
a factor of 1000. You have to scale it up by the same factor that all these storage systems, be they hydrogen, flywheels,
or whatever, have to scale up.

We don't have energy storage, "right around the corner".

You want to continue this discussion? Fine - go get yourself a PhD in Physics. Fine chance of that happening.
Even at Podunk University, the Physics faculty will take none to kindly to being told that they are not thinking out of the
box and that they are being stupid and authoritarian for believing in such physical laws as "Conservation of Energy"...

When are these "free-thinking" ( you get what you pay for ) types going to realize that what they think are "assumptions"
are real physical laws that Mother Nature will never let you contravene.

PamW

[robert_13]

169. Good grief!...

OK, I should have said, "Andromeda is the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way." It's only number 35 because of a ton of satellite galaxies in between. My point was the 2.5 million years ago the light from it we see today started off. But then you always miss the important points, don't you? (I guess you like to unwittingly support my previous references to your pointless, off-base critiques.) It is also often referred to as our twin galaxy, although it contains many more stars. Again, we pick at stupid little details and miss the main points, don't we?

Then you say dumb things about technology you clearly have no clue about. Your assessments are simply your brand of religious dogma. Your industry's propaganda says economically viable alternative technologies are not around the corner simply because it's not a convenient fact for them. You apparently swallow that whole and keep harping on how wind turbines and solar cells can never compete with these enormous power generation systems you seem to love. It is unconvincing to compare aircraft carriers with fish and pretend the fish aren't important because they don't stack up alongside a carrier in terms of size and power, as if those were the only worthy criteria.

It's just plain dumb. And for you to call me ignorant because I don't specialize in your field is ridiculous. Any intelligent reader who knows science will recognize that my knowledge is much less limited than you pretend with your political grandstanding and will be perfectly capable of judging that for themselves without your august, semi-literate help. ("Too" as in "too much silliness" is not spelled "to" as in the preposition "to" or the "to" that forms the infinitive of English verbs. You keep showing your ignorance of what I assume to be your own language, since I detect exclusively native errors and not foreign ones generated by different linguistic structures in other languages.)

The bottom line, my dear, is that in a few years you're going to have a ton of egg on your face. In other words, time will tell, and you're not going to be on the right side of that one, mark my words. You can spew ignorance as fact about what you conceive as the pitiful state of current alternative technology all you want, but that doesn't cut any mustard with the reality that will soon be so obvious as to be incontrovertible (if you even know what that means or how to spell it.)

[PamW]

170. Where did I say THAT?

robert_13 states:

("Too" as in "too much silliness" is not spelled "to" as in the preposition "to" or the "to" that forms the infinitive of English verbs. You keep showing your ignorance of what I assume to be your own language,


I'm usually very good as using the proper homonym of "to" or "too".

Perhaps you can identify the post number where I said "to much silliness".

I have attempted to find it, without success.

In fact, if I google my name "PamW" and "to much silliness" - the ONLY reference is in YOUR post.

PamW

[SpoonFed]

174. It is going to be a significant if not unsurmountable problem...

to accurately distinguish the quantity of egg face deposited when, given your arbitrarily defined epoch. Perhaps the stratification can be determined with the aid of the deposited long lived radioisotopes from the ¨insignificant¨ recent events in Japan.

[SpoonFed]

171. Cough it up...

I don't see why anyone would have such a difficult time believing that the scientists at the
National Academy of Science would say there are limits to what we can do with non-hydro renewables.

There is no need for anyone to believe, if you would just provide the citation for the statements you made.
Then there would be no reason for anyone to believe there was an (pseudo)intellectual fraud being perpetrated.

[PamW]

172. See post #159

There is no need for anyone to believe, if you would just provide the citation for the statements you made.
========================

Evidently you missed it. The cite to a National Academy of Science study is given in post #159

PamW

[SpoonFed]

173. Oh wait...

Are we supposed to believe that a bait and switch (refering to an offline NAS report pre-2000) and some after the fact google searching for NAS content from 2010 are one and the same thing?

Is this acceptable form of citation for current faculty and staff of MIT?

[PamW]

175. Nothing is wrong...

Are we supposed to believe that a bait and switch (refering to an offline NAS report pre-2000) and some after the fact google searching for NAS content from 2010 are one and the same thing?
===============================

Is there something "wrong" with giving a more modern, more up to date reference???

I think NOT - scholars do that all the time as more modern citations become available.

Why would you "think" ( term used loosely ) there to be something wrong with that?

PamW

[SpoonFed]

178. I can understand why you do not understand...

if I say I have an apple, and you say to me, show me the apple, and I respond by showing you an orange,
while yes, it is true that an orange is also fruit, it does not prove that i was not lying about
having an apple...

[robert_13]

156. Silly...

"The National Academy of Sciences; you know them, the TOP scientists in the USA; did a study a few years ago as to how much energy we could get from renewables. Their answer was about 15% to 20% of our present electrical capacity." - PamW

This is just plain silly and stupid! Yeah, TOP scientists who ignore that our "present electrical capacity" is incredibly wasteful. This makes sense only if you ignore everything stupid about what we're doing now. Before air conditioning, we used to build to keep ourselves cool with intelligent architectural design instead of dumb, heat absorbing, cracker box solar collectors with their equally efficient heat leakage in winter and lack of provisions to absorb what's already in the environment during the day and use it at night. Now, if you've ever lived outside the good old USA, you may know there are traditional, even ancient, and much smarter ways to do things that use much less energy and are quite comfortable. People from the upper middle class in Europe don't typically feel cold in air-conditioned malls during the summer and choke on the heat in the same malls in the winter. The contrasts from outside and inside are much more attenuated and people don't go around with summer colds like they do here. They come here and naturally think we're a little nuts in certain ways, even if they like us on the whole.

There are all kinds of co-generation schemes that work extremely well to conserve energy. They don't cost anything in the long haul, but save tons of money, etc., etc. These scientists, by basing their calculations on our current usage, have completely missed the whole target. They hit the bull's eye of a completely irrelevant target that assumes both current, stupid usage and the current state of commercially available alternative technology.

But some people's minds are stuck in what for them has become a sacrosanct tradition in terms of the way thing are "supposed" to work. You talk of fusion, but a hydrogen economy is just around the corner. There is already an amazingly efficient, scaled-up, industrial version of direct solar production of hydrogen. There have been simple, relatively inexpensive ways of densely storing hydrogen ever (not "every") since the hydrogen bomb, but what that uses is branded by our government as an illegal, highly controlled substance. There are others who have alternative ways to store it that are also very effective, but I wonder how the government will ultimately react to that.

There are also now discoveries of plentiful, inexpensive catalysts that are equally or more efficient than platinum in fuel cells and don't degenerate upon exposure to carbon monoxide. Fuel cell technology is about to take off commercially in a big way in the near future, a matter of a few years at most. There are also lots of people who are totally off the grid. They are small in number compared to the general population, but there are thousands. Their investments have been cost effective for many of them in the long run. That's NOW, despite the very high costs of the capital equipment they've invested in compared to what costs will become after mass production cuts in a few years from now. There are also very viable transition technologies, like new engine designs that are very small, light, run on conventional fuel or hydrogen, and are much more efficient, much simpler, and much less expensive to manufacture. Here you're saving energy at every level, from the manufacturing energy footprint to the amount of energy used in capital equipment.

"Sorry but you don't know what your are talking about with regard to potential energy. The energy IS in the field, and we know that from field mechanics and by experiment.

"If you claim that the energy is in a potential for a reaction; what physical form is that energy in?? Energy doesn't just come and go out of nothing ( violation of Conservation of Mass / Energy ). So how is this energy stored while its waiting around to see if a reaction is going to take place?" - PamW

(By the way, it's not "would not EVERY support nuclear power", but "...would not EVER support...". "Every" refers to numbers, such as "every one of them", and has nothing to do with time and related vocabulary such as "ever" or "forever". It would be nice if our MIT alumni with post-graduate degrees were sort of semi-literate.)

The question I asked is about WHERE the energy is, the fuel or the oxidant. You can talk about fields all you want to, but the fields have to change state in a reaction that combines atoms in a different way from whatever states they were in previously. If the net energy potential represented in the fields is different after the reaction, then you either have energy released or absorbed in the reaction. Where the energy is cannot defined by the energy in the fields (since that never goes to zero or even close to it as a percentage of the total) but the energy DIFFERENCE in the fields before and after the reaction.

So you can react gasoline with something besides oxygen and the amount of energy you say is "in" it is different. This is abstract, but you can't say it's "in" the gasoline any more than you can say potential energy involving damn water is "in" the water. It is in the energy difference between inertial frames in non-Euclidian space-time for a given mass moving in a given direction. That is, how much is there depends on how much mass moves, how far, and in which direction. So the potential energy is not in the mass, and the potential energy is not in the gasoline either. It is the difference between energy states after energy is put in or taken out of a PHYSICAL SYSTEM of some kind that involves a combination of factors, including the fields, whether moving mass around or changing chemical structure. If the energy is "in" anything, it is "in" the change of state within some kind of PHYSICAL SYSTEM. To say it's in the weight or the gasoline works as a primitive concept that can be useful for a naïve understanding of calculations, but in the big picture it is indeed a very naïve way of conceiving potential energy.

The law of conservation of energy and matter is a JOINT consideration of both matter and energy. The law doesn't work for either one considered alone, including rest mass, which we must remember is always relative to a particular inertial frame. Yes, without consideration of potential energy the law wouldn't work either, but that doesn't mean the energy "is" anywhere when it is potential. It is an abstract reference to the potential energy the difference between states in a physical system represents. It is a physical conceptual convention that works because nature is not so simple as to always keep energy around as literal energy even if you are simple enough to attempt it conceptually.

You must be aware that matter is ultimately fields, and fields communicate via particles and virtual particles, so matter is both field and particle...uh-huh, wave-particle duality. Fluctuating fields "generate" particles and particles and virtual particles "communicate" field effects among the fields. Moreover, particles are not little points or tiny balls, but probability waves and don't have an exactly specifiable physical location. Pretty abstract stuff that you must know a lot about, but apparently with no clue about the deeper implications.

So allow me to inform you that it is a strict matter of convention and convenience in mathematical calculation that we don't consider rest mass potential energy while we do consider state differentials in physical systems to be potential energy. When we lump it all together, we get that the whole thing is conserved and the conservation law holds. So that's very useful for a lot of reasons, but don't get carried away and take it too literally that potential energy is "in" any particular physical location.

Those with severely limited perspectives always tend to be literal-minded and have trouble with abstract concepts. They tend to have a black-and-white, highly special-case view of reality. They tend to focus on surface details and differences and fail to see the unifying aspects of very much. They tend to have a them-and-us mentality and call people who disagree with them silly names, such as "greenies", etc. and feel that they have the only right and superior view. They are typically xenophobic, but not necessarily involving ethnicity. They often look down on anyone who has what they label an inferior understanding. In the religious world, they're called fundamentalists. Fundamentalists can't understand abstract things like scriptural metaphors and take everything literally. However, the scientific world is full of what I call secular fundamentalists. You seem to be a highly qualified member.

[PamW]

154. Why NIF is different..

A little more on why NIF is different.

Yes - scientists have pursued controlled thermonuclear fusion for decades. If you'd like a good history of the
effort, try reading "The Man-Made Sun" by T.A. Heppenheimer. The following information is in that book.

In all those years of fusion research, scientists have never expected a fusion machine to reach ignition before.
We know the conditions it takes for thermonuclear fusion; we achieve those conditions in hydrogen bombs. So we
know what the conditions are. The question is can we reproduce those conditions on a small enough scale so that
the amount of energy released is manageable, unlike the hydrogen bomb.

There is a predecessor to NIF at Lawrence Livermore, another big laser facility called NOVA, that has 10 beams.
As detailed in Heppenheimer's book, when NOVA was first proposed, it was proposed to have 20 beams. However,
DOE wanted to save money. DOE asked if a 20-beam NOVA would actually achieve ignition, and LLNL told them "No".
Since a 20-beam NOVA wouldn't cross the fusion ignition threshold, DOE downsized the facility to 10-beams.

The NIF laser has 192 beams, and it is believed that this laser will be able to cross the fusion ignition threshold.
We have never had that hope for any fusion machine previously built. We knew that PLT - the Princeton Large Torus
would not reach fusion ignition. We knew that TFTR - the Tokomak Fusion Test Reactor, also at Princeton would not
cross the fusion ignition threshold. We knew that Shiva, NOVA's predecessor at LLNL, would not achieve ignition,
and we knew NOVA would not achieve ignition.

However, we believe we now have a machine that can achieve that "Holy Grail" of fusion ignition, and it has already
been built, and is in operation. It is being tuned in preparation for attempting thermonuclear fusion ignition. So
we are all hopeful that we will have a proof-of-principle for controlled thermonuclear fusion in the immediate future.

Stay tuned. The achievement of controlled thermonuclear fusion will be a "game changer".

PamW

[robert_13]

163. Break-even...

Fusion ignition is just a break-even point for energy in-out. That's a heck of a long way from commercially viable nuclear fusion. Well before then you will have been proven wrong about solar/wind/hydro/geothermal sources and the way we wantonly and uselessly consume energy now being a given. Time will put egg all over your face and I won't hesitate one nanosecond to say, "I told you so."

[wtmusic]

145. I would like to thank Ignored, Ignored, and Ignored for kicking my thread

The most important message of our time deserves nothing less.

:toast: :bounce: :toast:

[XemaSab]

147. .

:toast:

(What, no love for Name Removed? :( )

[Nihil]

148. True enough ...

... with the added bonus that you don't have to read through
pages of cut & paste buffer dribblings before realising that
it was just another attempt to smother the thread!

:toast:

[wtmusic]

149. Now you're making me nostalgic

:cry: :D :thumbsup:

[SpoonFed]

165. For some reason this makes me think of this scene...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTN7Mhv59KA&t=1m11s

[wtmusic]

168. I want an E/E thread that lasts forever

Is that too much to ask? :D

[gtar100]

176. I agree on these grounds

1) Fossil fuels will harm the environment with 100% certainty if used at all.

2) Nuclear energy won't harm the environment if we're really, really careful.

The emphasis is on the second 'really'.

[robert_13]

177. Nice, moderate position...

In principle I like your moderate stance on this issue, with one important, practical caveat. I'm confident that by the time it takes to get "safe" nuclear up and running we won't need it. Too much other better stuffing is happening. I'm against that kind of profligate waste for obvious reasons. Also, it's important to recognize that fully sustainable energy sources represent a disruptive technology to the major power brokers in both the financial and political arenas. They want us to remain dependent on their power and money to survive. Anything that challenges their unique position at the top of the pecking order is not something that makes them happy or enthusiastic.