Energy Production Is As 'Dirty' As Ever 260
kkleiner writes "A recent report (PDF) from International Energy Agency delivers some dire news: despite 20 years of efforts toward clean energy and a decade of growth in renewable energy, energy production remains as 'dirty' as ever due to worldwide reliance on fossil fuels. With the global demand for energy expected to rise by 25 percent in the next 10 years, a renewed effort toward cleaner energy is desperately needed to avoid detrimental effects to the environment and public health. The report says, 'Coal technologies continue to dominate growth in power generation. This is a major reason why the amount of CO2 emitted for each unit of energy supplied has fallen by less than 1% since 1990. Thus the net impact on CO2 intensity of all changes in supply has been minimal. Coal-fired generation, which rose by an estimated 6% from 2010 to 2012, continues to grow faster than non-fossil energy sources on an absolute basis.'"
Not all doom and gloom (Score:3)
We are producing more pollution because we are using more energy. The fact that it hasn't risen and is in fact falling in many places is due to us cleaning up and using more renewables.
I suspect this is just a lame excuse anti-environmentalists will use to justify inaction.
same pollution _per unit of energy_ (Score:2)
Since we are producing more and more energy, the absolute amounts of pollution emitted each year is still increasing.
Basically all the "green" energy is offsetting the increase in "dirty" energy.
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Re:Not all doom and gloom (Score:5, Insightful)
More renewables isn't enough to provide anything more than self satisfaction. At the current rate, it would take centuries to have any significant impact, and the laws of reality will prevent it from ever providing a significant fraction. Despite extensive effort, Germany is discovering this right now, and they too are ramping coal and gas generation.
It isn't a problem of inaction, but of the wrong action, which is arguably worse. "Environmentalists" would have us continue to pour money and resources into uneconomical "solutions" which can not possibly achieve our objectives. Once all of our money and resources are spent, implementing a workable solution becomes near impossible. The problem is that they refuse to face reality and have taken the only workable solution off the table. (Or they choose to live in a different reality, where pro-environment is synonymous with anti-human, and a collapse in population is an accepted part of the "solution".)
The crucial point is that none of our current technologies are capable of providing affordable power at the scale we require. Renewables like wind and solar are hugely resource intensive, making them inherently costly both to the environment and people. They are also unreliable, and require a non-existant storage technology which is an even more difficult problem than fusion. Pumped hydro storage is the only one currently available that is even close to economical at the scale required, but it isn't universally available. We should not be pursuing an energy policy that by its very nature requires a miraculous breakthrough to succeed, and would otherwise result in spectacular failure.
Those that appreciate the scope of the problem often remark that we need a "broad mix of technologies" to meet our energy needs. That is a translation for "none of our current options are sufficient", but it is a resigned mentality, because there is no guarantee that a combination of insufficient technologies will ever be sufficient. Rather, there is good evidence that the sum total will never be sufficient in the absence of reliable baseload electricity from fossil fuels or nuclear.
Fortunately, like you said, it is not all doom and gloom. There happens to be a proven technology that would be sufficient if we developed it. It has been providing clean and cheap electricity for decades with a minimal environmental footprint, the only issue being the large (and growing) up front capital cost, and the fact that we can't build plants fast enough. While useful, conventional nuclear to which I am referring is not the solution, and will never be sufficient. Fortunately, unlike the other options, nuclear has huge unrealized potential, and with a bit of development, it could become the solution we seek.
Molten salt reactors are fundamentally different from conventional nuclear, and solve all the problems which plague solid-fueled conventional reactors, while safely operating at vastly greater efficiency. The so-called nuclear waste problem is a product of conventional reactors which are nearly 100% inefficient , and that is not an exaggeration. The fission process is such that if not completed, it produces nasty intermediate products which then contaminate the rest of the fuel, a problem severely exacerbated by only consuming a tiny fraction of the fuel, before pulling it from the reactor and adding it to the growing pile of "spent fuel". The truth though, is that "spent fuel" is almost entirely unspent, and the problem essentially disappears if we completely consume the fuel. Rather than a waste problem, it is a vast reserve of energy waiting to be tapped.
The problem isn't producing clean energy, it is doing so affordably, so that the entire world embraces it. Robert Hargraves discusses this in his book, THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal [thoriumene...ancoal.com].
Re:Not all doom and gloom (Score:4, Informative)
The thing is, renewable energy is only uneconomical until it's not. Science and technology progress - pretending something won't ever work because it doesn't today is a dangerous line of thinking.
Progress comes in random spurts - but it always comes: http://www.digikey.com/Web%20Export/techzone/energy-harvesting/article-2011july-solar-cell2.jpg [digikey.com]
Re:Not all doom and gloom (Score:4, Insightful)
You could say the same thing about ubiquitous superconductors. The technology simply isn't ready, and there is no reason to expect it will be anytime soon. Until then, like superconductors, it will be consigned to niche uses, and not displace any fossil fuel generation in the developing world, which is absolutely essential. Subsidies should be spent on developing technologies, not deploying technologies which can't succeed.
Efficiently collecting diffuse sources of energy like wind and solar is an extremely difficult challenge. Massive storage is an absolute requirement. Transmission infrastructure is also expensive, and the low capacity factors of wind and solar compound this expense. For example, using a generous 25% capacity factor for wind, it is necessary to install four times the capacity, which also requires four times the transmission infrastructure. Worse yet, all of that infrastructure must be sized to handle the full load. The economics simply don't work yet, and are far from doing so.
Even if they did, wind and solar still waste a huge amount of land and resources to harvest a relative pittance of energy, so the environmental footprint will still be much larger than any sort of nuclear, even if you want to include exclusion zones. People really don't appreciate just how much land, steel, concrete, rare earths and such are required. Nor the impact of mining and processing all those resources, to say nothing of covering vast expanses of land, and the cost of regular replacement and maintenance. It is a nightmare.
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Yes, I'm suggesting that we spend a modest amount to finish the development and commercialization of molten salt reactors. There has already been extensive research at ORNL, and multiple successful test reactors. We know what these reactors are capable of, and there is very little technological uncertainty. The results are basically guaranteed if the government allows it to happen.
The difficulty of finishing the development of a well understood technology is worlds apart from the breakthroughs required f
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Up until recently, the biggest polluter in terms of producing electricity was coal-fired power plants, with a long list of really harmful emissions from such power plants. With the EPA now mandating strict controls on coal-fire power plant emissions (and most of the world doing the same), these pollutants are now vastly lower, especially sulfur dioxide emissions. China has yet to impose strict emission control rules on their coal-fired power plants, but after the major debacle of HORRIBLE air pollution in t
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Dirty (Score:5, Informative)
The article had one fact of which I was unaware, but should be entertaining:
"The boom in natural gas availability [mainly from fracking] pushed natural gas prices down last year to a 10-year low in the US. But the drop in US demand for coal sparked a drop in the price of coal, which in turn sparked a shift in Europe where coal replaced much of the more expensive gas to supply power stations."
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Not that much. Sulfur, mercury, and lead kills people. C02 kills civilizations, so the emphasis is pretty much spot-on.
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Not that much. Sulfur, mercury, and lead kills people. C02 kills civilizations, so the emphasis is pretty much spot-on.
Where would be be today if not for Bush Jr. eating all those leaded paint chips?
First thing Obama did was have the Oval Office repainted.
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Your uncle Al would be proud.
Re:Dirty (Score:4, Insightful)
C02 kills civilizations, so the emphasis is pretty much spot-on.
I thought that was chlorofluorocarbons.
Maybe it was ozone?
No...it's methane. Wait...
Sulfur dioxide you say? No, that one used to be bad because of acid rain but now I'm reading that it helped cool the planet and by reducing atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide we've actually made global warming worse.
Then again, I remember not too long ago that diesel exhaust was horrible and we needed to get rid of diesel engines, but now I read that they're much better than gasoline engines.
So today CO2 is a civilization killer, but I'm sure there'll be a new environmental pollutant to worry about soon.
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I wonder, if we got rid of all that CO2 and the global temperature dropped 10 degrees or so and a few billion people starved to death would these people that think they have all the answers step up and admit responsibility? Moot point I guess because short of cutting off electricity to a few billion people there is no real answer to the CO2 problem.
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Re:Dirty (Score:4, Informative)
Go find the nearest spray can. See the label which says "NO CFCS"? Chlorofluorocarbons WERE a huge concern, until we stepped up as a civilization and made the necessary changes to solve the problem. You don't hear about that problem anymore because we solved it. It didn't go away on its own. It didn't fade away like some green-fad. We recognized an environmental issue and solved it, and now the ozone layer is recovering. [dvice.com]
Similar points can be made about the other things you mentioned. Those are all bad, we are taking steps to address them, or at least figuring out if it's feasible to use a replacement or change our industrial/ag processes to minimize those pollutants. We aren't just ignoring them. And you're right, there WILL be new environmental pollutants to worry about. That doesn't invalidate the concerns over the previous ones we've identified.
Science constantly moves forward, adjusts, corrects itself when it makes mistakes. That's not a weakness, that's its chief virtue. It's the meddlesome lay people, the politicians, and the mouth breathing ignorant masses who believe you have to stick with your story, your narrative, or be deemed unprincipled or untrustworthy.
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I thought that was chlorofluorocarbons
Correct! CFC's were a huge concern and the global community realized this, did something about it and now they are no longer a concern. Keyword in your sentence: WAS.
No, that one used to be bad because of acid rain but now I'm reading that it helped cool the planet and by reducing atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide we've actually made global warming worse.
SO2 and CO2 can BOTH be bad at the same time. Think Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan in their heydays. Britney's shaved head may have diverted attention from a paparazzi crotch shot but regardless, they both ended up in rehab/jail.
So today CO2 is a civilization killer, but I'm sure there'll be a new environmental pollutant to worry about soon.
Sarcasm aside, I honestly hope you're right about this one too because that would mean that society either resolved
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Maybe he's talking about the Dinosaurs.
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Are you being sarcastic?
Please tell me that you're being sarcastic and you didn't really mean what you just wrote down.
Pretty please?
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Indeed, I hate when radical greens confuse pollution with greenhouse emission.
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The rise of coal use in Europe isn't completely due to economics. Part of it is due to Germany shutting down their nuclear plants and having to offset that electricity generation by increasing the production at their existing coal plants. They are also building (or planning to build) coal plants to help offset the loss of their nuclear plants.
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While unfortunate, I don't think that really matters in the bigger picture. If the price of coal dropped in Europe despite the availability of U.S. coal, that implies demand is down relative to supply, meaning the total coal used by the U.S. and Europe combined is still down. If consumption were up, coal prices would
Re:Dirty (Score:5, Interesting)
In case anyone is wondering, they're using CO2 as the sole measurement of 'dirty,' ignoring things like sulfur, mercury, and lead, which are probably important.
Exactly! Consider what was going on before cars. People used horses to move around. You know what horses do besides transporting people? They poop, and then step all over it pulverizing it. Pulverized horse poop is orders of magnitude worse than anything that can come out of a car.
Consider also all the epidemics that went on for centuries without aqueducts.
Despite what environmentalist would have you believe, technology is actually making the world less and less polluted over time. Just looking at CO2 and ignoring all sorts of pollutants that it replaced, is just myopic.
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Burning coal has a LOT of disadvantages, because the types of pollutants from coal burning are very long and very unhealthy. No wonder why the EPA has strict rules on coal-fired power plants, and why cleaner-burning coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming is in very high demand.
Longer term, the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), a highly-advanced nuclear reactor design that has very few of the disadvantages of solid-fuel uranium reactors, could become the main power source around the world within t
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That's what happens... (Score:4, Insightful)
...when your country completely discounts nuclear as the best option for an environmentally friendly energy source. Solar and wind can never be primary energy sources - they are not constant power sources. They can only supplement a steady power source. And they waste so much real estate compared to the alternative that even environmentalists don't like them, especially wind farms. I live in the shadow of one of the biggest wind farms in the United States, and it's an obnoxiously terrible use of land with comparatively little energy in return. At least now they're required to cover the cost of their eventual removal and land restoration.
Frankly I'd rather live next to a modern, safe nuclear power plant. China is appropriately proceeding with caution on the development of their next plants based on lessons learned with Fukishima (see recent slashdot posting) but they did not have a knee jerk "OMG nuclear is bad!" reaction. You fix it, you evolve the design, you move on. That's engineering. You don't go hide in a cave. Even Japan is coming round to the fact that ditching their nuclear reactors wholesale would result in an unacceptable level of energy dependence, plus they'd be burning dirty.
Nuclear is the only future in which we can have the energy abundance we have now, and do it clean. We CAN have both, unlike what some people may like to tell you.
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/24/energy-japan-mof-idUSL4N0AT00Y20130124 [reuters.com]
"Japan's LNG imports soared 11.2 percent to a record high of 87.31 million tonnes in 2012, driven by an increased need for fuel to generate electricity after the
nuclear sector was hit by the Fukushima crisis, government data showed on Thursday."
"Japan paid a record price for crude at $114.90 per barrel last year, compared with $108.65 in 2011."
This goes to what you were saying. There may be alternative energy sources for some c
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I think what will happen is that the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) will finally get the attention to be developed to commercial scale. The advantages of LFTR's are considerable:
1. The nuclear fuel is thorium-232, which is far more commonly available than uranium.
2. The thorium fuel is dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts, a very cheap form of fuel to make compared to the expense of assembling solid rods of uranium-235 fuel.
3. Plutonium-239 from dismantled nuclear weapons and spent uranium-235
Re:That's what happens... (Score:5, Interesting)
wind is intermittent; but it doesn't melt down, and storage can be done with hydro, pumped hydro or electric cars
But you need to plan to replace the wind turbines about every 12 years, and this cost must be factored in to the cost of the power.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9770837/Wind-farm-turbines-wear-sooner-than-expected-says-study.html [telegraph.co.uk]
Hydro is mature. All the good locations already have hydro plants; and environmentalists are trying to get existing hydro plants torn out to benefit river wildlife, so just forget about building new hydro plants.
I'm pretty sure pumped hydro storage is in a similar situation... you need a giant reservoir uphill of a source of lots of water you can pump. Where can you build a new one of these, and will the environmentalists approve?
Using a decentralized group of electric cars as an energy-storage system is an interesting idea, but I don't think you can dependably store very much that way in the near future.
I have hopes for molten-salt solar plants, which can keep producing power after the sun goes down because the salt holds so much heat. And it would be cool if we could work out a good way to use hydrogen to store excess energy from wind or solar... but it takes a lot of electricity to strip hydrogen out of water, and hydrogen is tricky to store.
And just as you will face opposition to building more hydro, you will face opposition to building solar in the desert.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/its_green_against_green_in_mojave_desert_solar_battle/2236/ [yale.edu]
Nuclear is more expensive than wind, and is also poor at load following; you normally find nuclear needs hydro as well; because it's so expensive to build it runs flat out and then the hydro does the load following- nuclear is better for baseload.
I agree with your final statement; nuclear is indeed better for base load and not good at load-following. But probably natural gas is a better near-term way to reliably follow loads.
By all means get renewables into the mix, but don't make the same mistake the U.K. made, wasting huge sums of money on a system that doesn't work very well. (Right when demand is most heavy in winter, the wind farms stop producing. Quote: "In winter, when the most intense cold period coincides with a high pressure front, most wind turbines do not work.")
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-2008055/Energy-giants-want-billions-windfarms.html [thisismoney.co.uk]
One no-brainer idea: homes and businesses in warm places (Arizona, Florida, Texas, etc.) should have solar panels on the roof. This will produce peak power during peak demand times (when everyone is running the air conditioning, the sun will be shining). This is only a tiny part of the overall energy picture, though, and will happen on its own as the cost of solar panels keeps falling.
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Probably - but that makes them more expensive, making the ultimate cost per megawatthour even worse. Also, there are limits to engineering - now matter how well you build them, they will wear down.
For a lot of people it's not - nothing that has any kind of negative effects whatsoever can be used. That is arguably the biggest problem with "green" po
Re:That's what happens... (Score:4, Informative)
Pumped hydro is about 70%-80% efficient [wikipedia.org]. So wind would have to be about 0.7-0.8x grid parity for stored wind energy to be economically viable. Charging losses for an EV [evworld.com] are about 25%. So if you also factor in losses converting the EV's DC back into AC for transmission on the grid, it's going to be worse than 70% overall.
Also, yeah wind doesn't melt down. But it killed more people in 2011 than nuclear, despite providing only about 1/10th the power. The difference is that those deaths caused by wind weren't splashed all over the TV for weeks on end. It's not that wind is inherently safer. Don't get me wrong, after hydro, wind is the most viable of the renewables and I fully support its build-out. But a lot of people are basing their support on incomplete or inaccurate information, colored by what stories make jucier headlines on the evening news.
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If all that you say about nuclear being economically unfeasible is true, then why are Chinese investing in it so heavily, specifically to build new plants? They do things all across the board, so they also do wind and solar, but nuclear still dwarfs those. Are you saying that their planners are incompetent idiots?
Duh (Score:2)
That's what happens when you ship your manufacturing to the third world and refuse to build nuclear plants at home.
Not surprising at all (Score:2)
Until nuclear is no longer suppressed for political reasons energy generation will be dirty.
Environmentalists need to take their heads out of their asses.
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If you wan
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Oh, it'll come from outside the US. China is the best bet so far.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9784044/China-blazes-trail-for-clean-nuclear-power-from-thorium.html [telegraph.co.uk]
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Either way, I disagree with your bit about environmentalists and in this situation see them more as noisy bystanders or the dog under the table used as an excuse to cover the masters farts. Even a rocket propelled grenade fired by a protester at the superphoenix construction site didn'
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And environmentalists give the lobbyists political cover. And the environmental lobby itself has considerable power, if you hadn't noticed.
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Nah, that comparison does not stand. There was not an influential, well funded anti Iraq war lobby. There is an influential, well funded environmental lobby. I do agree with you that the existing nuclear industry is ossified and resistent to change, but it goes beyond that. There is strident political, ideological resistence to nuclear on the left, and willful laziness with nuclear on the right.
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And all of those accidents combined have killed how many people? Compare that to the projected effects of climate change...
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There was a 28% rise in thyroid problems for Babies born after the Fukushima incident. For Chernobyl, more than 500,000 have died from Cancer related issues, and more continue to live with the effects of the Radiation. The dome that houses the Radioactive site is already crumbling. You have to look at long term effects, not the short term loss of life, which will be minimal.
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Citations, please. Your numbers for Chernobyl are not reflected in the U.N. report. [unscear.org]
And they are still tiny (Score:2)
compared to climate change effects.
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>> take their heads out of their asses.
I would say the same about the engineers behind Three Mile Island. And Chernobyl. And Fukushima...
Three Mile Island? You mean that marvel of engineering in Pennsylvania in which, despite being the site of the nation's worst nuclear accident, NO ONE DIED and which did not result in a single case of cancer?
Methinks you're the one who needs to pull your head out of your ass.
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With Chernobyl it was operating the plant in a way it was not designed to run, although from talking to a R
Turn lights off, unplug appliances (Score:2)
and for chrissake turn your damn computer off.
I've been turning this one on and off for going on 5 years and it hasn't died or fried a drive yet.
re energy (Score:2)
Well the time for " ZPG " is past .
It is time for a negative population growth
or remove some of the population ( or nature will do it for us -- and not in a nice way)
we DO need to be back to PRE World War 2 population levels
that WILL solve the energy and food needs
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China can feed itself thanks to landowners getting better at doing so with no thanks to the cultural revolution, communism or the one child policy (which wasn't universal anyway).
Germany, Japan... (Score:2)
All countries that publicly reduced nuclear energy production, makes up the diff with coal. China, is also using more coal, but they are building a large number of nukes too, so I won't blame them.
One problem with coal, is that after you burned coal, there is still more energy in the uranium in the ash, than was produced by burning the coal. So every coal fired plant is effectively a 'dirty bomb' that pollutes our food supply with radio active ash.
Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:5, Insightful)
CO2 is food for plants.
You know what, you're right [plantsneedco2.org]! And I don't know why those folks in Fukushima got all upset about their nuclear reactor getting water washed all over it! I mean, the darn thing needs water to work anyway, right? Plus plants and people drink water, why were they upset that they got extra from the ocean? It's just water!
Big whoop. Warming up this damn freezer I live in is NOT being "dirty".
Right because the possibilities of water wars, refugees, failing economies, destruction of the food chain, droughts and general destabilization of the planet will have no effect on you whatsoever.
Re: Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:2)
Where did you dig up that link? It's comedy gold! Successfully nailed every denialist cliche I could think of.
I'm gonna have to add this "Nongovernmental Planel (sic) on Climate Change" to my Humour feed for my morning chuckle.
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Where did you dig up that link? It's comedy gold! Successfully nailed every denialist cliche I could think of.
I'm gonna have to add this "Nongovernmental Planel (sic) on Climate Change" to my Humour feed for my morning chuckle.
Please, I don't deserve all the credit, thank H. Leighton Steward and coal baron Corbin Robertson [sourcewatch.org]. And from the looks of it, the Koch brothers somewhere up that chain ... did you know it's a 501(c)(3) and has a sibling (but separate!) ad-buying 501(c)(4) named CO2 is Green [co2isgreen.org]?
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So what does nuclear waste have to do with CO2 there?
Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:4, Insightful)
eldavojohn is totally correct when he mentions "water wars, refugees, failing economies, destruction of the food chain, droughts and general destabilization of the planet". These are all consequences of a warming planet.
Some areas will have far too much water at times - like the midwestern US that is flooding now. But then it can go into drought and crops wither like they did last year. Other areas simply suffer prolonged drought. Right now the Rio Grand has slowed to nothing but stagnant water in the southern part of New Mexico and the pecan and chile farmers are looking at big crop failures. People are already fighting over water rights in a number of areas as what is becoming a scarce resource is now the difference between a farm surviving or failing.
Scoff and deny all you want, but those of us old enough to remember the weather in the 60's and 70's know that the weather has changed and that what we are seeing now simply is not normal.
Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:4, Insightful)
So - you're saying that the couple of decades from your youth are to be considered "normal". We're going to ignore all of the evidence that points to cyclical warming and cooling on planet earth, and use two decades to define "normal".
Does everyone forget that the Native Americans lived on this continent for untold thousand of years, before any Euros showed up? Maybe we should be asking them, "What is "normal" around here?"
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those all have been the consequences of mere weather too at various times, besides climate warming and cooling which has always been ongoing.
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And those of us old enough to remember the weather in the 50's know that the weather in the 60's and 70's was simply not normal.
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Mexico is just getting us back for the All American Canal.
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You really are out of touch with reality. The Rio Grande no longer gets anywhere near Mexico. It pretty much dries up before it even leaves New Mexico. New Mexico is not in Mexico.
I was about to call BS until I looked at Google maps. And indeed the Rio Grande is dried up from west side of Brownsville to the east side of Brownsville. Probably about a 30 mile stretch. But the rest of it still has water. So still BS.
Re: Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:3)
And they're all great, right? Can never have too much water washing over your cities and farmland, and the more extreme weather, drought & crop failure, species extinction, refugees and political turmoil, the better.
Embrace the climate change! The tsunami of costs to adapt will wash over us, leaving us clean of funds and fresh of heart, ready to tackle the warm new challenges that await us!
Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:4, Informative)
what exactly is being added to the CO2 to make it poisonous?
CO, NOx, SO2, Hg, soot and fly ash mostly.
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Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:5, Funny)
That would coming mostly from China now, if you can find someone over there that cares.
They are easy to find. The prisons are full of them.
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Maybe you're confusing China with the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prisoner_population_rate_world_2012_map.png [wikipedia.org]
China is a nice pretty green color on that map. The US is some ugly color that I can't identify.
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That would coming mostly from China now, if you can find someone over there that cares.
They are easy to find. The prisons are full of them.
Nice.
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" we've had all those things for thousands of years, except for 'destabilitization' which has gone on for millions of years."
I never have mod points when I really want them. +500 insightful!
Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:4, Informative)
The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
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Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:4, Informative)
The SEGS, a solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert uses ground water from a rapidly depleting aquifer to run the condensers for their generating station. The NREL report about trough-based solar thermal energy lists the SEGS's water consumption as 1000 gallons (about 3.5 tonnes in real units) evaporated per MWh generated.
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/faqs.html [nrel.gov]
Oceanside nuclear and other thermal power stations do not evaporate any water, they return seawater warmed by a few degrees from the condensers to the ocean.
Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:4, Informative)
The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page [behvac.com]. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design.
*Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.
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The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.
You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.
Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.
Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page [behvac.com]. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design. *Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.
I don't like replying to my own posts, but I forgot to add that air-cooled condensers are avoided as much as possible. They use far less water, but use a lot more power to run the air fans. And the cooling surface must be much larger which also adds cost. And the entire cycle is less efficient with an air-cooled condenser because evaporative cooling can always reach a lower temperature (Carnot-type thermodynamics). In summary, cooling towers use more water per MW, but air-cooled condensers burn more fue
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I was completely convinced by his argument until you replied with using bold letters and completely blew his argument out of the water. I'm totally on your side now.
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Well, let's hear you repeat your utterly stupid statement in a few decades when the survival of the human race looks a lot worse than now.
Now is the time to be pedanatic (Score:3)
Well you can do whatever you want in a few decades because words won't mean anything any more.
But right now words mean something. And if you want to use words without us berating you, you need to use them accurately instead of blasting sensationalism everywhere.
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The real problem is not that we are polluting more, the problem there are a lot more people. Get rid of half the population and you'll get rid of half the pollution. Feel free to go first to set the example.
Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:5, Funny)
CO2 is a colorless gas. It doesn't look, smell, taste, feel, or sound like "dirt".
I hear you, friend. CO2 isn't even the end of dirty's improper use. There are thousands of girls all over the internet that are also called "dirty", even "very dirty". But upon close inspection, most of them don't have any dirt on them at all! And you can seriously inspect everything. Whats wrong with our society?!
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While I don't think this warrants an explanation, "dirt" in this context is synonymous with "contaminant."
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Want more stupid bullshit? TFS only compares the past twenty years. Let us go back to my high school days.
The place is West Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Penn Power's electric plant in West Pittsburgh emitted a black column of smoke, 24/7, 365. Back in the day, it was common for housewives to do laundry at home, then hang laundry out on a clothes line. Not in West Pittsburgh, though. Clothes hanging outside would come back inside grungy on the best of days, and when the wind was blowing directly from the
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*plonk*
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OK. Let's seal you in an airtight chamber with 100% pure carbon dioxide. After all, it's "clean", so it must be good for you, right?
After all, the standard toxicology test employed by scientists puts a person in an airtight chamber with 100% pure substance. That's how we know, for example, that the state of California finds things toxic and to cause cancer.
Re: Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:2)
Let's see how you survive in an airtight chamber with pure oxygen
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Let's see how you survive in an airtight chamber with pure oxygen
Didn't Michael Jackson used to sleep in this environment? Yep... it's right here in the Daily mail, complete with creepy picture http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1195845/Michael-Jacksons-world-He-slept-oxygen-tent-best-friend-Bubbles-chimp.html [dailymail.co.uk]
Gosh I miss that guy.
Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score:4, Informative)
That's not CO2 causing the smog in Beijing. Those are actual "dirty" particulates. Black Lung stuff. Burning coal in the last 50 years has become drastically better. Saying there have been no improvements is a lie. CO2 production isn't dropping but the truly poisonous stuff has largely been curtailed in the US. CO2 is a greenhouse gas not something causing Acid Rain. True it's helping warm the planet and disrupting the climate but then climate change is a fact of life on this planet. If you look at the output of a volcano such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines you'll see just how dirty mother nature can get. The incredible amount of sulfur dioxide pushed out by this one eruption was over 20 million tons. I think you'll see little reduction of CO2 without a massive change to another power source and currently the only viable alternative is Nuclear power but that comes with it's own problems.
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It's so sad. "Environmentalists" like you have become so obviously unable to predict the effects of what they're arguing against that their navel-gazing produces contradictory results, and they can't even see the contradiction.