The politics of energy

I recently saw a documentary about the largest windmill in the world being built in Germany. They were stating some facts about windgenerated power in general, and one was that all the windgenerators in Germany put together produced the same amount of electricity as 4 nuclear power plants. I of course don't have the source for that figure, it could be completely bogus.

But it seems to me that if everybody is going on about the power of the sun and the reason for global warming being sunspots or hotter magma - if those natural powers have so much energy, it would make alot of sense to invest and research the heck out of it in order to utilize that energy.

But (and here is the conspiracy aspect if you will) economic interests of the traditional powerplantcorporations that rely on gas, oil and coal are strong, and economical power is almost always correlated in politics - and there doesn't seem to be real interest in giving up that monopoly and power. And at least in Germany, protecting the coalindustry is something that the all politicians do to some extent. The left wants to subsidize coalmining because many workers would lose their jobs otherwise and that would hit a whole region extremely hard even though it doesn't make sense economically, and the right is always schmoozing with the heavy industry and doing (politically) what is beneficial for them. But I also heard that BP is investing alot in research into alternative energy sources - so I am curious how things will develop in the next years.

I don't think there's any conspiracy.  Fossil fuels are simply great sources of energy. They're like energon cubes from the Transformers.  Very concentrated.

In the long run, it will be solar power, fusion, what have you. But right now, the technology isn't even remotely there.

I don't think most people realize just how inefficient solar panels are presently. I should have scanned the size of a 7.5KW solar array. It's HUGE and it worked out to something like 900kw/h per month -- about enough for a home during the summer.  Not the type of thing you'd want in your backyard.  To get the same amount of energy from coal, you'd need a small pile.  

 

I think it should be noted that we're still using old Nuclear power plants.  If we could rebuild those 70s designs using 21st Century Technology, we could easily double their output while reducing their waste amounts.  The last construction of a Nuclear Plant was in 1977, although it came online in 1996 (utilizing 1977 technology and methodology).

The stop on the building (and renovating) of Nuclear Reactors in this country is one of the greatest tragedies of our Energy Crisis.

The rest of the world has renovated and built new Nuclear Reactors and proven this... but here in the US it's become a political propoganda tool.  Pointing at such things as Chernobyl as reasons we should move away from Nuclear Energy... mind you, that's the only incident to date of any signifigance.

This might be the case in the USA. But as utemia hinted it is very different in other countries Brad. In Germany for example wind energy covers about 6.4% of the demand already. Water 3.4%. The German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein is planning to cover all of its electrical power demand by means of wind power by 2020.

All this was supported and promoted by the government. So such a change is possible.

There are even countries like Spain, where at peak times wind energy covered half of the countries demand.

I looked up the numbers on Wikipedia (german).

Very inciteful.  And true to a degree.  As we saw in the old USSR, government can do anything it wants, but to do it for the benefit of society, your statement is true.  However, the latest craze among the Climategate crowd is to basically make the whole world a new USSR with mandates that will do nothing for their stated goals, but will have the effect of making government the only game in town.

Exactly.  

I for one would feel better if we had newer nuclear reactors and could switch off some of the old ones.

 

Considering all the ones built in this country were done when the 8086 was the cat's meow of processors (or before) for computers?  yea, I can go along with that.

That might be a good thing...nothing top hack into. Old doesn't necessary mean bad or inefficient, although I'm sure there is room for some improvements. You have to give credit where credit is due, that these 30+ year old designs are producing 20% of our energy (and 100% of our carrier and submarine forces) after all these years is quite impressive.

Speaking of Spain, seems I heard something recently that their alternative energy program is turning into a colossal money pit. I don't have the source at hand but apparently sunny Spain, isn't sunny enough.

Sometimes we have to see beyond the things we want to believe so that we can see that sometimes there is more than what we want to believe. Not only do these corporations not want to give up their monopoly (who would? would you?) but lets not forget that if they fall, their fall will be much worse than anything we saw in recent years. Obviously a person who builds a money making business would not risk losing it to try something that is not a sure fire success.

I'm all for going green, I just don't want to sacrifise everything just because a few people think the end is near if we don't change. We are more likely to be destroyed by a meteor that we may not even know it's on it's way than we are destroying our planet thru climate change or global warming.

We need to accept the fact that while there is nothing wrong with changing to alternative fuels that the change can not and will not happen over night. 1) because today's technology is not advanced enough to sustain our societies needs and even in 10 years it still will not be, and 2) considering those who invent it, those who build it and those who will sell it will all be looking into profiting from it; the technology will not be cheap and could cause more financial harm than good.

I would have thought we would have been more advanced in all of this by now but politics have made it impossible at this point. Just look at how quickly every car company came up with an electric or hybrid car out of thin air. Politics and money is the name of the gam anywhere on this plant.

Not necessarily bad (they dont do windows!), but inefficient?  I can't see how efficiency has not increased in the last 30-40 years.

Germany is alot smaller than the US. Texas is several times bigger than Germany - so maybe size is an issue in the distribution of energy. You probably know that Germany has passed a law to stop using nuclear energy in the future and to compensate that loss with "green" energy. Renewable energy is already providing 16% - and it is possible to increase that to compensate the loss of the nuclear power plants.

I am leery of nuclear power. One - the problem of nuclear waste hasn't been solved - a permanent 100% secure storage place for the highly radioactive toxic waste is nowhere in sight. There is also the issue of future generations and wether they will have the knowledge about the danger it poses - after all we don't know how long our form of modern society will last and how and if knowledge will be preserved in the future, say in 4000 years. Highlyn nuclear toxic waste from today will be dangerous alot longer than 4000 years. Two,  do you know how long it takes to debuild/take down an old reactor? Years and years and years. You can't just tear it down like a regular building.

Everything to do with nuclear power is connected with high risks, even if itis possible to operate a powerplant securely. When it is possible to create energy with other means, and enough energy at that - economic interests should not have the absolute priority. Germany is trying to make an example with their attempt to stop using nuclear power in the future.

The majorityof electricity is generated by coal/gas power plants and that won't change for a while.

Actually, you need to delete the word "nuclear" and it is more true - as we just saw yesterday in Connecticut.  Production of power always carries a risk.  It is how you mitigate that risk that defines whether it is "safe" or not.

Gas is dangerous. Every once in a while an appartment house explodes because of a faulty gasline. Just recently it happend in Lüttich in Belgium - 15 people died. 

I haven't heard of a way to mitigate the toxicity of nuclear waste. All you can do is bury it somewhere and hope that nobody finds it or stumbles across it. But such a place hasn't been found - most of the places in use or future sites pose some risk. It is fairly  difficult to find a place that is absolutely earthquake secure, has the right sediment that allows for a secure site and that will remain like that for a few thousand years.

Yes, this is true. And why is it exactly that they're not serious alternatives? Because they haven't been seriously pursued.

Meanwhile, you live in a nation whose oil production peaked back in the 70's...and I don't care how much folks squawk about drilling ANWR and offshore, U.S oil production at best could maintain it's present level, but will NEVER increase by nearly 30% to hit it's peak in the 70's.

So, over 60% of your oil is currently being imported, and more and more it's the expensive type of oil and less and less the cheap and easily reachable oil. This does not bode well for the future, of any nation as once cheap oil goes you have a whole host of new problems to deal with.

Then you've got coal. There's plenty of it, but the mining still leaves lots of nice little presents in the surrounding area and it aint fun living next to a coal fired power plant.

There's plenty of natural gas still out there, but as more and more folks switch to that as oil based energy becomes more expensive you're still only delaying the inevitable. Russia is cashing in big time on natural gas right now but at best that spigots going to be running for another two decades and then they'll start seeing diminishing returns very fast.

One country has got it right though. China is on track to become the leading producer, world-wide of solar panels and wind-turbines. They've recognized that they've got big problems and are trying to deal with them before they become un-manageable!

Could we not fill abandoned oilfields with nuclear waste?

I'm not sure the toxic waste would be more dangerous than the oil (if we hadn't used it up) in a few thousand years so we'd simply be replacing one danger with another.

 

Key word "Producer"... not user. The Chinese know exactly where they get the most bang for the buck. They gladly sell things they would rarely consider using themselves. So it selling imperfect technologies, of minimum value to the righteous weenies that will buy it, is "getting it right", then I agree with you. They are laughing all the way to the bank...smoke stacks blazing.

The way I see it is we don't have to store the waste for thousands of years, just until cost/pound of achieving orbit drops to levels at which commercial spaceflight is viable. All we have to do then is ship the waste to orbit, strap a booster onto it and point it at the sun/one of the gas giants.

The radioactive halflife of spent nuclear fuel is really really long. I forgot the exact number, but I recall something like 25 000 years for ²³⁹Pu . It will be more dangerous than oil for a long time. And you can't guarantee that it would be concealed down there for as long as it takes or that the knowledge that nuclear waste is dangerous will be around at that time either. After all, high civilizations and their knowledge disappear all the time from the face of the earth and digital storage isn't really all that durable. Doesn't a CD break in ca 30 years and becomes unreadable? One reason why the digitalization of the world's literature isn't really preserving it for the future because you would have to constantly copy the  data to keep it available. A library with real book in it is much more practical in the longrun. I do like projects like "Projekt Gutenberg" because it is convenient to be able to download alot of literature right on my PC, but I love to go to the library as well. One good thing is that books will probably survive a few thousand years - at least archeologists in the future have a chance to find them. Wether they understand what they find is another question. It is an interesting field in semiotics.

Wow. You assume too much for my liking here. And it is very risky to bank your hopes on future developments of technology to solve a problem that you create but can't solve yourself at the moment. What if that development doesn't come? Or if something goes wrong and the whole damn thing explodes on its way to orbit? Be that as it may, alot of nuclear waste is produced already so we do need a solution for that even if everybody were to stop using nuclear energy at once around the world.

Eh.. it probably has lot to do with prestige as well. They like to show that they are the greatest nation on earth by doing projects like that stupid 3 gorges dam they built for which the government forcefully resettled a few million people. Not to mention all the ecological problems it creates. And the Chinese are a kings of plagiarism, but the quality really sucks most of the time.

That's assuming that there would be an equal amount of both.

I don't think the nuclear waste of one power plant is as dangerous a find as all the oil that would be needed to produce the same amount of electricity.

 

Nobody has to guarantee it. The knowledge will come to future humanity after the first few thousand deaths, just like it did to us.

That number is still a lot lower than the number of people we would lose if we didn't have access to the electricity or, presumably, if we keep producing CO2 by burning oil instead of using nuclear power.

Aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered and I understand they saved thousands of lives after the tsunami.  Did a single use of nuclear power here save more lives than all the nuclear waste from reactors will ever cost?

Do you know the impact of Chernobyl? It was 56 direct deaths and approx. 4000 cancer deaths (in 600,000 people exposed) over their lifetime.

I doubt that a nuclear waste site is more dangerous than an exploding power plant.

And I guess that a lot more than 4056 lives were saved in the Soviet Union because the country had access to nuclear power.

 

Well, thanks to Obama and his cutting of NASA space funds (note, I understand he is increasing their AGW funds), that may be thousands of years.

I never argued against finding a place to reliably store current nuclear waste, just over the length of time it would have to remain sequestered there. Obviously launching this material to space will require new systems to prove themselves before we put any waste up in them, but in the mean time we can utilize vitrification processes and reactors designed to consume nuclear waste as a fuel.

It is completely unreasonable to assume that the cost of spaceflight will never drop below what it is today. Currently it costs between $10,000 and $40,000 to launch one kg of material into orbit. The Falcon9 rocket, scheduled for its maiden flight sometime early this year(http://www.spacex.com/updates.php#Falcon9Update081507), has a listed price of $49,500,000 for 10450kg or about $4736.84/kg for a launch from Cape Canaveral(http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php). Obviously, this is still ridiculously expensive compared to the cost of transporting the material across continents to an underground depot, but it is a stepping stone toward cheaper rocket based launch systems while other, less explosive methods for achieving orbit are explored.

Of all the manned flights performed by NASA, I can only find one catastrophic failure during liftoff resulting in explosion mentioned, or a 0.64935% chance of failure resulting in explosion, which to me is an acceptable percentage for launches.

Yes well, I'd rather have ZERO chance of the equivalent of a nuclear bomb exploding in low orbit. One human error or maintenance oversight, miscalculation or otherwise could cause a huge accident that would probably cause alot of radioactive fallout. It's like detonating a bomb. 100% security is hard to achieve though.

Dumping the whole meess into the sun would be nice.

I guess you haven't heard about  the secret cities and research reactor projects in the USSR where alot more people were and are exposed to toxic environments. In some places, they just dumped the whole lot in huge surface dumpsters like in Lake Karachay, where they had simply poured the waste from Mayak nto the lake. A unprotected person would recieve a deadly dose of radiation within a hour LINK  The Techa river is also heavily polluted with radiation, and that is just one example. People are sick and die all over the place due to radiation. After the accident/catastrophy in Kyshtym in 1957where a nuclear waste tank exploded in Mayak and many people were affected, the russian government didn't tell the people what happened (it was a secret research facility) and started to study the longterm effects on the population as in a huge experiment with human guineepigs. They are still doing it too. When asked, the health office for the region stated that there are no problems at all, that everything was just perfect.

Yeah - it's just like oil, no danger at all and only a few people died all in all. You assume that people would have the knowledge and knowhow to identify the threat in the future and also to have an idea how to stop it. Arguing that nuclear power saved more than it killed is not valid because we can't really estimate how the future will be affected and the balance could tip pretty quickly into the exact opposite of what you said. And because we don't know what will happen with nuclear waste, it is unethical to just produce more and more anyway with the hope that it will all turn out alright somehow. Thinking about all the nuclear threats as in sowjet nuclear subs rusting in the harbours like radioactive time bombs is giving me the chills - I avoid doing it too much and just pretend (like many) that nothing will happen because nothing happend so far.