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Jan 16, 2014 at 6:00 am
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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Fun fact: way more radioactive waste is produced by a coal plant than a nuclear plant on a per megawatt basis, and then there's the mercury, the arsenic and the fact that it just gets dumped into the air.
The thing to understand with coal is that it's mildly, mildly radioactive, but because a typical plant has to burn mile long trains of the stuff it adds up rather quickly.
I can look for other sources if you're curious.
If we're serious about reducing carbon, we need to take a combination of renewable power and modern nuclear power. France has a ton of experience with this, as does China.
Anyhoo, enough thread hijacking for the nuclear lobby.
The "clean" coal bullshit talks about pumping pressurized liquid CO2 into underground tanks with is awesome until one leaks and the heavier than air gasses kill off a city.
Drawing carbon out of the air via enhanced weathering processes of silicate minerals however would be both cheap and inoffensive but the ultimate efficiency of the process has to be assessed.
By the way, you don't need to be a nuclear scientist to understand the basics of nuclear power - I highly recommend Berkley's "Physics for Future Presidents".
2. environmentalists are unclear on what needs to be done, what regulations we should be fighting for, and what we individually must do to take corrective action.
3. Do I as a Seattleite have to not have children? not have dogs or cats? not eat meat? not drive anywhere? not fly to bali for that Sierra club vacation? not build a new LEED certified house, or if it's LEED certified then it' okay to tear down an older house, not renovate it, and dispose of it, and consume lots of energy making the green materials to build the new one? what about building airplanes, is it okay to build airplanes that help the airline industry pollute the atmosphere -- we don't have plug in electric airplanes yet do we.
Is it okay to buy a laptop made in china and an ihpone made in china and type internet comments using those products that were made in plants with electricity from coal powered power plants? If so, must we only buy laptops made in Washington state with hydro powered factories? won't that cost a lot more? what exactly and precisely do we need to be doing to be at a carbon budget that models the change we want, that lets us be the change we advocate for?
it's totally unclear. Result -- people don't know what action to take. Saying do all of it is unrealistic. What should my personal carbon budget be, and should I chuck the dog first, the second annual plane trip first, or the working at boeing first?
The SA summary and study cited are basically comparing 'improperly' managed ash vs. emission from a properly functioning, operational reactor. It was not accounting for long term waste emission, or the fact that nobody has a long term solution for nuclear waste products that approaches even the half life of many byproducts.
Then comes the real trick: convincing China and India (and, later, whichever African countries develop first) to play along.
Nobody has a long term solution? I've already mentioned fast breeder reactors and if you're going to talk about half life, you need to also discuss the inverse relationship between radioactivity and half-life and the different types of radiation being given off.
We could just do what the French do and recycle the damn fuel.
What do you suggest for baseload power generation if you want to reduce carbon in a meaningful way?
On nuclear we currently have the worst of both worlds:, old relatively dirty high maintenance designs running past their design lifetime. I'd like to see some kind of encouragement on improving that. E.g. Require less waste each year from the industry and subsidy only for less waste producing designs per kilowatt matched with retiring the least safe current reactors...or some such scheme to tide us over until there is something better. That could lead to more nuclear produced energy and less waste over time.
As far as pulling CO2 out of the air goes, we can go directly to the source. There's been substantial research into scrubbing coal plant exhaust of particulates and running it over sheets of cyanobacteria. The blue-green algae don't need that much sunlight, grow rapidly, and efficiently take up carbon dioxide from their surroundings, and the biomass produced can be converted into feed or fuel. (Article here.)
@12: Silicate weathering is a very long-term part of the geological thermostat. There's a great deal of exposed rock, but weathering is so slow that feedback takes tens or hundreds of thousands of years to really show much effect. We don't have a snowball's chance in hell of harnessing the effect to make a meaningful dent in anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
There is no evidence that convincing our corporate overlords or getting them out of the way will be easier.
If we're going to do it, we're first going to have to wage a revolution about our attitudes regarding the free market, about how it's better at solving things than government. Because if we implement nuclear, it has to be handled by people who understand that their loyalty is toward the people being served, and not the shareholders who only understand profit and loss.
As for silicate weathering, I said "enhanced" silicate weathering insofar the limits on silicate weathering in some environments may be the availability of fresh mineral surfaces.
@31 You're completely ignoring the issue of power transmission or lack of available sunlight everywhere. Solar is a localized solution only, and even then you need to account for power generation when the weather goes bad or at night.
Solar is great for many things, but it's still not a baseload power source.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: people talk about what needs to be done to reduce carbon emissions, but carbon emissions aren't being reduced; they're going up, and they're not only going up, but the rate of increase is increasing. The real boom in carbon emissions is barely underway. BP research says that global emissions are going to go up by A THIRD in the next twenty years, and I think that figure is low.
The important thing to realize is that it DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE US DOES. Global carbon emissions are going way, way up EVEN IF THE US CEASED TO EXIST. Your Prius accomplishes nothing except complacency.
400 ppm? How do you feel about 600? Can we get to 800 ppm by 2050? I think we can. Four billion people will die, but we won't let that stop us.
Investing in nuclear takes away from investing in renewables that have never been adequately funded. Nuclear isn't safe enough in today's politico-economics as seen at Fukushima.
Civilian nuclear never goes anywhere without his evil twin military nuclear. Civilian nuclear demands the highest level of scrutiny and security, which very few nations if any can really provide as shown at Fukushima.
The first "renewable" power source your link suggest is burning wood. Then to help with power fluctuations in wind and solar, they suggest using gas turbine generators. Methane is much, much worse than CO2.The last thing we need is more natural gas in power generation.
Furthermore, the idea that energy is "wasted" at night is silly: modern nuclear plants can vary their capacity significantly in around an hour, and if there is such a huge load it can go to things like water desalination, electrolysis for hydrogen fuel, recharging electric vehicles and so on.
Concentrated solar power is only useful and efficient at high temperatures and where the sun actually shines on a regular basis. It was built in Spain for a reason! You aren't building one of those up here.
The idea that wind will be fine if you interconnect everything ignores two very important problems - significant power loss through long distance electrical transmission and the fact that the best sites for wind are in sparsely populated areas. The former isn't even discussed at all, and that's a huge issue in the US, China and Russia.
I'm perfectly fine with the idea that 20-30% of our power could come from locally appropriate renewable sources, but the idea that we can just magic away the need for baseload power through building improvements is hopelessly naive.
If you have any serious and targeted references to substantiate your claims, i'll gladly have a look.
whatever will the enlightened homoliberals do?
run around like headless chickens, it seems.
people.
Climate Change is an unalterable reality.
your asses are cooked.
Face it.
besides.
your "civilization" will collapse in a violent spasm of self destruction long before the weather gets you.
because Gommorah.
All viable carbon capture and storage technologies grab the CO2 from fossil fuels we're already burning, so the gain is a net zero. In order to actually extract CO2 from the air, the highest scale solutions are botanical. Grow a tree, turn it into charcoal to stabilize the carbon, then store the carbon somewhere where it will not or will take a very long time to re-enter the carbon cycle.
As far as silicate weathering goes, I don't think you really understand just how slow the process is. Total carbon emissions from fossil fuel use and cement production is about 9.7 gigatons per year (source. The TOTAL CARBON SINK attributed to carbonate AND silicate weathering combined was estimated to be 0.29 gigatons per year (source, go to page 22). That's a decently large number but it's minuscule next to what we're pumping out. It's an incredibly slow process, and any human attempt to speed it up (and we don't really have a model for how to do that) would almost certainly produce more emissions than it absorbed.
that's a lot of waste product management that pretty much remains to be entirely done:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/c…
We already have the technology to make renewable energy a viable alternative. The decentralization possible with renewables is why capitalist industry has neglected to bring production up to the scale we need. Also we're approaching this problem from the wrong angle. We talk about filling our energy "needs" which are really energy desires with no real evaluation of what level of use is really necessary or responsible.
Mark Jacobson's plan for all renewable energy: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacob…
Jacobson arguing against using nuclear ("We don't need it") in a TED debate with Stewart Brand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK8ccWSZk…