On the plus side, we’ll finally have all the tech we need to go to Alpha Centauri.
Of course, if we have fusion power, then we’re golden. Doubly so if each household can have its own Mr. Fusion.
Superconductors aren’t going to be room temperature anytime soon. But it is not an impossibility to have a few lines that are super cooled. We are going to have to upgrade the grid and we might as well do it right.
I’m aware of that. It demonstrates the potential extensive toxicity of coal mining as well.
Thank you. This is a lot more compelling than some-guy-tripped-over-a-skylight-while-carrying-solar-panels.
The article does note that the Chinese companies are not mitigating the problem by recycling silicon tetrachloride, not taking steps to reduce the toxicity of the waste and properly deal with it. These are obviously cost-saving measures taken at the expense of the environment and population surrounding the plants. The companies will obviously not be held responsible for those costs, so it makes sense for them to opt for the cheaper, less environmentally responsible route. That’s not a position I advocate. We’ve seen this before with so many other industrial productions. This only demonstrates that unscrupulous producers must be held accountable for their impacts and 's something the U.S. has a much better record for doing than China does. (Not to say we there aren’t improvements to be made in our own regulatory system.)
This is something that I’d like to see much more discussion about in the public arena. China has an abysmal record for environmental quality control and western industrialized nations are complacent, complicit and cooperative to China’s environmental abuses.
This is a sensible position, but I’d like to see a better solutions to dealing with nuclear waste than burying it. This is the type of all-encompassing approach to energy that I can get behind. It’s good to finally see someone talk about reducing energy consumption in terms that aren’t condescending, exaggerated and dismissive.
I’m one of those people that was earlier deemed to be one of those hemp-wearing fruitcakes that thinks people ought to be living in the dark ages. I don’t wear hemp and I don’t think we should be living in the dark ages. I may still be a fruitcake, though. I do understand that we are going to have an impact on our environment. I simply believe it is too big and it doesn’t have to be. I seek to conserve in any way I can. I still wear synthetics, but I opt for recycled textiles when it’s practical. I haven’t completely converted away from incandescent bulbs, but I turn off the lights when I’m not using them. I have an electric lawnmower because it does reduce my oil consumption. I can make a lot of little changes that reduces my carbon footprint, but I may not be able to reduce it as much as someone that lives in a more rural environment.
I have to go to work, but I just wanted to note that conservation is very important to me.
Suppose a lot of homes in the East had had solar panels before the snowstorms of this winter hit. I suspect solar panels don’t work so well when covered with snow. There would have been an additional reason for people to be climbing around on snowy, icy roofs, so we’d have had more people doing it. Climbing on snowy, icy roofs is a dangerous activity, even for a professional roofer, so we’d have had some injuries and possibly some deaths.
You DO SOME risk calculations of your OWN then.
Least THAT guy had sources, numbers, assumptions, and actual risk calculations and had some idea of how to use them.
If you can’t do that, you don’t understand numbers or risk or science for that matter. And of course, if thats your mindset, then yeah nuklear is all scary evil stuff.
I await your impressive numbers.
Its not that complicated. How many roofers get hurt or killed every year? If you have solar panels on roofs everywhere, you are going to have an army of solar panel installers/maintainers on par with that of the roofers. Is there something about installing SOLAR panels on roofs that makes workers immune to electrocution and injury/death from falling? Must be that magic pixie dust they are made of that made them free and energy producing 24/7.
Is solar deadly? Hell no, it will be pretty safe actually in an absolute terms. Way better than coal or fossil fuels (and that before you even consider the effects of pollution ).
I don’t know any pro nuke people that are AGAINST solar. But IT JUST ISNT ENOUGH to cover all the bases. And neither is wind. Or hydro. Or all off em put together.
Even if those sources were perfectly safe (they are not) and had no environmental impact (they don’t) they are not a total solution. Certainly not short to medium term. Maybe never.
So, what pray tell, is supposed to take up most of the slack?
You are left with coal/fossil or nuclear. Nuclear is demonstrably safer than either of those even before you worry about pollution or global warming.
It doesnt matter if solar is perfectly safe, free, and has no environmental impact if it can’t provide what we need.
Yeah, see, this is what I was talking about. This is exactly what we should be doing. Nuclear energy AND Solar AND general reduction of consumption AND battery tech development AND general R&D AND large-scale long-term population downshifting AND so on and so forth.
Except I think burying nuclear waste is a perfectly reasonable solution.
Why? Simple. The amount of time something is radioactive is inverse to the lethality of it. Meaning that all of the truly nasty stuff will be gone by the time we have to worry about anyone digging it up. And if, in the far-flung future, people end up digging it up, all they’ll find is moderately radioactive rocks, same as we did when we discovered radioactivity.
Magic pony technology. That is what you’re asking for. Until we can actually create a room-temperature superconductor, pinning all our hopes on future tech we can’t actually make yet is foolish.
What do you base that on? Besides solar and other clean energies don’t have melt downs. They don’t allow poisonous gasses to leach into the soil. They don’t have tritium leaks that are kept from the puiblic . They don’t have problematic and dangerous waste.
I spent a fair amount of my time as a hazmat tech accepting and repackaging for shipping toxic waste from factories disposing of the waste from their manufacture practices. One of them was a factory that made the cute little solar cells for calculators and other scientific demonstrations [early 80s] and their waste was pretty toxic … manufacture wastes have to go somewhere, and if we made enough solar cells to roof everybodies home, it would be a fucking shitload of waste produts that have to be disposed of. Then you need to manufacture replacement cells for incedental damage or vandalism, new home building.office building … it is an endless cycle of manufacture producing toxic waste… where nukes produce a hell of a lot less waste over all.
I wanted to point this out as one of the most basic, germane points of this whole discussion - people all want to come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and stoves and microwaves and tvs at the same time. The reality might be that we might not be able to do that in the future without cheap oil and gas to run the power generators, but anything less than people continuing to get their bread and circuses is not going to be acceptable to the masses. You can’t even convince people to throw aluminum cans in this bin instead of that bin - good luck selling them on not using their air conditioners when it’s 95 degrees out.
Whenever someone says “let make damn sure…” I hear the beginnning of a no true scotsman argument.
For example, if we packed the spent nuclear rods in containers that can be dropped out of an airplane without cracking, we ship them to a part of the country where we have been conducting nuclear detonations for generations and store them in an underground facility that is so deep in the ground that the sun would burn out before the radiation could pose a problem, someone would say “yeah but a terrorist could hijack the shipment and open those containers and sprinkle the waste in my baby’s crib”
I mean how “damn sure” do we have to get? Do we have to eliminate ALL risk associated with nuclear energy before we can start replacing coal fired power plants with nuclear power plants?
My understanding is that we are at least 10 years away from solar cells that will be as cost efficient as current grid power, AND solar cells generate toxic waste during production and are not easily disposed of either.
That would require an apetite for government activity that seems to be unpopular these days.
There is a whole host of things that government can probably do better than the private sector but everyone seems to think that everything is better left to the private sector these days.
Now they can be made of silica or organic compounds. The green energy is still in its beginning stages. You can be sure they will get cleaner and cheaper as time goes on.
The Economic Reality and Economy of Scale. Thinking public energy corporations will not be involved in large scale exploitation of any energy source is pollyanna stupid.
You say Solar doesn’t allow toxic gasses to leech into the soil, but considering they are made with toxic chemicals, it is an absolute certainty that at some point we will discover that rain run-off from solar panels is causing some of those chemicals to be deposited in the soil beneath them. Then you’ve got square miles of land polluted by “clean” solar panels.
And god help us if there is a fire (a certainty at some point and place) and that shit burns.
Yeah…they have been for a while now. But the manufacturing process, afaik, still generates a lot of toxic waste. I haven’t seen any magic manufacturing techniques for making solar cells that doesn’t generate waste. Have you?
I don’t think anyone is denying that, gonzo. What they are saying is that it’s not ready today. At this time we will essentially have to wait around and hope that indeed lower cost, higher density green solutions that can scale up to meet our needs can be found. When? Gods know. 10 years? Doubtful. 20? Maybe. 30-50? Yeah, that’s probably in the ball park. But that’s the time to develop and test those new solutions, not put them into production. After they finally figure out the process then they have to manufacture it on a sufficient scale to make a difference and then deploy it. It will take years, possibly decades to manufacture and deploy on that scale. If the GW folks are right I don’t think we HAVE 3-4 decades before we can START to reduce CO2 emissions.
On the other hand, we could start putting nuclear into production tomorrow if we had the political will to do so. We could have nuclear power plants coming on stream and starting to significantly cut into our CO2 footprint in the time it will take the green solutions to do R&D for POSSIBLE future solutions that can scale up to our needs TODAY (let alone what they will be in another decade). I suppose we could just throw our hands up and say that nuclear is ‘too risky’ (without really understanding what those risks are), and go with the status quo until the magic ponies really come on stream in a few decades. If we were to do a major push today we MIGHT be able to get enough solar cells and wind generators on line to reduce our energy from coal by 5-10% (just a WAG on my part)…which still is going to leave quite a bit of our total energy coming from coal fired plants.
What this thread has shown me is that it’s not really a left/right issue, as one between those who rationally understand the risks and the trade-offs in any undertaking on this kind of scale and those who don’t, who can only see one side of the problem (that nuclear waste is bad, that nuclear power plants COULD fail and cause harm, etc) and who are, seeming, incapable of looking at the big picture. And it’s going to be the anti-nukes (left/right and center) who are going to continue to drag our nations feet on nuclear power, are going to continue to cost us more wasted money, cost more lives in absolute terms and, ultimately, put more CO2 into the air by their actions. They movement reminds me of the anti-vax movement in a lot of ways…including the fact that while trying to do good they are actually killing more people and costing everyone more money in the long run.
-XT
Well, some corporation has to make the cells, and some corporation has to ship the cells, and some corporation has to sell the cells, and some corporation has to install the cells and some corporation has to maintain them.
What’s to prevent any of them from cutting corners?
Simply create a solar panel that has telescopic extenders that can tilt it upright till the snowstorm dies down.
Excellent post XT.
Sums things up quite well.
You’re not serious, are you? Do you have any idea what that would do to the complexity of the system? Or what would happen when you have a STORM and you raise a bunch of flat panels vertically into it?
Let’s forget the telescopic extenders.
The problem isn’t just snow anyway. It’s snow, dust, rain causing dust to turn into dried dirt… Have you ever left your car outside for more than a week or two? Try it, then turn on your windshield wipers, and see how much dust and dirt is removed. It’s a LOT.
The dust/dirt/snow problem is not trivial. It’s one of the bigger issues facing large solar farms and household panels alike.
Falls from roofs is one of the largest categories of occupational fatalities in the United States. The number is not small - from 1980 to 1985, 3,491 commercial workers were killed from falls. Now, these are professionals, who tend to use safety gear and know what they are doing.
Now imagine a city full of solar power panels, and the aftermath of a storm which leaves most of them covered. Imagine all those homeowners getting out their rickety ladders and trying to get their power back. Tens of thousands of them. Multiple times per year.
If we got our power by covering the roofs of homes with solar panels, I would not be surprised if 5,000 people a year were killed as a result.
Windmills by their very nature require service work to be carried out at a high altitude, and require large construction equipment and cranes to put them into place. There will be fatalities from that as well.
This is not to argue against solar and wind. It’s to point out, once again, that there are no truly ‘safe’ energy sources. It’s not a choice between nuclear and riskless power - it’s a choice between nuclear and other risks. And to date, nuclear has the safest track record, and has killed fewer people, than any other major source of energy we have. And it’s not even a close comparison.