The environment thread

[kapkomet]

Voting Coffers for Democrats 2010 ™

 

And I'm only semi-kidding, because the way that the whole thing is structured, unemployment is going to look beautiful in the late summer compared to right now, among other things.

 

I've heard it said that Obama's sitting on a $2 trillion dollar election fund for the next three years. And you can't really argue against it if you're looking at it fairly.

 

 

[NorthSideSox72]

We only really spent a pittance on construction jobs in the stimulus too.

Highway construction alone was $30B. That's more than 10 times what we are spending on this latest energy package. Wrong priorities, IMO, and short term thinking is going to kill us.

 

[Balta1701]

Highway construction alone was $30B. That's more than 10 times what we are spending on this latest energy package. Wrong priorities, IMO, and short term thinking is going to kill us.

Highway construction was $30 billion, and that's a factor of 15 less than the amount of tax cuts included in the package. Hence, it was a pittance.

[southsideirish71]

Maybe its 30 years of Global Cooling.

 

UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change member professor Mojib Latif - the globe is now in a "cold mode" which could see temperatures falling for between 20 and 30 years.

 

 

 

[NorthSideSox72]

Maybe its 30 years of Global Cooling.

 

UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change member professor Mojib Latif - the globe is now in a "cold mode" which could see temperatures falling for between 20 and 30 years.

The Daily Mail?

 

I just checked the google news feeds, and the only places this stuff is appearing, at least for now, is blogs, the Daily Mail, and papers with the name "Inquirer" in the title.

 

By the way, I see in my search that this very same scientist who wrote this paper, has also said he indeed believes in global warming, but that these cycles are ALSO part of the picture.

 

This isn't journalism, its a hack job of splicing out what information they prefer to project to make their point. Let me know when we see some actual reporting done on this, showing, you know, the whole picture in all its shades of gray.

 

The main trend still stands - thousands of peer-reviewed academic papers, all in a unison chorus in one direction. On the other side, a few random quotes and some non-scientists making assumptions. No one can know for sure, but I'll take the former before the latter.

 

[Rex Kickass]

Oh and the arctic is having a warm trend this December which is really really bad for sea ice.

[Balta1701]

Oh and the arctic is having a warm trend this December which is really really bad for sea ice.

Impossible. My Fox News hosts tell me its cold everywhere.

[Rex Kickass]

Current Temperatures as of 12:10pm Jan 11

 

Nuuk, Greenland airport - 41.0 F

Jacksonville, Florida airport - 42.1 F

[Balta1701]

Current Temperatures as of 12:10pm Jan 11

 

Nuuk, Greenland airport - 41.0 F

Jacksonville, Florida airport - 42.1 F

There's a really interesting graph that shows this quite well:

 

No scientist is really saying it because no one wants to over-step things and get the attack dogs after them and because it's an El Nino year so everything is crazy anyway, but this is exactly what models say should happen if you start to weaken the Gulf Stream or if you rotate it away from Europe and towards Western Greenland (say, due to added meltwater entering the Atlantic from Eastern Greenland). Freeze Europe and the eastern U.S., everywhere else gets hotter.

[NorthSideSox72]

So, we've discussed before, it Amtrak can better compete with airlines. Well, as it turns out, they are now running an ad campaign at O'Hare, going right for them.

 

[BigSqwert]

Cult of Consumerism at Root of Planet's Environmental Degradation & Destruction

[BigSqwert]

Last decade was warmest on record according to NASA study.

January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade. Since 1880, the year that modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, though there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s.

Edited January 22, 2010 by BigSqwert

[Balta1701]

Last decade was warmest on record according to NASA study.

Duh. We knew that 5 years ago.

[BigSqwert]

Duh. We knew that 5 years ago.

 

I could have sworn a few people in this thread were arguing that there was a cooling trend this past decade.

[Y2HH]

I wish it was even warmer.

[Balta1701]

A group of scientists were planning a meeting at my former school to discuss how California would deal with what used to be likely a 1000 year storm event, which may wind up being much more likely due to climate change.

 

About a dozen of them had to cancel their attendance because of mudslides due to torrential rains.

[EvilMonkey]

A group of scientists were planning a meeting at my former school to discuss how California would deal with what used to be likely a 1000 year storm event, which may wind up being much more likely due to climate change.

 

About a dozen of them had to cancel their attendance because of mudslides due to torrential rains.

Mudslides in California are an annual occurance! As are forest fires and Linsday Lohan driving drunk.

[StrangeSox]

Let's go nuclear

The first conclusion is that the mean value of emissions over the course of the lifetime of a nuclear reactor (reported from qualified studies) is 66 g CO2e/kWh, due to reliance on existing fossil-fuel infrastructure for plant construction, decommissioning, and fuel processing along with the energy intensity of uranium mining and enrichment. Thus, nuclear energy is in no way “carbon free” or “emissions free,” even though it is much better (from purely a carbon-equivalent emissions standpoint) than coal, oil, and natural gas electricity generators, but worse than renewable and small scale distributed generators (see Table 8). For example, Gagnon et al (2002) found that coal, oil, diesel, and natural gas generators emitted between 443 and 1050 g CO2e/kWh, far more than the 66 g CO2e/kWh attributed to the nuclear lifecycle. However, Pehnt (2006) conducted lifecycle analyses for 15 separate distributed generation and renewable energy technologies and found that all but one, solar photovoltaics (PV), emitted much less g CO2e/kWh than the mean reported for nuclear plants. In an analysis using updated data on solar PV, Fthenakis et al. (2008) found that current estimates on the greenhouse gas emissions for typical solar PV systems range from 29 to 35 g CO2e/kWh (based on insolation of 1700 kWh/m2/yr and a performance ratio of 0.8).

Sovacool, B.K. (2008) Valuing the greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power: A critical survey. Energy Policy, 36, 2950-2963.

 

Current-gen nuclear is orders of magnitude better for the environment than any realistic alternative. By all means, we need to invest in alternatives, but they're just not feasible on massive, 1GW+ scales all over the country. Nuclear is and its a hell of a lot better than coal or LNG. Ecologically it's probably less damaging than a hydrodam. It's marginally worse for carbon output than solar power. It requires substantial investment up front but it recovers it over time and produces cheap, reliable power.

 

If leftists want to live in reality and stop being neo-luddites, they need to drop their opposition to the only real alternative out there.

 

Nukes: 66 g CO2e/kWh

Fossils: 443 to 1050 g CO2e/kWh

Solar: 29 to 35 g CO2e/kWh

 

And that's current-gen nuclear power. All indications are that fourth gen will be significantly more efficient.

[NorthSideSox72]

Let's go nuclear

 

Sovacool, B.K. (2008) Valuing the greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power: A critical survey. Energy Policy, 36, 2950-2963.

 

Current-gen nuclear is orders of magnitude better for the environment than any realistic alternative. By all means, we need to invest in alternatives, but they're just not feasible on massive, 1GW+ scales all over the country. Nuclear is and its a hell of a lot better than coal or LNG. Ecologically it's probably less damaging than a hydrodam. It's marginally worse for carbon output than solar power. It requires substantial investment up front but it recovers it over time and produces cheap, reliable power.

 

If leftists want to live in reality and stop being neo-luddites, they need to drop their opposition to the only real alternative out there.

 

Nukes: 66 g CO2e/kWh

Fossils: 443 to 1050 g CO2e/kWh

Solar: 29 to 35 g CO2e/kWh

 

And that's current-gen nuclear power. All indications are that fourth gen will be significantly more efficient.

On the bolded you are vastly overreaching.

 

I disagree with the far left, in that I think nuclear should be part of the picture. But the idea that its the only way to go, ignoring the side effects of using nuclear fuel and ignoring the maturity process, is silly.

 

Do 'em all - nuclear, solar, wind, geo, hydro, etc.

 

[StrangeSox]

Solar, wind, geo and hydro aren't feasible short or mid-term alternatives to coal or NG plants.

 

By all means, let's fund them and research them. But let's not pretend it's a realistic option to replace coal plants in the next decade or two. There's currently less than 1GW of solar thermal power installed in the entire world. Geo power is only feasible in some places. Same goes for wind (Illinois does have a massive wind farm under way, I'll note). Hydro presents its own ecological issues.

[NorthSideSox72]

Solar, wind, geo and hydro aren't feasible short or mid-term alternatives to coal or NG plants.

 

By all means, let's fund them and research them. But let's not pretend it's a realistic option to replace coal plants in the next decade or two. There's currently less than 1GW of solar thermal power installed in the entire world. Geo power is only feasible in some places. Same goes for wind (Illinois does have a massive wind farm under way, I'll note). Hydro presents its own ecological issues.

it is because each and every source you mention, nuclear included, has flaws, that the best tactic is to spread things out. But long term, nuclear isn't a great option. At the rate of increase in efficiency, solar and wind will both become much more practical in the next 10 years, and are already both workable as part of the picture right now. Geo, hydro and tidal are nice regional alternatives. Spreading it out is just good business in this case.

 

[Balta1701]

Natural Gas, yeah, I'll agree that's a core climate solution, and it will in the end likely be necessary to keep a few natural gas plants around even after shifting to 100% renewable to meet demand at times when the weather just doesn't cooperate.

 

Saying "there's only so much of it installed" however is not an argument for why more can't be installed right now if we set our minds to it. In particular with wind, less so but still somewhat with solar, the lack of wind generation right now is directly related to the rapidly changing regulatory scheme at the national level here; one year there would be subsidies for wind development on par with what is there for fossil fuels, then the next year those subsidies would disappear, the companies would go bankrupt and all the employees would be out of work, then the next year the subsidies would reappear again but whole new companies would have to be created to make use of them.

 

If we really put our minds to it and put money on the order of the stimulus plan into it, we could have a nearly-carbon-free electricity generation and distribution system within about 10 years based solely on the technology we have right now. Wind power generation domestically the last few years (between stimulus dollars and a non-hateful regulatory environment in 2009 and the fossil fuel price spikes from 2007-2008) has grown at over 40% a a year for the past several years. Solar, likewise.

 

I'm not going to directly argue against nuclear. I will note a couple things; first, the U.S. government on its own subsidizes the nuclear industry to the tune of $1 billion a year in direct cash payouts because the government promised to find a place to store the waste and has yet to do so. Even with that subsidy, nuclear power keeps having a nasty habit of already being vastly more expensive per KWH than renewable or gas generation, because the startup costs are so giant. Here's an example; San Antonio keeps wanting to install 2 new nuclear reactors, but has so far balked because the costs keep going up ($20 billion/reactor and counting). They've proposed a 10% electricity rate hike before the things are even built/on line in order to pay for them. It's difficult to get an exact price per kwh out of the nuclear industry right now, but on average, the quoted rates wind up being 1.5 to 2x the current electricity rates for most of the U.S. Renewables typically can beat that easily.

 

There is of course one way to get around this discussion entirely and to make it much, much clearer which way is the right way to go long term. Put a significant price on carbon, stabilize the regulatory environment for everything, cut out the oil and coal subsidies, and let things sort themselves out.

[NorthSideSox72]

Natural Gas, yeah, I'll agree that's a core climate solution, and it will in the end likely be necessary to keep a few natural gas plants around even after shifting to 100% renewable to meet demand at times when the weather just doesn't cooperate.

 

Saying "there's only so much of it installed" however is not an argument for why more can't be installed right now if we set our minds to it. In particular with wind, less so but still somewhat with solar, the lack of wind generation right now is directly related to the rapidly changing regulatory scheme at the national level here; one year there would be subsidies for wind development on par with what is there for fossil fuels, then the next year those subsidies would disappear, the companies would go bankrupt and all the employees would be out of work, then the next year the subsidies would reappear again but whole new companies would have to be created to make use of them.

 

If we really put our minds to it and put money on the order of the stimulus plan into it, we could have a nearly-carbon-free electricity generation and distribution system within about 10 years based solely on the technology we have right now. Wind power generation domestically the last few years (between stimulus dollars and a non-hateful regulatory environment in 2009 and the fossil fuel price spikes from 2007-2008) has grown at over 40% a a year for the past several years. Solar, likewise.

 

I'm not going to directly argue against nuclear. I will note a couple things; first, the U.S. government on its own subsidizes the nuclear industry to the tune of $1 billion a year in direct cash payouts because the government promised to find a place to store the waste and has yet to do so. Even with that subsidy, nuclear power keeps having a nasty habit of already being vastly more expensive per KWH than renewable or gas generation, because the startup costs are so giant. Here's an example; San Antonio keeps wanting to install 2 new nuclear reactors, but has so far balked because the costs keep going up ($20 billion/reactor and counting). They've proposed a 10% electricity rate hike before the things are even built/on line in order to pay for them. It's difficult to get an exact price per kwh out of the nuclear industry right now, but on average, the quoted rates wind up being 1.5 to 2x the current electricity rates for most of the U.S. Renewables typically can beat that easily.

 

There is of course one way to get around this discussion entirely and to make it much, much clearer which way is the right way to go long term. Put a significant price on carbon, stabilize the regulatory environment for everything, cut out the oil and coal subsidies, and let things sort themselves out.

I remember seeing a study, not too long ago, showing how if they took the $1.2T spent on the Iraq War, we could be energy independent within 10 years, and have a large swath of our energy be from sustainable sources as well. Does anyone really think that the Iraq War was worth more than that?

 

[StrangeSox]

Natural Gas, yeah, I'll agree that's a core climate solution, and it will in the end likely be necessary to keep a few natural gas plants around even after shifting to 100% renewable to meet demand at times when the weather just doesn't cooperate.

 

Saying "there's only so much of it installed" however is not an argument for why more can't be installed right now if we set our minds to it. In particular with wind, less so but still somewhat with solar, the lack of wind generation right now is directly related to the rapidly changing regulatory scheme at the national level here; one year there would be subsidies for wind development on par with what is there for fossil fuels, then the next year those subsidies would disappear, the companies would go bankrupt and all the employees would be out of work, then the next year the subsidies would reappear again but whole new companies would have to be created to make use of them.

 

If we really put our minds to it and put money on the order of the stimulus plan into it, we could have a nearly-carbon-free electricity generation and distribution system within about 10 years based solely on the technology we have right now. Wind power generation domestically the last few years (between stimulus dollars and a non-hateful regulatory environment in 2009 and the fossil fuel price spikes from 2007-2008) has grown at over 40% a a year for the past several years. Solar, likewise.

 

I'm not going to directly argue against nuclear. I will note a couple things; first, the U.S. government on its own subsidizes the nuclear industry to the tune of $1 billion a year in direct cash payouts because the government promised to find a place to store the waste and has yet to do so. Even with that subsidy, nuclear power keeps having a nasty habit of already being vastly more expensive per KWH than renewable or gas generation, because the startup costs are so giant. Here's an example; San Antonio keeps wanting to install 2 new nuclear reactors, but has so far balked because the costs keep going up ($20 billion/reactor and counting). They've proposed a 10% electricity rate hike before the things are even built/on line in order to pay for them. It's difficult to get an exact price per kwh out of the nuclear industry right now, but on average, the quoted rates wind up being 1.5 to 2x the current electricity rates for most of the U.S. Renewables typically can beat that easily.

 

There is of course one way to get around this discussion entirely and to make it much, much clearer which way is the right way to go long term. Put a significant price on carbon, stabilize the regulatory environment for everything, cut out the oil and coal subsidies, and let things sort themselves out.

 

I can agree, in general, with everything you and NSS are saying. I will just point out again that nuclear is a technology we have and we know it is reliable. It is safe. It has minimal environmental impacts. It's current-gen carbon footprint is higher than solar or wind but orders of magnitude lower than coal. Fourth gen plants are estimated to be lower than current solar and wind by a significant margin.

 

From what I've seen you've really overstated the cost of those San Antonio plants. It ranges from $13-17B total, not per reactor. Wind and solar generation isn't cheap, either, and currently costs a lot more than nuclear generation. Please show me where renewables are typically beating nuclear prices. Make sure subsidies for both sources are factored in. And factor in the fact that you still need backups for wind and solar because they're not reliable sources of energy.

Edited February 2, 2010 by StrangeSox

[Balta1701]

From what I've seen you've really overstated the cost of those San Antonio plants. It ranges from $13-17B total, not per reactor. Wind and solar generation isn't cheap, either, and currently costs a lot more than nuclear generation. Please show me where renewables are typically beating nuclear prices. Make sure subsidies for both sources are factored in. And factor in the fact that you still need backups for wind and solar because they're not reliable sources of energy.

You're correct, it was total, not per reactor. My mistake.

 

I have no ability to actually factor in subsidies here, and there's actually a key reason; a lot of the politics here involves casually not telling people how much things are costing.

 

If I go straight to cost per Kilowatt, Right now, Nuclear Power is somewhere in the $8000/kilowatt range. This number is consistent with the San Antonio plants as currently described. Problem is...it keeps going up. About 3 years ago, the head of one energy company said he doubted that any new nuclear capacity would be installed before 2020 because of the cost...which he estimated at $4000/Kw.

 

For similar examples, there's been estimates produced of the cost per kilowatt for plants in Florida. A most recent quote was in the $14 billion range, which translated to $6600/kilowatt. But that didnt' count building distribution networks, which added another $3 billion and pushed it to $7500/kilowatt. And that utility says that its current estimates are "Non-binding".

 

A few years ago, Moodys put out a study (which they actually use to argue in favor of nuclear power as a climate solution) that undercuts its own argument. It quotes the $7500/kilowatt price I just did. It also quotes a price of $2000/kilowatt for wind and $3000/kilowatt for solar. Those are from 2007, and that's ignoring projections of a halving of solar installation costs over the next decade, but anyway. It winds up concluding that solar and nuclear are about even, because it puts the depreciation time for solar at 20 years and the depreciation time for nuclear at 40 years, so the total 40 year investment winds up being similar, but that is strongly dependent on the depreciation time, and there are, for example, 30-40 year old wind farms still running in California that were built during the late-70's energy crisis.

 

The reality I see with nuclear is...right now, the startup/construction costs are huge, and they keep going up, rapidly. At best, nuclear is right now competitive with wind and solar, and at worst is several steps behind them, depending on how you do the math and how long the plants operate for. And wind and solar expect to see substantial cost decreases over the next few years, while nuclear is going rapidly the opposite direction.

 

If I see data that disagrees with this assessment I'll reevaluate, but the numbers I keep seeing, consistent with every reactor cost estimate that comes through, appear to agree.