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On August 06 2010 06:14 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2010 05:49 Romantic wrote:
An inherent flaw in capitalism is that nobody takes into account systemic risk or non-$$$ considerations. Nobody thinks, "Oh when I buy this car taxes will go up to pay for the roads, I'll have to deal with congestion, global warming, drunk driving, noise pollution etc". America was purposefully marketed cars instead of more public transport and thats that. For a shitload of places it simply wouldn't be profitable.
Personally, I would love to take a train to school or work. Plenty of spare time to do homework.
Then again, I'm not a very good consumer. I don't even own furniture. You'll have a tough time convincing others to consider systemic risk. Even if they do, they probably don't see it as too risky.
Just keep up with the activism. Maybe you can find ways to get people to cut back in small ways. It's called an externality and economists do think about these things. It just doesn't have enough political leeway yet. Anyways, thoughts like the OP are fairly one dimensional and impractical, and don't really address actual problems. I mean, if everyone just stopped eating beef and farmers didn't have to raise cattle, they would save an enormous amount of energy. What good is an idea like that? Why are we even discussing this?
I only meant to point out the average people who create the demand for cars do not consider these sorts of things.
Economists are much smarter than I
Off topic, I made a diet plan for my mother that saves the environment!!! I convinced her to walk or ride a bike anywhere she needed to go within 3 miles of the house. Green Earth Cookie nominee, please?
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United States22883 Posts
On August 06 2010 06:03 crate wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2010 05:44 Sunyveil wrote:
But seriously, I think the drawbacks of going nuclear are far outweighed by the benefits. Yes, there's some nuclear waste that we have to deal with but I'd take that over your standard pollution any day.
And people need to install solar panels more places, it's not that hard What drawbacks to nuclear? Other than the construction cost and the fact that people don't understand it...? The understanding can and should be fixed, the construction cost probably won't but it will be made up by the fact that operating a nuke is cheaper than any other sort of plant. Solar panels are rather inefficient, and producing more efficient ones is costly. The best spots for generating solar are largely away from population centers, so you lose energy in transmission. Solar energy is unreliable and already more expensive than nuclear or fossil fuel power. Solar panels are great for things that just need a small amout of power in the day, but it's just not realistic to get a large amount of our energy from solar. Solar also takes vastly more land area to produce energy than nuclear or fossil fuel plants. Wind has similar problems. edit: LOL misread your sentence, gonna leave this up though.
Nuclear waste disposal is a national security concern. The current options are that we ship it across the country on trains (which are notoriously unsecure) to be buried, or we could follow the model of many European countries where the waste is reprocessed, in which case we're spending extra money and each plant would be storing weapons grade plutonium. They're still working on better methods for reprocessing in the National Labs.
Even if it's a slim chance, it's still a legitimate concern and it's a politically impossible concern on top of that.
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I have some points to be made:
1. + Show Spoiler +
-Efficient use of waterways
I don’t what you mean because of the lack of the details that you provided, but if you talk about straighten out the waterways then don’t do that. The fish needs a light current which a bended waterway give. If you straighten it out the current will be too strong for the fish. Anyways whatever efficiency you can gain from better use of waterways will be very small compared to what you can get from enhancing other systems.
2. + Show Spoiler +
I looked this up once long time ago, so I don’t have any sources, but its like if 1 dane use 1 amount of energy then 1 american will use 2 amounts of energy. That’s partially because in Denmark and other European countries have implemented additional green tax on stuff that is polluting like gas. The additional green tax have made us enhancing our systems so they have become more efficient but allas this is simple stuff and it wont stop the transition our climate is undergoing, and in order for this to work u need time, and we don’t have time, maybe only few years.
3. + Show Spoiler +You are correct that transportation is a source for pollution but there are 3 other areas aswell which should be evident from this picture: ![[image loading]](http://i38.tinypic.com/2iik2ex.jpg) Source: + Show Spoiler +Stationary combustion is what I would call power plants? So really its also because you burn oil and coal to generate electricity. Imagine if a big part of that could be generated through sun panels. That would really help a lot on the problem. Then you have dirty power plants to take care of the spikes and prey its enough to stop the transition our climate is undergoing. Also there may be hours of the day where there wont be electricity available, but hey you cant expect to live like you did yesterday. There is a problem and it needs to be fixed. So stop using that aircondition and if there still isn’t enough electricity then we can look into the electricity shortages there still might be. This of course also means you cant turn on 100 fucking trillion lightbulbs around Christmas. WTF is that for? The following is disturbing and needs to be in spoilers so kids wont be exposed to it. + Show Spoiler +
4. + Show Spoiler +
Infrastructure, the main subject of OP. Lol, I have speculated about this too. There are 2 ways to approach this problem. 1st way is to go electric cars, and let the electricity come from the sun. Then distance and 1 car per house isnt a problem. The 2nd way is to totally reorganize how everything is situated. Houses should be placed around industrial and farms should be placed around packing plants which should be placed around shopping centers which should be placed around houses. But this is really complicated and im not sure if it even could work, I mean just look at how much energy you put into to it just to make it happen. My opinion is that electric cars are the better alternative to the system we have today.
5. + Show Spoiler +
Wars. Wars pollute so much that they don’t even are included in the statistics. Enough said about that -.-
6. + Show Spoiler +
There should be a law forbidding companies to give economic support to politicians. And it should be illegal for politicians to receive money. Right now oil companies are paying huge amount of money to politicians so the politicians wont make laws that would make USA greeny. Politicians should have a private transparency budget so we can see that they don’t receive money from entities they shouldn’t receive money from
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On August 06 2010 06:03 crate wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2010 05:44 Sunyveil wrote:
But seriously, I think the drawbacks of going nuclear are far outweighed by the benefits. Yes, there's some nuclear waste that we have to deal with but I'd take that over your standard pollution any day.
And people need to install solar panels more places, it's not that hard What drawbacks to nuclear? Other than the construction cost and the fact that people don't understand it...? The understanding can and should be fixed, the construction cost probably won't but it will be made up by the fact that operating a nuke is cheaper than any other sort of plant. Solar panels are rather inefficient, and producing more efficient ones is costly. The best spots for generating solar are largely away from population centers, so you lose energy in transmission. Solar energy is unreliable and already more expensive than nuclear or fossil fuel power. Solar panels are great for things that just need a small amout of power in the day, but it's just not realistic to get a large amount of our energy from solar. Solar also takes vastly more land area to produce energy than nuclear or fossil fuel plants. Wind has similar problems. edit: LOL misread your sentence, gonna leave this up though.
What about... hydrogen fuel cells???
DUN DUN DUN
Energy for transportation is the biggest one at least in the US; dunno much about other countries. I think the best way to do this would be through some kind of localized development, but barring a massive reduction of the human population (i.e. by nuclear war), I don't see how we can really improve our energy situation.
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On August 06 2010 06:18 silynxer wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2010 06:03 crate wrote:
What drawbacks to nuclear? Other than the construction cost and the fact that people don't understand it...? So what do you plan to do with the massive amounts of radioactive waste, that would be continuously produced if everyone switches to nuclear energy? Nuclear energy is only cheap if you don't consider the costs of waste dispatch in the long run. Btw to say that Chernobyl did only kill 30 people is horribly misguided.
Coal plants produce a pretty fair bit of radioactive waste. They spew it out into the atmosphere. Nuclear waste is either fission products which we currently let decay away, or it's uranium/plutonium/thorium that we can convert to more fuel. It's also not really a massive amount--compare the volume (or mass, if you prefer) of waste generated by nukes to the volume of waste generated by coal. Since nuclear reactions produce on the order of a million times as much energy per gram as chemical reactions, we'll automatically have less waste.
Show me the reports that conclude Chernobyl killed more than 30. The reports I've seen do not conclude it killed more (Rockwell says maybe 10 or 12 children died from thyroid surgery afterward; he also notes that there was no relation between the thyroid nodule occurrence rate and radiation dose received. He also says that a UN + WHO report concluded that no members of the public were harmed). That the response messed up a lot of people's lives is true.
I found this: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html
which says that the response to the disaster caused much more harm than the disaster itself. That can be prevented by not overreacting in the future.
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@Jibba:
Reprocessing only makes up to 10% (did only look it up on wikipedia but even if you double it, it's still a joke) the rest remains waste.
Burying is nice and all but space is limited and let there be any kind of water crack or landslide and you got radioactive groundwater. Of course at the moment the areas would be remote but I don't think it's a good idea in the long run to have contaminated areas or areas at risk to be contaminated all over the country .
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Did you really suggest hydrogen fuel cells? Some people really need to brush up on basic chemistry and physics before posting. Now that isn't to say more money can be devoted towards it, but right now it's pretty impractical.
Nuclear is pretty good for the immediate short-term. So silynxer, for the practical future, nuclear is pretty much the best barring some kind of major breakthrough.
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On August 06 2010 06:23 Jibba wrote:
or we could follow the model of many European countries where the nuclear waste is dumped in Somalia waters
fixed
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On August 06 2010 06:23 Jibba wrote:
Nuclear waste disposal is a national security concern. The current options are that we ship it across the country on trains (which are notoriously unsecure) to be buried, or we could follow the model of many European countries where the waste is reprocessed, in which case we're spending extra money and each plant would be storing weapons grade plutonium. They're still working on better methods for reprocessing in the National Labs.
Even if it's a slim chance, it's still a legitimate concern and it's a politically impossible concern on top of that.
Yes, this is a legitimate concern. There was a reactor at NRTS (now INL) that was to study fuel reprocessing that would not create weapons-grade plutonium but would create usable nuclear fuel. Its early results were encouraging, but the program was shut down before it could finish going through an entire fuel cycle. I don't remember the name of the reactor but I know it's discussed somewhere here: http://www.inl.gov/proving-the-principle/ (try after chapter 20, I don't exactly recall though).
Grabbing unprocessed spent fuel really isn't all that dangerous imo, it'd require processing to be useful for anything. A group with that capability most likely has a better way to get uranium than stealing spent fuel too.
edit: Personally I'm not at all convinced this is a problem that should turn us off of nuclear. Oh--and we don't actually have to ship it anywhere, it's quite safe to store spent fuel at plants (as Rockwell points out). We can, which is obviously more convenient for processing it for re-use.
edit 2: @d_3: Hydrogen fuel cells are far from being practical right now, so I don't see the point of discussing it in this context. Is it worth looking into? Possibly. But it won't solve anything for years.
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As far as cars are concerned
http://www.teslamotors.com/
These types of cars will solve this problem. Economy priced electric cars with 250+ mile ranges could hit the market as soon as 2014. Electric is the future. If Tesla can deliver on its goal of a 20,000 USD family sedan that can go 250+ miles on a single charge at less than a few cents per mile in electricity costs the impact one the energy economy would be enormous. Seeing as cars account for just under 50% of our oil consumption, and the internal combustion engine is far more cost inefficient than the huge economies of scale the power industry is built around you can see why. I don't think intrusive policy or some sort of personal green revolution will be the answer to our energy problem. Wisely investing in and implementing emerging technologies is.
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
On August 06 2010 05:49 Romantic wrote:
Personally, I would love to take a train to school or work. Plenty of spare time to do homework.
Then again, I'm not a very good consumer. I don't even own furniture.
fucking high five mate
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On August 06 2010 06:36 crate wrote:
edit 2: @d_3: Hydrogen fuel cells are far from being practical right now, so I don't see the point of discussing it in this context. Is it worth looking into? Possibly. But it won't solve anything for years.
It was a joke. I should know.
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On August 06 2010 06:41 thedeadhaji wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2010 05:49 Romantic wrote:
Personally, I would love to take a train to school or work. Plenty of spare time to do homework.
Then again, I'm not a very good consumer. I don't even own furniture.
fucking high five mate
*highfive*
Not having furniture is pretty cool. Easy to clean, healthy (getting up and sitting down 40 times a day is fairly significant).
My girlfriend demands furniture before she moves in, though 
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On August 06 2010 06:38 Aquafresh wrote:As far as cars are concerned http://www.teslamotors.com/These types of cars will solve this problem. Economy priced electric cars with 250+ mile ranges could hit the market as soon as 2014. Electric is the future. If Tesla can deliver on its goal of a 20,000 USD family sedan that can go 250+ miles on a single charge at less than a few cents per mile in electricity costs the impact one the energy economy would be enormous. Seeing as cars account for just under 50% of our oil consumption, and the internal combustion engine is far more cost inefficient than the huge economies of scale the power industry is built around you can see why. I don't think intrusive policy or some sort of personal green revolution will be the answer to our energy problem. Wisely investing in and implementing emerging technologies is.
No, this would only be a delaying tactic. I don't think you really understand how ingrained petroleum/fossil fuels are in energy production and industry. Perhaps it would be more efficient to burn our fuels at the plant and convert them into electricity for our cars, but it wouldn't eliminate our demand for oil. A transition into nuclear power would be able to alleviate a large part of it (i.e. cars powered by electricity generated by nuclear plants) though I imagine it would still be cheaper/more familiar to use petroleum.
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On August 06 2010 06:52 d3_crescentia wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2010 06:36 crate wrote:
edit 2: @d_3: Hydrogen fuel cells are far from being practical right now, so I don't see the point of discussing it in this context. Is it worth looking into? Possibly. But it won't solve anything for years. It was a joke. I should know.
I was hoping so, but....
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On August 06 2010 06:38 Aquafresh wrote:As far as cars are concerned http://www.teslamotors.com/These types of cars will solve this problem. Economy priced electric cars with 250+ mile ranges could hit the market as soon as 2014. Electric is the future. If Tesla can deliver on its goal of a 20,000 USD family sedan that can go 250+ miles on a single charge at less than a few cents per mile in electricity costs the impact one the energy economy would be enormous. Seeing as cars account for just under 50% of our oil consumption, and the internal combustion engine is far more cost inefficient than the huge economies of scale the power industry is built around you can see why. I don't think intrusive policy or some sort of personal green revolution will be the answer to our energy problem. Wisely investing in and implementing emerging technologies is.
Yes clearly that's the way to do it, just because there isn't a power plant on virtually every street corner doesn't mean that is a good idea. This won't stretch the power grid that currently running on what kind of fuel power plants? Yeah, thought so, don't believe the hype. Just like that ethanol hype a few years ago.
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I feel like "Green" anything shouldn't be planned in any way, what so ever. If a need for it exists it'll naturally occur as a the market responds to the wants of the people.
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@crate: It's pretty amusing how I saw just yesterday a documentary film about the different methods of counting the Chernobyl victims, especially critizising the UN interpretation. They mentioned the drawbacks of the evacuation as well.
I'm not a big fan of throwing around sources especially since I always have to find an english equivalent to the German sources I have at hand. But even if you look at the 2006 WHO paper you will find that even the smallest number of directly traceable caused deaths is now 56 and it is very difficult to estimate the actual number of deaths:
It is impossible to account for all additional cases of (not-thyroid) cancer since the expected number of additional deaths according to the dose-response relationship is around 4000 (for the 600000 people who were highly exposed) while the number of deaths caused by "natural" cancer in this timeframe would be around 120000.
For the 6 million people who were mildly exposed the expected additional fatalities are statistically insignificant (but still in the thousands).
But even though it is impossible to trace these fatalities directly to Chernobyl (even statistically) it is still incredible naive to say there weren't any and this is only considering cancer.
I never said I support coal plants in fact I'm strongly opposed to using coal as an energy source. So that coal is worse is not an argument. Until reprocessing rates somehow skyrocket nuclear power remains unsustainable in my opinion.
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On August 06 2010 07:56 silynxer wrote:
@crate: It's pretty amusing how I saw just yesterday a documentary film about the different methods of counting the Chernobyl victims, especially critizising the UN interpretation. They mentioned the drawbacks of the evacuation as well.
I'm not a big fan of throwing around sources especially since I always have to find an english aquivalent to the German sources I have at hand. But even if you look at the 2006 WHO paper you will find that even the smallest number of directly traceable caused deaths is now 56 and it is very difficult to estimate the actual number of deaths:
It is impossible to account for all additional cases of (not-thyroid) cancer since the expected number of additional deaths according to the dose-response relationship is around 4000 (for the 600000 people who were highly exposed) while the number of deaths caused by "natural" cancer in this timeframe would be around 120000.
For the 6 million people who were mildly exposed the expected additional fatalities are statistically insignificant (but still in the thousands).
But even though it is impossible to trace these fatalities directly to Chernobyl (even statistically) it is still incredible naive to say there weren't any and this is only considering cancer.
I never said I support coal plants in fact I'm strongly opposed to using coal as an energy source. So that coal is worse is not an argument. Until reprocessing rates somehow skyrocket nuclear power remains unsustainable in my opinion.
Well I'm just posting the information I've seen. If you have sources saying it's more, and those sources are right--ok, it's more. I've not seen them, and the sources I have seen put the death toll pretty low and the harm from radiation release also quite reasonable.
Regardless an accident of the same type is not possible in the types of nuclear plants the US uses (the biggest contributor was the positive void coefficient of reactivity, which basically means that as the core heats up reactivity goes up as well. All US plants afaik are the opposite and thus partially self-regulating) and the worst commercial US nuclear accident (TMI) killed no one directly, almost certainly did not do anything to the public, and as far as I know didn't harm the operators either. The SL-1 incident (you can read about it in "Proving the Principle" which I linked above) killed the three people in the core and did seriously expose emergency response crews to radiation, but I don't believe anyone outside the structure was seriously exposed to radiation. I'm not aware of any other US fatalities linked to nuclear reactors.
As for reprocessing, we have enough fuel to last without reproccessing and without breeder reactors for a couple hundred years I think, and breeder reactors can generate electricity while converting more U-238--or thorium, though I don't think the US has any thorium-based reactors--to fuel than they burn U-235 (I'm not familiar with what processing if any is needed for breeder reactors to use their bred fuel though).
If you're not agreeing with coal (or other fossil fuels, presumably), and you're not saying nuclear is good either ... what should we use? No one is going to start living without electricity. Solar and wind have many problems that I see as making them inadequate as a primary power source (Rockwell covers them on his site, and I have heard the same stuff from other sources). I'm not aware of any other possibilities for large-scale electricity generation for an entire nation.
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On August 06 2010 06:59 d3_crescentia wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2010 06:38 Aquafresh wrote:As far as cars are concerned http://www.teslamotors.com/These types of cars will solve this problem. Economy priced electric cars with 250+ mile ranges could hit the market as soon as 2014. Electric is the future. If Tesla can deliver on its goal of a 20,000 USD family sedan that can go 250+ miles on a single charge at less than a few cents per mile in electricity costs the impact one the energy economy would be enormous. Seeing as cars account for just under 50% of our oil consumption, and the internal combustion engine is far more cost inefficient than the huge economies of scale the power industry is built around you can see why. I don't think intrusive policy or some sort of personal green revolution will be the answer to our energy problem. Wisely investing in and implementing emerging technologies is. No, this would only be a delaying tactic. I don't think you really understand how ingrained petroleum/fossil fuels are in energy production and industry. Perhaps it would be more efficient to burn our fuels at the plant and convert them into electricity for our cars, but it wouldn't eliminate our demand for oil. A transition into nuclear power would be able to alleviate a large part of it (i.e. cars powered by electricity generated by nuclear plants) though I imagine it would still be cheaper/more familiar to use petroleum.
Did I say it would eliminate our demand for oil? Of course it won't, but it will certainly alleviate it. In no way will it be cheaper to use gas powered cars if the electrics I am talking about grab a decent share of the market. It may be more comfortable, and the shipping industry will certainly prefer them until new infrastructure is in place, but it definitely won't be cost effective. The whole idea is to be able to sell the cars at the same price as their competing ICE based cars. Combine this with the fact that even at the highest electricity prices (Hawaii) it is still cheaper per mile to power your vehicle electrically and you see why.
As far as oils impact on the energy industry? It depends on what you consider to be "the energy industry." As far as electricity generation is concerned, which is what we're talking about here, it does not play such a large roll. It is mostly used for industrial purposes, producing consumer goods such as plastics and lubricants, and fuel. Fuel is what we use about 70% of our oil for, and about 2/3 of that is gasoline, resulting in 46% of oil demand coming from what we put in our cars. Electric cars would drastically decrease that demand and shift the burden onto natural gas/coal based sources, which while not being ideal, are much more appealing than oil for environmental as well as political and economic reasons. I have no idea whether adopting Nuclear power is environmentally preferable to the primarily coal/natural gas based power we currently use, but it would almost certainly be more cost effective in the long run.
On August 06 2010 07:01 Judicator wrote:
Yes clearly that's the way to do it, just because there isn't a power plant on virtually every street corner doesn't mean that is a good idea. This won't stretch the power grid that currently running on what kind of fuel power plants? Yeah, thought so, don't believe the hype. Just like that ethanol hype a few years ago.
I don't even know what you're saying here. First of all petroleum only accounts for 1% of the power produced the US, perhaps you have it confused with natural gas? Second it is much more cost efficient to turn coal and other fossil fuels into electricity than it is to refine petroleum into gasoline and burn it in an ICE. Even if the increase in demand doubles the cost of electricity country wide (doubtfull) it would still be far less costly to operate your vehicle than if you were still paying for gas. There is no parallel to ethanol, so I don't know why you brought that up. Electric cars are not, and do not pretend to be, a new energy source as ethanol fuel did. It is simply a way to use existing source in a much more efficient way.
It's all about well to wheel efficiency, and electric power has almost always been superior to the alternatives. It is only recently that technology has advanced to the point where the performance is even and the range issues have decreased. Battery technology is on the verge of another major leap forward so electric powered vehicles are set to become even more appealing in the future.
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