February 28, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Steve Jones - Editor (2/28/2008)
I like seeing the proposals for new nuclear plants. The newer designs (I hope ) will get better and pay dividends.Matt, not sure I agree with your analysis. Part of our problem is increasing efficiency, but also footprints. This is sometimes unintended consequences, sometimes it's a new technology that takes more energy to produce than the old way.
I'm not sure we use more gas today because cars are more efficient. In many ways they aren't. Lots of people drive large cars/trucks in the US because has has been cheap and they like the space. We also have more people, and we're more spread out. There are plenty of people that can afford air travel (uses lots and lots of oil) and they take more vacations because we're more prosperous. We have more computers and more electrical gadgets.
On balance I think that's a good thing, but we need to try to change the way we produce energy, IMHO, not our lives so much.
I'm referring to a rather interesting concept, called the rebound effect. It just happens to be a pattern that seems to repeat itself a fair amount, IMO.
Anyway - a rather decent primer on the Rebound Effect (although long-winded) is located here:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Rebound_effect
If you think about it - we see this in our own industry. The minute the chipmaker come up with a new way to reduce the voltage on parts for a new CPU, all of a sudden twice as many CPU's get popped into the machine, and the power demands go UP, not down. Cooler processor, and all of a sudden, TWO video cards, each drawing 200+W.
In the old days - a "big" power supply used to be 160W (I could swear my AT had a 75W power supply!). These days you can't "touch" a machine without at least a 350W. Gamer and high-end machines garner 3 times that power consumption.
you're right though - the overall goal is to somehow put a muzzle on the footprint. The issue isn't how to make things more efficient - we apparently know how to do that: it's how to say "stop" and not squander the gains we acquire.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
February 29, 2008 at 1:38 am
Matt Miller (2/28/2008)
....you're right though - the overall goal is to somehow put a muzzle on the footprint. The issue isn't how to make things more efficient - we apparently know how to do that: it's how to say "stop" and not squander the gains we acquire.
Ain't that the truth.
Apparently, a major UK supplier of prawns catches their wares in the North Atlantic, lands them in the UK, then flies the prawns to the Far East for shelling before flying them back to the UK for packaging, because the labour costs make this cheaper than using a shelling machine in Scotland. I may be out of date with this anecdote, but I'm sure we all could come up with similarly obvious tales of waste.
On the flip side, I have an allotment (for those in the US, this is a small piece of land you can rent at a nominal cost, generally for the purpose of growing your own fruit and veggies - we don't have gardens as big as yours....). Most of my family's veg consumption is measured in food feet rather than food miles. I buy my meat from a farm (organic, as it happens) about a mile away. Carbon footprint involved in putting dinner on plate is, therefore, minimal.
Efficiency of an energy-consuming item, as Matt says, isn't really the issue. It's efficiency of a process. As a parallel, businesses used to reap minor benefits from using computers as quick typewriters, but most of the benefits were to be had by changing the process overall to make typewriter use obsolete.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
March 2, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I haven't had time to read all the posts. But from what I read in the editiorial I say that anyone who advocates nuclear power has rocks in their head; it would have to be the most dangerous, long lasting and polluting way of generating power that will ever be known to man. Sure there hasn't been many accidents in the last 53 years of its use (only two major ones viz Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) but there will be more. And with a nuclear accident it is not just a bit of mopping up of oil, its not a bit of global warming, rather it is a 250,000 year bit of lethal radiation that everyone has to put up with. It kills people, it can't be got rid of and it is there forever.
The recorded history of the world is 6000 years or so. The half life of some of the radioactive elements created in nuclear power generation is 250,000 years. This should put everything into perspective.
Tim Brimelow
March 2, 2008 at 4:34 pm
We have this great show in Australia called "The New Inventors". They showcased towards the end of last year an energy efficient home. I don't remember all the details but one of the things that caught my imagination was the idea of using solar panels to produce hydrogen that could be stored for use by a household power generator to supply the majority of the power required by the home if not make the home a next power producer. The added bonus could be that in markets where hydrogen fuel cell cars are being actively marketed households can refuel at home for those run about trips.
As my wife constantly reminds me in Germany they have solar panels on nearly every building and this reduces the demand for new power stations, and they have no where near as much sun as some other countries!
Isn't it time to think of a paradigm shift and look at the emerging market of home based power generation. This would create new business opportunities in the service, installation and maintenance arenas and leave major powerstations to supply energy to business rather than having to cater to the masses. Or is this too much of a threat to the established players in the market: Government, Power Companies, Oil and Mining companies?
My two cents worth anyway.
March 3, 2008 at 11:34 am
tim_brimelow (3/2/2008)
I haven't had time to read all the posts. But from what I read in the editiorial I say that anyone who advocates nuclear power has rocks in their head; it would have to be the most dangerous, long lasting and polluting way of generating power that will ever be known to man. Sure there hasn't been many accidents in the last 53 years of its use (only two major ones viz Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) but there will be more. And with a nuclear accident it is not just a bit of mopping up of oil, its not a bit of global warming, rather it is a 250,000 year bit of lethal radiation that everyone has to put up with. It kills people, it can't be got rid of and it is there forever.The recorded history of the world is 6000 years or so. The half life of some of the radioactive elements created in nuclear power generation is 250,000 years. This should put everything into perspective.
Tim Brimelow
There are a couple of points to consider on this one:
First, burning fossile fuel releases megatons of radioactive radon into the atmosphere every year. Your "non-radioactive" power solutions are, in fact, radioactive. Three Mile Island, for example, released less radiation into the atmosphere than you get from pretty much any given coal-burning plant in its lifetime.
Second, modern pebble-bed plants essentially can't "melt down".
Third, if you really, really want to make a safe nuclear power plant, you bury it about 2 miles deep in the continental plates. Bottom of a worked-out coal mine is good. (I think it was Freeman Dyson who suggested this.) Not only does that protect the environment from leaks/meltdowns/etc., it also renders it really, really tough to smash one with an airplane or bomb.
Another alternative is put them in orbit, but then it's kind of silly to not use solar energy instead of nuclear anyway. (Safer to launch solar cells/thermal systems, too.)
The actual objection, these days, to nuclear power, isn't the safety of the plant. They can be made safer than most other power sources (heck, a windmill can fall on someone; nothing is perfectly safe). The problem is so-called radioactive waste. Which is something politicians invented, not a scientific/engineering necessity. (To an engineer or scientist, anything radioactive is just more fuel. Recycling nuclear waste would be easier than storing/disposing "waste", but Jimmy Carter issued an executive order disallowing it, because the kind of power plant that can recycle it can also be used to build bomb fuel. Nuclear waste is, essentially, a fiction created by politicians out of fear, not a physical reality.)
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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March 3, 2008 at 11:39 am
Oh, and as an addition, on the subjects of (bio)-diesel and nuclear power, it is now possible to synthesize diesel fuel out of carbon dioxide and water vapor, using the electricity from any good power plant. Of course, the Laws of Thermodynamics point out that using any carbon-based power plant to do this will result in a net loss, but using electricity from a nuclear plant (or solar/geothermal/wind/tide/other renewable) could do it.
Again, conservation of matter makes it so that any fuel synthesized that way, and then burned, would result in 0 net gain of pollution in the air.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
March 3, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I think you need a combination of solutions, and nuclear is part of it. The layman's view of nuclear is tremendous danger and waste. That isn't quite true. There's some waste, but it's not a huge amount. The problem is it's very, very dangerous. Now some of this can be solved with recycling and reusing the waste fuel, and treating a lot of the other waste products. Net good or bad? No idea. Hard to figure that since everyone pro or con has an agenda.
I think more than building larger or more plants, we need to really get the generation closer to the consumption. So more, smaller plants, reduce the likelihood of anyone targeting a specific one (because they're smaller) and less transmission losses.
March 3, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Steve Jones - Editor (3/3/2008)
I think you need a combination of solutions....
Amen on that! Definitely agree.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
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