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cheese posted:Agreed. Personal/home water conservation is a red herring and nothing will change for the better until we manage water from an industrial perspective. Well if you start focusing on industrial usage, it fucks with people's profits... So, yea, that's just about the last thing that will ever get any serious attention.
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Jan 1, 2012 10:22
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My discipline is psychology but my PhD is in carbon capture, so I've been getting to know the social side of climate change literature quite a bit. There's one particular article that I found very interesting: The Psychology of Global Climate Change (Rachlinski, 2000)Rachlinski posted:One can scarcely find a problem faced by contemporary society that better fits the definition of a social trap than global climate change. The worst-case scenarios projected by the scientific community are biblical in proportion. He talks about the combination of institutional/economic factors, cognitive biases and tragic commons principle that basically mean nobody will do a loving thing about global warming. It's a little dated, but it's a good read. Highlights: Rachlinksi posted:Several psychological phenomena of judgment, however, support a more pessimistic perspective on humanity’s ability to respond effectively to the prospects of global climate change. First, because of a lack of a scientific consensus* on the degree of climate change that the planet will experience, society is unlikely to achieve a consensus on the need to undertake costly preventive measures. In other cases of scientific uncertainty, people tend to adopt extreme positions, and adhere to them closely, which makes consensus in a large group difficult or impossible. Second, even if a consensus emerges that the problem requires costly solutions, other psychological phenomena suggest that people will be unwilling to undertake such a solution. People become attached to their current level of prosperity. They feel entitled to what they have, which makes any solution that requires significant cutbacks in the economic status quo unacceptable. * It doesn't matter that there actually is a scientific consensus, what matters is that people don't think there is one. "Teach the controversy" and all that. Rachlinski posted:The scientific evidence on global climate change presents plenty of fodder for biased assimilation. Although there is a general consensus that human activity is affecting the global climate, estimates of the degree of the change and the impact that it will have vary tremendously. Just as many scientists believe that the weight of evidence suggests that global climate change is becoming a serious problem, others believe that the evidence suggests otherwise. Predicting the climate is a complex challenge for scientists that will surely produce a mixture of support and opposition for the prediction that global climate change will cause significant adverse consequences to society. Rachlinski posted:Even if a consensus emerged on the scientific aspects of the problem, society might still be unwilling to undertake expensive precautions to reduce the likelihood of a catastrophic change in the world’s climate. Psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered that people are reluctant to undertake activities that change the status quo for the worse. People treat a potential loss from the status quo as more significant than a potential gain from the status quo. People also make riskier choices in the face of losses than in the face of gains. Each of these influences will impede society’s ability to undertake precautions to reduce the risk of global climate change. These influences also make negotiations that distribute costs among parties particularly difficult, thereby complicating efforts to negotiate an international treaty to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Rachlinski posted:Although in many contexts, people are willing to sacrifice a great deal so as to be fair, people also find it easy to come to believe that a fair resolution of a dispute benefits them over others. If two sides to a dispute feel entitled to more than half of the pie, then a negotiated resolution of their conflicting entitlements will be difficult. Paradoxically, the preference for a fair outcome can combine with a sense of entitlement to create a significant impediment to allocating losses. In short: Not only are we swimming upstream against global economic/industrial growth, we're also swimming upstream against individual human psychology because of the structure of the problem and the way it's framed. Global warming is very gradual, nearly invisible (and by the time it's visible, it's far too late), and requires immediate and sizable sacrifices yesterday if we want to mitigate it. Modern humans aren't equipped to deal with that. We don't just need an institutional revolution, we need to change the way we think and talk about climate change, but it's still not clear how we're meant to do this. My job is to investigate the psychological factors governing public perception of carbon capture in particular but also global warming in general, and from what I know so far nothing people do makes any sense. It's all feedback loops and complex systems and totally unintuitive causal relationships that you wouldn't expect. I'm happy to talk about it though.
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Jan 1, 2012 18:01
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cheese posted:Agreed. Personal/home water conservation is a red herring and nothing will change for the better until we manage water from an industrial perspective. I will never forget the water conservation tip I got from Captain Planet as a child: Dishwashers are very wasteful. Instead of using a glass or a mug to drink out of, use a disposable paper cup instead!
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Jan 1, 2012 18:06
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Boing posted:
I think that the dangers of climate change CAN be effectively communicated. This year had a record number of droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes (either matching or exceeding the ravages of the dustbowl of 1930, floods of '29, and the tornado epidemic of '74). The science isn't exactly one to one, but it's clear that adding more warmth to the atmosphere is acting like adrenaline for our climate system. We had a record number of 12 national disasters this year, compared to the normal rate of 3 or 4. People can get their heads around that. The problem is that it has been politicized by a reactionary wing of our politics, but it is something I believe that people will have no choice but to face.
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Jan 1, 2012 18:10
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cheese posted:My point was that a graph like this not going to do all that much to help anyone. Most people won't understand statistical certainty and error, and it will simply be dismissed as 'lawl scientists can't tell if its 1 degree or 6 degrees!'. If we are going to change things before its too late, we need something better than a 2070 graph that a lay person is not even going to understand. That's an odd point to make here, about a graph taken from a scientific report not designed for public consumption and posted in a thread in which climate skepticism is banned.
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Jan 1, 2012 18:19
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Republicans posted:Instead of using a glass or a mug to drink out of, use a disposable paper cup instead! This brings to mind one of the things that struck me as odd about conservation is the schizophrenic nature of some of the arguments. Like "Use plastic shopping bags instead of paper to save trees." Well, yes, ok, it does save trees, but trees grow back (more than once in a human lifetime), oil doesn't. A product cycle that goes "farmed forest --> new paper product ---> recycled paper product ---> waste paper burnt to generate electricity" is not only by and large carbon neutral but is totally sustainable and conserves petroleum. Wood ash is also high in potash and phosphorus, so with some processing it can be used to fertilize the forest it came from. In this way the farmed forests are then little more than cellulose factories.
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Jan 1, 2012 19:07
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Shageletic posted:I think that the dangers of climate change CAN be effectively communicated. This year had a record number of droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes (either matching or exceeding the ravages of the dustbowl of 1930, floods of '29, and the tornado epidemic of '74). The science isn't exactly one to one, but it's clear that adding more warmth to the atmosphere is acting like adrenaline for our climate system. We had a record number of 12 national disasters this year, compared to the normal rate of 3 or 4. People can get their heads around that. Most people don't want to live in interesting times, they want to do their job and come home a little richer than their parents and raise their kids in a world that promises the same for them too. Climate change is a nebulous existential crisis for society (but probably not humanity) and people are going through the stages of grief because either way their life is going to change dramatically and very likely for the worse, unless you kick the can down the road, then you can pray that technology or God comes to the rescue or that the scientists are wrong.
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Jan 1, 2012 19:23
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Shageletic posted:I think that the dangers of climate change CAN be effectively communicated. This year had a record number of droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes (either matching or exceeding the ravages of the dustbowl of 1930, floods of '29, and the tornado epidemic of '74). The science isn't exactly one to one, but it's clear that adding more warmth to the atmosphere is acting like adrenaline for our climate system. We had a record number of 12 national disasters this year, compared to the normal rate of 3 or 4. People can get their heads around that. The problem is that it has been politicized by a reactionary wing of our politics, but it is something I believe that people will have no choice but to face. The problem I see is the same one that exists regarding almost any important issue related to politics/the economy - media is proven to more or less direct public sentiment, the media's message is more or less determined by whoever provides the particular television station/newspaper/whatever with revenue, and corporations have the most money. As a result, it's almost impossible to shift public opinion in a direction that doesn't align with corporate interests. It feels nice to say that people will change their minds with the right evidence or message, but people are ultimately influenced the most by what they see and hear in the media. Even if we do have more natural disasters, it's easy to simply not mention their connection with climate change or claim that it's just due to something like El Niño/La Niña. The important thing to keep in mind is that, even with far more natural disasters, the vast majority of Americans still won't be directly affected. You'd have to see a substantial portion of Americans directly and unequivocally impacted by climate problems before it would override whatever the media says, and that would obviously be way too late. I'm just hoping that at some point a powerful corporate sector becomes substantially worried about the affects of climate change. I don't mean to come off as a Negative Nancy, but I think that many people heavily underestimate the extent to which the public's views (that includes everyone, including myself) are shaped by media. I think that Occupy Wall Street is a perfect example. The media was completely successful in turning public opinion against the movement and letting it more or less disappear from national discourse. The extent to which national discourse can be affected simply by how often the media chooses to report something is truly outstanding.
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Jan 2, 2012 01:02
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Dramatically changing people's live in order to stop climate is NEVER going to happen. Seriously, just try and tell people that you want to put up legislation that will force car or gas prices up so that people will rely on public transportation or that their taxes are going to go through the roof because they chose to live in a suburb. Either people will vote you out of office or there will be riots. I'm saying this as a person who understands climate change well and knows what's coming. The reality is that you are not going to get anyone to change unless it's literally hitting them in the face and even then, I even doubt it. Most people are idiots who continually watch shows like Jersey shore and the Kardashians. They want to live it up just like those people. If you even try and tell them that you are taking away their ability to try to be like those idiots through legislation and taxes, then you will have serious issues and you will be painted as a villain by the media who will give these people huge amounts of attention. The general public is stupid, you should never forget this fact. What we are going to have to do is start preparing for the worst case scenario. That is, what will happen if there is a 6 degree rise in temperature. True it's not really something we can truly prepare for, but things can be done. The focus really needs to shift from prevention to dealing with the after effects.
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Jan 2, 2012 01:29
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ryan8723 posted:What we are going to have to do is start preparing for the worst case scenario. So you mean the deaths of like ~6 billion people? Or complete extinction of our own species? What do you think the worst case scenario is at this point? There is no living preparing for that scenario, there is nothing you can do to prepare for a catastrophe of that scale. The best we can hope for is for our society to collectively wake up and reform in order to live in the reality we've created for ourselves as quickly as possible. What kind of events will need to transpire for that to take place is another question all together, or if it's even possible at all. I don't think we need to shift away from prevention, we just need to be honest about it and stop pretending like energy efficient light bulbs, "green" products, hybrid cars or any other bandaids are a part of the solution to this problem
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Jan 2, 2012 01:35
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a lovely poster posted:I don't think we need to shift away from prevention, we just need to be honest about it and stop pretending like energy efficient light bulbs, "green" products, hybrid cars or any other bandaids are a part of the solution to this problem Not solutions, marketing opportunities. Maybe we need a B ark.
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Jan 2, 2012 01:49
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Ytlaya posted:The problem I see is the same one that exists regarding almost any important issue related to politics/the economy - media is proven to more or less direct public sentiment, the media's message is more or less determined by whoever provides the particular television station/newspaper/whatever with revenue, and corporations have the most money. This actually goes against the tide of the last century (and more). From the imposition of the income tax onwards, corporate interests have been defeated or usurped when a sufficiently enough number of citizens harbor even the slightest focused sense of antagonism and will. To badly paraphrase JS Mills, there is an arc here, but it is a long one. Even today, where climate change's effects are somewhat hard to pin down or eyewitness, about half of americans believe that we cause it and that it needs to be combated. As things get worse, that percentage will increase, and so will our society's efforts to ameliorate it. It's just a matter of time.
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Jan 2, 2012 14:33
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Science journalism is almost uniformly horrible. I think because in Science there is a right answer(we may not know it, but there is one), and journalism isn't about presenting a right answer so much as it's about presenting a controversy or establishing a narrative. So as a result, even if the climate science community is 99% behind something, all the data lines up for that conclusion, etc. the stories tend to be of the "let's ask a republican and a democrat about this" style. Both of the aforementioned talking heads will probably be lawyers who haven't had a science class since their gen ed reqs in undergrad, and are in no way equipped to offer any opinion at all. Which is just recklessly irresponsible. Add in that the Republican party is 99% full of reactionaries beholden to large corporate interests and the Democrats are about 90% in the same boat and there is just no way to get an informed public out the other end of that. And that's not even getting into the horrid intersection of religion and ideology and science, or the reliance of the media on ad revenue from those same interests.
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Jan 2, 2012 16:37
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Buffer posted:Science journalism is almost uniformly horrible. I think because in Science there is a right answer(we may not know it, but there is one), and journalism isn't about presenting a right answer so much as it's about presenting a controversy or establishing a narrative.
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Jan 2, 2012 19:09
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Squalid posted:We already have something very similar to your "nuclear tree". It is purely solar powered, requires little to no maintenance and production is a cinch. You can call it the 'solar bio tree,' or more commonly, a 'tree'. Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Jan 2, 2012 |
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Jan 2, 2012 20:17
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Strudel Man posted:A regular tree offers only short-term CO2 storage - once it dies and decays/burns, the stored carbon will be re-released into the atmosphere, barring weird plans I've heard people mention about doing things like burying logs in the desert. Artificial trees at least have the potential to yield carbon in a form that can be efficiently sequestered. On the other hand trees are an extremely low tech, low starting cost, low maintenance , can produce stuff we want besides wood and is an highly distributed way of capturing vast amounts of carbon. I'm going to straightforward admit that I have no idea what hypothetical products sequestered carbon could be turned into but whatever we would produce literally metric fucktons of it so it might be good to have that distributed production rather than having to move millions of tons of graphite or limestone or whatever from the "factory" to a storage area.
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Jan 2, 2012 20:35
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Strudel Man posted:A regular tree offers only short-term CO2 storage - once it dies and decays/burns, the stored carbon will be re-released into the atmosphere, barring weird plans I've heard people mention about doing things like burying logs in the desert. Artificial trees at least have the potential to yield carbon in a form that can be efficiently sequestered. So we make charcoal out of the tree and use it as fertilizer for more trees.
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Jan 2, 2012 20:55
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Claverjoe posted:So we make charcoal out of the tree and use it as fertilizer for more trees. MeLKoR posted:On the other hand trees are an extremely low tech, low starting cost, low maintenance , can produce stuff we want besides wood and is an highly distributed way of capturing vast amounts of carbon. I don't know, I suppose we could try to have a 'wooden revolution,' store carbon by intensive growth of trees to make into everything that can be possibly made out of wood. More wood in houses, et cetera. Flammability could then be a potential problem, of course. Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 2, 2012 |
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Jan 2, 2012 21:21
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I just assumed that an artificial tree would capture massive quantities of CO2.
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Jan 3, 2012 04:34
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Haraksha posted:I just assumed that an artificial tree would capture massive quantities of CO2.
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Jan 3, 2012 05:16
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Shageletic posted:This actually goes against the tide of the last century (and more). From the imposition of the income tax onwards, corporate interests have been defeated or usurped when a sufficiently enough number of citizens harbor even the slightest focused sense of antagonism and will. To badly paraphrase JS Mills, there is an arc here, but it is a long one. I don't think anyone is arguing that corporate interests will win forever and that the people will not eventually see the light. The concern is that this realization will be when sea levels have risen 30 feet and it will be way, way too late (assuming you don't think its already too late to avert a lot of damage).
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Jan 3, 2012 05:23
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Strudel Man posted:That's fine. The point is, though, that the carbon sequestration ability of trees is pretty much determined by the amount of land area you're willing and able to permanently give over to real/artificial forest. Stating the obvious is a fairly easy point to make. I think the next obvious question would be "what in the nine hells kind of trees should we plant (for good growth, much less ideal growth) when we don't know what the climate will be in a couple of decades from now in a given region." Is it even a good idea to bother planting even mesquite trees in, oh say, West Texas? Strudel Man posted:I don't know, I suppose we could try to have a 'wooden revolution,' store carbon by intensive growth of trees to make into everything that can be possibly made out of wood. More wood in houses, et cetera. Flammability could then be a potential problem, of course. Wooden shoes for everyone!
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Jan 3, 2012 05:43
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There are more photosynthetic organisms than just trees. While planting trees and turning them into wood/charcoal works, it's inefficient, and takes up a huge amount of land. Something like algae would be much more efficient. I've seen a number of proposals/studies done about natural carbon sequestration, and from what I've seen algae is the way to go. In addition to carbon sequestration, you can use the algae to produce biofuels or food for animals. There's a bunch of articles about it. This article covers the concept pretty well.
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Jan 3, 2012 06:14
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Uranium Phoenix posted:There are more photosynthetic organisms than just trees. While planting trees and turning them into wood/charcoal works, it's inefficient, and takes up a huge amount of land. Something like algae would be much more efficient. I've seen a number of proposals/studies done about natural carbon sequestration, and from what I've seen algae is the way to go. I touched on this much earlier in the thread when I posted about how iron fertilization of the ocean was a pretty terrible idea, and I'll comment on algae in general since it's come up again. Honestly I don't think algae are any better than trees and are far inferior to inorganic methods for the purpose of carbon sequestration. If you're interested in biofuels or other natural products, then algae are potentially valuable. Photosynthesis is horrifically inefficient. The conversion efficiency from sunlight to biomass is in the range of 0.1-10% depending on the plant. Algae are even less than that, typically, because water is really awesome at absorbing light. To build an algae bio-reactor that works off of sunlight (or artificial light, either way) you'd have to use tremendous amounts of space to get enough surface area to light your algae. It's actually a very delicate balance between not enough light and sub-optimal growth and too much light will cause photoinhibition. There's also the added problem of turbidity--algae grow very very quickly, they mature in a matter of hours or days depending on species, so if you have a bioreactor that's growing at optimal speeds you also have to have some way to constantly clean out the mature biomass or the turbidity in the water will shade your algae and kill it. This happens pretty regularly in cyanobacterial cultures, which is more than likely what you'd use for such a bioreactor and definitely what you want for making biofuels. They're bacteria and as such they grow exponentially but tend to crash very quickly when they run out of nutrients or sunlight. Algae are also mostly soft-bodied, so the biomass they produce would have to be sequestered or stored in some way so that it doesn't simply decompose and go right back into the atmosphere. Land plants are made mostly of cellulose (think wood) which will store fixed carbon for quite a long time. Cyanobacteria do grow very quickly, but the trade off is that their carbon sequestration is far less permanent than a slower-growing tree. Edit: that article is also from 2007, which in science terms is quite dated. There's a lot of awesome research going on in algal fuel cells and particularly with chemoautotrophic strains. Did you know some bacteria pass electrons to each other through carbon nanowires? Yeah! And there's a lot of research into iron-oxidizing bugs and the like, which would probably work better than photosynthetic algae as you could "feed" the carbon fixation with an electrical current as opposed to light. Though they do grow a lot slower. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Jan 3, 2012 |
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Jan 3, 2012 09:10
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Forgive me if I'm missing the obvious, but when I think about mechanical or science based ways of physically pulling carbon from the atmosphere vs the hundreds of millions of cars and ships and factories pumping it into the air, I can't help but laugh at the 'spitting in the rain' feeling I get. Creating a bunch of carbon trees just seems so puny compared to the problem - is it realistic at all?
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Jan 3, 2012 09:35
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cheese posted:Forgive me if I'm missing the obvious, but when I think about mechanical or science based ways of physically pulling carbon from the atmosphere vs the hundreds of millions of cars and ships and factories pumping it into the air, I can't help but laugh at the 'spitting in the rain' feeling I get. Creating a bunch of carbon trees just seems so puny compared to the problem - is it realistic at all? The way I look at it is that every bit helps. And you can capture the carbon near the source to feed it to whatever your sequestration method thing is to make it more efficient (eg take the emissions directly from the coal plant's smoke stack instead of waiting). And how "puny" the effort is completely depends on the method(s) and the scale. But yeah, carbon sequestration is not a solution by itself, it's merely another step we can take to un-gently caress ourselves. Society absolutely needs to switch to zero-carbon energy for any good progress to be made.
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Jan 3, 2012 10:20
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Uranium Phoenix posted:But yeah, carbon sequestration is not a solution by itself, it's merely another step we can take to un-gently caress ourselves. Society absolutely needs to switch to zero-carbon energy for any good progress to be made. Now, whether "sufficiently developed" is actually in the cards, that's another question, and one I can't really answer.
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Jan 3, 2012 10:39
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cheese posted:Forgive me if I'm missing the obvious, but when I think about mechanical or science based ways of physically pulling carbon from the atmosphere vs the hundreds of millions of cars and ships and factories pumping it into the air, I can't help but laugh at the 'spitting in the rain' feeling I get. Creating a bunch of carbon trees just seems so puny compared to the problem - is it realistic at all? You pay 2000 guys (govt employment program!) to plant 200 trees a day each for 250 days a year, for ten years, and you have 1,000,000,000 trees planted. Thats maybe a million hectares (10,000 km2) of land with brand new trees and a big old rural employment program to go with it. 1 person planting trees aint much, but a whole lot of folks planting trees can amount to alot
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Jan 3, 2012 11:39
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Uranium Phoenix posted:The way I look at it is that every bit helps. And you can capture the carbon near the source to feed it to whatever your sequestration method thing is to make it more efficient (eg take the emissions directly from the coal plant's smoke stack instead of waiting). And how "puny" the effort is completely depends on the method(s) and the scale. Here's a catch: 'society' is divided into countries and then further divided into states, districts, families, communities, etc. The people with a lot of money and power actually use the divisions in society to continue operating and maintain control. For example, the United States has a ton of environmental laws on the books. They are actually reasonable, if not too strong. A company that has a dirty plant in the United States has a few options. They can invest more money than they want to and probably more than they have to magically create a clean plant or they can operate in secrecy or they can pay off the government or they can relocate their plant. 99 times out of 100, they relocate the plant to another country and continue using dirty technology and gain another nice perk of cheap, practically slave labor. In fact, there aren't many dirty plants left in the United States for those two reasons, but the pollution in China is beyond reproach. There is no 'society' really that decides how things are done. There are only greedy people exploiting who and what they can to get a little bit of power, which in this age, is a commodity itself which can be bought. The government is a terrible means by which to force companies into environmentally friendly compliance. It only punishes people unfairly. It would be to the benefit of mankind to use government funded jobs on things like pollution cleanup and planting trees, but the government would rather spend our money instead on fruitless wars in arid wastelands and prisons and campaigns of propaganda.
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Jan 3, 2012 13:18
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cheese posted:Forgive me if I'm missing the obvious, but when I think about mechanical or science based ways of physically pulling carbon from the atmosphere vs the hundreds of millions of cars and ships and factories pumping it into the air, I can't help but laugh at the 'spitting in the rain' feeling I get. Creating a bunch of carbon trees just seems so puny compared to the problem - is it realistic at all? It depends where you pull it from as well. It'd also be used in conjunction with moving to new, cleaner forms of energy. Of course right now this is all as likely as us sprouting wings and flying off to Jupiter so whatever
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Jan 3, 2012 14:57
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Strudel Man posted:Well, wait, if we had sufficiently developed carbon sequestration, it seems like it would be a solution by itself. If the problem is that we release too much carbon dioxide by our industrial activities, then recapturing and burying it is just as much an answer as not emitting it in the first place. There was a lot of discussion earlier about CCS. There's some brilliant work being done in the field and we'd probably be capable of putting some of this stuff to direct use right now. BobTheFerret posted:Just for anyone who's not up on what modern chemistry/biochemistry is cooking up to solve the problem of excess CO2, it might not be completely unreasonable to say we could have a way to fix massive amounts of CO2 in the next 5-10 years, assuming the powers that be are willing to throw money at the development of what has already been discovered. The problem is that capturing CO2 will never be economical on the short term (as far as our governments are concerned) because the only real plan right now is to capture CO2 and bury it somewhere in some chemically stable solid form. There's also the problem that cheese highlighted: even if we installed a lot of CCS systems everywhere we'd still be fighting against further use of fossil fuels on top of trying to remedy the current alarming CO2 levels, unless we use alternative sources of energy that produce less or no emissions. The dagger in the back is that most CCS systems will require power to work, and lots of it. We'll need new energy sources to power both CCS and to stop us from using emitting sources. The choices are renewables or nuclear. Personally I prefer the nuclear route simply because it's more powerful and versatile: Office Thug posted:A bit of a cross-post from my GBS thread but the reason I'm interrested is due to the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, a reactor that was originally invented and tested at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 60s-70s, and which China is currently researching. The things are theoretically cheaper than coal, safer than conventional nuclear by a long shot, easier to scale, and could be placed practically anywhere due to operating at high enough temperatures to use gas turbines while not requiring water cooling. Ideally for full use of their excess heat you could build them tethered underwater along costlines. That heat could be used to do a number of things like desalinate water, and could also be used to drive the production of Hydrogen and Oxygen through Iodine and Sulfur cycles (H2O + I2 + SO2+H2O --> 2x HI + H2SO4 + 900 C heat --> H2 + 1/2x O2 + I2 + SO2+H2O). Electrical power could be diverted towards CO2 capture and storage. Using hydrogen gas and captured CO2, it would then be possible to synthesize simple hydrocarbons for use as zero net emission fuel. Nuclear's problems stem, quite litterally, from irrational fear. Regulations make up an astounding 75% of the total costs to building and maintaining reactors in the US at the moment, most of it being a result of work delays and the tacking on of additional safety features, a major reason why there have been exactly zero new nuclear plants since Three Mile Island. Previous to that, even our crappy 0.5% efficiency pressurized water reactors were cheaper than coal. I wouldn't count on regulations letting up anytime soon, however there are still ways to curb their costs. Small instrinsically safe reactors that need less redundant safety systems would already be a huge plus, but the most important feature of miniaturization is factory line production using a standard model. France' use of standard reactors is one of the major reasons why their plants are so incredibly cheap compared to other Westearn countries, for example. In the end, the advantage would be a clean energy source, the ability to use CCS cheaply, and the ability to replace emitting fuels with zero net emission fuels. We'd just need to expand on both CCS and nuclear. Office Thug fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Jan 3, 2012 |
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Jan 3, 2012 18:16
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Office Thug posted:Regulations make up an astounding 75% of the total costs to building and maintaining reactors in the US at the moment, most of it being a result of work delays and the tacking on of additional safety features, So...safety is a regulatory cost? When you say "regulations make up 75 percent of the total costs" I think "there are that many people doing redundant inspections and impacts studies and paperwork?" I don't think "damned enviro-nazis making us install safety equipment!" For that matter, what's higher? The cost of those safety features, or the costs of Fukushima and Chernobyl averaged out over the industry?
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Jan 7, 2012 03:31
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VideoTapir posted:For that matter, what's higher? The cost of dealing with all the red tape thrown up to satisfy lobbyists and win votes from people irrationally scared that Fukushima or Chernobyl can happen to anything that involves radioactive materials ever, or the costs of simply not building the same kind of outdated or lovely (respectively) reactors that caused those disasters in the first place? I would pay to see someone attempt to cause a catastrophic meltdown in a CANDU reactor, but I'm not Canadian so that's not my tax dollars at work, and you can engineer pretty drat well for safe shutdown in the event of a crisis (see America's worst reactor meltdown, Three Mile Island, the intact parts of which are still generating electricity). I WILL give you that I don't trust new construction in America right now, because A) seriously who's doing any and B) there's a lot of sound planning that would get thrown out for the sake of profit, but that leaves a huge chunk of the power grid that can still (and probably needs to) pull itself together in places that wouldn't just sit back and take it if things went sideways. dont be mean to me fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Jan 7, 2012 |
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Jan 7, 2012 05:24
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Let's also add in how the fear and obstructionism only make existing nuclear more dangerous, since the more pressure there is against building newer, safer, and more efficient plants, the more appealing it is to keep aging models in operation as long as possible. Really it's crazy to see people say "but Fukushima and Chernobyl!" about building new plants. It's like hearing people say "Don't talk to me about buying a TV! No way am I going to stare at a tiny black and white screen to watch three channels while I hope one of those vacuum tubes doesn't burn out again, when I could go out to see a moving picture!"
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Jan 7, 2012 05:46
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edit: nevermind, this was idiotic. I am not anti-nuclear. I am against the implication that safety requirements are bullshit hysterical obstructionism and an unnecessary cost. I'm also skeptical of his 75% statement without some more detail provided. VideoTapir fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Jan 7, 2012 |
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Jan 7, 2012 06:19
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Killer robot posted:Really it's crazy to see people say "but Fukushima and Chernobyl!" about building new plants. It's like hearing people say "Don't talk to me about buying a TV! No way am I going to stare at a tiny black and white screen to watch three channels while I hope one of those vacuum tubes doesn't burn out again, when I could go out to see a moving picture!" I've said it here before but nuclear power, while "clean" (just ignore those mining operations and construction-related resources) does nothing to address the far greater concern, that the power goes to fuel a constant and untenable rate of consumption. Your example about TV and movies is a great subconscious example of how deeply we have been socialized to associate quality of life with magnitude of consumption.
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Jan 7, 2012 07:10
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deptstoremook posted:Your example about TV and movies is a great subconscious example of how deeply we have been socialized to associate quality of life with magnitude of consumption. ...remind me, when was that again?
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Jan 7, 2012 07:29
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deptstoremook posted:I've said it here before but nuclear power, while "clean" (just ignore those mining operations and construction-related resources) does nothing to address the far greater concern, that the power goes to fuel a constant and untenable rate of consumption. Your example about TV and movies is a great subconscious example of how deeply we have been socialized to associate quality of life with magnitude of consumption. That's totally backwards, is the problem. Yes, yes, yes, Americans could stand to drive less and buy less stuff, no one's really disputing that. But that's not the point, any more than people in Phoenix watering lawns really matters much next to farmers trying to turn the Sonoran Desert into the next cotton belt. Power efficiency and less wasteful lifestyles are nice, conspicuous consumption is bad, but fixing that won't fix the bigger problems. The rest of the world is the point. The billions being pulled out of poverty or still barely at its edge. The ones for whom, as much as the West, have had quality of life improvements greatly caused and limited by energy availability. It's health and happiness, it's increased lifespan and health, it's reduced grueling and dangerous labor, it's industrial processes that work more efficiently and better recycle materials, it's getting crop yields that can support larger populations on less land. It's giving people the quality of life that birth rates drop and the larger population issue stops being a problem. It's giving them freedom to travel, more solid shelter, protection from elements, safety nets against bad times. This stuff is all energy-intensive. And any sort of negative climate change is going to make energy availability more critical in deciding how many people live and how many of those get something more than a short life of misery and crushing poverty. In climate change discussion as in economic discussion, austerity as a prime solution is dangerous, in that if it works at all it will only do so at the cost of immense and avoidable human suffering. Like with economic discussion, it's mostly suggested by those who are doing okay, and like to imagine that they'll cut back a little since they're just that sort of noble person, and really if anyone else doesn't make it then obviously they just weren't up to snuff anyway. Even if climate change ends up on the mild end of predictions, hell even if the denialists are right and it never happens, there are totally good reasons that both cleaner energy production and increased energy efficiency are things worth heavy investment in worldwide, and that the future will be better the more there is. On the other hand, if the more dire predictions are true, how much non-fossil power the world is generating will literally be what decides how many people live on this planet and how many of those are not in daily misery. "Starve the beast", however it is phrased, should be slapped out of the mouth of an environmentalist or humanitarian harder and faster than out of that of an economist.
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Jan 7, 2012 08:38
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Strudel Man posted:If only we could go back to those halcyon days when people didn't need or want possessions to be happy. I too have trouble imagining a world where anyone can be happy without a constant glut/rut of goods manufactured by slaves. Killer robot posted:That's totally backwards, is the problem. Yes, yes, yes, Americans could stand to drive less and buy less stuff, no one's really disputing that. But that's not the point, any more than people in Phoenix watering lawns really matters much next to farmers trying to turn the Sonoran Desert into the next cotton belt. Power efficiency and less wasteful lifestyles are nice, conspicuous consumption is bad, but fixing that won't fix the bigger problems. You unwittingly do the exact same thing you criticize later on. You're brushing off consumption (fueled by the full faith & credit of the first world) as though it were some trivial concern. Also, nice job on advocating for "population control" in the third world: quote:It's giving people the quality of life that birth rates drop and the larger population issue stops being a problem. In other words, it's really up to the third world to stop having children so our mess doesn't get any worse. And, you claim, we can help them have less children. How noble.
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Jan 7, 2012 09:00
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 22:56 |
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deptstoremook posted:I too have trouble imagining a world where anyone can be happy without a constant glut/rut of goods manufactured by slaves. quote:Also, nice job on advocating for "population control" in the third world:
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Jan 7, 2012 09:26
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