Greens wage war on clean low-carbon renewable energy The most promising renewable energy of all is making pro-renewable Greens frightened and angry. It’s geothermal energy, which taps into the natural warmth below Earth's surface, providing an abundant heat source. Geothermal exploitation used to be about finding and retrieving hot water – but new technology allows water to be …
According to Macaulay, "The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."
In the case of Greens, lower consumption is an end in itself, not a way to conserve resources. The parallel is obvious. Greens are the new Puritans.
There are intelligent, open minded environmentalists who want a better world. Unfortunately there are masses of people calling themselves greens who simply don't understand that affordable, plentiful energy saves end enriches human life on a scale impossible for the mind to truly comprehend.
Apocalyptic misanthropy disguised as being green just makes me admire the Amish. At least when they say technology is bad, they actually avoid using most of it, unlike the AMDABG, who happily tell everyone to get used to being relatively poorer then hop on a plane to go tell another group the same thing.
I don't have a favourite. My only criteria is that it must be cheap and reliable with minimal impact on the environment. That pretty much means any form of generation (in the Western world) except for wind and solar. Neither of which are either cheap or reliable.
"I've often wondered why obviously geothermal rich countries such as Iceland don't export electricity. I suppose transporting it is the main challenge."
In a sense, they do export electricity. A lot of aluminium ore is exported there to be refined, which is an extremely energy intensive activity.
The main reason is that the Icelandic power companies have previously concentrated on building power plants to service energy intensive industries such as aluminium smelting and ferro-silicon based in Iceland. This policy is going out of favour as the benefits of the factories are minimal in that they create relatively few jobs and their products are relatively low-value bulk materials whose value fluctuates wildly with changing global economics. More recently they've been exploring the potential for using hydro and geo power to power server farms which are a much higher value business.
There's also been a big public backlash against the perceived transformation of public lands into private hands. The damming of some of the most spectacular rivers in the country such as at Kárahnjúkar and the three new dams planned on the lower Þjórsá has been immensely controversial and the recent sale of geothermal reserves in Reykjanes to a Canadian company, Magma, was very, very unpopular.
who has also not had a drastic reduction in energy requirements per person on their agenda.
Now, I'm not saying that we should go down the rampant energy use path, and that efficient use of energy should not be promoted, but the people shouting here are almost certainly the hair-shirt brigade that want to suggest that we should reduce our energy footprint to be the same as a Kalahari nomadic tribesman.
So any project that suggests that we can keep our current energy use will be attacked from every possible angle.
@Peter Gathercole:
Hello, I'm someone who thinks that a) our current levels of energy usage are unsustainable but that, b) does *not* fit your cliche'd stereotype "hair shirt" nonsense.
As I've posted on these forums before, what we need to do is to use energy in a *more efficient* manner and develop effective and sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels. Of course when you continue to see Opinion Pieces written by axe-grinding authors spreading their own "misleading propaganda" any sensible arguments get lost in the mouth-frothing nonsense that follows.
As someone said: "No matter how much information you give people, if their minds are made up, their minds are made up". Ironic, isn't it...?
It's obnoxious the way some people have tried to claim the word when there are many of us out here who actively work to protect the environment but happen to be, for example, pro-nuclear.
There's an Old Guard that have a lock on the top of the environmental movement. There's no way any pro-Nuclear argument will ever get past the people at the top of Friends of the Earth, for example, no matter how much sense it makes. But where do the rest of us environmentally minded people go when we're put off from all the main environmental movements because of the closed-minded people at the top.
I'll stick my head out to get shot at as an 'enviro-mentalist'. I believe that we should be aiming for a sustainable level of energy use and for our methods of producing energy to be as non destructive to our environment as is reasonably possible (again, sustainability). I don't believe we should live in grass shacks and paddle a dachsund to work, nor should we abandon coal / gas etc tomorrow.
What we do need is a real, solid commitment to getting our collective backsides moving towards diverse and sustainable power generation. That is likely to be a mix of solar, geothermal and nuclear fusion (should we ever get round to building commercial scale stations).
I can understand the concern over geothermal, if for no other reason that history has shown us that people who stand to make money from something will lie through their teeth about the concequences of their actions. In Hawai'i we also have to respect the religious objections to geothermal. That being said, it is not new, so far it seems to be a good contender as a medium term and potential long term source of power.
We spend ever increasing amounts of money getting oil and gas from increasingly more difficult fields. That money would have had us to the point of commercial fusion, at which point you have considerable amounts of extremely low carbon power with miniscule amounts (compared to fission) of waste. We need energy, lots of it, and from sources that won't run out and won't turn the world into los angeles with its wonderful 50ft visibility due to smog.
It's ok to be an environmentalist just as it is to want to protect your levels of usage, everyone needs to consider that their future needs to be sustainable. Living in grass shacks isn't sustainable with our population levels, not is driving f450's to costco three times a day. Less bitching and more doing is the way forward. It's not like we don't have the answers already. We can continue using 'western' levels of power without turning the planet into a dump, but we have to start moving soon.
Fusion has yet to show a positive energy budget, despite decades of research.
Fission, conversely, has such an enormously positive energy budget that most recent R&D on the subject has gone into reducing it. It's a much more reliable contender than geothermal, certainly, even in places where there are no aborigines objecting to holes in the ground -- and the waste objection is really a non-starter, considering that what we currently call "waste", being still hot and thus still usable fuel, is only "waste" if it's wasted, rather than being incorporated into radioisotope thermal generators or similar -- which would also be, by far, the safest place we could ever find to put it.
Better still, the boundless electrical power available from fission plants offers the prospect of effectively free-of-charge hydrogen gas from water cracking (hydrolysis), which in turn offers the prospect of internal-combustion vehicles running not on filthy, expensive distilled dead dinosaurs, as now, but rather on a fuel which is not only cheap as chips but literally could not be any cleaner-burning.
In short, with nuclear fusion and hydrogen-powered vehicles, we'd be able to maintain at least our current level of technological culture, safely and cleanly, for longer than we've even been writing down our history thus far.
The only problems with implementing this idea, that I can see, are a) that "environmentalist" includes a completely irrational but quite wide streak of yellow on the subject of nuclear fission, and b) that "environmentalist" for a lot of people also seems to include a sort of crypto-Luddism which doesn't want our current culture to be sustained or sustainable, as best I can tell for religious reasons which leave me entirely unmoved. That said unsustainability implies Malthusian catastrophe seems not to faze those who are not actively pleased to contemplate such a result.
Me, though, I like my species pretty well, and I'd rather do almost anything than watch millions upon millions of us die off horribly through plague and famine. Implementing fission doesn't strike me as that much of a stretch by comparison.
Sorry forgot to say I agree entirely with the anti dead dinosaurs sentiment. If we can get power we can change our method of storing it for transport.
To some degree I agree re nuclear waste. Over the life of a plant it does generate a lot of contaminated material, however I should have elaborated on my statement. My concern isn't the 'waste' per se, but our ability to cut corners in search of more dollars. We screw up, we get greedy. Fukushima could have been prevented by using a safer location or a larger wall but no doubt beancounters were whipped into lying by executives. When it went to shit nobody who made the poor decisions had to take responsibility. Fixing that would help sway a lot of those of us who distrust nuclear (not because of the design, but the implementation). As you state nuclear is one of the better currently available options.
Check out ITER and DEMO. Ignore for a second how you feel about how well it works, just look at all the dick waving about who pays how much, where it will be and exactly how many scientists each country gets. Fusion might not work out but 20 something years have been wasted in a giant nob fest over pissing rights. We just need to find out. Maybe its a dead end, maybe its the answer, its about time we found out.
People have been trying to implement fusion for better than thirty years now. No experimental fusion reactor has yet run at a positive energy budget for even so little as one second. "Maybe [it's] a dead end"? So far, it has yet to be anything else. Sure, if the academics keep plugging away at it for long enough, it might end up being useful for something. Right now, though, it's not worth considering as a replacement generation technology, precisely because it has never once, throughout its existence to date, demonstrated the slightest hint of any potential to fulfill that purpose.
During the brouhaha over the Fukushima accident last year, I made the point that responsibility for nuclear generating stations should not be entrusted to an organization driven by a profit motive, but rather to one which could instead maintain the absolute and maniacal focus on safety of operation which is, in my I think not too controversial opinion, the only reasonable way for anyone in charge of a nuclear plant to behave.
David Pollard, quite rightly, objected that democratic accountability was a necessity for any such endeavor -- in short, you'd need engineers to oversee something like that, but you'd need governmental oversight, which in this era means democratic oversight, for a hypothetical "US Nucleonics Corps" or what-have-you. You can't expect commoners to be engineers enough to exercise such oversight, and choosing a subset of the larger group just incurs the eternal quis custodiet problem.
While at the time Mr. Pollard's argument stopped me in my tracks, I am now able to weasel my way out of that objection quite handily, simply by noting that mob rule seems less and less like a good idea to me in any case. "Power to the people" is all well and good in theory, but if it doesn't work in a datacenter, there's no reason to expect it to work in an even more complex, technical, and potentially dangerous field, such as nucleonics -- or, for that matter, government.
Let us usher in a new era of responsible, professional rule -- let us dismantle our parliaments and lustrate their inhabitants; let us turn the public-opinion managers, professional liars and brain-washers that they are, out of their comfortable offices and set them to the alms-begging and whoring which are their rightful lot; let us replace all such with people with whom the job of managing nations is bred in the very bone -- and the problems you describe around nuclear fission, which right now are indeed quite real, will more or less solve themselves.
Until that happens, I'm increasingly convinced, we're going to be more or less screwed no matter what we do.
Quite to the contrary, many of the experiment sin the last 20-30 years into fusion has met or exceeded its goals (JET as an example). The goal of these experiments was not to produce an excess of energy but to take steps towards that. The excess energy comes with scale, small scale test tokamaks wouldn't generate an excess or a sustained reaction. ITER will be the first fusion reactor designed to produce a surplus (generating 10 times more than it uses), DEMO (generating 25 times more than it uses, and on an continual basis) will be the first fusion power station (ITER generates an excess but it isn't harnessed for electrical generation). The scientists have been playing it safe and working up to a surplus, because if they had built a commercial scale 2000-4000MW surplus fusion plant theres a fair chance there would be a smouldering hole in Oxfordshire. The problem they have encountered is the delays in all the politiking between countries.
With respect to who should be in charge of the operation of Nuclear plants, you are entirely correct. We are screwed. Companies will seek profit over safety to the point of buying politicians to allow them to cut corners. Politicians will be bought so they are out. The general public (which not exactly stupid) will make decisions based on FUD, gut instinct and potentially greed. Scientists by and large (as can be seen by expert witness testimony in courts) can be bought and sold just as politicians can. Frankly (and this is by no means meant to be disrespectful) I would rather see you in charge, you seem to have a balanced and realistic outlook.
The only other way I can think of dealing with it is creating a solid link between the management (C level + board) of the company and the results of any disasters. i.e. if you want to have a nuclear power plant the entire management will live next to it, go for a swim once a week by the outflow and eat the local shellfish. When it is their families and their well being on the line I think they may pay a little less attention to suggestions about cutting corners to save a quarter of a percent in costs. If you look at windscale, fukushima, 3 mile island and chernobyl, all were preventable or manageable. Windscale piles were built in a hurry and no one went back to fix errors, fukushima didn't have a wall high enough (and the placing of nuclear reactors next to the shore in a country prone to earthquakes and tsunamis is dubious), 3 mile island could have been prevented by better training, the list goes on.
The people making the decisions, those with oversight, don't have to live with the consequences. They don't end up with cancer, they don't end up paying out of their own pockets for clean ups, yet they get the financial benefits from cost cutting. The sooner they do the sooner we will see a rapid improvement in safety. You can bet the minute that law came in there would be a hell of a lot of meetings and site visits from suits the normal workers had never seen before.
Flattery will get you everywhere! I am really not at all suited to the job, either by constitution or by inclination; I'm just a sysadmin with a smart mouth and a good sense of his own limitations. But I certainly do appreciate the vote of confidence on a Monday morning.
And do note, because it counts, that I propose not to turn it over to scientists, i.e., researchers, but to engineers, who are accustomed to delivering tangible results. Specifically, I'd turn it over to ex-naval nuclear engineers with experience of operating nuclear plants in a context where they not only live next door (or a few hatches) down from the thing, but also literally can not get away from it if it goes wrong -- it's awfully hard to bail out of a submarine under way, unless you can breathe water, and human "crush depth" is rather shallower than that at which nuclear subs generally cruise! When one's well-being and very life depend on operational safety, one becomes rather obsessive on the subjet, even perhaps maniacally so, which again strikes me as the very best kind of attitude for anyone involved in the design, construction, operation and maintenance of a nuclear plant.
Of course, the Navy, not wishing either to waste highly trained personnel for no reason, or to play "penny wise, pound foolish" with boats costing a billion bucks a pop, supports this attitude right up the line. My notional US Nucleonics Corps would do just the same, only more so. The Navy also provides grave penalties for people who make culpable mistakes, and the Nucleonics Corps would emulate the Navy in that respect also. It's one thing to fail through no fault of one's own -- it is, of course, quite possible to do everything right, and still lose. But one who loses through not doing everything right may reasonably expect real penalties -- from being defrocked through being imprisoned to being publicly hanged, depending on the gravity of the error and its consequences. (After all, if one errs in such a way that it costs innocents their lives or well-being, why should one not expect to pay in like coin for one's negligence? It won't bring anyone back, of course, but neither will anything else, and such a response should make a salutary lesson for anyone who has similarly been letting his responsibilities go wanting.)
You've got a point about politicians, but note again my comments on the subject of mob rule; absent that, we don't get the kind of politicians you're talking about, because there's no point to politicking in the first place -- one of the nicer points of absolute monarchy is that it doesn't have to hew to the mob's every whim! That's not to say it should ignore them entirely, which any sensible monarch wouldn't do -- as Charles I put it, right before Cromwell's thugs removed not only his crown, but the head on which he'd worn it:
"[As for the people,] truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them; a subject and a sovereign are clear different things. And therefore until they do that, I mean that you do put the people in that liberty, as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves[...]"
-- nor have we; the problems with mob rule are legion, as we've been discovering ever since, to the extent that even the most committed democrats loathe, under the name of "politics", the very system they purport to venerate. (Pity it never seems to occur to them that, under a system where the mob's trend or fad or hysteria du jour doesn't risk turning the whole world on its ear, the politics they so loathe need not exist at all!)
Even under mob rule, buying the nuclear plants off their current owners and handing them over to the Nucleonics Corps, or equivalent, would solve some problems -- that said, and democracy being what it is, we still wouldn't have something really reliable, until we replace the government we have, with the government we need.
I am one of those engineers, at least by original training (and has found the standards of the private sector "British Energy" markedly higher than they were in my days when I trained with the CEGB/NNC, but we'll leave that to one side for the moment).
There's one essential you seem to be missing here.
Cost.
I'll agree that fuson is likely to be one day technically viable. Don't forget however, there is a major radioactivity problem - the majority of the energy leaves the fusion reaction in the form of high energy neutrons, which not only activate the reactor structures themselves, but require the reactor to be surreounded with a capture blanket, in which these neutrons can first transfer their energy to a moderator type material (probably lithium or similar) and ultimately be captured. That too is likely to involve significant production of radioactive products of various types.
However, we're seeing nothing at the moment that suggests that fuson plant is likely to be other than horrendously expensive - ITER, even at just 500MWth is looking likely to cost well north of €20Bn to complete; that's for a plant that lacks any steam-raising or other "balance of plant", and would be good for perhaps 150-200MW of electrical output. Weas yet don't have the faintest idea of the likely operating costs of a commercial scale plant, beyond knowing that they're likely to be extremely high - those neutron flux issues will mean that almost everthing will require remote handling, and the plant is hugely more complex than the internals or associated plant of a fission reactor.
Even assuming we we able to add all the balance of plant without inflating costs, and reduce by a factor of ten the unit cost of a fusion plant itself (on a €/MW basis, by scaling and avoiding FOAK costs), and achieve similar unit operational costs to a fission plant, we'd be looking at unit output cost in the £350-400/MWh range - or about 5 times the unit cost of output from a new generation fission plant.
That's a phenpmenally tall order.
Aaron, I hope this was at least a little tongue in cheek
"Let us usher in a new era of responsible, professional rule"
... because, that would in all likelihood put the James Hansen's of the world in power, and for the life of me, I cannot think of a more horrifying scenario. He (and more than a few of his ilk) is(are) already in positions of extreme administrative power now, despite that we have a functional democracy (well sort of).
IMHO, politicized science manipulated by "politicians with agendas" masquerading as scientists is more dangerous than democracy, and sadly, politicized is what I suspect would become of your "professional rule".
Not tongue-in-cheek at all, Philip, -- that said, Hansen is but one of many who'd be lustrated under the regime I have in mind.
Preferably, said lustration would be by means of enforced retirement from public life, at a pension equaling whatever he's making annually right now; both kindness, and the desire to avoid excess sanguinity during the process of transition, demand it.
But if he can't surrender his political ambitions, even when it becomes inescapably clear they will never go anywhere again...Well, it shouldn't take more than a few hours for a work crew to erect both a gallows and a gibbet, somewhere nice and public like the Washington Mall -- I'd put it in front of the Lincoln Memorial, myself. Sic semper technocrates!
To be as clear as possible on the subject: I am a royalist. Any monarch worth the crown would recognize Hansen and his ilk for what they are, and give them exactly as short a shrift as they deserve.
It isn't quite objecting to holes in the ground, understanding the situation provides for a solution. The objection is to holes in the side of volcanoes as they are the home of Pele. It doesn't preclude other locations. Disrespecting other peoples views as primitive is not helpful.
With respect to fusion vs fission. Fission has a place in our future unless or until fusion is proven practical. The issues with fusion are largely political (and vested interests). We have fusion that doesn't generate a surplus of energy, under construction now is ITER which should see plasma injected before the end of the decade. In theory it should take about 50MW to run and output 500MW. We thought fission was 'the answer' so we neglected fusion, then we dragged our feet. Finally we are close to answers.
There are lots of questions over fusion, it may not be awesome but right now we do have to look. It is more environmentally sound than fission, we just need to move a lot quicker towards getting answers about its practicality. I think its reasonable to say if we can get a cleaner nuclear process, its worth a look right? It might not work, but so far the signs say it will.
We need to start a gradual shift away from coal, then away from gas but this cannot happen until we have somewhere to go. Solar / geothermal and nuclear are our current most realistic options. In time fusion may replace fission (I ackowledge it may not but we need to find out quicker than we are) or something else may come along. I think whats clear is that breeding like rabbits and exhausting limited resources at an escalating rate in a manner which polutes the land, air and sea just isn't a long term plan.
Scepticism is good, beligerance and inactivity isn't. When we put our minds to it we can be smart. Engineers with slide rules and log tables built a passenger plane that reliably exceeded twice the speed of sound. We have managed to stand on the moon and get home again. Concentrating a little more on making our lives more sustainable and a little less of big brother and idle american isn't beyond the realms of possibility.
He gets really excited when he sees someone writing a question. To not punctuate it at the end with help from our dear friend the question mark is putting him out of a job! He is lonely and unloved, can't we find some room for him in our hearts?
"No matter how much information you give people, if their minds are made up, their minds are made up,"
I'm usually as cynical as the next man, but I do like to think that with a persuasive, well thought-out and factually backed-up enough argument, any intelligent person can be brought round. This "oh they'll never listen" stance is sometimes far too defeatist an attitude.
"I'm usually as cynical as the next man, but I do like to think that with a persuasive, well thought-out and factually backed-up enough argument, any intelligent person can be brought round. This "oh they'll never listen" stance is sometimes far too defeatist an attitude."
Where is this magical place you live. It certainly isn't in the real world?
Here's a frackin' good idea. Instead of using water+additives to frack wells, why not use an alkane gel? Comes back up as gas, and contamination of water is impossible.
Been done. The process has already fracked over a 1000 wells. More expensive than water, so with shale gas prices at historic lows in the USA, the bak-of-envelope calc needs looking at by a bean-counter - and I don't mean bean-eater.
Frackin' marvelous. Enough to make a Green green with envy. Ideas - the Greens just don't have new ones.
"Here's a frackin' good idea. Instead of using water+additives to frack wells, why not use an alkane gel? Comes back up as gas, and contamination of water is impossible."
It's interesting, but I would guess the logic is as follows: the people who do the frakking believe that water+additives is safe and wont contaminate water tables, therefore there is no advantage to using the gel. Secondly, whatever they do, the loudest parts of the environmental movement will still condemn them and shout that it's unsafe. Thus more cost for no benefit, unless groups like Friends of the Earth were willing to take a more nuanced view of things, which in my experience they are not.
That's one of the reasons I'd really like to see the Polywell fusor a.k.a. Bussard fusor be shown to work. Not only do I want to see a clean source of power, but I REALLY want to see the various "greens" (note: scare quotes) deal with a power source that is hard to argue against from a logical perspective.
Why do something cheap and easy when there is expensive and complex! Geothermal works well in the countries where there are already volcanoes and earthquakes, see Iceland for example, but they survive, not sure a bit of fracking will really cause any issue to the stable Great British Isles. Environmental lunacy!
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