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NNadir

(33,368 posts)
20. I do recognize that it is difficult for bourgeois liberals to see so called "renewable energy..."
Tue Jul 24, 2018, 09:14 PM
Jul 2018

...for what it is. As a bourgeois liberal myself, I've been there, done that.

I used to believe that so called "renewable energy" was a good thing. I've changed my mind completely. It isn't, if you look into it, not even "renewable." The name for this stuff is a lie, never mind what it actually does, which is very little.

In the period between 2006 and 2016, over 2.0913 trillion dollars were squandered on solar and wind alone.

UNEP Frankfurt Report, Investment in Renewable Energy, Table (Figure) 3, page 14

What do we have to show for it?

The bulk of this money went to solar, trillion dollars. The horrible thing about this is that no one really expects a solar panel to work more than 25 years. Thus a solar panel purchased in 2006 is near the halfway point of its lifetime, whereupon it will become toxic electronic waste.

Combined, this money, wind and solar alone over the last ten years, is approximately equal to the annual gross domestic product of India, a nation with 1.3 billion people in it, many of whom live in dire poverty and are not involved in our fantasies about cars, electric or otherwise.

Frankly I'm not interested either. As I point out here, Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come, my political liberalism is connected with my view of the intrinsic worth of every human being, and as such, a fondness for Section 1 of article 25 of the 1948, UN approved, Declaration of Human Rights, which is honored regrettably, more in breach than in practice.

To my mind there is no legitimate reason for nuclear energy "to live in harmony" with so called "renewable energy." Nor am I about to embrace the "Appeal to Popularity" fallacy, by caring whether "most" liberals like so called "renewable energy."

However, I do think that we can take the reluctance to use logical fallacies too far.

In terms of deaths per Gwh of electricity, dams are more dangerous than nuclear power plants, but both types of plants are tough on fresh water supplies, at least as nuclear energy is applied to dams in the general sense. In pointing to this fact, however, I am not arguing that this is the chief reason that dams suck. They are safer than dangerous fossil fuels, and many cities around the world rely on their water. If we get too attached to avoiding rhetorical logical fallacies, we risk losing the willingness to do simple comparisons, and this would greatly damage a happily growing branch of engineering environmental science, "life cycle analysis." We need to do life cycle analysis for all forms of energy and indeed all of the ways we live our lives. To the extent we don't do this - and we don't do it very much at all - we are stealing from future generations, criminally stealing.

Nuclear plants cooled by seawater are a different game, although in an ideal way we'd do more sensible things with so called "waste" heat than dump it. Designing nuclear reactors to operate at much higher temperatures than typical light water reactors will help in recovering waste heat in two pathways, higher thermal efficiency, and more concentrated waste heat.

I note that salt is completely insoluble in water in the supercritical state, and very soluble in liquid water; regrettably very few reactor designs today are capable of heating water to supercritical temperatures and pressures. Designs for doing this are well known, and advances in materials science should make a clear path to avoiding some of the corrosion issues that have vexed the path in the past.

Desalination has some very profound environmental risks of course, but I note that if large amounts of water were removed from the oceans and stored or utilized on continental land masses, this might off set to some extent, albeit probably a minor extent, sea level rise. This might ring a little of geoengineering, but it needs consideration, particularly because of other resources seawater contains besides water and uranium; it is an excellent source of carbon dioxide. In fact the oceans are a huge carbon dioxide extraction device; without it, we'd probably be closer to Venutian climates than we are now.

Dams are not expandable; we are out of new rivers to destroy, and whether rivers survive at all is a function of how bad climate change is, and as we're experiencing around the world this summer, the nightmare is already here. Also dams waste water by significant evaporation, prevent the drainage of salts to the sea, and thus destroy land, destroy important ecosystems, particularly estuarine resources, and otherwise cause they cause unacceptable environmental destruction to important habitats and species.

I'm a free river kind of guy. Although the modern day Sierra Club is devoted to grinding up bats and with wind turbines, and destroying pristine habitats by making them into wind farm industrial parks, it was founded to oppose dams, including the horrible Hetch Hetchy dam. It's too bad that it, and many other ersatz "environmental" organizations have transformed into habitat industrial development advocacy organizations. John Muir had it right, and he'd probably weep over what his legacy has become.

David Brower "traded" - without any authorization to do so - the Glen Canyon for the Grand Canyon - yes there were proposals to make it into a reservoir - and the Glen Canyon dam should be removed in my opinion, although generations will be required to restore Glen Canyon to what it was, likewise the Hetch Hetchy valley. (Glen Canyon has done a fan dance with humanity in the recent droughts; they'll be more as the effects of climate change get even worse than what we are seeing in 2018.)

I do believe, understanding the enormous risk of changing saline flows in the oceans, that properly managed, desalination could be preferable to dams. I say this knowing that the only real viable option for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a challenging engineering task but one which may be possible, or at the edge of possible, goes through seawater. By exploiting the electrochemistry associated with salt gradients, it may be possible to recover some of the electricity lost from dams while minimizing brine zones at outfall pipes.

To the extent that desalination can eliminate reliance on dams, it's desirable.

Dams are, I agree, slightly less obnoxious than solar and wind plants, but not all that much so. As a whole, all so called "renewable energy" schemes are all failed and unnecessary technologies. None of them can be as clean and as sustainable at nuclear energy. The so called "renewable energy" scheme is a scheme to make two systems do what one can do, and this has implications both in the thermodynamic and (as follows) the environmental sense. This is, I note, inclusive of batteries. Batteries waste energy.

Have a nice day tomorrow.



Solar is just getting started. True disruption to other sources is not in our lifetime. Fred Sanders Jul 2018 #1
Yeah. I know. Solar has been "just getting started" since 1954. NNadir Jul 2018 #3
Uh, first it is an ad and so hyperbole is par. Second, it is one battery. See no claim it is going Fred Sanders Jul 2018 #8
So is climate change NickB79 Jul 2018 #11
Tired of this crap. Eko Jul 2018 #2
I got the same Strawman! Fred Sanders Jul 2018 #9
So this is the convincing part of your arguent... sfwriter Jul 2018 #4
'I don't see anyone choosing renewable over nuclear. They choose renewable over coal.' John ONeill Jul 2018 #12
I thought the thread concerned the US market. sfwriter Jul 2018 #14
By your logic... NNadir Jul 2018 #15
Move to China ... GeorgeGist Jul 2018 #5
Actually, I love my country and despise the morons who are making it unsafe... NNadir Jul 2018 #6
I am actually with you on nuclear. Pocket nuclear plants today, without being a expert, seem Fred Sanders Jul 2018 #10
Thank you for your civil and kind suggestion about an approach to, um, "getting my point across." NNadir Jul 2018 #13
Thank you for the response, I am truly flattered, as much as I can be given my resistance to Fred Sanders Jul 2018 #16
Are renewables useful ? John ONeill Jul 2018 #18
Word...Battery...once the power density storage efficiency reaches a certain point, all the energy Fred Sanders Jul 2018 #19
I do recognize that it is difficult for bourgeois liberals to see so called "renewable energy..." NNadir Jul 2018 #20
Laos dam collapse: Many feared dead as floods hit villages hunter Jul 2018 #21
Improvement comes from criticism. JayhawkSD Jul 2018 #7
To the extent this displaces the typical Chinese coal fired power plant... hunter Jul 2018 #17
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