Last edited Fri Aug 14, 2015, 10:59 PM - Edit history (1)
...this is a product of your own attachment to so called "renewable energy."
Maybe you need to rethink your position.
The fact that so called "renewable energy" is not sustainable does not imply that nothing is sustainable.
We are seeing a sea change among environmentalists - real environmentalists as opposed to people who simply spout rote rhetoric - who are embracing, at long last, nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy is not perfect, as anyone can see. However it need not be perfect to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
The reason that nuclear energy is superior to everything else is a function of its high energy/mass ratio. In half a century of operations, used nuclear fuel has accumulated about 75,000 tons of mass. By contrast the dangerous fossil fuel industry puts about 2 to 3 billion tons a month. What is remarkable about used nuclear fuel is that it doesn't kill people. Air pollution, by contrast, kills millions of people each year.
Which one is "dangerous?"
As Jim Hansen pointed out, nuclear energy saves lives, and it is responsible for the prevention of the dumping of more than 60 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the form of carbon dioxide: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895: Unlike many papers in the primary scientific literature - including many of those Icited in the "Sustaining the Wind Series" although I've provided links for those who do have such access - this paper is open access. Anyone can read it.)
Not all advocates of so called renewable energy are mindless anti-nukes, but whether they are or not, the fact is that what they advocate, so called "renewable energy" has soaked up vast sums of money and resources for little or no result. So called renewable energy is not sustainable, period, because it relies on exotic (and often toxic) elements that will not allow it to produce even a fraction of the 560 exajoules of energy humanity consumes each year.
I admit, to my great shame when I consider that a large fraction of my morally inept generation is responsible for this unfortunate episode of "group think," that nuclear energy has had bad press. Traditionally that subset of people who advocate for so called "renewable energy" and who demonize nuclear energy are engaged in selective attention. They are more interested in an atom of cesium 134 in a tuna fish than the fact that 7 million people die each year from air pollution. (See the Lancet reference in the first part of "Sustaining the Wind."
We live in an unfortunate generation where we hear only what we want to hear, and where we hate the truth if it's "depressing." Personally, I wish we lived in a courageous time - future generations will be well within their rights for vilifying us for our cowardice - where we faced the truth because it is the truth, and dealt with it.
This is very much an ethical issue, as I attempted to explain in my first post on Dr. Brook's website: Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come.
A note on your references: For the record, for the last two or three decades of my life, I've generally spent between ten to twenty hours a week - sometimes much more - reading the primary scientific literature. Even when one reads peer reviewed journals, one needs a healthy dose of critical thinking. I will comment on my views about this in Part 5 of the series. Some blog posts, which are not reviewed, have merit, but many more are pure garbage. Regrettably, this is also true, if in smaller proportion, for some of what one reads in the primary scientific literature.
If one cruises around here, or anywhere else on the internet, one can find millions of posts screaming praises of all the things so called "renewable energy" "could" do. It's always "could do," never "is doing." This sort of thing has been going on for most of my adult life and I'm not young. (When I was young, I confess, I believed that stuff, because I wanted to believe it.) One needs to simply ask, if so called "renewable energy" is so great, why are we now burning more dangerous coal, more dangerous gas, and more dangerous petroleum than we have ever done, this after half a century of mindless cheering for wind and solar.
The wind industry and the solar industry are both trivial. They can't even run the servers dedicated to saying how wonderful they are.
Frankly, it may be too late, but we still need to wake up and smell the fumes. We may survive if we do so, but if we don't, we'll surely simply choke to death. One path has some hope. The other has none.
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