The Growth of Solar Capacity In California, Capacity Utilization, and Solar Energy Production.

[hunter]

19. There's some interesting work being done with concrete formulation.

Currently concrete is made by heating up certain rocks using fossil fuels, turning the carbonates in these rocks to carbon dioxide which is vented into the atmosphere along with the carbon dioxide from the burning fossil fuels. This rock is then crushed to a powder and mixed with fly ash from coal power plants.

That's a lot of carbon dioxide, from both the fossil fueled cement plants and the coal power plants.

As concrete sets it reabsorbs some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but not near so much as was released manufacturing it.

Conceivably we could manufacture concrete, other structural materials, and transportation fuels using nuclear power. Rocks could be heated using nuclear power and the carbon dioxide captured. This captured carbon dioxide could be turned into various additional structural materials and fuel using additional nuclear energy.

The net result would be concrete and fuels with net zero carbon dioxide emissions.

The greatest problem with nuclear energy is that it works. We could use nuclear energy to increase the human population and turn all that's left of the natural environment into automobiles, roads, parking lots, and big box stores. For a time, even here on DU, I thought that was a fairly good reason to oppose nuclear power. I've also quipped here that if I knew the secret to cheap fusion energy I wouldn't tell anyone.

My greatest fear is that humans, given a safe nearly unlimited energy source, will eat the earth. We'll turn the entire biosphere into more humans.

With the human population approaching 8 billion people "renewable energy" can't sustain us all; humanity has become too dependent on highly concentrated energy sources.

If we don't quit fossil fuels billions of us are going to suffer, starve, and die as a consequence of global warming.

If we do quit fossil fuels without a roughly equivalent concentrated energy source then billions of us are going to suffer, starve, and die

Wind and solar can't entirely displace fossil fuels for the simple reason that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. Generally natural gas is burned to fill in the gaps. Burning any amount of natural gas is bad.

We've worked ourselves into a corner. Nuclear energy is the only technology capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely.

Natural gas power systems, supplemented by solar and wind energy, are not going to save the world.

Personally, I don't have any antipathy to solar power on rooftops or over parking lots. My own neighborhood is possibly a net exporter of electricity whenever the sun is shining. Our schools have solar panels over their parking lots and shaded playground areas, I can park under solar panels as I do my grocery shopping, and at least a quarter of my neighbors have solar panels on their roofs. There are solar panels on the rooftops of the big box stores.

I dislike wind and solar developments on previously undisturbed land. It strikes me as a sort of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" mentality.

For all that we worry about nuclear waste, there are far greater volumes of equally toxic industrial wastes that have a half-life of forever polluting our environment.

There have been plenty of industrial accidents worse than Chernobyl but nobody pays as much attention to them because they don't make a Geiger counter tick. At Fukushima the worst environmental toxins spread about by the tsunami had nothing to do with the nuclear power.

I was a radical anti-nuclear activist when I was young. At one point I met Helen Caldicott , I was there when Jerry Brown made his "No new nukes!" speech at a Diablo Canyon protest, and I was frequently hanging out with some prominent anti-nuclear activists that I won't name. I spent a lot of time on the road between San Onofre and Humboldt. (I was pretty good at minor trespasses and dumpster diving...)

I've changed my mind about nuclear power. Fossil fuels are the far greater threat.

This reply is a bit of a ramble, maybe because I'm a bit disturbed. I've been out in the Sierra foothills of California and the water situation isn't like anything I've ever seen. It's so dry! There are posters up at the grocery stores offering state assistance to low income people whose wells have gone dry. There's only a few inches of water in my favorite skinny-dipping spot. Usually at this time of year it's still deep enough to float in.

Driving across the Central Valley (Trump Land!) didn't improve my mood. The farmers there seem to think building more dams will make the water come. They only have to look at Lake Mead or Lake Powell, which capture all the water flowing down the Colorado River, to see how that turns out. Both lakes are about 1/3 capacity. This is almost certainly a symptom of global warming.

Yeah, I know I'm burning fossil fuels to travel. I am a hypocrite. I've burned more than my fair share of fossil fuels in my lifetime, not so much as some, but still quite a bit. I remember when I could fill the tank of my little Toyota for less than an hour's wages. Gas was almost free!

Now I've lived long enough to see the consequences of that.