green power solar is

[Bruce]

Thanks for the molten salt storage power station reference, I'm becoming persuaded that renewables with storage may become cheaper than nuclear after all.

 

But what a shame if it is all too late, and the planet has been wrecked by greenies who effectively stopped nuclear in favor of coal for 50 years.

 

 

[storchy neil]

where is your real power coming from neil

 

 

[Bruce]

If I had been listened to, the real power would have come from nuclear for the last 50 years and the planet would be in better shape than it is now. Millions are already sick and dying from climate change, maybe a thousand times more than in all the nuclear accidents put together.

 

Try looking up the effect of heatwaves on the poor in cities in India, for just one example.

 

 

[pmccarthy]

The numbers are far worse than that Bruce. In just 2006 for example, an inundation at the Xinjing coal mine in the Shanxi providence killed 56 miners, and 27 miners were killed in an explosion in the privately owned Wayaobao mine in Shaanxi province. Fires, floods and explosions claim hundreds of deaths, some reports say thousands, every year in Chinese coal mines. In India, 7 lives are lost for each 100 million tonnes of coal extracted, a death rate of about 50 per year. By contrast, nuclear electric power has not killed many people in nearly 70 years . The opposition to it is a form of religious mania, not based on logic.

 

 

[Marty_d]

Bruce, Chernobyl happened in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. There have been another 9 serious accidents. If the world had been using nuclear power everywhere for the last 50 years it'd need something like 15,000 plants, there'd be a serious accident every month, and we'd have run out of mined uranium in about 5 years.

 

Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs

 

On the other hand, if the world had started rolling out large-scale renewable plants 50 years ago, imagine how fast the innovations in wind, solar, hydro, batteries, and collection & storage in general would have occurred.

 

As to what would never have happened - Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf War to name a few.

 

But a few billionaires would not be billionaires if we'd gone that way.

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

... the planet has been wrecked by greenies who effectively stopped nuclear in favor of coal for 50 years.

Bruce this rash statement is beneath you. "Greenies" are far from perfect, but they are at least trying to limit the damage to Mother Earth. If nuclear had been adopted as mankind's main power source we'd now be dealing with dozens of Chernobyls and Fukushimas, dozens more states would have nuclear weapons and our grandchildren would be saddled with hundreds of toxic, decommissioned sites and their waste for generations.

 

Renewables -and all the sustainable policies that come with them- would never have been developed.

 

 

[willedoo]

On the other hand, if the world had started rolling out large-scale renewable plants 50 years ago, imagine how fast the innovations in wind, solar, hydro, batteries, and collection & storage in general would have occurred.

 

As to what would never have happened - Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf War to name a few.

Marty, I'd strike the Exxon Valdez oil spill from that list. Deepwater Horizon was a gas well and a lot of gas is used for power generation. But how do we replace oil with wind, solar etc. We'd have no plastic, no bitumen roads, no machinery or cars. We would all have to embrace an Amish lifestyle to live without oil. Maybe in the future there will be technology to make a compound to do the job of oil based plastics.

 

The problem with oil is that it's all or nothing. If we are going to stop using it, we have to find ways to eliminate it from everything that contains it or is based on it. Point I'm making is that if we reduce our oil usage by 80% and still need the remaining 20% for essentials like plastic based products, the price of those components would be sky high. Oil companies don't do what's not profitable, so the end user would have to pay. A toothbrush would cost 50 or 60 dollars.

 

 

[Bruce]

Even if old K's figures are correct , that would still make nuclear the least worst option between nuclear and coal.

 

( I reckon Chernobyl was a disgrace, an under-maintained old station, and as for building any power station on a tsunami coast, well I thought better of the Japanese)

 

Marty's point about running out of uranium does not apply to modern reactors, especially the hybrid fission/fusion ones.

 

But if stored renewables can come in cheaper, well thats great news and a surprise to me.

 

 

[octave]

I am not necessarily against fusion power. I would suggest that it may be part of the mix. I do have some concerns though. The chance of an accident is really quite low however the consequences are potentially large. A company must be able to provide secure safe storage for the waste for many generations. Nuclear power plants are extremely complicated and expensive to build such that they are seldom built by one company. Who would finance, build, own and operate a power plant in Australia?

 

 

[spacesailor]

Just a question ?.

 

" decommissioned sites and their waste for generations "

 

Isn't England's FIRST nuclear power station still operational, and it's OLD.

 

Calder Hall.

 

spacesailor

 

 

[octave]

Just a question ?." decommissioned sites and their waste for generations "

 

Isn't England's FIRST nuclear power station still operational, and it's OLD.

 

Calder Hall.

 

spacesailor

Nuclear decommissioning - Wikipedia

 

Sellafield incorporates the original nuclear reactor site at Windscale, which as of January 2019 is undergoing decommissioning and dismantling, and Calder Hall, a neighbour of Windscale, which is also undergoing decommissioning and dismantling of its four nuclear power generating reactors.

 

 

[octave]

I found this series uplifting and interesting. These clever progressive folks of Orkney island could teach us a lot.

 

 

[red750]

What surprises me is that, with the take-up of solar panels being so high, that there should have been blackouts in a couple of states when the temp got a bit high.

 

 

[Litespeed]

Blackouts were related to the grid not the generation side.

 

 

[pmccarthy]

Government was blaming coal fired power stations....how does that work?

 

 

[nomadpete]

I know it's uncommon for our grubbermint to say anything negative about coal but the recent load shedding in Victoria was due to ageing coal fired power station failures .

 

They say that three generator units failed overnight. About 1800Mw of capacity lost. Not a problem until the temperature got up into the forties and everyone cranked the A/C up. That's when they found (would have known in advance) that the interstate interconnector couldn't manage all of the 1800 to fill the shortfall. So state load had to be reduced a bit. This scenario is very rare in our East Coast grid.

 

Its not uncommon for a generator to be offline for rebuild. Not so common for them to fail unexpectedly. Also, grid managers constantly monitor weather forecast and accurately predict the load requirements so there is enough spinning reserve to fill the gap if a part of the grid or a generator breaks down. I suspect the maintenance budget has been cut in a shortsighted attempt to reduce electricity prices.

 

 

[Bruce]

You are a kind guy nomad. Less kind people have suggested that maintenance is deliberately scheduled at times of possible crisis in order to create a shortfall in supply and send prices through the roof.

 

Is this insane system still in place? I am reminded of how the Chinese used to pay their physicians only when they were well ... they were not as dumb as us if this is true.

 

 

[pmccarthy]

Professor Jordan Peterson on climate change

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbvehbomrY

 

[Bruce]

Do you think Jordan Peterson would take my bet? I doubt it, he's not about to put his money ( or his sponsors ) where his mouth is.

 

Details of the bet are negotiable, but basically I pay out when colder than normal happens and he pays out if hotter than normal.

 

So far, the response to my bet proposal has been completely negative , from people who deny that global warming is happening. Why is this?

 

 

[Marty_d]

Marty, I'd strike the Exxon Valdez oil spill from that list. Deepwater Horizon was a gas well and a lot of gas is used for power generation. But how do we replace oil with wind, solar etc. We'd have no plastic, no bitumen roads, no machinery or cars. We would all have to embrace an Amish lifestyle to live without oil. Maybe in the future there will be technology to make a compound to do the job of oil based plastics.

The problem with oil is that it's all or nothing. If we are going to stop using it, we have to find ways to eliminate it from everything that contains it or is based on it. Point I'm making is that if we reduce our oil usage by 80% and still need the remaining 20% for essentials like plastic based products, the price of those components would be sky high. Oil companies don't do what's not profitable, so the end user would have to pay. A toothbrush would cost 50 or 60 dollars.

Given the impacts that plastics have on the environment, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Toothbrushes could be made from bamboo for instance - like many other products. Maybe well-crafted wooden toys would come back into fashion, instead of cheap mass-produced plastic crap. (Lego would be a big loss- the only quality plastic toy I know of!)

 

We use plastic for heaps of things we don't need to. Milk bottles, shopping bags, drink containers, food containers. We could probably ditch 80% of plastics pretty much immediately without huge impacts.

 

 

[octave]

Not sure what this the opinion of a Psychologists adds to the debate. By the way, many of his assertions are incorrect. I was going to do a critique of this clip but this guy does a much better job than I can.

 

 

[pmccarthy]

Mallen Baker and Jordan Peterson are both making sense. I don't think there is much difference between what they are saying at all. Peterson believes (rightly I think) that the world is moving in the right direction and we don't need a (leftist imposed) economic and technical revolution. Baker doesn't actually say what he thinks should be done differently.

 

 

[willedoo]

Given the impacts that plastics have on the environment, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Toothbrushes could be made from bamboo for instance - like many other products. Maybe well-crafted wooden toys would come back into fashion, instead of cheap mass-produced plastic crap. (Lego would be a big loss- the only quality plastic toy I know of!)

We use plastic for heaps of things we don't need to. Milk bottles, shopping bags, drink containers, food containers. We could probably ditch 80% of plastics pretty much immediately without huge impacts.

Marty, it comes back to what I previously said about the economic feasibility of oil companies existing just to make oil for essential products. Sure, we could get rid of the junk plastic, but per weight, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the plastic we need and cannot replace with anything else at this stage. We could do without it as packaging and food additives, for example, with jars, we could use less oil by going back to sand mining to make glass, but it would be hard to do without some of the following:

 

Cars, trucks, XRay machines and almost all other medical equipment, air bags, seat belts, aeroplanes, false teeth, baby bottles, optical implants, machinery, boats, plumbing in our houses, water tanks, batteries, solar panels and most renewable energy products, irrigation systems, fertilizer, seat belts, electrical insulation, footwear, clothing, sheets for our beds, tennis racquets, TV's, computers, mobile phones, stents & pacemakers, stationery, rope, insulation, sewage pipes, adhesives, paints, coatings and lacquers, pilot's helmets, masks and nomex suits, satellites. The list could go on forever, as polymers are used in almost everything these days. We can't provide 7 billion people with food, water and health without oil based polymers. But most importantly, we'd have no double plug thongs without the oil industry.

 

The big problem with replacing oil based products is what do we replace them with. One example people push is growing hemp for fibre. But to do it on a big enough scale, we need farm machinery running on and partly constructed with oil, irrigation pipes and pumps made from oil, chemical fertilizers ( the biggest source of nitrogen in farming is urea, made from, you guessed it - oil); we're joined at the hip to oil. We can get rid of some polluting plastic packaging, and that would be a good thing, but it wouldn't make any difference to the world's oil production.

 

Recently I was looking up some food additives after a bit of allergic hayfever and it's interesting to trace them right back to their origin. In a lot of them, that's oil byproducts. In the past, they've had byproducts that have no use or economic value, so now with the help of a bit of scientific research, they've found a way to dispose of it and make a few dollars. Simple solution - get us eating it. But I guess that comes back to what Costa from the gardening show said, ' If you're worried about food additives, you're eating too much product and not enough produce'.

 

 

[octave]

Mallen Baker and Jordan Peterson are both making sense. I don't think there is much difference between what they are saying at all. Peterson believes (rightly I think) that the world is moving in the right direction and we don't need a (leftist imposed) economic and technical revolution. Baker doesn't actually say what he thinks should be done differently.

Well, Baker starts out by saying he agrees with much of what Peterson says except when it comes to climate change.

 

He takes issue with Petersons view that either it is not happening or if it is you can't do anything about it.

 

He also disagrees with Petersons notion that human ingenuity will fix it and we don't have to direct this ingenuity it will just happen.

 

He points out that whilst there are activists who may see this as an opportunity to push for some kind of dismantling of capitalism these people are not now the drivers of change. Business is now a major driver and is frustrated by inaction.

 

By way of example: "The head of oil and gas giant Woodside Petroleum has stepped up demands for more decisive political action on climate change, warning the "risk of inaction is too great".

 

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/risk-is-too-great-woodside-ceo-rails-against-climate-inaction-20181113-p50fo9.html

 

Peterson states that we can not store renewable energy not true!

 

Baker disagrees with Peterson on the issue of population. Peterson believes there is no problem with overpopulation and adds that more people = more ingenuity to fix problems He believes there are no problems to another 2 billion.

 

I will add that some of Peterson's statements incorrect or at the very least misleading. "You can't have renewable power, look at Germany it introduces a lot of renewables and the c02 emissions went up" [ATTACH]49808._xfImport[/ATTACH]

 

I can't see how he can make this claim. Now it is true that the rate of reductions has decreased and it may not meet its 2020 target but that is not what he seems to be suggesting it has been unsuccessful.

 

At this point, I stopped looking for areas of disagreement.

 

A question for you. What is it that you want to happen in the future with regards to power generation and transport. What is it that you are unhappy about at the moment?

 

[pmccarthy]

Germany is 12% domestic nuclear, 40% coal, gas 13%, wind 12%. In a 28 November 2015 Special Report The Economist, having pointed out that French households pay about half as much as German ones for electricity, commented: “Germany has made unusually big mistakes. Handing out enormous long-term subsidies to solar farms was unwise; abolishing nuclear power so quickly is crazy. It has also been unlucky. The price of globally traded hard coal has dropped in the past few years, partly because shale-gas-rich America is exporting so much. But Germany’s biggest error is one commonly committed by countries that are trying to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewables. It is to ignore the fact that wind and solar power impose costs on the entire energy system, which go up more than proportionately as they add more