Posted on 01/31/2006 12:25:34 AM PST by truemiester
The world economy is currently running on a resource that is controlled by our enemies. This threatens to leave us prostrate. It must change—and the good news is that it can change, quickly.
Using portions of the hundreds of billions of petrodollars they are annually draining from our economy, Middle Easterners have established training centers for terrorists, paid bounties to the families of suicide bombers, and funded the purchase of weapons and explosives. Oil revenues underwrite new media outlets that propagandize hatefully against the United States and the West. They pay for more than 10,000 radical madrassahs set up around the world to indoctrinate young boys with the idea that the way to paradise is to murder Christians, Jews, and Hindus. It was men energized by oil-revenue resources who killed 3,000 American civilians on September 11, 2001, and who have continued to kill large numbers of Westerners in Iraq and elsewhere. We are thus subsidizing acts of war against ourselves.
And we have not yet reached the culmination of the process. Iran and other states are now
(Excerpt) Read more at taemag.com ...
BTW, I seriously doubt that a power company can just abandon a sludge pond or a wind farm and walk away from it free and clear. You're going to have to give me some evidence for that statement.
bump
The costs for the work at Yucca Mountain are paid for out of the nuclear waste fund. That is bankrolled by a tax on nuclear generation that the government levies on plant operators. All the costs are covered. The costs are covered for development, operation, and eventual closure of that facility.
There was a windmill blown over in CA just recently in one of those eyesores of a wind farm that the operator decided wasn't worth the cost of fixing. Last I heard, the idea was to abandon it in place. So the darn thing will end up a rusting pile of junk. So much for walking away from a problem.
"I wish the Pres would make energy the focus of his SOTU speech tonight"
Your wish may come true. Rumor has it that the President is going to talk about America's addiction to oil in State of the Union Address.
Of course hydrogen will be talked about, but maybe ethanol will get in the speech. Let's hope.
"We have underinvested in energy research over the last 25 years, but that is changing rapidly. This will be a totally different economy in another 25 years. It has to change because the price of oil is going to keep going up."
I agree with your statement above. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Also, we are in the Information Age. Old methods of stifling technology ideas through politics or bureaucracy is ending. A politician here in the USA will not allow embryo research? Fine, someone in Korea will do it and then we'll all benefit later. This will happen with the petroleum dependancy also.
Fingers are crossed!
Hydrogen seems to be a net loser from this article.
Bush needs to inspire tonight and a new energy approach would certainly help remove the oil man image that he has been painted with.
They love to talk about the huge profits of Exxon and thereby implicate the President.
well, ironic, isn't it? that you should label me as anti-corporation w/out doing the slightest bit of research, which on free republic pretty much amounts to pulling up my name and reading some of my postings. As the saying goes, "segun su condicion es que juzga el ladron".
& yes, Iceland is what I meant. a simple mistake, whether you believe it or not... not that it matters a bit that you do or not.
One of the quirks in asking questions as a layman is that there's always a chance the guy who's smarter than everyone takes the opportunity to remind me that he's... well... smarter than everyone. Congrats, rocketman; you're it.
no, I'm not an anti-capitalist. Just looking to learn a bit more about this complex and important topic. Way I see it, (in our Republic...) your vote is the same as mine, and improving one's knowledge about something is always first and foremost an improvement of one's self... even if our "betters" deign otherwise.
But it's for different reasons. We once had a more distributed system, where each little city had it's own power plant. Many still do, but only load them down during peak usage times. The reason everyone has gone to the Big Plant, is that it's more efficient. The big plants are more efficient at turning fuel, of whichever sort, into electricity. Pollution control is also easier, or at least cheaper on a per kilowatt basis, for a larger plant.
True but irrelevant. So are batteries. You have to look at the whole cycle, and think of the hydrogen as a storage medium, not a source. If you use nuclear power to produce electricity to do the electrolysis, that probably is as efficient as shipping oil from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, or even Alaska.
Still I like the idea of using methane. In the long run, you'll still need to use something like hydrogen, because eventually you'll run out of natural gas or even coal.
So is oil. And it's a slow process, renewable only if you don't use it up faster than it accumulates.
"I'm happy to hear that the cannisters are nearly indestructible, but you still have to store the nuclear waste safely for hundreds of years and take your chances with potential volcanic activity."
Sties have been identified to mitigate any risks not just for hundreds of years, but for 10,000 years, ie geologic ages. Such concerns massively over-engineer a safe disposal solution and yet there is an even better alternative. Wait 100 years, after which time the radioactivity will be 99.99% diminished, and then recycle the actinide elements as fuel.
In this manner, nuclear energy will have a much smaller waste stream, no long-term storage issues, and will be a fully renewable source that could literally last for a million years.
"Also, nuclear power plants produce plutonium, which can be stolen by terrorists or rouge states and used to make nuclear weapons."
But the used nuclear fuel has a tiny amount of such material relative to the other radioactive elements, so that it is expensive, technologically challenging to process. Only a nuclear technology state could accomplish this, and they are better off working from purer Uranium 'yellowcake', which btw folks like Saddam picked up from Niger, etc.
So this concern is misplaced.
Also, there are proliferation-resistent methods mix nuclear fuel that make is almost impossible to convert into bombs. In particular mixing different isotopes that are hard to separate. This may be an ultimate solution to providing nuclear power to countries that we might not trust with full nuclear technology.
" There are other alternatives for energy production that don't have these risks and have not been adequately explored and researched."
And what alternatives are they?
We've spent billions and billions on many alternatives, some have panned out, most have not. Economics kills most of them, and none have full benefits that nuclear has in being both economically sound (ie cheapest source of electricity) and environmentally safe.
"H2 production is a net energy loss no matter how you slice it." "True but irrelevant. So are batteries. You have to look at the whole cycle, and think of the hydrogen as a storage medium, not a source. If you use nuclear power to produce electricity to do the electrolysis, that probably is as efficient as shipping oil from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, or even Alaska."
This is true. You have to look at economics and whole cycle , not efficiency at one stage.
Yet there is something that is quite, well, pie-in-the-sky about hydrogen as a viable transport fuel.
Liquids are easier to handle, store, ship, put in a tank than gases. So why bother with a gas? We have a better answer, gasoline, and while we can get hydrogen from nuclear power, it seems more practical to use the author's approach to get it to the car: Use hydrogen with coal to make syn-fuel, ship it as we do today to gas stations. That could be methanol or ethanol, which are very clean-burning.
Much more practical and economical than the H2 economy that is touted.
Does the nuclear industry pay those huge consulting fees and DOE expenses?"
For the most part,yes...
http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=2&catid=63
"Centralized repository funded by electricity consumers. To pay for a permanent repository, an interim storage facility, and the transportation of used fuel, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act established the Nuclear Waste Fund. Since 1982, electricity consumers have paid into the fund a fee of one-tenth of a cent for every nuclear-generated kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed. Through 2004, customer commitments plus interest totaled more than $24 billion."
"Hydrogen seems to be a net loser from this article."
That's because, if you study it, you realize it doesnt give anything we cant get cheaper or easier through other means.
The new solar plant being built in the Mojave desert using solar-powered Sterling engines is reportedly cost-competitive with nuclear power. This kind of power plant requires a lot of land and sunshine, but it's a viable alternative in some areas of the country and I would bet that in the long run the power ends up being cheaper than nuclear when all the costs of waste disposal are added up.
It is more expensive, but not "much higher". That is because the playing field is not level. The nuclear industry is the most heavily regulated, most politically opposed industry in the country. Given these facts, I find it all the more amazing that it has still managed to be the cheapest, on a per kwhr of energy produced basis, large-scale energy source for baseload electricity production. The latest numbers I saw from the industry figures (based on FERC reports) indicate that nuclear-generated electricity maintains a cost advantage over competing sources, especially given the huge run-up in NG prices (which was perfectly predictable). That is saying quite a bit, given that it is the only industry that pays for its own regulation, waste disposal, and decommissioning costs up-front.
You're probably thinking of the old cliche "too cheap to meter". That in many ways is the type case for the anatomy of a cliche. If you check the history of the technology, that phrase was never used by anyone in the business. It was used one time in a speech by a retired navy admiral (not Rickover, someone else). The media just picked it up and ran with it, attributing it to everyone and their brother who might have been marginally involved in the industry. Truth is, any engineer worth their salt knows that there ain't no free lunch, that everything has a cost, even politically correct sources like wind, solar, hydro, tidal, waves, "clean" coal, and fuel cells. The day something becomes "too cheap to meter" is the day everyone stops building it, because you aren't going to make money from it.
People like SUVs because they can haul a lot of stuff. We probably will be able to design big personal vehicles in the future that have much less weight and use biofuels. Why would conservatives be against that?"
We shouldnt be. OTOH, we should be against Govt boondoggles to try to get people out of one mode of transport they like and into another they might not like.
"Imagine if you combined Amory Lovins' ideas with the idea put forth in the main article referenced on this thread. We could use biofuels to power lightweight cars, which means you'd need a lot less fuel in the first place."
I'll go one better: plug-in hybrids can replace fuels with electricity for short trips, effectively getting 100mph on standard hybrids. Add lightweight for efficiency + ethanol for alternative fuel (getting 100 miles per ethanol gallon) and you have a practical gasoline-free vehicle.
If you are into risk management and business as you say, you'd better take a closer look at the downside risks of not using nuclear technology, as well as the risks associated with intermittent energy sources, especially those dependent on the whims of Mother Nature (e.g., solar and wind). I have run any number of utility simulation codes and estimated the downside risks in terms of the LOLP, the Loss Of Load Probability. This basically tracks the stability of a power grid and the chances of widespread outages. The absolute worst case is when you have a significant (in the range of 10% or so) of your capacity in intermittantly-available forms. The very best reliability (and low risk) is attained when you have intense, large-scale, high capacity-factor baseload supplies (e.g., nuclear plants) loaded into the generation mix.
But even that is only part of the picture. When you get into long-range planning of public policy to encourage/discourage certain forms of energy production, then the risks of unreliable energy forms really comes into it's own. We simply can't sustain a growing, world-class, technologically based society and economy and military on low-intensity, low availability, low capacity sources. You really need to look at highly developed energy forms, ones wherein production and delivery are extremely reliable and assured.
As far as conservation goes, there is nothing wrong with that. No one is in favor of unwise use of resources. Let's put that canard to bed right now. But conservation only takes you so far. You still need an energy source to conserve. Nothing has an infinite lifetime, and facilities in operation today may not be in 10, 30, or 30 years' time. When those sources go away, you have nothing to conserve. Conservation doesn't produce energy, it simply stretches what you already have. And if you don't produce more, to account for losses from retirement of facilities and growth in demand, eventually you will have shortages.
The fact is that this country has never had a coherent, technically sound, sustainable energy policy. It has either been pie-in-the-sky like during the Carter era or the "free market conquers all" laissez faire of the Reagan/Bush administrations. What we need is an industry-government partnership to solve this problem in a logical, technically sound manner, an energy policy that is viable and won't change with every election, bringing to bear the best of both worlds, one wherein the engines of commerce and innovation and inventive genius are enabled and encouraged and facilitated by sound public policy and decsion-making based on a long-term vision. Will that happen? I have my doubts.
"The new solar plant being built in the Mojave desert using solar-powered Sterling engines is reportedly cost-competitive with nuclear power."
Maybe but I've done my own studies on solar and they rarely get close to competitive. More like 5 times the costs of nuclear and coal. We've spend billions on solar energy and have little to show for it. Nuclear energy is far more concentrated than solar, making it more effective at generating *lots* of energy.
" This kind of power plant requires a lot of land and sunshine,"
The land is just one issue - a nuclear 1 GW power plant would require how many square miles for a comparable solar plant? ... Do the math and *then* decide if solar makes sense on a broad scale. How many square miles do you want to chew up with these plants?
" but it's a viable alternative in some areas of the country"
... and the rest of the country will need nuclear power.
"I would bet that in the long run the power ends up being cheaper than nuclear when all the costs of waste disposal are added up."
you'd lose your shirt betting like that.
Costs of waste disposal are .1 cents per Kwh.
Nuclear power at the wholesale can cost 4 cents / Kwh.
... Solar costs, depending on how its done, runs about 10 - *30* cents / Kwh.
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