Reply #83: My reply [View All]

[Bread and Circus]

That's cool, here are my replies:

Me: However, the implication is that there is not enough renewable energy which is a bold faced LIE because there's more renewable energy in the course of a year than ever will be extracted from the ground by coal, oil, nuclear fissible material or otherwise for all time coming.

You: This is, of course, not the issue of scale that the critics keep harping on. I know all about Dyson spheres (to toss out the ultimate example of solar energy capture technology), and the staggering amount of energy they could capture. The scalability problem occurs in the implementation, not the energy resource itself. It's the material (200 tons per megawatt for a large wind turbine), the fabrication facilities, the installation capacity, the cost of ancillary installations like roads, monitoring facilities, distribution stations etc.

And nuclear plants are made out of what? Puffed rice? Marshmallows? External lifecycle costs for nuclear plants and nuclear waste is huge (include the mining of fissable uranium in that as well). Nuclear fission may be at it's cost effective peak but renewable technology is in its infancy and gains are being made (see things like Stirling Engine solar plants over traditional PV's, etc)

There is also the simple sniff test of how fast an industry can grow contunuously over the long haul.

Yes, and nuclear has the same scalability issues. You can't just snap your fingers and nuclear power plants appear overnight. Actually, in some ways nuclear has more scalability issues than renewables because you can't start making energy until a plant is done, if it gets done.

Finally then there is the fact that electricity can't do what oil does. It can't even be an effective fuel for vehicles on non-fixed routes unless we lick the storage density problem (pace EEstor, you're not there yet). And all the alternative vehicular fuels we've come up with have serious externalities that kick in long before you get to 10% of the required energy.

And how is this a plus for nuclear? I think we all agree that eventually we will have to go to electric or hydrogen based vehicles (or some other non fossil fuel). Either way, nuclear energy offers no current advantage in this arena. In the long run if we have electric cars and people can power them up w/ local solar/wind, then that's a huge advantage for non nuclear energy.

The whole edifice seems to be built on prayer - pray we can ramp up production/installation facilities fast enough, pray we can solve the intermittancy problems, pray that some basement company like EEstor can crack the storage nut, pray we can find a liquid fuel that doesn't compete with food... If there were only a couple of unsolved problems (or undemonstrated solutions) standing between us and Valhalla, I'd be on board. When I see the tangled pile of barriers we have yet to conquer, and know that we have at most 10 years to do it, I get a little bummed out.

Granted, I can't really find fault with you there but I don't think it's going to be this mass human society collapse as it is portrayed to be. Things are gonna suck in some ways, but we will move on.


I don't care whether we do nuclear power or not. A non-nuclear future would be fine with me. I want my grandchildren to live in the Garden of Eden. However, the world I truly believe we will bequeath to them is the damaged, resource depleted world we already live in, only with almost no fossil fuels left, dead oceans, CO2 pushing 600 ppm because we burnt the fossil fuels anyway, a chaotic climate with a runaway greenhouse effect, a few beleaguered enclaves powered by renewables, and a vastly diminished (though still vast) population living in fear, want and misery. And I don't think all the brave talk about wind turbines or concentrating solar or cellulosic ethanol is going to change that. Not at this point.

and nuclear is fraught with the same perils. considering it's been around for 60+ years and hasn't solved our problems should be a cautionary tale.