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47 comments on Thomas Friedman: "Green is the New Red, White, and Blue"

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apsmith on January 8, 2006 - 11:23pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"We will know the liberals are serious about energy independence"- what???

A - Thomas Friedman is hardly a liberal. NY Times has two regular liberal columnists: Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert. It has three centrists: Friedman, Kristof, and Dowd. And two right-wingers: Tierney and Brooks. All part of that mainstream "balance" you know. Plus it has the excellent Frank Rich (liberal), but only on weekends.

B - plenty of "liberals" talk a lot about nuclear power. I've written about it in the "Physics and Society" newsletter referred to here in another recent article. You ask "do the math" - have you "done the math" yourself on nuclear power? I certainly have. 20,000 1 GW-scale nuclear plants are likely needed to meet all world energy needs by 2050 (especially if we go with hydrogen for transportation!) That's 50 times what the world has now. Are you sure that's such a good idea? Do you realize that means we have to find a lot of new sources of uranium, or go to more complex fuel cycles with reprocessing, which nobody has any commercially cost-effective experience with?

On cost - nobody has provable numbers on nuclear power costs that are actually cost effective; the nuclear industry extrapolates, but their extrapolations tend to be 2 or 3 times less expensive than past experience has shown. Meanwhile wind power is already cheaper than nuclear has been in the recent past (comparing apples to apples, i.e. capital costs per annual kWh delivered, and O&M + fuel per kWh). That's why the industry is rushing to install wind all over the world, while almost nobody is actually building nuclear power plants right now.

Even solar, still much more expensive, installed over 1 GW of capacity worldwide last year, and the growth rate for grid-connected solar electric is doubling in less than 2 years; prices are likely headed down soon with new thin-film materials, meanwhile it's alreay a very hot multi-billion dollar business. Have you invested in a nuclear power company recently? Put your money where your mouth is, if you really think nuclear's the future. I know where my money is (literally!)

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george in vermont on January 9, 2006 - 10:48am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
In response to a query of mine last month, someone did "do the math" here with respect to wind and estimated that it would take a windfarm 1600 square miles in size to meet the energy needs of New York City alone.

And what about heat? The excess heat produced by a nuclear power plant built within 30 miles of the city could be piped in and used to keep New York City buildings warm. Wind and solar aren't going to do that.

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george in vermont on January 9, 2006 - 11:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Had to look for that post, here it is. Thanks to Tom Deplume:

If we assume an average of 1kw electricity use per capita then New York city would need 8 to 10 Gw supply. At a typical 30% duty cycle that comes to 25 to 40 Gw installed. Using 5MW turbines that works out to 5000 to 8000 turbines spread out over 1000 to 1600 square mile. 1600 sq mi is 40 miles per side.

Tapping into the powerful ocean currents along the east coast maybe the most reasonable option for the the tens of millions who live there. Being under water means "out of sight out of mind."

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apsmith on January 9, 2006 - 6:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
1600 square miles sounds like a lot of land. But if we take your upper-bound estimates, at 10 million people NY City has 1/30 the total population of the US; so total area requirements by those criteria to power the entire US would be 48,000 sq miles. The United States has a land area of about 3.5 million square miles, so 48,000 is about 1.4% of US land area - about the same as the current artificial "impervious surface area" of the US (roads, parking lots, buildings). And as anybody who's been near a modern wind turbine knows, it's way up high in the air so you can do pretty much anything you want with the land underneath - farming, manufacturing, commerce, etc.

Wind may well not be the ultimate solution - I don't personally believe it is, but throwing around numbers like "1600 square miles" is meaningless without context - are you just trying to scare people, or yourself?

As I mentioned in another reply here (probably was thinking of your post) - electricity can easily provide heating very efficiently through ground-source geothermal (geo-exchange) technology - typically the heating provided is equivalent to 4-5 times the electric energy supplied. Much better than piping hot fluids from neighboring nuclear plants, I would think!

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george in vermont on January 9, 2006 - 6:58pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'm neither anti-wind nor anti-solar, but too often I find people believing that these will be a realistic replacement for the amount of fossil fuel we consume. Wind and sun are inconstant and unreliable. If we have an option to replace existing fossil-fuel powered plants with something that will provide constant, reliable electricity, I believe this will be the foundation of a new energy economy. There will be plenty of room for both wind and solar as well, but they will be marginal compared to the other more reliable source.

I used to live in Holland so I have plenty of experience of being around wind turbines.

There was a lengthy discussion recently about the merits of nuclear versus other alternatives, here.

I would appreciate any information you could provide about the electricity-to-heat technology you describe.

See additional comments linked to your post below.

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apsmith on January 10, 2006 - 12:03am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ah, the issue of constancy is definitely an interesting one. The short-term solution is stabilization through the grid; fossil fuel plants can be limited to running only when the wind and sun aren't available (nuclear plants have a harder time turning on and off, so aren't really suited to that sort of stabilization role), but that adds to capital costs and means we are still relying on fossil fuels.

There are three long-term solutions: one is to greatly improve electric transmission so inconstancy is averaged over a larger area (ultimately Buckminster Fuller's idea of a world grid). The second is greatly improved (and cheper) energy storage - enabling electric vehicles provides some other incentives for that too, and may actually be part of the solution.

The third long term solution is to go where the sun does shine constantly - off-planet. Space solar power in various forms has been seriously proposed for almost 30 years now, with some minor demonstrations of transmission feasibility etc, but not much real research effort. The Japanese are spending a few million dollars on it right now though - there's a suborbital experiment on zero-g robotic construction coming up in the next few weeks that should be interesting.

So yes we have some real challenges, but so does nuclear power. Let's spend the money on real R&D now, and let them all compete on as fair a basis as we can make it. It's my belief that one of the primary energy technologies (probably not wind, and not once-through nuclear fission) will become the dominant energy source of the future, with a majority of the market thanks to cost effectiveness. But none of them are there yet; we need a lot more R&D.

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apsmith on January 10, 2006 - 12:09am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Oh, I forgot to add a link on the geothermal solution:

http://www.geoexchange.org/

The Comparing Systems page gives some useful numbers.

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george in vermont on January 10, 2006 - 4:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Thanks for the link. I'll keep it. I do know of one company up here in Vermont that has that type of system (it's a wind measurement company), which I think they use mainly for cooling. They refer to the pond at their energy-efficient headquarters as a "heat sink."

I asked Stoneleigh, a person with some first-hand knowledge about these types of systems, for his perspective with regard to providing heat, especially in colder climates. Our exchange is under the Open Thread News Drop section.

Here's the link to the company up here NRG Systems.Just passing it along in case you haven't seen this particular site.

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jkissing on January 9, 2006 - 2:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You make several points.
First, I classed Friedman as a liberal because he did not mention nuclear power. Very substantial expansion of nuclear power is coming soon because we do not have sufficient alternatives to replace hydrocarbons.
Most people who object to nuclear (or any other option) first state that the disliked option can't do it all. Wind and solar might help at the margin, but wind will never do it all, and solar seems likely to remain substantially more expensive than nuclear for at least a long time. The future will no doubt use multiple streams to replace the dwindling oil one. Speaking specifically of wind, the best locations, with the best wind, are being exploited first, just like oilfields. Fairly soon we will be looking at second rate locations, many of which have NIMBY and environmental objections, just like other solutions.

We have two problems, reduced hydrocarbon supply and the need to replace hydrocarbon use, which is poisoning the planet. Nuclear solves both, fission is proved and economically competitive, so this is the near term solution. The US could replace the existing coal and ng plants with  350 nukes, then use the coal to produce liquid fuels. The net is a substantial reduction in co2 emissions while coal consumption remains constant. 1 nuke/month would get us there by 2040, maybe fast enough to replace sufficient oil, and which is less than the peak rate when nukes were being built in the seventies.

Longer term, we will have to go to either solar or breeders because of limits in the scarce U235. Breeders can consume all the actinides in spent nuclear fuel, and either/or consume the plentiful U238 and/or thorium actinides. The former reduces the amount of nuclear waste around 99%, and also reduces the time required for the waste to decay to background from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of years. Total available fuels would be sufficient for at least 1000 years, maybe more.

A very interesting type is described in the Dec. 2005 issue of Scientific American. Interestingly, metals are plated out, then cadmium is removed, the non-metallics become the waste, the new metallic fuel consists of a mix of actinides which remain highly radioactive and is therefore no more attractive to terrorists than existing spent fuel. It is true that we don't know the cost to build these plants, but consider - no expensive mining, no expensive U235 enrichment, and a credit to dispose of both nuclear wastes and the nuclear waste problem (the latter will annoy the liberals the most.) Meanwhile, we are moving into a higher cost environment, so wind, solar and breeders will all look more attractive.

A solar breakthrough might come at any time, or never. We should continue this research, and expand solar wherever it is cost effective to do so. We should also be prepared for a future with less and less oil and prohibitively expensive solar.

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apsmith on January 9, 2006 - 5:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You say "Friedman [is] a liberal because he did not mention nuclear power.", while I stated that many liberals do indeed "mention nuclear power". More than that, many prominent "liberals" as usually defined have made strong statements in favor of nuclear power recently - Stewart Brand for instance (founder of the Whole Earth Catalog), Gaia inventor James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, Friend of the Earth Hugh Montefiore, etc. etc.

So I suggest you first check your definition of "liberal"...

The Dec 2005 Scientific American article is indeed interesting; I worked for a time at Argonne National Lab which was closely associated with a major project to create such a "fast breeder", though the project basically shut down (thanks in part to cheap oil) in the 1990s. All these high-tech project ideas are fine - in fact the one I most strongly favor is fusion, which I think should receive a lot more money than it does, given the promise and how close we are now.

But the problem is, high tech is expensive, and it's never clear until we well after we start bringing things to market how competitive they will eventually be. Both "liberals" and "conservatives" these days recognize market realities (and no liberal I know would be annoyed by nuclear waste disposal credits for a reactor that actually physically destroys nuclear waste). The fact is that current nuclear technology is not suitable for large scale expansion, it is already too expensive (nobody's building it anywhere in the world without government subsidies) and the new nuclear solutions are still in early R&D stages, decades away from large-scale deployment.

Wind and solar also rely on government subsidy for the moment, but the total amounts they receive are tiny compared to government investments in fossil and nuclear capacities; economies of scale and the learning curve alone will easily bring them to competitive levels; it's simply false that "the best locations, with the best wind, are being exploited first" - the best locations are offshore, and the US has NO offshore installations yet, though several are being planned.

Wind and solar (or any electric source) can provide heating very efficiently through geothermal/geo-exchange electric heat pump technology; are you seriously proposing piping steam from nuclear power plants to heat cities in winter??

I don't have a problem with government investment in advanced nuclear R&D and particularly fusion technology. I don't have any problem with the power industry investing in new nuclear power plants to meet needs, as they see market conditions warrant. What I do have a problem with is people going around hyping nuclear as the "only" solution and forcing my taxpayer dollars to go to a mature technology that is simply not cost-effective. No "liberal" or "conservative" should like that.

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george in vermont on January 9, 2006 - 6:33pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Cogeneration to heat buildings in New York City is nothing new - the steam coming from beneath the streets is waste heat from existing power plants. Whole neighborhoods used to be heated this way. In Sweden, waste heat is transported great distances for residential and business heating.

I'm no scientist, so please tell me what's wrong with the idea, and are you proposing that a 1600 square mile windfarm be built out in the ocean, to power just one city? The investment necessary to build all of those turbines and create the infrastructure, which will have to weather the ocean climate and storms, seems preventative to me compared with building more nuclear reactors, using new and improved technology.

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apsmith on January 9, 2006 - 11:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The fact is, such a collection of wind turbines would be no more capital-intensive than an equivalent collection of nuclear power plants. 1600 square miles is a tiny fraction of Earth's surface, and NYC contains a considerably bigger fraction of the planet's population. You spend the money on one, or on the other. With the nuclear plants, you still have to pay for fuel, which may start running low if everybody's doing the same thing. With wind, you have maintenance costs, but so far those seem not too bad.
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Dan Ur on January 9, 2006 - 11:57pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
COME BACK TO REALITY!

 One nuke a month!  What are you smoking!  We are talking the NIMBY USA here.  This all says that the USA will wake up in time to see the light and KNOW we are about to hit the WALL which I do NOT think we are seeing yet.

 OH SURE WE ARE GOING TO HIT THE WALL,  but no one is telling us that we are, so for all intents and purposes we aren't.   UNTIL of course we hit the wall!!, then it will be to late to do anything about it.

 We can't afford 350 NUKE plants let alone a few dozen, haven't you read anything about the state of the union??

 WE are in dept up to our EYEBALLS and still going strong, We are dooming ourselves to failure.

 PS. I just spent 9 days in the hospital with something that kills 50% of those that have it, And I know that I have some reason to live today, but 350 nukes is not it.

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tom deplume on January 11, 2006 - 12:43am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
One nuke per month. Considering it takes maybe 8 years to build one nuke that means being able to have nearly 100 nukes under construction simultaneously. Settling on a standard design like the Integral Fast Reactor could cut average build time in half which results in the need for 50 projects at once. Since we built the Interstate Highways in a similar amount of time it just might be doable. But look at the pickle building those highways put us in.
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47 comments on Thomas Friedman: "Green is the New Red, White, and Blue"

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