144 comments on Implications of "Peak Oil" for Atmospheric CO2 and Climate
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144 comments on Implications of "Peak Oil" for Atmospheric CO2 and Climate
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The really hard work is in finding a replacement for coal, but people still avoid admitting that nothing else comes close to it yet.
It's because it's not true.
Uranium (and 2050 and on, thorium) fission is a direct replacement for coal-burning plants.
I said "yet".
I personally think pebble-bed reactors have a lot of potential, and I'm optimistic about fusion by the end of the century.
However I wouldn't be the first one to point out that there are problems getting fission to scale up with current technology within a useful time-frame.
And you do actually have to get the plants built in a real-world physical location, with the agreement of the local planning authorities. I don't think these are insurmountable challenges - just challenges.
I'm more sympathetic to nuclear than my comment might have indicated - my real thrust was to get across that people don't like to admit that we are dependant on coal because it has a lot of useful characteristics(technically simple, cheap, easy to build,baseload power), and it's hard to find something else to replace it.
Yes it has some horrible side effects. But if it didn't have a lot going for it we wouldn't have become addicted to it in the first place.
My point is that the first step to kicking an addiction is to admit you are addicted. Admit that coal is filling a need, be honest about the dimensions of that need. Then look for alternatives.
If we are to believe in things we cannot see or touch, how do we tell the true belief from the false belief?
"I personally think pebble-bed reactors have a lot of potential, and I'm optimistic about fusion by the end of the century."
As am I (especially once the military gets out of research and we can concentrate on decreasing the half-life of spent fuels instead of Mt of TNT).
However, where are we going to get the helium from if we are past peak NG? Especially if we don't develop Thorium reactors (i.e. really good technology for making alpha particle streams).
Waste is still quite a problem for HTGRs, as the pebbles need some pretty harsh treatment (similar to MOX rods, as I understand it) to be able to be put into Synrock.
Please look at IEC fusion, whose lead researcher is Dr. Robert Bussrad, we may know by the end of this decade if he has as reactor design @ proof of concept.
http://www.emc2fusion.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiHsSAS_SQw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBfsq80EgOs
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/12/171119/055
http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/2006-9%20IAC%20Paper.pdf
Intriguingly, though, the current designs of nuclear power plants relies on massive quantities of cooling water (as to a lesser extent do coal fired plants).
This means in areas where drought is increasingly realistic, meaning it is being experienced now, and with models suggesting such conditions remain likely into the future, an existing nuclear plant in southern Europe or Australia is unlikely to be very useful.
And this should not be equated with the environmental concerns (heating rivers leading to fish die off, for example) which prompted nuclear plants to throttle back in Europe during several 'extreme' summers - in the concrete case of both southern Europe and Australia, the physical quantity of water is insufficient.
Don't count on the world's current investment in nuclear power plants to be as useful as expected. And as for building more of the same - let's just say there is a lot of interest in ensuring profit streams for a number of very well connected large companies, and intelligent debate is not very likely.
Of course, we can discuss other designs and ways to generate electricity using fission - unfortunately, this is a discussion roughly on par with powersats - technically feasible, finacially achievable, and not available today. And very unlikely to be available in a decade either.
If water is an issue, secondary coolant condensers are a very easy solution for new plants. Dump the heat into the air or, better, into a community hot water loop.
Proper thermal management of our lifestyles is a relatively easy step in cutting back home energy use to a small fraction of what it currently is. There are a thousand things you can do to a home, but also things you can do to the cement plant on the other end of town.
We waste FAR too much fuel generating updrafts.
In Australia the problem is trivially easy to address. Most of the power requirements are on the coasts, which is where ample supplies of cooling water happen to be. People love to invent doomish problems it seems.
I agree, when reality sets in, the NIMBY attitude will evaporate, methinks. Also, HGTRs would be really useful in Australia for desalination (hey, we could even pump it inland to wash away the last few inches of topsoil!)
Trivial? The "coastal location" is not decisive. What matters is if power plants are cooled by water from rivers (affected by global warming - more evaporation and less rain) or by sea water. In New South Wales, coal fired power plants (12,000 MW) are cooled as follows
20% from Cox River
40% from Hunter River
40% from sea water
"The water shortage across eastern Australia is now so acute it has begun to affect power supplies, and the country is at risk of electricity shortages next year."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/power-cuts-bigger-bills-on-the-wa...
Duh.
This has little bearing on future siting of australian nuclear power plants.
Hi Expat,
Would you mind commenting on the Candu re heat dispersal?
CANDU plants (such as the Darlington station near Toronto, Ontario) use a discharge-diffuser system that limits the thermal effects in the environment to within natural variations.
I imagine there are other systems and solutions and even some positive uses for non-utilized heat production. I wouldn't mind living near a plant if I could use some of that heat to grow a rutabaga or two in winter.:-)
If we begin with the premise that we shall not exceed 450ppm co2, we need to construct a trajectory that keeps that from happening.
We need a moratorium on new coal plants and a phase out of exising ones. Combined with serious conservation, we take care of the deficit for awhile with solar, wind, and some biofuels. If nuclear is excluded, the real challenge is how do we maintain the minimum necessary baseload to backstop the intermittent renewable.
Yes, there is drought, but does that mean nuclear is not an option everywhere. Will the whole world be in drought? I don't think so but would like to see some projections
Further, if we can fall back on sequestered coal, are there water issues there, too.
Honestly, is it all just hopeless?
No, it is not hopeless. Once people understand the seriousness of the situation and the viable options, nuclear will not be excluded. It will become the world's primary energy source. Today's objections to nuclear do not have strong factual foundations. Once the crisis hits, society will make the tradeoffs in favor of preserving civilization.
It may be a bit late by then. It takes 10 years from the inception until a nuclear powerplant produces electricity. By the time we truly feel the crisis, we'll be so for into the slope that we won't be able to get our act together any longer.
That's old, non crisis, thinking. That assumes all the opponents can tie up the permitting for years and delay the construction. Using standard designs, I have heard that they could build the plants and go into operation in about three years. If we could break through all the nimby and obstructionist objections in permitting, that should not take more than a few years. We could build a lot of plants in 10-20 years if we gave it the urgency and resources of a world war. Just look at the hundreds of billions, soon to be trillions, the US has wasted on Iraq and that was not important for its national security. If the French can do it so can the US.
If China is complete one coal plant every week, can't we finish one nuclear plant every month?
Large scale coal generators also require major infrastructure as well---especially the titanic trains coming in with the astonishing quantities of coal, and the trains going out to dump the fly ash waste into non-sequestered unsound 'storage' as pounds of crap with infinite half-lives.
And yet---when there's motivation they get done.
I'm also pro-wind as well. But we need to be realistic about the import of the laws of physics and geophysical facts, with oil, gas, coal, wind, biofuels and nuclear.
Of them all, so far nuclear and wind seem to have the least bad downsides by basic physics, and some modest (wind) to major (nuclear) potential.
Apparently we would need about 10,000 reactors (about 20 times what we have now) to supply the equivalent of the world's total current energy consumption, a large but not unimaginable number. We could take a generation or two to build them. The world could survive with a lot less than the current level of energy consumption and still avoid a catastrophic die-off that would wreck the world.
These reactors would power the current electrical grid but also most transportation and the chemical/fertilizer industry using the remaining low grade hydrocarbon feed stocks. It would take a monumental construction task but does not seem out of the realm of possibility, if the world put in a World War II level effort for 20 years.
Wherefore the popularity of defeatism? We have no reason to suspect that it will be 'too late,' whatever that means.
Unless you really are trying to start yet another death cult.
To build a nuclear power plant you need two things: Time and Uranium. We don't have too much time. A Nuclear Boom would be required. Do you see that coming? I don't. And to have Uranium you have to dig for it. Check out the Uranium production graph for the past years and tell me in the face that Uranium is an alternative, when it is facing a clear bottleneck in production.
Another point on nuclear, as global construction slowed dramatically after Chernobyl and the collapse of USSR we are approaching "peak nuclear decommission rate" as the existing fleet reaches end of life. We'll be doing well (from a nuclear generating point of view) just to hold global generation flat over the next 10-20 years in the face of this decommission.
"A Nuclear Boom would be required. Do you see that coming? I don't."
If you do not see it, then perhaps you are not taking the crisis seriously. No, it is not happening RIGHT NOW, although there are about 30 applications now in the works in the US after not completing any plants since the 70s. Right now the world is in denial. But when it finally becomes inescapable, people will look at the real options and do what they can to save their lives. Sure, we will build wind and solar as fast as we can. But, our main hope is fission.
I think mankind will rise to the occasion. This is what the start of a boom looks like. Peoples' minds are being changed.
There may well be a financial "boom" for those making their money in the nuclear industry... the rest of the world - we shall see...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Uranium is an alternative.
It is absolutely nothing like peak oil. The equivalent in petroleum would have been as if all oil exploration had been shut down for 30 years, and oil production heavily curtailed (all from the four or five known in place oil fields), with the bulk of oil consumption satisfied for years from surplus military strategic reserves.
The uranium industry is but a gnat compared to the oil industry---and if just a fraction of the capital invested in oil would go to uranium (which it will under energy conversion scenarios) the amount of available uranium would be far higher.
There's a bottleneck now for the next 2-7 years. After that, it's only a matter of capital put in.
There is quite recently (3 years) an enormous explosion in uranium exploration and mining. This is real and on-the ground already.
Uranium is not rare, unlike petroleum. And we are using the most uranium-inefficient fuel cycle now because uranium is still so cheap.
The global uranium reserves correspond only to 10 years of the actual power extracted from oil. Uranium is not less rare than oil.
Breeder reactors pose a number of problems that are not yet solved. Letting thousands of tons of plutonium travelling around the world is simply unthinkable, and U-Th process is far from being mastered. Furthermore, there is a maximal rate at which you can construct breeder reactors because you need first to generate fuel, which does not exist in the nature; there simply no way of replacing the decline of oil in real time, not to speak of the very different use (power generation vs transportation).