 | Iraq's Oil: The Greatest Prize Of All ? | The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | The Bullroarer - Saturday 29th November 2008 |  |
4 comments on The Bullroarer - Friday 28th November 2008
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4 comments on The Bullroarer - Friday 28th November 2008
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OK, I'll bite. Even Google's renewable scenario with no energy growth to 2030 (ignoring the efficiency dividend) still keeps the current level of nuclear. Or try David MacKay's book for a numerical look at options for Britain.
The trouble is that human exponential economic growth is horribly damaging to the world we live in. It will still be horribly damaging if we get back to growth without the greenhouse (and ocean acidifying) gases. So now seems like a good time to get off the treadmill of growth, and I have a lot of sympathy for that, and excluding nuclear will certainly achieve that. Trouble is, it will go a lot further than that since very few places will be able to run on renewables alone at even current levels of economic prosperity. Maybe Aus, but certainly not India, China, Europe and North America. Also the only genuine chance of leaving coal in the ground is to find a comparably cheap option and renewables are never going to be that. Also, although "renewable" sounds friendly to the environment it isn't: Off-shore windmills affect ocean currents; Solar in the dessert is going to impact the most fragile ecosystems; Dams have always been an ecological disaster.
The world is going to go nuclear, and Aus won't resist for long because our per capita greenhouse gas production will be the world's worst, and even our friends will get grumpy with us.
Best hopes for next gen nuclear to be cheaper than coal (or at least close).
Nuclear is a dead end that is best forgotten - its time to give up on dreams from the 1950s that went sour decades ago.
We can power the whole world with renewables and dispense with polluting power sources based on extraction of finite resources.
All our power needs can be met from 3% of the world's desert areas - I'm sure these 'fragile ecosystems" could handle that if necessary (of course, we'll actually do so much distributed, small scale generation that this won't be necessary).
We are talking about the facts here, and I don't have any special knowledge of the facts. I find some experts more convincing than others. I just want to take this opportunity to reiterate my one and only certainty. The Energy Crisis is an engineering problem. The route to the correct solution lies in a vigorous open well-funded investigation of the facts by teams of engineers and scientists with good mathematical skills. TheOilDrum is a fantastic proof of what can be done, even without the "well-funded". I was slightly encouraged by Eric Schmidt's talk.