Open thread
Posted by Yankee on October 6, 2005 - 7:09pm
Topic: Miscellaneous
Clearly you guys need an open thread. Play nice. We'll be back soon with commentary from the actual scientists who spoke at Petrocollapse. Perhaps you'll be happier with us then.
best,
It would reportedly make enough electricity for 3 million homes.
I cannot find the story on the bbc website..
financial times front page is discussing co2 emissions
we have been forecast a cold winter.
Our diesel costs $7.50 a gallon
help..
help...
they need to use coal
and they need to lower carbon emissions
a good article in todays independant
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article317818.ece
Building a power station is hugely costly and requires years of planning and building. A huge number of Britain's power stations - including most of our nuclear plants - are coming to the end of their working lives. "In order to keep the lights on, we need to build an awful lot of power stations over the next 10 years," Mr Skillings said.
If there is no cap and trade beyond 2012, it may make sense to replace the stations with coal-fired plants. Or if there is to be a bigger crackdown on emissions for the 2008-12 period, or beyond, it could make sense to fit carbon capture and storage technology, or build nuclear.
I am in favor of creating a massive program to replace our fossil fuel dependence with pebble bed nuclear reactors along with a strong nuclear recycling program:
1 - It is IMPOSSIBLE for a pebble bed reactor to melt down. The hotter a reactor becomes, the LESS reaction occurs.
2 - Jimmy Carter stopped all efforts aimed at recycling spent fuel due to his fear that terrorists might intercept nuclear materials in transit. By minimizing transit, he sought to minimize the threat. HOWEVER, 97% or so of spent nuclear fuel can be reused if the 3% that is really "used" (fission products) is removed. This make nuclear quite efficient and minimizes high level nuclear waste.
3 - Nuclear reactors produce no greenhouse gas emissions except for a minimal amount of water vapor (which returns to earth quickly as rain).
4 - Nuclear electricity can further be used to wean us from dependency on oil through use with electric cars, buses, and trains.
5 - Nuclear power generation does not contribute to acid rain or smog.
I know that disposal of waste IS an issue, but I feel it is more than offset by the advantages above. Also, this is an EXISTING technology that can be used IMMEDIATELY (pebble bed reactors can be built with relative speed) to decrease our oil dependency in order to lessen the economic and social impacts of peak oil while also mitigating acid rain and greenhouse gas emissions.
There! Will that do for an open thread topic?
If we go to nuclear I propose several changes to the way we live.
- An outright ban on incandecant lighting
- Insulation of buildings that far exceeds current standards.
- A large tax on electric cars (ofcourse, i'd tax gas/oil way more then an electric car). promote electric mass transit, and electric bikes.
- large taxs for single family dewlings, encourage and give tax breaks for densly populated dewellings.
- no mega huge reactors. make them smaller, and local to where consumption is.
- use tax money from electricity from nuclear reactors and gas to subsidize wind generated electricty.
Sorry for the bad spelling...Interesting idea. I think you're getting at the idea that incandescent lighting is more energetically wasteful than other methods of lighting, like say fluorescent. How exactly would you word the actual legislation for something like this? Wouldn't it be better to just impose some kind of tax to make certain types of light less desireable?
Like how much? How would you handle the regional nature of weather? Some areas will obviously benefit a lot more from greater insulation than others.
Electric cars are more efficient than internal combustion engines in terms of converting the stored chemical energy on board into kinetic energy. But, are electric cars inherently better over the long term? You would need to look at more than just the driving of the car. You'd also have to look at it's production and how the power to run it is generated and delivered.
I'm not sure about this. The goal here is to increase population densities in urban centers? Shouldn't our goal be to get people to move out of cities entirely and back into rural areas? After all, if PO is as bad as some people think it will be, we're going to need more people living in the countryside in order to produce food. What needs to go away are the SUBURBS.
I totally disagree with this, but would like to see your logic regarding why you think this is beneficial.
What would we subsidize. The solutions we develop need to be permanent, and I'm not convinced that anything developed under a long term subsidy is permanent. If wind power is simple enough to generate, that should be all the subsidy needed. I certainly don't mind seeing a fraction of the tax stream going into research.
We know there are problems with oil, thus tax it. We know coal produces too many emissions, although it remains an abundant domestic resource: tax the emissions.
Houses are getting excessively inefficient. Perhaps a law that forces developpers to foot part of the elecricity/heating bill (for a limited period time) would work?
The growth of suburbs could potentially be stopped simply through smarter zoning and minimal highway/road development (coupled with more mass transit).
Massive infrastructure upgrades, like a hydrogen network, could also be in order, but not until the solution is proven. Nuclear power's already pretty proven, so a gov. encouraged building bilge there could be timely.
Tax subsidies can be a powerful tool to speed things up, but again, should not be so specifically oriented toward electric bikes or wind power. Instead, for instance, drop property taxes (for a limited period), for land holding (near) 0-emission, 0 consumption power generating facilities.
There's also a major advantage to getting the solutions first, albeit at some great government cost. You can then sell those solutions (and enjoy their benefits), whilst the rest of the world struggles to catch up.
These are just a few ideas, please critique and add.
Parking - The "invisible" link between land use and transportation is parking. It is the interface between the two and for 99% of auto trips it is "free" at the end. In reality americans spend somewhere between $150-$300 Billion a year on it. Most of it is payed through mortgages, property taxes, retail purchases, and whatnot. Getting rid of zoning laws that require parking and then even using fees to cover their cost would go a long way to changing the develoment patterns of our cities, suburbs, exurbs, and towns.
Not making houses out of wood would be a great start to making them more efficent and better insulated. Brick and concrete is much more efficent and has way less maintanice. They cool better in the summer, and maintain their heat in the winter as well as stand up to the elements better. Clay/adobe(sp?) is also very good and last's a long time. Cost's a little more to construct, but in the long haul it pays off many times over I'm sure. I'd say hire a group to do surveys of efficency in differnt areas, and design building codes that reflec what would be most energy efficent in that area.
You have a good point about cars, especially enviromentaly when it comes to their batterys. It'd be neat to see someone bring to market and car, say a 4 passenger vehicle, that was enclosed, but also pedal powered (and single person vehicles like this, i'd ride by bike all winter, but the cold gets to me too much). I'd think you could get a pretty light carbon fiber frame that could seat 4, have pedals, and could do 35 miles per hour with 3 or 4 peole pedaling. Electric for lazy people, or people who simply can't pedal or even to back up the pedaling, but mostly pedal for us folk that actually enjoy working out while getting from point A to B.
I think a high rise appartment/condo that was constructed well would be an awesome place to live. I know some of the college dorms in Ames, IA are completly constructed with concrete (the floors and the walls) and then you can't hear your neighbors and it gives you real privacy. I think a nice big tall high rise that was basicly set in a the middle of a field w/ a nice park where the tennants worked the garden would be fabulous. You could take an area of an entire suburb, have light rail train out to the skirts of the fields for people to work and i think that would be a great way to use land. Have the buildings all connected with light rail also, have the buildings say about every 2 miles appart.
I just think localized power seems to make sense, you wouldn't have 50 million people all lose power at once.
Subsidize the creation of wind farms. i live in the midwest, and it blows my mind (pun intended) that wind is not used more. Hydrogen storage could use the excess power to make hydrogen for peak times and for days its not so windy. I think the hydrogen storage should be local also. I think it'd be neat if power basicly worked like the internet, have node stations that all feed and work together to provide fault tolerance.
ofcourse, I have no idea how we go about tearing everything down and re-building, but in my 'post peak positive dream', this is how i'd like to see it.
Wrong!
First, concrete really stinks as an insulator. Concrete gets 0.08 R/inch. Compare this with fiberglass batt at 3.14 R/inch. Brick is even worse than concrete. (Numbers come from http://coloradoenergy.org/procorner/stuff/r-values.htm).
Second, concrete and brick have large embodied energies compared to wood products. (Numbers at http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/yourhome/technical/fs31.htm.)
I participate in a couple of mailing lists that focus on natural, green, and straw-bale construction. Much of the discussion at those sites is on minimizing concrete use because of its massive embodied energy.
Concrete and brick have their places in construction (footings, basement walls) and there are new concrete products (like autoclaved concrete foam) that are really interesting, but conventional concrete is definitely not a good replacement to wood as it is used in conventional north-american homes.
I'd be a concret shell, but the inside wall on the living space would not be concrete.
That would not be more efficent than wood? And last a whole lot longer?
By contrast, there are 200-year-old wood houses that are still in great shape.
As far as light bulbs: Most of the non-dimmed lights in my house are fluorescent. When dimmable fluorescents or LED's become available, I'll gladly switch to them. I have looked, and even with Google and Ebay, they're near-impossible to find; I'd have to buy a 12-pack for $150 or something like that.
Dimmable CFLs currently don't work that well based on the one I purchased. On top of that, they are $13 each.
Concrete in housing will last longer than concrete that is subjected to the stress of being part of the road system.
Some of the most environmentally fundamentalist straw-bale and natural home builders (ie. my friends) still use concrete but only for footings. Even then, they often use rubble (field stone, miscellaneous rock, recycled pieces of concrete) to minimize the amount of new concrete they use. But as a footing material, concrete is hard to beat.
Seriously, you really don't need a concrete slab for a home. A well done earth floor is beautiful, functional, has a low environmental impact, and inexpensive. You can even insulate an earth floor (underneath and on the sides) to use it for passive heat-storage or passive cooling, not to mention active heating.
And concrete isn't necessarily as long-lived as you might think. Like all building materials, improperly used, installed, or maintained, it's rather short-lived.
A concrete slab with tubes for water heating on 0,2 - 0,3 m (8-12") layer of plastic foam.
The floor heating uses low water temperatures with is favorable for a heat pump or deep cycling of a heat accumulation tank connected to a wood or pellet boiler.
Walls made of wooden framework with crossed beams to avoid heat leakage thru the wood, insulated with 0,2 - 0,25 m (8-10") mineral or glass wool giving a u-value of about 0,22.
Two or three pane often argon filled and IR-surface treated windows with a u-value of about 1.3, summer cottages etc often use old style two pane windows with u-value 2.5.
And below the roof very often about 0,5 m of loose fiber isulation.
The most popular ventilation system is to have a fan sucking out air and most often a heat pump to recover the energy in the ventialtion air and heat hot water with it and take some of the general heating load. Fresh air is sucked in thru vents in most rooms, it is often combined with old style radiators. I suspect that ballanced mechanical ventilation with a heat exchanger will get more common since they use much less electricity.
Most new small houses have 1 or 1,5 floors and cellars have become uncommon since they are a little to expensive to build. The living area is usually between 110-200 m2. (1200 - 2100 square feet? )
The current main heating systems for small houses are with VERY rough
numbers:
Direct electricity 40% (shrinking fast)
Heat pumps 23% (growing fast)
Oil 9% (shrinking fast)
District heating 9% (growing)
Wood and wood pellets 18% (growing fast)
The abnormal ammount of electric heating is due to overinvestment in nuclear power during the 70:s and 80:s giving a long lasting dumping of cheap electricity. This is ending now due to increasd onsumption and export to other european countries.
Air conditioning is uncommon but is becomming more popular, mostly as a feature on air-air heat pumps for heating during spring, autumn and not so cold winter days.
The achilles heel is the electrical heating and electrical water circulation. The heavy concrete floor stores enough heat for about 24h during cold winter days before the house freezes. Long lasting grid breakdowns during cold spells is the most likely major disaster. The building standard has been driven by a wish for comfort and energy efficiency. Comfort is important since people have invested to have the houses comfortable during very cold -20 C (-4 F) days when most of the winter is more like -5 C ( 25 F) (Varies between locations. )
(I hope I got all the "funny units" right)
How do this compare to new built housing in different parts of USA?
State code in Oregon requires as a minimum: (R = 1/U)
Walls R-21 via 2x6 walls
Ceilings R-38
Floors R-25
Windows U-0.40
There might be additional codes for each city.
The State encourages building or renovating a house beyond the minimums specified. They also provide tax incentives to add solar hot water, solar PV and/or wind if appropriate.
The radiant floor system you mention is becoming somewhat more popular, but still a novelty.
The majority of houses are wood framed. 2300 sqft average? (but you see lots of the 3000+ sqft on 5000 sqft lots)
Some of the 3-5 story multi-family bldgs are using steel instead of wood.
Heating is mainly electrical, with older houses using oil and usually converted to natural gas (also prevalent in new homes as well).
There is only one district heating system I know of in the state.
There has recently been some downward trends in insulation thickness, house customers have to keep asking for thick insulation or the house builders build with less to get better margins or a lower price. I suspect one of the limiting factors are the banks, they often include the running cost in the calculation on giving a loan or not and they know that a better built house is worth more to them if their customer defaults.
It would seem easier to level a tax at the state or local level.
For a given level of lumens, no more than X watts can be used. Above that threshold the tax kicks in. And have the tax increase every two years making it more expensive to purchase lighting that doesn't meet the lumens/watt requirement.
Use the money to assist low-income households switch their lighting to CFLs, LEDs or whatever the next lighting tech is.
What news on co-generation. The idea rattles around in my head that a house loses enough energy when heating itself to compensate for a goodly amount of its electrical requirements.
Other than the need for energy, are there things happening in the nuclear field that can change public perception of reactors? Of course, the changes have to be real. Americans are fed up with public relations campaigns that aren't particularly truthful.
Nuclear energy is one of those things that might cautiously go forward if there's also a more aggressive research program dealing with waste issues.
We're going to need multiple approaches because it's not clear what the consequences are going to be for any particular set of solutions. Alternative energy people, however, will find nuclear reactors a real threat if security and waste issues continue to languish and the consequence is that things like solar and wind languish as well. For people concerned with longterm environmental issues, exchanging CO2 for radioactive pollution is not much of an improvement.
Sort of like when we discovered the East Texas field, and the Persian Gulf fields in the thirties. Shale oil couldn't compete and it all shut down. Britain turned to oil imports and closed the mines.
The NYC site, which Ianqui and I run is dedicated to "Helping NYC understand, prepare and adapt to peak oil".
For your reference...as always, keep it real guys and gals.
There's a couple of boards I used to frequent fairly often that I stopped going to (prudentbear.com being the most noteable) that I stopped going to because I got tired of reading 8 posts about how The Jews, The Democrats, The UN, the Illuminati or Grey Space Aliens With Bug Eyes were working to take away our freedoms and devalue our dollars in order to find one post about an actual economic topic.
I'm not saying that you should limit people's speech, or shy away from controversial topics, but a succesful bulliten board is like a garden. It needs to be well tended, and some times you have to pull out the weeds.
I just wanted people to know where we were coming from.