A gesture is sometimes important...
Posted by Prof. Goose on November 21, 2005 - 10:21pm
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: congress, house of representatives, oil, peak oil, roscoe bartlett [list all tags]
In Brief: Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the `Man on the Moon' project to address the inevitable challenges of `Peak Oil.'
A good start, I guess. The thing will be to see whether the thing gets stuck in committee or not, and even if it passes, this bill by itself won't make much happen.
I wonder if it would help to have more co-sponsors?? People could write in to their Reps and ask them to get on-board.
Step 2: Write a short, specific and respectful message to your representative urging them to support this resolution and give a reason why you feel it is important. Include the link to Global Public Media
Step 3: Forward link to others asking for them to do the same.
Believe me, staffers do read their mail and numbers do matter.
My congresscritter is already a co-sponsor, so my job is limited to giving this more visibility.
I already sent it off to Jerome, so maybe there will be a good diary on dKos in the next day or two about this. I could write it up myself, but it would disappear in 30 minutes and nobody would notice.
The idea of a new "Manhattan project" misses the fact that the people in the atomic bomb project knew what they were doing. They had the theory and the task was to find the technological solutions to build the bomb. The moon flight project was also based on an theoretical model of space travel. The participants of those projects knew that it was doable.
The energy problem is quite dfferent in nature. In fact we know it is undoable - there are no known new primary energy sources. The only concrete project we could think about is the nuclear fusion. But this project has been going on for fifty years already. All the renewables have been under development for a long time. There is no single solution that could be realized by some crash project. The real task is a very broad one - how to use less energy so that the adverse effects are minimized.
- We know how to make synfuels out of coal, and we have lots of coal, and so do many other countries.
- We know how to make battery powered cars, trains, and vans, and we know where the lead and nickel and zinc and vanadium is for those batteries, and that's 90% of liquid fuel use right there.
For noncarbon electricity to combat global warming.- We know how to make windmills with energy payback in months.
- We know how to make concentrator photovoltaic with energy payback in months.
- We know how to build plutonium reprocessing plants to build lots of fast breeders with energy payback in months.
Why do you pretend that we are in some kind of technology crisis instead of a policy crisis?Concentrator photovoltaic uses fabricated modules to concentrate up to, well, 40,000 times sunlight is theoretically possible, but practical is more like 1,000 because of cooling and thermal shock problems.
These modules are expensive because of the labor cost of fabrication and assembly. They are steel and plastic and glass and aluminum and much less energy expensive per pound than crystal silicon. Crystal silicon requires that you not only reduce silica to silicon, but that you hold it in a molten state for days while the cooled seed crystalizes the silicon. I worked in a wafer fab and you should have seen the busbars for the power supply.
So the cost of concentrator photovoltaic electricity depends on the cost of labor instead of the cost of silicon. Despite the fact that silicon wafer prices have been going down since the seventies (till recently) the concentrator economics haven't improved because construction labor costs are only down 20% since the seventies.
Maybe so, but still not cheap, and they will be more expensive still in an energy-poor world.
As always, the problem lies in the the scaling-up.
As my sister put it, we are like fish trying to imagine the desert. Energy has been so cheap and abundant for us, for so long, we have a hard time imagining what it was like when the energy cost of steel and glass was so high that they were reserved for the wealthy only.
This is not high tech - this is low tech. It is easy - the Egyptians used solar reflectors to illuminate inside their temples and pyramids, concentrating more of them when more light was needed. When were silvered mirrors invented? All of these items are hundreds of years old.
The only new parts of the concentrator system are the heliostat and generator parts. If this were to be done in the 1600's or 1700's, then a clockwork heliostat could even have been employed. Generators are simply not high tech either - some magnets and copper wire wound round. Remember that Ben Franklin dabbled in electricity, long before the oil age.
I am currently building one of these things in my free time - pleae don't make it seem like some kind of high tech solution. It simply isn't.
But it does work. How well I should be able to tell you by summer....
Have a happy ....
Yes, although it would crisp it pretty quickly. I don't have all the mirrors set yet (about 70%), and it is quite dangerous at the focal point. At high noon, it's hitting the central focal point with 150 .025 spots at between 350 and 500 degrees...
Temples and pyramids. Not Joe Sixpack's living room. That's my point. "Simple" technology may have been known, but it was too expensive for ordinary folk. Mirrors were luxury items until relatively recently.
It's only in very recent times that a substantial middle class has gained access to relative luxuries and peak oil is likely to reverse that trend sharply.
The clock isn't turning back but going forward. Glass is no longer something enigmatic and valuable, but something ubiquitous and even a significant part of our waste stream. I know you have seen the house built of coke bottles on TV probably. Point being, glass is no longer what it was - now it is everywhere. Unless it is total collapse, glassmaking will continue to go on at a relatively cheap price, because all it requires is heat from ANY source...
People have been making glass for 5,000 years. The problem is the heat it takes to work it. The ingredients are relatively cheap, it's working it that is expensive.
Getting enough fuel (firewood, dung, etc.) to cook and heat with was a neverending struggle before we discovered fossil fuels. It still is, for much of the undeveloped world. The fuel cost required to heat glass to 2000 degrees is what made it expensive, not the "mystery."
This is what I mean when I say we're like fish trying to imagine the desert. We assume that ancient peoples didn't do what we do because they didn't know how to do it. The idea that they knew how to do it but it was too energy-intensive is hard for us to understand.
Of course we have lots of scrap now. Plastic, aluminum, steel, glass. However, it will take a lot of energy - heat - to work into new uses. This might be a good temporary solution. If we do it with the knowledge that we are just cushioning the drop and it is not sustainable, I'd be all for it. But it's not a long-term solution.
IOW...yes, glassmaking will most certainly go on. But not at a "cheap" price.
We aren't in that time period any longer - the argument isn't valid with all the cheap crap we have cluttering up our world these days.
The U.S. is obviously the coyote in this histogram and energy solutions are abundantly running around untouched by us loathesome Yankees
Wind and photovoltaic energy are great, but won't provide the amount of energy we currently use, unless you are willing to cover a good portion of the country with windmills and solar collectors.
At current usage rates we have something like 50 years of uranium left, if we suddenly start building lots of nuclear plants we'll find uranium peak right around the corner.
It is not a technology crisis nor a policy crisis. It is a worldview or paradigm crises. The view that endless growth is sustainable is being shown to be insupportable. There is no choice but to reduce consumption and design a new worldview, a new economy.
David
We are very far from the uranium peak if we consider breeder reactors. Also, there is an alternative reaction that we could probably do using thorium, which has a several times greater natural abundance than uranium.
I think there is a perception crisis. Our society has a strong conditioned response to nuclear power that is handicapping the technology that is most likely to sustain us into a somewhat recognizable future.
Fears about potential mishaps have restricted all forms of nuclear power technology. With peak oil upon us, as well as the actual cumulative damage caused by our fossil fuel fixation, alot of people will need to reexamine those fears of nuclear nonevents.
Why not reprocess fuel where it is burned? You don't need a boat for your plutonium if you don't move it. Also, on the topic of boats, we are already shipping LNG in ships that would flatten a port if ignited. The risk to life embodied in just these ships must be greater than the combined risk of all our nuclear power cycle.
In the UK, the nuclear authorities have been very poor at covering up major mishaps and even worse at doing something about it. These radioactive spills have gone on for weeks before being detected, let along something being done about it. The public are right not to have any trust in these scientists (and I am speaking as someone with a degree in physics). The scientists are/have been hiding major pollution problems (Windscale, Irish Sea etc, etc), hoping that no one will notice, what right do they have to try something that could be even worse and devastate the Irish Sea or mainland Britain or Ireland. As much as I would want nuclear power stations to help out in producing electricity, the nuclear workers (or more likely their managers and accountants) have so little regard or care to the consequences of radioactive leaks that it would be better that they were shut down. Frank Spencer would be amongst the best workers in the nuclear industry, given the widespread radioactive disasters they have inflicted upon the British Isles.
Reprocessing isn't something that can be done just anywhere in order to avoid having to transport plutonium. The THORP plant at Sellafield cost billions of dollars. I can't imagine other governments building similar structures all over the place, as well as building the huge number of reactors it would take to supply them and use their output. Transporting plutonium would be inevitable. Not that transporting LNG is a good idea either, but plutonium is in a class of its own.
As far as plutonium being in a class of its own, there are many things that are far worse, if human life is the measure. A peak oil induced economic collapse would probably kill billions.
Fast breeder reactors extract 100 times as much energy from uranium than our current reactors do. With breeders, available uranium reserves also expand because of the greater EROEI, so much so that even extracting uranium from seawater would be viable.
Fast breeder reactors, combined with advances in design over the last 40 years, have made them much safer than what we are currently using. The EBR II safely shut itself down after all of its control rods were pulled and its cooling pumps were stopped in a test in 1986.
I think the primary reasons we are not yet pursuing breeder reactor technology has to do with short-sightedness and fear. The myopia is the same short term behavior that has our society flying off the tracks as we pass over peak oil. Breeders cost more to build than conventional reactors, so it is hard to justify to those who make decisions on a bottom line that only goes out 10 or 15 years. Currently, breeder reactor electricity would cost more than coal-based electricity, but are any investors considering how peak oil will multiply the cost of coal extraction in the near future? With breeders, all of the uranium 238 that we need for the next 100 years has already been mined.
The fear has to do with plutonium. There is a widespread impression that it is one of the most toxic substances around and to be avoided completely. Many were panicked by the Earth fly-by of a plutonium carrying spacecraft. These people should have kept in mind that over 10 tons of plutonium had already been released by atomic bombs, with no discernable worldwide health effects over many years. Swallowing a 50 mg pellet of plutonium oxide might give you the runs. Swallowing a 50 mg pellet of nicotine would probably kill you on the spot.
I think that everyone has to be truthful and transparent when it comes to nuclear power. The industry and agencies need to let everyone see what they are doing. The public should be able to judge nuclear power on its merits, but also has the responsibility not to hold it to a standard that is incredibly higher than any other energy industry. Maybe if we had not been so fixated on potential problems with nuclear, we would not now be in such a pickle with the previously ignorable issues associated with carbon-based fuels, like global warming.
Maybe Michael Crawford could be an analogy for nuclear power. After years of being nearly type cast as Frank the loser, he went on to great success in other roles.
To bad most people "believe" we can work our way out of the oil crisis with some good ole technology! They do not get the fact that oil depletion and technology are two different subjects.
But the politicians have found a new mantra to feed to the sheeple and they will use to their own demise..
You're reading this on the internet, a perfect example of a distributed network: open, multiple, and non-dependent technologies combine to make one working whole. So why do we have to replace oil with one magic technology? We can't replace oil with one thing, but if we put enough effort into it (not just energy technology but also better environmental technoogy, populaiton control and socal organization) we can replace it with a lot of things.
The "fix" is to "reform" the social order in which the politicians thrive, which is why the politico's are going to oppose it.
Better than 'Collapse' by Jared Diamond?
http://www.museletter.com/archive/154.html
My take on it is that Tainter's work is more fundamental than Diamond's. Basically, Tainter's argument is a thermodynamic one. People can solve problems, including resource depletion, but only if they have enough energy to do so.
Diamond pretty much deals only with the problem of environmental degradation. This often the same problem as running out of energy, as we are discovering. But there are societies that appear to have collapsed due to reasons other than environmental problems (none of which are discussed by Diamond).
Both books are worth reading, IMO. Tainter's book is heavily theoretical, and a bit dense in places. It's an academic work, that is often used as a textbook (so it pretty expensive, even used). Diamond's book is much more empirical, and aimed at a popular audience, not an academic one.
We need to buy as much time as we can to allow us to re-engineer our society around lower energy use, and technology will play a big part in that. The alternative is doing nothing and giving up, and I owe my kids a bit more than that.
But your kids are all majoring in business and other "money making" educations rather than in engineering and science. (And by "your kids", I don't mean "you people", I mean my kids too.)
It is our society and it's "values" system that is heading us ever closer to the edge of the cliff.