Environmental News

You are basically accepting the lesser evil of the two. It is a utilitarian conundrum all the great minds of the past and present have debated over. And came up with no answer that convinces everyone. I also don't have an answer that can convince everyone. But, my stance is that human suffering and life are incommensurable. Yes, you can count the number of death in each case and compare which one killed more. But the loss of one life to save many is not my answer. Equally, sacrificing many lives to save one is also not my answer. But as I said, I don't have an answer that will convince everyone. My answer would be to try to save all lives. But don't ask me how.

 

Let’s compare nuke to renewables

 

I want more of both. Next?

 

I only want one

 

I say let's try to cut down energy usage altogether so we don't need to build an additional nuke and gradually replace older petrol-powered ones with renewables.

 

Start by shutting off lights in empty office buildings

 

That's what we just finished, all the LED light installations. It allowed for a nice reduction in base load. But now that's done, the results are baked in, and we are back to growth including a big need for housing (including HVAC) and EV charging.

Time to build more powerplants. It's okay if you want more wind and solar setups and less nuke stuff, but it's going to take a lot of the former to offset lack of the latter.

 

It’s a good thing Arizona is running out of water, maybe they’ll stop building in the desert

 

As long as we (as all humans collectively) are more concerned about growth and new development, then we are doomed. Not that maintaining the status quo is going to be sustainable either. Anyway I think of it, we will have to reduce production, consumption, and population to save the planet. Then again, when dooms day comes and the human population is nearly wiped off the planet, that would be the day zero to celebrate the new beginning. But I will be long dead before that... I hope.

 

You're the one that brought up nuclear weapons and conflated their use to nuclear power generation. It is an absurd comparison.

All our methods of generating electricity have some degree of harm. Wind turbines require regular maintenance, and workers can fall off them for example. The harm of nuclear power needs to compared to the harms of other power generation types, not something unrelated because it shares the term nuclear. If you insist, then you'll have to include the people helped by nuclear medicine.

Want to end the US nuclear weapon program? You'll have my support. It is actually a decent sized source of our nuclear waste.

In Georgia, this plant will likely displace coal or natural gas.

Renewables are growing, but natural gas installation hasn't stopped.

How do you propose we do that? Just keep repairing old coal and nuclear plants until we get the renewables online to replace them? Alone, those two were about equal to renewable generation amounts in 2022. Natural gas was equal to about two of those three. U.S. electricity production by source 2022 | Statista

Do we divert battery production away from EVs for gird storage to get to 24/7 renewables as fast as possible? Skimp on the review process to get more lithium mines operating sooner? I want renewable energy, but like EVs, the shift takes time, and old capacity will need to be replaced in the mean time.

Which becomes a challenge with the shift to EVs, and developing countries wanting to improve their people's lives.

This is the ideal plan, but there are a lot of variables to hinder it. Renewables need to be over built to be reliable. Required resources are needed for other things. Then we've seen people fight against them; they aren't immune to NIMBY. What's the plan when conservation and renewable expansion can't keep pace with new uses of electricity and aging power plants?

The new nuclear unit coming online has just under a third of the generation capacity as Georgia's oldest operating coal plant of 4 units, which came online back in 1971-75.

 

"Gradually" replacing current fossil fuel plants -- nearly all of them, not just the older ones -- isn't anywhere near fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe. We need to be actively shutting them down, but can't do that before building alternative less-bad energy capacity.

Yes, we have enormous opportunity to use energy more efficiently, possibly even achieving a temporary reduction in global energy use. But any such reduction is only temporary. Absent a dictatorial Pol-Pot-style push backwards, population growth, economic growth, and technological progress each push towards increased global energy use.

So far, all energy sources have had some deleterious side effects, even those once portrayed as safe and clean. Not yet knowing what future problems will appear, we shouldn't be artificially narrowing the future choices and possibilities. Earlier I pointed out our major progress in aviation safety over the past couple generations. But nuclear energy, which on paper has made great strides in safety improvement, has not been given similar real-world opportunity to demonstrate such, or to learn more along the way, as all technologies have needed to do. We don't yet know how much of the claimed improvements are really possible, but we shouldn't be hamstringing nuclear energy based on its equivalents to 60 year old commercial aircraft designs that would now be having a major disaster every week.

Personally, I won't even rule out future fossil fuel plants that use CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) to keep their CO2 exhaust out of the atmosphere, instead burying it underground as chalk or calcite within our extensive geological basalt formations. But because fossil fuel is already becoming expensive compared to other energy sources, and CCS will necessarily reduce its output conversion efficiency and increase its cost even more, I won't be banking much on it anytime soon. Just remember that when lots of money and brains come together, sometimes some major technological surprises appear. Sometimes.

 

In the very long run, we can't save the planet. The planet is doomed by Nature. Astronomy and cosmology. To survive well beyond that, our descendants (evolution will have changed us to some subsequent species by then) must leave and migrate elsewhere within this galaxy, or at the very absolute minimum, farther out in this solar system beyond the broiler range of the upcoming red giant phase. That will require a huge energy expenditure, vastly beyond everything we are using now. And a vastly larger economic activity that we have yet seen.

At our current pace, we'll destroy ourselves long long long before Nature does it to us. Those particular scenarios to demise need not be inevitable, but enforcement of your growth or energy caps will ensure such demise.

"The meek share inherit the Earth. The rest of us have other plans."

Yes, I will be dead long before that. But that doesn't keep me from thinking in terms of my descendants.

 

In terms of geological timeframe and cosmology of events, what humans did and will do to Earth in such a short span of the period would be very inconsequential to the planet and absolutely insignificant. I have this Life History Timetable as my desktop background to remind me of how minuscule our time has been on this planet. Yes, Nature will take care of itself one way or another, with or without humans, that I am convinced of.

https://www.popsci.com/story/science/charted-pale-blue-blip/

 

Workers can fall off of them?

 

Maybe you are not concerned about what eventually happens to humans, or our descendants.

But I am.

Yes, we need to take care of this planet, if we are to survive long enough to be able to move elsewhere. But leave, we must, unless we intend to die out here. And that will require very significant economic and technological growth, which includes greater energy use.

 

We can increase the speed of solar and wind development

 

Nope. Not in a sense what will happen in million years from now. As far as I am concerned, they will not be anything like the Homo sapiens we are now.

I don't find humans to be any more special than other life forms that evolved on this planet. I do not practice Buddhism, but if I do, I don't mind being reincarnated to a totally different life form after my earthly body is destroyed. Not sure what I want to be in my next life, but I'd rather not be re-born as human again.

 

Not enough. And not enough source diversity either, to help cover the problems associated with these.

 

Yes, of course this is true.

...Until somebody develops something that turns back the clock, slows down consumption, cancels consequences or generally reduces the deleterious effects of population growth.

These things are being invented and distributed all the time. We may or may not get ahead, but we're all committed to trying- that's the bet we all made.

This includes putting up some modern nuclear power plants. Ones that draw from lessons learned on all the ones ever made before.

 

While stationed in Nebraska we would go hunting in the dead of winter - I was amazed at the natural worlds ways of coping with the bitter weather and how the different animals survived on instinct, wits and natural adaptation. Many times the quail, pheasants or rabbits would get the best of us and we would come home empty handed.

These animals are stuck in the bitter cold of the Midwest for months at a time and survive - actually thrive. No Walmart's, electric vehicles, Krogers, Starbucks, solar power, windmills etc just their natural habitat. I think we humans could learn a lesson or two from them.