The rest was mixed, good and bad, but contained much of the same doublespeak that we’ve heard for the last six years. Any substance to be found in this brief discussion unfortunately appears on the supply side of the energy equation. As far as I know, nuclear power (and especially its waste) is not “clean and safe”, drilling for oil to be burned is not “environmentally sensitive” and clean coal is an environmental oxymoron all itself.
I offer the beginnings of a list of items missing from this part of the speech and welcome you to blog some more:
- 1. Where are the caps and limits on national CO2 emissions?
2. Will automobile CAFE standards make up for lost time?
3. Will federal tax credits for hybrids that have expired be restored?
4. What about the word CONSERVATION!?
It wasn’t all bad, of course. Plug-in hybrids are great…ask anyone who once owned an EV1 before General Motors pulled the plug. Grass, agricultural waste, wood chips, are good to a point. I was glad to see Wind and Solar get equal billing with coal, oil and nuclear.
Let’s see what devil’s in the details.
Unless there is meaningful policy behind the rhetoric, and I hope there is, one might be tempted to believe that dragging climate change into the conversation was used to distract from other disasters such as the war in Iraq.
Here’s the relevant part of the speech followed by some parting words from next week’s IPCC report from thousands of the world’s best climate experts.
It is in our vital interest to diversify America’s energy supply – and the way forward is through technology. We must continue changing the way America generates electric power – by even greater use of clean coal technology, solar and wind energy, and clean, safe nuclear power. We need to press on with battery research for plug-in and hybrid vehicles, and expand the use of clean diesel vehicles and biodiesel fuel. We must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol – using everything from wood chips, to grasses, to agricultural wastes.
We have made a lot of progress, thanks to good policies in Washington and the strong response of the market. Now even more dramatic advances are within reach. Tonight, I ask Congress to join me in pursuing a great goal. Let us build on the work we have done and reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years – thereby cutting our total imports by the equivalent of 3/4 of all the oil we now import from the Middle East.
To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory Fuels Standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 – this is nearly 5 times the current target. At the same time, we need to reform and modernize fuel economy standards for cars the way we did for light trucks – and conserve up to 8.5 billion more gallons of gasoline by 2017.
Achieving these ambitious goals will dramatically reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but will not eliminate it. So as we continue to diversify our fuel supply, we must also step up domestic oil production in environmentally sensitive ways. And to further protect America against severe disruptions to our oil supply, I ask Congress to double the current capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. These technologies will help us become better stewards of the environment – and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change.
So much more could be said about climate change here but for tonight it’s all about who said it. I do have a few parting words though from several thousand climate scientists in the IPCC report due out next week as reported by The Guardian:
12 of the past 13 years were the warmest since records began;
Ocean temperatures have risen at least three kilometres beneath the surface;
Glaciers, snow cover and permafrost have decreased in both hemispheres;
Sea levels are rising at the rate of almost 2mm a year;
Cold days, nights and frost have become rarer while hot days, hot nights and heatwaves have become more frequent.
Go ahead. Click on the article. Then sleep if you can.
climate change here but for now it’s just about those words and who spoke them. I’m a progress junkie, so will celebrate this as such.
Nuclear power is definitely safe. In the entire history of nuclear power plants, there has never been an accidental release of enough nuclear material to cause any problems. Chernobyl blew up because they intentionally disabled every safety device on the reactor, so it wasn’t really an accident. The three mile island meltdown was fully contained, so it caused no damage outside of the power plant. Those are the only two major incidents or serious problems with nuclear reactors. Ever. There are very few technologies that have a safety record that good.
<
p>
Nuclear power is also clean. Nuclear power releases less radiation than coal. Because nothing is burned when extracting energy from nuclear sources, all of the wastes are contained and can be fully accounted for. This is very different from oil, gas, and coal, which release large quantities of CO2, SOx, and NOx gases when burned. Once those gases are in the atmosphere, they are very difficult to remove. Furthermore, most of the nuclear waste is due to regulations. If power plants could reprocess fuel rods, there would be very little radioactive waste from nuclear power plants (Wikipedia article about nuclear fuel). The main justification for why they can’t is that anyone who can reprocess fuel rods can also make nuclear bombs. But we could just let the government reprocess the fuel rods, since we already know that they have nuclear bombs.
<
p>
Wind and hydro are the only sources of power that are cleaner than nuclear (look up the manufacturing process for solar cells if you don’t believe me). There is no way that we can generate enough power from just wind and hydro. Wind is not steady enough and we would have to put dams on every river in the country to even have a chance at getting enough power from hydro (which would have more of an environmental impact than switching to nuclear).
<
p>
The environmental movement has never had a worse idea than opposing nuclear power. Environmentalists should have been demanding nuclear power for at least the past 20 years. Particularly now that greenhouse gases seem like the biggest environmental threat, it is irresponsible to claim that nuclear power is not environmentally friendly but that burning grass, woodchips, ethanol, and other fuels is.
My appologies up front – i have no time now to do my homework, so I’ll throw out the Q to see if anyone wishes to respond with the substance I momentarily lack.
<
p>
1. It is my understanding that nuclear power actually costs more to produce than it brings in. It is subsidized to an extraordinary degree. T/F?
<
p>
2. It is problematic to claim a power source is “clean and safe” when it’s byproduct (radioactive waste) will last for thousands (more?) of year. One can’t claim that until the nuclear waste is no longer dangerous. T/F?
<
p>
3. We are quickly running out of places to store nuclear waste (or places willing to store it). T/F?
<
p>
4. Old contamination sites such as Hanford, WA have been left to fester and spread. We should have the utmost confidence that any contaminated sites created in the future would be handled much, much better. T/F?
<
p>
5. Each additional ton of spent fuel produced is as safe today from would-be nuclear weapon makers as it was in [insert favorite year]. T/F?
Of course, now that we have developed genetically engineered gay nuclear power, which is clean and safe, we don’t have to worry about any of those things. j/k
<
p>
Conservation is the better answer…less people working on dumb things, people working closer to home on real things, using less appliances and entertainment, more austerity and peaceful enjoyment of tranquility and satisfaction with life.
<
p>
When I see that Greenpeace now advocates “alternative energy” instead of conservation, I realize that the infiltration of my generation’s laziness and adhd and sense of entitlement is really to blame. We want everything, so we demand that people invent and construct guilt-free power plants for us. But just creating that infrastructure would use up billions of kilowatts and barrels of oil. “Alternative energy” is a cop-out. Conservation, meaning I shouldn’t have the SOTU rerun on as I type this, is the answer. There, now it’s ESPN, which is more essential. Seriously, though, I think married people don’t have their TV on at 2 in the morning.
1. T-sort of. The insurance for nuclear power plants is paid for by Uncle Sam. It’s not insignificant. The phrase “costs more to produce than it brings in” doesn’t make much sense though — its costs are both in terms of: dollars, risk of accident, damage to environment mining nuclear fuel, and its waste stream. Of those four, the first one isn’t hard to overcome if it means fighting global warming. The second one is pretty damned small, and new nuclear reactors would have an even smaller risk. The third cost is not insignificant, and often overlooked. Nuclear material is mined much like coal — while the amount of material needed is much less, it requires digging up a lot of earth to get it. The final problem is the biggie…
<
p>
What do we do with the waste? We could reduce the problem if we started reprocessing the waste, but foreign policy considerations get in the way. We can’t shoot it into space (cost of failure too high), we can’t throw it in the ocean (violates International treaty), so it just sits around.
<
p>
What about Nevada? Well, it’s not a bad plan in total. I think that it could work for much of the waste west of the Mississippi. However, Nevadans don’t want it (do you blame them), and transporting the waste on rail around the country moves it within 50 miles of just about everyone. That’s not smart either.
<
p>
2. T Nuclear waste is dangerous. So is coal waste and oil waste and natural gas waste and the waste from generating solar cells. The thing is, they are different kinds of waste. Nuclear waste is, I think, less dangerous right now than waste from coal fired power plants.
<
p>
3. F. Nuclear waste is stored on site currently. It doesn’t take up very much room. It just lies around, unprotected, right next to the power plant. It’s not a smart system, but it’s not an issue of running out of room. It is true that nobody wants to receive somebody else’s nuclear waste.
<
p>
4. F. Hanford is currently the largest environmental cleanup project in the world. 11,000 people are employed cleaning that mess up. Understand that Hanford is 60 years old — its where fat man was built, and built in a hurry. So, not only are we 60 years “smarter” when it comes to nuclear energy, but we’re not rushing to build bombs for a war so fewer mistakes would be made. Hanford is a tragedy in many ways, but its a tragedy that simply couldn’t happen nowadays.
<
p>
5. Meh. Nuclear waste isn’t all that useful to he-who-would-build-a-bomb because it’s not a high enough quality. Sure, there are about a half a dozen nations which could use the material — Israel, France, England, India, Pakistan, Russia, and China. But, they don’t need to steal our nuclear waste and transport it halfway around the world for their bombs. The waste is a problem, but it’s not an unsolvable problem in terms of securing it from theft or terrorism. Our current diffused solution isn’t so great — I’d like to see at most 1 storage site for each state as a first step toward consolidation. The unsolved problem with nuclear waste is how long it stays kicking around, not with security.
<
p>
I think that, ultimately, the US will have to use more nuclear power to eliminate our use of fossil fuels for electricity. However, I don’t think we need to start building more nuclear plants now. Let’s crank out a war-effort worth of wind farms, solar rooftops, biomass generators, geothermal plants, tidal energy pistons, and small hydro plants — all the while increasing energy efficiency standards on autos, appliances, and building codes. After we’ve given a few years of real focus on those things, if we still need nuclear power, let’s give it a whirl. In the mean time, let’s build power plants that don’t pollute carbon nor result in huge piles of nuclear waste.
well argued, stomv, but it’s telling that in your last paragraph, you also don’t use the word “conservation”. Is that, like, inconceivable to you?
<
p>
There are ways we can lower how much power we use. We can fine businesses that have their A/C set too low, which i think they do in Japan. We can have policies that lead to fewer people working away from the home and driving long distances. The war-effort to make those wind-farms, etc, would itself be a huge use of power, and like all war-efforts, be wasteful. We should have a war-effort to cut power consumption. Trivial and frivolous products should be taxed or prohibited completely. No car company should be allowed to produce a television ad with a helicopter dropping a car onto a mountain ever again. How about taxing all advertising, like 1000%? Video games taxed at 100%. And research into genetic engineering, well, that’s completely wasteful, and uses tons of power, and could just be shut down.
The ideas for how to supply the energy demanded, and the ideas for how to reduce the energy that need be supplied are not related. Not one iota.
<
p>
They have nothing to do with each other, and it’s entirely possible to have a discussion about one of those without muddling it by involving the other.
<
p>
They are two separate problems. They are solved independently. Me talking about how to change the supply side has nothing to do with my ideas about the demand side.
<
p>
What the last paragraph is “telling” is that I understand the above. Your question indicates that you do not (yet).
You want to build more stuff, on a war-effort scale. But it takes energy to build more stuff. Yes, when we do build more stuff, we should make it more efficient and clean. But I’m against “alternative energy” because it’s just another industry now, and a utopian magic one at that. Energy use has gone up and up and up. That’s the problem. And talking about how we’re going to have solar and wind and all that takes the pressure off everyone to lighten the load, or think about ways to lighten the load. So I think it is bad to talk about solutions that don’t include conservation. Are you in favor of conservation? Lots of people think that energy consumption is the key to prosperity, and if we aren’t using more and more power, we’ll fall back into an agrarian economy and have to wear white frocks and buckles on our shoes, and so they are against it in principle.
are several individuals having an honest and open discussion about the future of power generation, putting all options on the table to be given due consideration.
<
p>
You seem to want to discuss only conservation, and draconian measures at that.
And though conservation is certainly a worthy and necessary topic, it is a parallel topic.
<
p>
Even with the most careful use of energy resources, even encouraging new energy efficient technologies and inovations, the world will continue to require more and more power.
<
p>
This is not (or should not be) a left/right issue. And with little exeption, the posts here seem to reflect that.
<
p>
I personally find this thread to be a delightfully frank, informative, and non-partisan exchange of views.
The problem right now with supply is that at the current pace of renewable energy supply increase, we’re still getting more coal power plants too. By dramatically increasing the renewable energy supply (a process that, while requiring energy, is indeed net energy positive very quickly), we could be in the position to turn off coal and oil fired power plants.
<
p>
To rephrase: right now, we’re on pace to release more carbon through electricity generation next year than this year, in spite of renewable supply increase. We need to get to the point where the amount of carbon we release next year in electricity generation is less than this year, and that means dramatically increasing supply.
<
p>
As for conservation — you aren’t going to reduce America’s electricity usage by 50%. That’s what it would take to get off of coal, and that completely ignores using oil or natural gas.
<
p>
I am in favor of conservation, but I wouldn’t go about it in the way you suggest. I’ll post a set of conservation diaries in good time, but first I’m writing about supply (the coal one was well received, I think oil will be next week). A sneak preview of what I would propose, taking no regard for state vs. federal laws or how hard they would be to pass…
<
p>
1. Oil: – Ban the construction of new oil power plants. Period. No peaking, no nothing. If you need oil for peaking, then figure out a way to do it with natural gas or by smoothing the peaks. – Improve CAFE standards, and impose feebates on all motor vehicles, from Vespas to big rig trucks. – Dump megabucks into mass transit, in cities (subway & good bus), suburbs (commuter rail), and across tUSA (expanding Acela-quality rail). In addition to expanding the span and the quality of the service, we’re going to lower the price through (more) subsidies. – Reduce the speed limit on highways by 10 mph. – Expand the number of HOV mile lanes dramatically. – Increase the gas tax by $0.005 per month, every month, automatically. Thats 6 cents a year, but slowly. Consumers will get the message a little bit at a time, and they also know that prices are going up over time.
2. Coal: – It’s not going away anytime soon, but better regulation and enforcement in the areas of (a) smokestack emissions and (b) mining would do a world of good. – Cap and trade, a la RGGI. – Tax it.
3. Natural Gas: – It’s a push — right now it isn’t the best solution, but it’s far better than coal and oil. Steer clear for the most part.
4. Nuclear: – No new nukes yet — lets implement the rest of this stuff and see how we do. – Consolidate waste to one site per state. That puts us at 50 sites or fewer, which is more manageable. We’ll work on regional plans after that, but it would be a step in the right direction, and safer and easier to monitor. – Allow for nuclear reprocessing. We may as well get more electricity for the same amount of nuclear fuel, and in doing so reduce the amount of waste. I know there are foreign policy implications, but if France can pull it off, so can wel – If (when) nuclear expansion is necessary, we’re going to go with a standard reactor. A single design — which already exists (this post shall remain link free, so find it yourself). This will reduce cost and complexity
5. Solar: – Million roof plan and whatnot. The elegance of solar is that it peaks in production when demand peaks, thereby smoothing the demand spikes which takes pressure off of using oil or natural gas for peaking. – All new government buildings should come with solar installed. Period. I want solar hot water heating at minimum, and solar cells where it makes sense (about 40 of the 50 states).
6. Wind: – Yeah, lets do it. On land and on sea. On mountain ridges and in the high-wind plains. We’ll do it by extending the generation credit in time length (but probably not in dollars per MWh generated). – We could also subsidize the loan insurance, thereby making it easier for banks to fund these plans.
7. Other renewable elec: – geothermal, biomass, tidal, etc. Let’s fund lots of research. Make it make sense.
8. Electric grid as a whole: – Make net metering legal in all 50 states. Allow for all sorts of renewables in all sizes. Allow for individuals to be net producers, and pay them at the retail (not wholesale) cost. Sure the utilities cry “unfair” but you know what — they’ve had plenty of time to roll out renewables and they haven’t done enough. – Time based metering for all. It doesn’t make sense to pay the same at 3:00 Sunday morning as it does 3:00 Thursday afternoon. It costs vastly different amounts to supply, it ought to cost vastly different amounts to consume. – Customer fees are to be reduced, and never more for time-based than for fixed rate. Consumers who use lots of energy pay a very low percentage for their customer service fee, but those who conserve end up paying a big chunk for the privilege of being a customer and getting a bill mailed once a month. This doesn’t make sense. Roll a chunk of the customer service fee into the variable rate, thereby encouraging more conservation. – Increase the cost of electricity. Yeah, it sucks. But — supply and demand. As it costs more, you’ll use less.
9. Ethanol: – Reduce the tariffs on Brazilian ethanol, but not all at once. We’d like to be generating at least some ethanol domestically, but lowering price of ethanol will help widespread adoption. It’s a tightrope to be sure. – Expand the widespread use. Instead of rambling about E85 for a few and E0 or E5 for the rest, lets make E10 a national standard. When we get there, we can bump it to E15, and so forth. Require x% of cars to be able to handle E20, and make x tend to 100 over the span of 10 years. – Fund research for ethanol from non-corn feedstocks.
10. Biodiesel: – Just as x% of cars should be able to take ethanol, that same track should work for B20. – Government vehicles should be running on B5 right now, B20 in a few years, and B100 within 10. Let’s do it. – Require that y% of pumps for all major brands be B5 (eventually B20) nationwide, and y must increase to 100 within 10 years. – No tax in biodiesel fuel for now. Let it creep up to approach diesel tax over time, but let’s give ’em a break to get started. Note: B20 would therefore have 80% of the tax as regular diesel.
11. Efficiency:
In addition to the efficiencies induced by mass transit, higher CAFE standards, lower speed limits, higher gas tax, higher fuel tax for fossil elec, net metering, time based metering, higher elec prices, etc. (all of which have no direct financial cost to the gov’t) we can be doing the following… – Revise building codes to require better materials, better insulation, better HVAC systems, more solar hot water heaters or geothermal water heaters, more tankless water heaters, etc. – Revise zoning codes to allow for more high density, mixed use space. Folks shouldn’t have to get in their car to buy a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk. Current zoning laws effectively mandate that sort of outcome. – Build more sidewalks and crosswalks. All over the place. – Require builders to plant energy efficient landscaping when they sell the new house. The new owner is welcome to chop down the tree that provides shade in summer and blocks wind in winter, but most won’t bother. – Just like CAFE works for cars, lets do the same thing with dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, computers, and home electronics. – Require federal, state, and local gov’t buildings to be LEED certified. The ADA is a pain and an added cost, and this would be too. It’s worth it. Build healthier buildings. – Fund more “rail to trail” and other cycling initiatives. Every single gov’t building ought to have sufficient bike racks out front. Encourage cycling. Teach both cyclists, motorists, and the police about cycling laws (like: you’re allowed — often required — to ride in the street, and the gutter isn’t safe).
<
p>
So, there’s your sneak preview. The full report will take months with me writing one item per week. There’s plenty that the government can do to tickle the right kind of supply while reducing the wrong kind, and there’s plenty the government can do to encourage conservation and tickle innovation in those areas. There’s no silver bullet — we need to use every weapon we can come up with, and roll them out quickly. I hope that the states will continue to experiment and adopt each others’ successes, while pushing the Feds to implement the best working ideas nationwide.
I look forward to your weekly installments.
Nicely written.
It is highly likely that NKorea obtained their fissile material for their nuclear bomb from the spent fuel rods of their nuclear reactor. One of the end-products of a fuel rod in a nuclear reactor is plutonium. That’s one of the reasons that the IAEA had kept the NKorean spent fuel rods under inspection.
<
p>
The NKoreans would have had to have the wherewithall to separate the plutonium from the uranium. But apparently that isn’t a particularly difficult problem–apparently not as much of a problem as enriching uranium to a high-enough percentage of U235 to make a uranium-based nuclear bomb. And that is probably one of the issues that has upset the Israelis and the US regarding the Iranian nuclear program.
I’m going to answer your questions out of order here…
<
p>
3) We are quickly running out of places to store nuclear waste. This is currently True, but could be False very easily. As jkw mentioned above, there are reprocessing techniques that could be used for greater efficiency, as well as usage of what we currently consider “waste” materials.
<
p>
1) I really don’t know if that’s currently the case. But according to Wikipedia, we currently extract only about 1% of the energy of U-235 in our conventional plants. Reprocessing would bring us from 1% to over 90%, which means that if this is currently true, it would almost certainly go to falso.
<
p>
2) These techniques also greatly reduce the long-term radioactivity of the waste. So there’s less waste and that waste is less radioactive. The half-lives of the waste are on the order of decades instead of the 4 billion year half-life of U-238 (which is the majority of nuclear waste produced by conventional power plants).
<
p>
4) True.
<
p>
5) I sure hope so. But I don’t know. However, if there’s less waste, this can be truer…
<
p>
See the Wikipedia article on the Integral Fast Reactor for more information on one possible reprocessing technique…
<
p>
2. Clean and safe is a relative term. It is not problematic to claim that a power source is safe when it has a substantially lower death rate per unit of power produced than any other power source that has been around long enough to have accurate statistics (see my first link above). Nuclear waste is small and solid, which makes it much easier to store than the waste products of other forms of power generation. If the fuel rods are reprocessed (as is done in France), storage is not a significant problem. Nuclear power plants also produce less nuclear waste than coal power plants do (per unit of energy generated). We currently know how to store nuclear waste in ways that will not kill even a single person for the next hundred years. The same is not true for CO2.
<
p>
3. This is a political problem, not a technical one. On the other hand, we are running out of space to store CO2 without dramatically altering the world in a bad way. That is a technical problem that we have no solution to. Given the choice, I would prefer to generate easy to store nuclear waste and put it in the middle of nowhere rather than generate CO2 and dump it into the atmosphere.
<
p>
4. Hanford was the first nuclear production site. It was built when people did not know what they were doing. So yes, there is reason to be confident that we would do a better job in the future.
<
p>
5. Spent nuclear fuel is small and easy to contain. It is also easy to guard. It is certainly no harder than guarding the thousands of nuclear warheads that the US has sitting throughout the country.
<
p>
There are two big producers of CO2 that we should be focusing on reducing: transportation and coal power plants. Grid generation isn’t very useful for transportation, so that is an unrelated topic. We should make shutting down every coal power plant in this country a major priority (to be followed by oil and then gas). The only zero-emissions power production methods we have right now (in the sense that they do not release any waste to the environment while producing power) are wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear. Wind and solar are unreliable, so they have to be supplemented by something more controllable. That means we need enough nuclear and hydro plants to provide most of our power. Otherwise we have to keep the fossil fuel plants running enough to use them when it is dark and non-windy. We don’t have enough rivers to go entirely hydro, so we need nuclear too.
I don’t know a lot about the details of this issue and do agree that it is important to look carefully at every alternative energy option (particuarly renewable sources like nuclear).
<
p>
But I do think you have underestimated the dangers associated with nuclear power production and waste disposal. You have also ignored the risk that further development of nuclear power will be diverted to weapons programs.
<
p>
I encourage all to read the comprehensive report (“Insurmountable Risk: The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change”) and/or the Executive Summary available here:
<
p>
http://www.ieer.org/…
with this pie-in-the-sky nuclear stuff. The industry got everything it wanted in the last energy bill–billion-dollar subsidies for new nukes, all kinds of taxpayer-backed guarantees–and now has decided that maybe isn’t enough.
<
p>
Spare me the crocodile tears over global warming. The last big nuclear blowout in the 60s and 70s was based on inflating electrical demand to the point that we probably wasted more energy than we got the nukes that did get built–leaving us worse off than otherwise.
<
p>
There’s no reason so suppose the second go round on nuclear would end any better than the last.
<
p>
More to the point, with one of NASA’s top scientists saying we only have ten years to turn things around on climate change, how does nuclear fit in?
<
p>
There is no credible scenario for new nuclear capacity that would back out meaningful amounts of carbon in the next decade. Rather, nukes are just another somewhere-over-the-horizon excuse for not taking action now.
we need to motivate people into conservation in a big way. taxes and fines and incentives that really tell people that it is important.
<
p>
If society believed that NASA top scientist, here’s how nuclear would fit in:
<
p>
Go find the largest 50% of coal fired power plants* and replace them immediately with nuclear power plants. You’ve now reduced the amount of carbon released into the air dramatically.
<
p>
If the nation believed that NASA scientist, then
replacing coal with nuclear immediately would be the most effective, efficient, and cheapest way to take a huge chunk out of the greenhouse gas emissions of the electric grid.
<
p> * The 50% of the largest plants produce far more than 50% of the electricity, just like in a population of 10 people the five tallest represent more than 50% of the total height.
You can’t do anything “immediately” with new nuclear because the darned things take too long to build.
<
p>
You can ramp up energy efficiency and start saving energy as close to “immediately” as no never mind. But that’s just too boring, isn’t it, compared to those big sexy nukes that can never get built in time to make a difference.
Nuclear plants could be built within a few years. New designs have been vetted, and by building the same exact plan multiple times, faster construction dates could be met.
<
p>
Changing 25% of the electricity supply source within five years counts as immediate in my book.
<
p>
There’s no way (short of artificially inflating consumer cost by an order of magnitude) that you could impact that much greenhouse gas on the demand side that quickly. None.
<
p>
Efficiency in the form of a more efficient hardware takes many many years, and there simply aren’t sufficient gains to be made that quickly. Even if there were televisions, refrigerators, washers, dryers, dishwashers, and computers that were 40% more efficient, it would still take way more than 5 years to get a 20% gain. How often to people replace their refrigerators? Washers & dryers? Dishwashers? Far less frequently than every 10 years.
<
p>
Efficiency should absolutely be part of the plan — but it can really only be used to mitigate demand increase in the immediate sense. Only in changing price or changing methods of supply can we muster a major change in the next decade.
after his polling determined that it was less alarming than “global warming.”
I think a real turning point would have been if Bush had used “global warming.”
from the IPCC article I linked in the post:
<
p>
The statement “frequency of devastating storms” while correct, is subject to misintepretation.
<
p>
Currently the frequency of storms is not directly linked to global warming. However the intensity of storms is. (at a minimum, More moisture in a storm increases kinetic energy (Ke=mv^2 increase the mass, increase the Ke)
<
p>
So yes, big storms occur at a greater percentage than they have in the past but storms in general, do not.
<
p>
Mark
<
p>
Fresh back from “Al Gore’s Global Warming Training School” 🙂 I’m always looking for more venues to present on global warming.
<
p>
My schedule of public events is here.
Excellent post, and good job pointing out the many omissions and shortcomings of his ‘vision’ for dealing with climate change. But I can’t even get a little bit excited that he brought it up.
Count me in that camp. This might make me the biggest cynic on the thread, but to me, what he said was “Speaking of Iraq — how about that climate change, huh?” Under this administration, the SOTU address has become a back-up-the-truck, “throw it up on the wall and see what sticks”, say-anything type of exercise. He had us going to Mars one time, fer chrissakes! The devil is, indeed, in the details (if not the Oval Office itself).
<
p>
I’m just sayin’.
just as soon as the Dems do something to stop Nazifying America. By that I mean an end to
Spying
Data mining by private the government and private sectors
Torture
Depleted uranium
Biometrics, passports and RFID technology,”registered” travelers and implantable chips. Yes, I know you have all just clicked your “off” buttons but most of the common folk I talk to are starting to agree with me. MSM talks about mindless crap, a diversionary mechanism.
http://www.scl.cc/ho…
http://www.dailykos….
http://www.nascocorr…
<
p>
You can get thousands more comments on a celebrity gossip board than you can on a political activism site.
<
p>
This one says why.
http://www.bushflash…
An excellent program right now (10 pm) on History Channel.
Kinda simplified, but touches on several interesting topics; carbon sequestration, bio-diesel, etc..