The numbers in David McKay’s Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air are a bit different; he reckons that “Stuff” and “Transporting Stuff” accounts for about 48 + 12 = 60 kWh per day per person, of a total of 195 kWh per day per person, so more about a third instead of over a half. But yes, you are right, it will be very hard to decrease this chunk. But there are chunks in one’s personal energy stack which are under one’s direct control, e.g., “Car” (40 kWh/d) and “Jet flights” (30 kWh/d), and it were mostly these I had in mind when I wrote about energy-intensive lifestyles. I should have stated that explicitly.
I agree that the central planning you describe here is a pipe dream, and that large-scale nuclear power seems less far-fetched. But there are other ways to steer the world towards a more efficient use of its resources, e.g. by proper energy pricing. (Gas, and especially jet fuel, is currently much, much, much too cheap.)
On the other side, if you think about letting nuclear play a significant role in our total energy production (not just electricity generation), you would need to consider building hundreds of nuclear power plants (of standard power output of ~ 1 GWe) for the US alone, over the next 20 years or so. There is currently not enough heavy industry capacity in the world to build the required pressure vessels quickly enough. Building a 1.3 GWe plant like the EPR takes about 8 - 10 years, and costs about 9 billion GBP. I think this time and money is much better spent further ramping up renewables, and developing the energy storage systems that we will need, as you very rightly mention.
For anyone looking to gain an understanding of the maths and physics behind various carbon free energy options, to help them make an informed understanding of whether a particular energy plan could add up to match supply with demand, I’d like to recommed this book:
David J.C. MacKay. Sustainable Energy – without the hot air.
UIT Cambridge, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9544529-3-3. Available free online
from www.withouthotair.com.
Too late. It’s also highly unlikely to get a large percentage of the population to give up reproducing. However, if you put the ability to control reproduction in the hands of people whose bodies it happens inside of, you stand a good chance of slowing population growth and expanding prosperity for all.
No energy technology is substantially carbon neutral to construct.[/quote]
But some are less neutral than others. Fission plants are particularly carbon-heavy to construct; lotsa concrete.
I don’t object to fission power; by all means, keep the existing plants running, upgrade the old ones, and maybe even build a few new ones in places for which they’re particularly suited.
But I don’t think that fission is going to form a large component of a global climate solution. Too slow, too expensive, too centralised, too vulnerable. Fission plants can be tolerably safe in a stable industrialised nation, but not in places that have a civil war or coup roll through every five years.
We need a maximally-diversified collection of genuine renewables, improvements in storage and transmission efficiency, and a heavy focus on reducing energy waste.
The economics of nuclear are unworkable. The capital investment of scaled-up installs cause massive financial and engineering failures which always require bailouts (because sunk cost and politics). The industry is corrupt, from the science and engineering through management and operations, and then there’s decommissioning and waste storage. The designs that are supposed to save the industry haven’t panned out.
Meanwhile, renewables only need to fix load balancing (which remains a problem for nuclear) and short-term storage. They are decentralized and easily localized in financing and operation. The engineering challenges and financial risks are fucking easy. But no, we have to sell high-risk bonds to fill the pockets of the superrich. Again.
Fusion is interesting. It’s a pie-in-the-sky that might actually pay off in science and engineering advances, if not actual power stations. Til then, use what works and stop gifting our infrastructure to scam artists.
This is exactly why I’m so furious at all the Bernie Bros that voted for Jill Fucking Stein or stayed home. Your purity came at the cost of extinction.
Ironically, the fastest solution for global warming is in fact nuclear weapons. A sustained attack on any point of the globe would eject enough dust and fine particulate matter into the air to substantially cool the earth.
This is exactly why I’m so furious at all the Bernie Bros that voted for Jill Fucking Stein or stayed home. Your purity came at the cost of extinction.
“Bernie bros,” a line of bullshit, didn’t fund and elect the Republicans who suppressed the franchise in the states Clinton took for granted. Clinton in turn didn’t fight for the vote in those states. The rich did fund that takeover in those states, especially the rich who make money from oil services and other corrupt climate-denying industries.
It’s unlikely that anyone under 40 will NOT suffer terribly under the effects of climate change. The “extinctionists” are ensuring that nothing will be done (or even tried), looks like we all die from starvation - http://survivalacres.com first. Then heat stress, lack of water, collapsing civilization, etc., etc.
I’m fully prepared to believe the problem is vastly exaggerated, if not a total myth. For one thing, they’re windmills, not Vornado fans. The blades aren’t moving so fast as to be invisible. Which ties into the detail that birds have eyes, and windmills aren’t made of plate glass.
This is the issue on which I find the Greens most lacking in understanding because it is not only nuclear plants - ramping up offshore wind is also not an easy process; with renewables, redesigning the entire distribution network to deal with the new points at which power enters the system is a very large capital investment, whereas nuclear would cost less if it were possible to build plants close to the existing fossil fuel generation - which is politically impossible.
The biggest problem with renewables is that of storage - at night for solar, during low wind periods for wind. People in general and, I find, Greens in particular, seem to think that it is easy to build electrical storage, whereas it is very, very expensive indeed. An obvious comparison is $100 for a 50 litre oil tank versus $8000 for a set of batteries with the same energy capacity. While Musk talks a big talk about ramping up electric cars we are still talking under a million worldwide by 2020, and to replace just the car fleet of a few hundred million vehicles would exhaust known lithium reserves many times over. Pumped storage is very expensive and few places are suitable - again you have the problem of moving the grid access points to the generation as well.
The tl;dr is that I think we are already far too late because the amount of fossil fuel we will need to burn to replace fossil fuel with renewables is itself going to take the environment outside the safe zone, before considering the additional use to keep the lights on. At this stage I really think population crash is inevitable. And is possibly such a standard result of evolutionary scenarios that it explains why nobody has visited us from outside our system - societies run out of energy before they reach that stage, and the more available energy there was to begin with, the faster that happens. (Then there are planets that never had a carboniferous and there never was a cheap fuel supply to drive civilisation past the wooden boat stage.)
