“Green” energy policy in Europe – The numbers don’t lie
March 10th, 2010
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Many countries in Europe like to talk about how “Green” they are and indeed in many of these countries the Green Party has become one of the most powerful political parties and has gained control of the government, either directly or as part of a coalition in the past decade. But for all the talk of programs for renewable energy, reduced greenhouse emissions and better enviornmental policy, how have these countries actually been doing and how do they compare to the less “green” countries?
For the purposes of this comparison, a “green” energy policy is defined by the following:
- Rejects nuclear power, in the most extreme examples, calling for its complete phaseout or banning it outright.
- Strong focus on wind and/or solar power
- Favors enormous subsidies to wind and solar power
- Generally has a fairly favorable stand on natural gas, even if it is rarely (if ever) mentioned
- Attempts to reduce energy consumption through effeciency
- Believes it is acceptable to heavily tax or penalize energy usage as a means of encouraging reduced consumption
- Is supported by Greenpeace, the Green Party, Friends of the Earth, Earth First and other groups with similar agendas
The following numbers are from the US Energy Information Administration. Some of the data is a couple of years old, but if anyone knows of any other source of information that provides better country profiles with comprehensive data of this type, let me know.
Lets take a look..
Belgium – Somewhat Green
Currently, the government of Belgium is controlled by the Christian Democratic and Flemish Party, but when it comes to energy, the policies of Belgium would be the policies are very much in line with “Green” politics, especially when it comes to nuclear energy. In 2003, Belgium passed a law banning the construction of new nuclear power plants and seeking to expedite the closure of the existing nuclear facilities. This would result in a complete nuclear phase-out by 2025. There has been a good deal of controversy on this issue, however. The current political leadership is generally considered to be right of center and concern has been expressed over the fact that loss of nuclear power would force Belgium to import most of its electricity. While the Greens are not in control of the government of Belgium, they remain a powerful political group which does control some local offices.
When it comes to energy-related CO2, which serves both as an indicator of greenhouse emissions and a general indicator of the fossil fuel emissions of a country, Belgium is not doing especially well.
While the emissions in Belgium have only risen nominally, the same can’t be said for the country’s consumption of natural gas. It’s skyrocketed and in the process left Belgium extremely dependent on the constant importation of gas.
Austria – Very very Anti-nuclear, Very Green
Austria has a reputation for being one of the most anti-nuclear countries in the EU and indeed in the world. This was not always the case, as the Austrian government favored nuclear energy in the 1960’s, but in 1978, the Austrian Parliament banned the use of nuclear fission for energy purposes in the country until 1998 and banned the transport of nuclear material through the country, effectively making any nuclear activities, even pure research impossible. The ban was only for thirty years, but sadly the Parliament of Austria renewed it in 1997, thus affirming the country’s anti-nuclear stance.
Austria gained attention when the country threatened to block the entry of its neighbor, the Czech Republic into the European Union unless the country shut down the Temelín Nuclear Power Station, located about 50 km from the border with Austria. Representatives from Austria to the EU have consistently pushed for anti-nuclear policies, but with little success.
The official energy policy of Austria favors “renewable” energy as the cornerstone of future energy development. Their emissions numbers for energy-related Co2 are … abysmal.
Despite efforts to build more generation capacity in the form of wind and solar, the net generating capacity of the country is actually slightly down.
Austria has managed to reduce coal burning, but this has been replaced by a combination of electrical imports and natural gas, which, not surprisingly, has surged.
Denmark – The World Leader In Wind Power – Very Green – Very Anti-Nuclear
Many in the “Green” movement like to point to Denmark as an example of what a country’s energy policy should be. Denmark is fiercely opposed to nuclear energy, outlawing any nuclear reactors in the country in 1985. Only three nuclear were reactors ever built in Denmark, a series of small research reactors at the Risø DTU National Laboratory, but that reactor was ordered shut down and the laboratory has since been renamed the “Risø DTU National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy.“ The laboratory no longer does any nuclear related research.
Denmark is also one of the biggest supporters in the world of “renewable” energy, especially in the form of wind power. Starting in the 1980’s, the country invested billions upon billions of Euros in wind energy, making it one of the largest producers of wind turbines in the world and giving Denmark the undespited first place in wind energy as a proportion of total domestic electrical generating capacity. By the late 1990’s the country claimed to have over 15% of power coming from wind and by 2005 the number topped 20%, with nameplate capacity exceeding three gigawatts.
A large portion of the energy from wind farms is exported (often at a loss) to Norway and other nearby countries where hydroelectric installations can provide some degree of load-following and energy storage – albeit at a huge net energy loss.
Despite the huge investment, the emissions of energy related CO2 in Denmark have not been going down, at least not by very much. In fact, they seem to be all over the place.
There really does not appear to be any kind of trend, certainly not downward. There have been some reductions in emissions since the mid 1990’s, but those have been pretty modest and don’t even go far enough to undo the growth in the early 1990’s. It appears that the CO2 emissions are as variable as the wind. One major reason for the reduction in CO2 emissions may be the reduction in the use of coal in Denmark. Coal has the highest emissions per unit of energy of any fuel, as coal is nearly 100% carbon. Coal use has been dropping, even if not spectacularly.
Is this because coal is being replaced by wind? Not exactly. Coal is being replaced with another fossil fuel: natural gas. Natural gas does have some benefits over coal: it produces somewhat less CO2 and is substantially less dirty when it comes to emissions like mercury, sulfur dioxide and fly ash. However, natural gas is also more expensive and less stable in prie and supply. The use of natural gas does not eliminate the emissions issues with coal, it only reduces them somewhat, and the price is security of energy supply.
In the early 1980’s Denmark’s consumption of natural gas was very small, almost negligible and Denmark was not a net importer of gas. Since then, the consumption of natural gas has skyrocketed in Denmark and hundreds of billions of cubic feet are imported annually.
Spain – The world leader in solar power
Spain has gotten a lot of good press for the numerous solar projects it has bled copious amounts of national treasure into. Spain has some of the world’s largest photovoltaic plants and also has constructed large solar thermal “power towers.” Spain not only subsidizes solar energy directly but also mandates higher rates for electricity be paid to solar generators than other sources of electricity by grid operators and rate payers. Spain also has been increasing wind capacity in recent years and now has a large wind power industry.
Spain has eight nuclear power reactors, but has generally been opposed to nuclear energy since the late 1970’s. In 1983, the Socialist government of Spain enacted a ban on the construction of any new nuclear power plants and has restricted the upgrades to any existing nuclear plants. This also haulted the construction of new reactors at two of Spain’s nuclear power plants, even though the reactors were already partially built. In 1994 a further law stopped any further construction on partially built plants, which had been in a state of limbo since the 1983 decision, insuring that the plants would be torn down and not completed.
Officially, Spain is committed to phasing out nuclear energy in favor of renewables. Shutdowns of nuclear power plants began in 1990, when a small turbine fire shut down one of the nuclear plants. The government would not allow an upgrade or replacement of the turbine, effectively shutting down the plant and any others which may encounter the need for systems replacements. The José Cabrera nuclear power plant, a relatively small nuclear power reactor was shut down in 2006 after 38 years of operation.
Spain’s ambitious renewable energy policy has helped the country achieve something that many would have thought impossible. Spain has actually done worse than pittiful policies of Austria. CO2 emissions alone have skyrocketed:
Coal consumption in Spain is down slightly, but the natural gas imports of the country have gone in a different direction. Want your energy, Spain? Better pucker up and prepare to plant a big smooch right on Russian’s backside, or someone might be inclined to turn off the supply. So much for domestic energy security…
The Netherlands – Very Green
You could just about call the Netherlands Greenland if the name were not already taken by the large island north east of Canada. The Netherlands actually provides taxpayer money to support groups like Greenpeace, which is headquartered in Amsterdam. Illegal ships run by groups like Greenpeace and Sea Shepard fly the dutch flag and are ported in Amsterdam. The Dutch have been big supporters of “renewable” energy and in recent years have been fervently anti-nuclear.
The country does have nuclear power reactors, but inn 1994, the Dutch Parliament voted to phase out all nuclear energy. In 1997 the first plant was shut down. A second nuclear reactor remains in operation in the Netherlands at the Borssele nuclear power plant. Plans had initially called for shutdown in 2003, but the power deficit could not be filled by other sources, leading for an extension in the plants operating license until 2013. Later the Dutch government decided that the plant would be allowed to operate up to 2033, if necessary, but have reserved the power to shut it down if they believe it is not meeting safety standards – a very arbitrary requirement.
The operators of the plant are required to pay most of the profits from the plant into a fund for “sustainable energy.” Profit is almost illegal in the Netherlands and in this case, the money goes to a fund that provides about half a billion euro in direct subsidies toward the construction of “sustainable energy” – meaning wind and solar power facilities.
In recent years, the Dutch public has become more receptive of nuclear energy, but with powerful entrenched groups like Greenpeace screaming bloody murder at the very word “nuclear” the country remains a very anti-nuclear nation in terms of policy.
Fossil Fuel Related CO2 has only gone up nearly as fast as wind turbines...
The increase in Co2 emissions is not surprising considering that the Netherlands has been burning nearly twice as much coal in recent years as it did in the early 1980’s.
Sweden – Somewhat Green In The Past (situation has changed twice)
Sweden is an interesting case when it comes to “Green” politics. Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, the government of Sweden favored nuclear energy and was not prone to burning money on things like renewable energy. That changed in 1980, when the political party in charge, force a referendum in which Swedish voters could vote on the fate of nuclear power in their country. However, the ballot measure only allowed for three different phase-out options, effectively making it a no-choice situation for voters.
For some time, Sweden was committed to the phase out of nuclear energy, but this never really happened because the language of the law allowed for nuclear energy to be used until renewable energy could replace it: In other words, forever. However, it also prevented Sweden from building or upgrading their existing nuclear plants. Despite the politics that seemed to hate nuclear energy, the Swedes by and large have supported nuclear energy in public opinion poles.
Only recently was the policy reversed. Still, in the intermittent time period, Sweden has, like many other countries, invested quite a lot in “renewable” energy and has seen absolutely no benefit from it. Today Sweden gets most of its electricity from hydroelectric and nuclear power generation. For political reasons, the two reactors at the Barsebäck nuclear power plant were shut down in 1999 and 2005, respectively. This lead to a small increase in the net electrical imports to Sweden. Sweden also has some fossil fuel power generating capacity, although this only accounts for about 10% of the total power generated in the country.
Interestingly, the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel in Sweden dropped throughout most of the 1970’s. However once “Green” politics began to take hold in the early 1980’s the dramatic improvements just about flatlined.
Sweden does not use natural gas in any large capacity for power generation. The use of natural gas has risen in years past, in part because Sweden used almost no natural gas prior to 1980 and has since begun to use gas for heating and industrial activities like oil refining. However, after an initial rise in the 1980’s, when gas was first introduced at a large scale, it has since barely increased at all. As a net exporter of gas, Sweden is not dependent on gas imports and not at all dependent on gas for electricity.
Sweden is not far from Denmark and has a similar climate (although it is actually a bit colder). It also has twice the population. Yet Sweden consumes only a tiny portion of the natural gas that Denmark does! Per-capita, the average Swede uses less than ten percent as much gas as the Danish.
Coal is also not used at any large scale for power generation, and has largely been disused for heating. Some coal is still used for industry, coking and other such uses, but the trend has been toward less coal consumption since the mid 1980’s.
The UK: A little bit of both. “Middle of the Road”
The UK is not the kind of green stronghold that many other European countries have become, but at the same time it is not strongly anti-green either. The country has 26 nuclear power reactors, with the last being built in 1988. Although the UK does not have any official “nuclear phase out” like other countries do, it also has not been building any new nuclear power plants. The proportion of British electricity provided by nuclear energy has dropped as some of the older plants have reached the end of their useful lifespans and been retired. The UK still operates at least two Magox reactors, which are considered to be technically obsolete and are slated to be retired in the next few years with no viable replacements yet forthcoming.
The UK also has a fuel reprocessing operation, although it not as large or as modern as that of France, in part because of political opposition. Politically the issue has remained very contentious. Two of the largest political parties in the UK (the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democratic Party) generally been opposed to new nuclear plant construction, but have fallen short of calling for a nuclear phase our or banning the possibility of new nuclear plants. The current political party in power in the UK is the Labour Party, which has generally been more receptive toward nuclear energy. In 2008 the government gave the go-ahead to begin planning for new nuclear power plants, but plans for new plants are still very tenative.
In other areas, the UK also has been only somewhat receptive to “green” politics and policies. The UK has begun to burn money on worthless wind turbines in recent years and has promoted “renewable” energy, but not nearly to the degree that some other countries have. Energy effeciency legislation in the UK has not generally been quite as draconian as in Germany, Spain or the Netherlands. The UK continues to rely heavily on coal for electricity, and like many other countries, has been increasingly turning to natural gas for power generation. British society has begun to fall for the “organic food” nonsense, but has not gone so far as to ban genetically modified foods.
Given the indecisive politics and general stalemate of British energy policy, it’s not surprising that the energy related CO2 emissions from the UK are not getting any better. However, unlike most of the “greenest” nations, they’re not really getting any worse either, which actually makes the UK one of the better examples of energy policy in Europe…
The UK did manage to decrease coal consumption for most of the 1980’s and 1990’s, but as “green” policy support became more popular in the mid to late 1990’s and new nuclear power plant construction ended, the numbers began to rise again.
So too has natural gas consumption. The UK has historically been a large producer of gas and increased development of North Sea natural gas fields in the 1990’s eventually lead to the UK being a net exporter of natural gas. Unfortunately, increased demand domestically combined with well depletion and restrictions on further development of natural gas fields has once again turned the tide and made the UK a net importer of gas.
Romania: Not Green At all
Romania is about as un-green as you get, if you go by the politics of groups like the Green Party, Greenpeace and other enviornmental groups. For one thing, Romania has not spent any significant national assets on “renewable” energy in the form of wind, solar and other worthless energy forms. Romanian energy policy has long favored the deployment of hydroelectric energy to the maximum extent and the use of nuclear energy.
Romania has been seeking nuclear energy since the 1980’s and began construction of its first power reactors the Cernavodă Nuclear Power Plant in the late 1980’s. The project was put on hold for a few years due to the disruptions caused by the fall of communism, but resumed in the early 1990’s. Unit one, a CANDU-6 reactor began full operations in 1996 and unit two in 2007. Unit two was amongst the lowest cost CANDU-6 reactors ever built and was completed under budget and ahead of schedule.
At present, Romania is constructing two additional reactors and has plans for the possibility of adding up to three more reactors in the near future.
The combination of pro-nuclear policies and improvements to fossil fuel power plants while all but ignoring solar and wind power may bother many in the psuedo-enviornmental movement but Romania’s CO2 numbers don’t lie.
Although Romania remains a net importer of natural gas, the country has managed to buck the trend of most other nations when it comes to natural gas consumption. Romania has slashed domestic consumption of natural gas, with a very noticeable drop when they first began using nuclear energy as a major energy source in 1996. Coincidence?
Coal consumption is generally down as well:
France: Not green at all and a huge thorn in the side of the whole “Green” movement
France embraced nuclear energy like few others ever have. In a relatively short period of time they went from being a large importer of power with very little domestic nuclear energy to being nearly 100% free of fossil-fuel in their power generation sector and the regions largest exporter of electricity. France managed to go from only a relatively small percentage of nuclear energy on their power grid to more than 80% i just a couple of decades.
The CO2 numbers for France are considerably better than many other countries. The country managed to buck the trend of higher CO2 emissions throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. Since the completion of the nuclear energy transition, CO2 has risen, but only slightly. All and all, France produces less CO2 today than it did in the early 1980’s and even less than the mid 1970’s. Something few countries can claim.
Natural gas consumption has risen, though not as badly as most other countries in the region. Recent initiatives to increase the use of electric heat and other replacements of fossil fuel with electricity are beginning to reverse this trend.
Coal consumption is another story. It’s only gone down to almost nill. Today France only uses a small amount of coal for things like coking and as a carbon feedstock for chemical processes. Coal is no longer used for prime energy in France.
Amazingly, despite these numbers, the French are not using less energy. In fact, the consumption of energy in France has actually gone up.
It should be noted that the CO2 numbers in France only reflect the gross emissions within the country. They don’t take into account the net reduction in CO2 emissions and gas consumption that occurs when French-generated nuclear electricity displaces other sources in adjacent countries. Exports of electricity have only gone up.
Germany: Very Green and phasing out nuclear energy
A quick look at the CO2 figures from Germany might lead one to think that the country is doing fairly well when it comes to cutting back. However, these need to be taken in context. The modern state of Germany came about from the reunification of East Germany and West Germany. East Germany was equipped with soviet-era infrastructure that was anything but effecient. Since then, there has been a rapid modernization of East German facilities, accounting for most of the reduction in CO2. Even so, the net CO2 emissions have not fallen by very much and are generally a flat-line.
Coal consumption dropped immediately after reunification, but by 1999, most of the older East German power plants had been upgraded and the trend began to reverse, if only slightly.
While coal consumption has only risen moderately, natural gas has seen a steeper rise.
Given that Germany has installed a great deal of wind, solar and other “renewable” capacity, you might think that they’re producing more energy than in the past. You’d be wrong, however, because domestic prime energy is actually down. This does not mean that less energy is being used, however, as more and more electricity is being imported.
The Czech Republic: Not Green
The Czech Republic has not invested very much in the favorite “Green” energy systems, such as wind and solar. The country continues to get much of its power from coal, but has embraced nuclear energy as and has considered expanding its nuclear power capabilities. 60% of the public supports more nuclear energy, which would add to an already significant domestic capacity.
Nuclear energy already represents 30% of the power generated in the Czech Republic. There are six power reactors in the Czech republic, with the first coming online in 1985 and the most recent coming online in 2003. Last year, the country announced it was interested in taking bids for building of additional reactors. There are also projects underway which are expected to upgrade the power output of existing reactors. The two reactors at the Temelin nuclear power plant currently produce 963 MWe each, but are being upgraded to produce 1050 MWe in the near future.
The enthusiastic support for nuclear energy in the Czech Republic has had some political concequences. Austria has repeatedly claimed that the reactors put their country in danger and even threatened to block the Czech Republic from entering the European Union. Yet the Czech Republic remains strongly in favor of nuclear energy, both for enviornmental benefits and because of the impact it has on the country’s energy independence. The head of the Czech Academy of Sciences recommended increased nuclear energy.
It’s no wonder that there is such support, the country has done quite well with the current energy policy. CO2 emissions are down since the mid 1990’s and have not risen as they have in most other countries.
Coal consumption has been on a downward trend.
This would not be noteworthy if, like so many others, the Czech Republic had replaced coal consumption with consumption of more expensive and mostly imported natural gas. It has not.
Conclusion:
While some might claim that correlation does not imply causation, it’s certainly clear that the more “green” energy policies are not producing any benefits when it comes to emissions or energy independence and economics. Furthermore, it appears that those which are most prone to embracing these policies are actually doing fairly poorly. The numbers are surprisingly consistent: countries which have committed most strongly to renewable energy and have moved away from nuclear energy are failing, while those that reject this ideology are doing very well, in many cases, improving signifficantly. Countries which are somewhere between or have gone back and forth on the issue have seen similarly inconsistent or neutral levels of improvement.
It’s also worth looking at the numbers for CO2 per capita rank. Nuclear-friendly France ranks number 59, and Sweden, which uses a combination of nuclear and hydroelectric ranks number 62. Meanwhile Germany ranks 36, but is rising, Belgium is 25, and Denmark is ranked 31. The Czech Republic is 24, but improving.
Of course, there’s more than just power generation that goes into what makes a country’s CO2 footprint large or small. Oil refining, heating and transportation also factor in. In general, colder countries use more energy and countries that are geographically large rely more on automobiles. Even given these differences, there’s no indication that sticking to a renewable-based and anti-nuclear energy policy does anything to help with CO2 emissions. Indeed, the data indicates the opposite may very well be the case!
The numbers don’t lie!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Good Science, History, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 13th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Cosidering my recent attack on Mr. Buzzo’s numbers, I can’t refrain from quoting this one, it is just too good:
drbuzz0 said:
Granted not much is known with absolute certainty about the dawn of man, but it is generally accepted (outside the creationist community) that homo-sapiens appeared between two and five hundred thousand years ago and left Africa about a hundred thousand years ago. Many European nations have a long and proud history, France included, but not even the famously proud French would trace back their ancestral settlement rights to before homo-sapiens, I think.
On a lighter note, In the view of many of their European neighbors, the French are stereotypically considered to emphasize the ‘homo’ part and ’skimp’ on the sapiens part of their human existence.
Satan_Klaus
Quote Comment
March 13th, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Matt the French said:
To some degree, yes, but there’s no way you can compare countries in Europe to the US in terms of composition in general. Sure, Germany as we know it is only 19 years old, but the region and the population goes way way further back. It’s one thing to have some influx of new and foreign cultures, but at some point it overwhelms a country and it’s culture and heritage.
In the US it’s always a complete mix. You walk down the street and see light skinned blonds walking next to red heads, Asians, Hispanics, Mediterraneans, Indians and so on. You go to any major city and there will be Italian restaurants, (which are actually an Americanized version of Italian), you’ll see Irish-themed pubs and bars, you’ll see many establishments that have a distinct mix of two or more cultures.
You see that to some degree in European cities, but go to some place like Ireland and a person with a Spanish accent or dark skin sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s not the color of their skin, of course, it’s more than that. Ireland has catholic churches and a few protestant ones. It has ales and stouts and cider and whiskey to drink. They eat shepherd’s pie and stews.
If suddenly the country were filled with other nationalities, such that there were more mosques than catholic churches, half the population didn’t speak English, belly dancing was more popular than dancing a jig, tacos, stir-fried rice noodles, curry cured lamb were the most popular foods and 30% of the population drank Saki while another 20% preferred vodka, then would it look anything like Ireland? No, of course not.
Yes, a culture can adapt and borrow from foreign influences, to some degree, but there are many cultures around the world that no longer exist because they were swamped and completely overrun by others. At one time, there was a very distinct German-derived culture that thrived in a portion of Western Pennsylvania. It’s been so dispersed that it no longer exists.
Matt the French said:
You are confusing legal citizenship with heritage. I’m an Irish-American. I’m a native born American but of Irish ancestry. This whole concept is fairly unique to the New World. Most French are simply French. Not Italian-French or Indian-French, just French. The only ones who can claim that in the US are Native Americans, and really there are very few 100% full blooded native Americans Anymore.
Obviously everyone came from somewhere at some point, but that’s besides the point.
“You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk, But then he added, ‘Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American”
Matt the French said:
You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve become so enamored by the idea of multiculturalism that you don’t even understand what a culture is.
Look, to use the melting pot analogy: If you have copper and you add a tiny bit of tin, you know what you have? You still have copper, only now it’s less pure copper. You add some more tin and now it’s “copper with some tin in it” then you add some more and now it’s neither copper nor tin, now it’s something new called “Bronze” now add lead and you’ve got “bronze with some lead imputations” and keep adding it and you have “Pewter” but keep adding more and more lead and you have “lead, with some minor impurities”
You know what would happen if you suddenly moved 200 million Chinese into Italy? You’d no longer be able to get around speaking Italian there and there wouldn’t be very many capachino places anymore. You know what would happen if you moved the whole population of Brazil into turkey? It wouldn’t seem very Turkish anymore. If you moved 30 million Indians, 40 million Chinese, half the population of Mexico and 20 million Russians into Ireland, then in addition to being very crowded, I doubt you’d see a lot of the culture Ireland is known for.
Quote Comment
March 13th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Satan_Klaus said:
I dispute your numbers for age. I personally buy into the hypothesis that places the divergence of homo sapians closer to 400,000 years ago and migration to Eurasia being fairly soon after that (50,000 years)
Actually based on everything we know about human migration, it tends to happen faster than we usually estimate. I doubt that humanity just sat in one place before starting to move around. I’d suggest that relatively early on in the species there was a movement into the Middle East and Europe.
The fossil record is fairly limited, I’ll admit, so there’s room for disagreement on that.
I suppose you’re suggesting, however, that there are no distinct cultures in the world and that if you suddenly moved 200 million foreign people into Germany, that there would still be beer halls, Oktoberfest, umpa bands, schnitzel and Christmas trees, just as there had been before.
Quote Comment
March 13th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
DV82XL said:
Hope I’m not picking a fight on this one:
To be fair, I don’t know that there would be any “French Canadians” as a group or in any way seen as seperate if there had not been a lot of concerted efforts to preserve the language and culture.
Quebec and Canada as a whole have a lot of laws and traditions aimed explicitly at preventing French from being overrun and assure that there’s always recognition. Less than a quarter of Canadians are French Canadian, and when you consider that the surroundings include the US and that France is an ocean away, I think that if French Canadians had been apathetic about the matter, then the whole thing would just melt into North America and be overrun with English, in the same way that the Pennsylvania Dutch (actually German) or the Appalachia Scots and the Acadia-Cajun groups basically faded into the background and melted into the greater North American English-speaking culture.
Quote Comment
March 13th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
drbuzz0 said:
No, I’m just making fun of your numbers because they are breathtakingly ridiculous.
As I admitted, not much is known about the early history of mankind and your early migration therory is a valid hypothesis. We can only know (with at least some) certainty when the earliest specimen of our race lived in Europe that we have found. Likely, the one we dug up by chance won’t be the first one to set foot in europe. Maybe homo-sapiens was there four hundred thousand years ago, we will only know for certain if we find one that old.
However, disctinct cultures are a remarkably shortlived, or rather rapidly changing affair. Nothing on the scale of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years like you insist. Germany has existed, in one form or the other, for about two thousand years but the sole (and only somewhat) consistant thing is the language. And even that changed a lot. A modern day German would have a hard time understanding 14th century German and proto-Germanic is a completely foreign language to him.
Most of the cultural institutions you described are very recent introductions, usually not more than two hunderd years old. Octoberfest is actually exactly two hundred years old, being first celebrated in 1810. Even the way we celebrate Christmas today, and consider it to be a traditional ‘must observe’ social event with rigid ritual, would be alien to a German just a hundred years ago. In short, cultures don’t get created, diluted, and as a result, destroyed; they flow. Many traditions formerly considered cultural staples of Germany have passed away along with the elderly people who failed to pass the tradition on to their grandchildren. New ones have arisen in their stead.
Of course a sudden, immediate, influx of, say, more than 10% of foreigners will dangerously destabilize a country. Possible climate refugees are a big danger factor here. But at a slower rate the foreigners will only transform the host countries culture gradually, which, as I have outlined, is a natural process. Even a European country does not consist of a monolothic culture, it consists of people. If the people change, so does the prevailing culture. Not necessarily for the better, but no worthy culture is in need of aggressively protecting every part of it. It’s good elements will be defended and eventually assumed by the immigrant minority while it’s less noteworthy parts will pass away and be forgotten. If Schnitzel is replaced by Döner Kebab, so be it. Same with Oktoberfest, Umpa bands and beer halls, all of them Bavarian traditions by the way, who consider themselves as ‘a people apart’ from the other Germans and only happen to share a language and a country by accident.
Bavaria calls itself a ‘free state’ for a reason. Before the unification of Germany just one hundred and fourty years ago, each of the little states that comprise modern Germany was free with its own monarch and alliances. It was common for them to wage war against each other and if it was not for an overpoweringly strong prussia, Germany might well have ended up as several smaller countries sharing the same language like the UK does with Ireland or France does with Belgium.
So culture and national identity are very short lived things in the great scheme of things and if the French manage to keep the (sometimes uneasy) peace with their immigrant community for just a hundred years, then, certainly the people of magreb decent will cheer for the same football clubs and eat the same ‘traditional’ dishes as the people whose ethnicity we noawadays call French – and, likely, some of those dishes will be of North-African origin as will be some of the players. Really quite similar to the ‘traditional’ side dish served to both the (actually Austrian) German Schnitzel as well as the Bratwurst: French Fries, which happens to have a distinct, uniquely American ingredient as well as being a Belgian invention.
Your ‘amalgamation’ example is actually not all bad, because this is exactly what is happening. But on a timescale that reaches over generations. For the old, the confusing and somewhat alien mixed culture they experience in their waning years is the natural culture of the young, native and immigrant alike. Of course there are always ‘pockets of resistance’, shut-out communities that try to guard their (not seldom immigrant) culture from adopting the mixed ways of the main stream but they tend to break down after a hundred years or so when no one alive remembers the old ways.
Satan_Klaus
Quote Comment
March 13th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Satan_Klaus said:
That might be true, but it has more to do with the attachment to a tradition or its composition in the mind of the public as part of their identity. Despite the fact that Oktoberfest is comparatively young, it’s one of those things that is quintessentially German.
What do you think of when you think France? If you had to draw something that indicated the setting was France, what would it be? I’m going to guess the Eiffel Tower. Is the Eiffel tower really a long standing institution of France? I should think not. It was built in 1889, against the wishes of a sizable number who thought it was ugly. It was proposed that it should be taken down after the 1889 World’s Fair.
Yet can you imagine the outcry if this young, initially temporary structure were taken down or even damaged? It is so iconic to the cultural identity and the emblem of Paris and France that to be even threatened would likely result in an enormous backlash.
There’s the statue of Liberty in New York, which is not even American. My family lived in Brooklyn New York, and it might seem odd that 40 years after a baseball team left Brooklyn there would still be a very deep scar and feeling of loss. I mean, they were only there from 1883 to 1958. The Holiday of Thanksgiving has only been celebrated since the 1860’s in the US and is one of the deepest rooted traditions.
It really doesn’t matter how old something is as long as it’s old enough that no living person can remember before it.
Satan_Klaus said:
Traditionally, yes, it has been gradual and gradual change is not generally the kind of thing that causes conflict – not in the same way that something like completely overhauling something in a matter of a few years does. It would be considered tragic by most French if the sidewalk cafes of Paris were gone, replaced entirely with Mideastern-style markets, Turkish bizzares and Irish pubs in a matter of two or three years. Perhaps it would be tolerated if it happened over several decades…
Why is it that it would necessarily be so gradual without some kind of method of control or keeping it in check? An airliner can carry a good 500 people, and transport them from one part of the world to another in less than a day and there are literally millions of people around the world who can afford a ticket and might consider France a better place to live than where they do now.
It’s entirely possible, with modern transportation infrastructure, that 60 million Chinese, 40 million Pakistani’s, 30 million Indians, 30 million Africans, 20 million Latin Americans, 10 million Russians and a few million others could be brought to France in a matter of months. Whose to say it would never happen? Mass migration of such an extent is not without precedent, although mechanized transport and current populations would dwarf anything in the past.
The vast majority of Indians have a lower standard of living than most in France and there are about one billion of them. The same goes for much of China and Africa. If given the opportunity, who is to say that the country of France could not see a population influx so enormous that the national density became larger than one human being per every few square meters while the population density of India dipped bellow that of Antarctica?
It is both technically and economically feasible to transport such enormous numbers in a few years.
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March 13th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
It is actually worst than that, doc: it was estimated that given the opportunity to freely immigrate to an industrial first world country, approximately three billion people would take it. If there were a developed country that had an absolute no questions asked open-door policy it would be overrun – the market for cheap travel could be so enormous that they would have container ships ferrying tens of thousands per voyage at a rate of thousands of arrivals and departures per day.
There is actually a theoretical point at which the population density at sea level over a large area is so huge that carbon dioxide is produced by respiration faster than it can defuse and people begin to die from it, but I’m sure they’d die first from other things.
Given that immigration movements tend to continue even after an area is no longer hospitable (it takes some time for word to get back that it’s just as bad over here as back there) a small European country that opened its borders could be so overrun that habitable areas would be literally shoulder-to-shoulder for miles on end. LITERALLY shoulder to shoulder.
Say nothing of cultural suicide, such a policy would be direct suicide.
Oh back on topic: The numbers regarding Germany and power and pollution are a bit ambiguous. However, I don’t think there’s any doubt that a closer look reveals that the energy policy since the mid 1990’s has been an epic failure. Not quite as bad as spain perhaps, but much money has been burned on wind turbines even as they construct enormous coal power plants.
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March 13th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Chem Geek Gregor said:
That is actually a good point. The reason why I was attacking Mr. Buzzo’s statistics was because from the presented statistics alone, for Germany, beside being misleading (primary energy production vs. consumption) you can’t read the ‘epic environmental fail’ out of them. Green Germany has actually had some successful environmental strategies, like introducing insolation standards for homes, and those, unlike the startup solar plants, might actually show in the statistics as well as the usual random noise.
However, there are things very worthy of critique. A thousand times worthier, actually. Did you know that Germany actually is subsidizing coal? COAL! And not just a little bit. Subsidies used to be 8% on every kw/h (I can’t find current numbers at the moment because they don’t put it on the power bill anymore) but solar subsidies are just 1.2 cents per kwh and at ~20 cents/kwh end user price those 8% for coal used to be a bit more than that.
To sum it up for sane people who can’t get this madness into their heads on the first try: The German government is paying mining companies to deplete its own country of natural resources, destroying the landscape in the process, so that power plant operators don’t have to import CHEAPER coal from Australia.
The blame is mainly on the Social Democrats who fear of losing a traditional voter clientel. But the Green party to blame as well because they never campaigned to put a stop to this madness. Their reasoning: “Anything is better than nuclear.”
COAL! Argh!
I don’t disagree with everything on this site. I just get the feeling that the polemics to facts ratio is sometimes a bit too high for proper scientists. If you come upon a statistic that doesn’t say what you want to say, it’s not good form to bend the facts until it does. It might do for the other side but it’s not good enough for us.
Satan_Klaus
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March 13th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Satan_klaus said:
Point taken. On a larger note, this actually occurred to me when making this post. The problem is this: the situation with Germany is especially complex and very difficult to express or go into without going pretty in depth into the policies and statistics.
Of course, that presents a problem. What should I do? Omit the country from the comparison of European countries? No, that would be a very glaring omission. Perhaps I should have gone more into it. However, if I did, it would have taken up about three pages on its own.
I chose the middle road. To include it and to simplify or summarize much of the context, probably over-simplifying it. This may have been a mistake. Actually, it probably was.
Of course, you can’t really dissect the energy policy of a country with a few graphs. Especially on the European mainland, there is enormous back context to this. The continent has undergone no less than two major economic revolutions in the past 20 years – the fall of Eastern Block communism and the rise of the EU as a major economic force. Countries have completely changed their political standings multiple times and none really have a monolithic, consistent and one-sided energy policy.
Perhaps I missed my initial point that I tried to start off with. My point in showing these numbers is this: Many believe that those societies which adopted renewable energy subsidies, tariffs and so on lead the way in improving enviornmental footprint. Yet, it appears that there is no greater trend of improvement associated with that kind of policy
Regarding my criticism of Germany, Spain and others for energy policy, I get asked about this a lot as to why I pick on these countries. Is it because I think that US Energy policy is better? Do I think they’re really the worst ones in the world?
No. US energy policy is deplorable. It’s horrible. There is very little I can say good about American energy policy at all. However, I see no need to convince anyone of this. The US has a horrible energy policy that has earned it a well deserved poor reputation. It sucks and everyone knows how bad it sucks.
That said, I am constantly hearing about how Germany in particular and also Spain and the Netherlands are shining examples of everything a country should be for energy policy. In fact, I constantly hear politicians suggesting that we need to be more like them or that the rest of the world is in danger of falling far behind these few countries which are the leaders of the world in making a better planet, developing better technology and also that their **** doesn’t stink.
There are constantly articles in the American and International Press that say things like “Germany’s Big Green Energy Boom” and “US Falling Behind on Green Energy” or “Spain Solar Energy is Envy of the World.”
This is what gets to me. The US is currently blowing the tops off of mountains in West Virginia, and shame on us for doing that! It pisses the hell out of me. However, I dislike hearing that the answer to this problem is to be more like Germany, which is doing no better.
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March 13th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Gordon said:
French Quebec maintained its language and culture through its own efforts long before Person and the B&B commission decided the federal government should get involved, and it might surprise many outside hat Provence did not think it was a good idea to shove French into the face of the rest of the country ether. However having said that the whole issue comes down to this: When the confederation of Canada was formed, it was agreed that there were two founding peoples and two official languages that would be considered co-equal. This was the contract made to forge this nation.
When I wrote above that I know what it feels like to be considered a foreigner in the country of one’s birth, it is because I am old enough to remember being treated like an unwelcome alien in parts of Southern Ontario when I was a kid, and being told to ’speak white’ and being told to ‘go back to Quebec and stay there’ Now these were red-necked ignoramuses, upset because we just used their bantam hockey team as towels to wipe-up up the ice in their own rink, but it was very unsettling, and it wasn’t just the one time ether.
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March 14th, 2010 at 1:54 am
DV82XL said:
Okay, you’re right about that, but part of my point is that it’s something that French Quebec did make efforts to do. It’s like they were apathetic to the prospect of being overrun by their English-speaking neighbors and completely lost in the mix. I mean, since the beginning there was a recognition of the culture. It’s not quite like some other distinct cultures and languages that are isolated and end up being overrun, because I don’t think really bothered to even consider some of them until they were trampled over by a larger group.
DV82XL said:
Forgive me if I come off as ignorant of what that’s all about. I’m not from anywhere near there, I don’t speak French and my father and therefore 50% of my family came from Michigan USA, so I have no idea what that’s like.
Still, that sounds like a bunch of idiot punks just blowing wind at someone who is “different” and no citizen should need to suffer that kind of bull****.
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March 14th, 2010 at 8:13 am
drbuzz0 said:
This is a stupid example: copper and tin can not have sex together and share their genetic pool and their culture. Culture is the reflection of a group of people, it evolves everyday; it is not as permanent as the atoms are.
drbuzz0 said:
Do you read what you are writing? This is ridiculous: your numbers are ludicrously high and your argument make no sense at all, this has nothing to do with the actual numbers of immigration in France in the last 30 years, which was the start of the discussion if you are remembering correctly. You are trolling your own blog.
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March 14th, 2010 at 8:58 am
Gordon said:
This is probably not the place to discuss this topic – however, “je me souviens” was not a phrase coined just for the purpose of writing it on car license plates. We have a history of struggling against assimilation, since the Quebec Act of 1774. There has never been a time where this wasn’t a factor in French Quebec’s relationship with North America.
Gordon said:
In many ways it was, however it was also an accurate reflection of how French-Canadians were historically received in the rest of Canada, in fact the phrase ’speak white’ was routinely flung at soldiers during the war when two of them had the audacity to talk to each other in their own tongue in earshot of English speaking officers.
Look I have no chip on my shoulder, and I’m not a Separatist. As far as I am concerned we are maîtres chez nous in Quebec, and our language and culture are both strong. But to pretend that there are not those in English Canada that wish we would assimilate, and are vocal about it, is to ignore reality.
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March 14th, 2010 at 11:57 am
Matt the French said:
No, it’s an extreme example to illustrate a point. Obviously 100 million is not a realistic number, but at one million the same effect would occur, although smaller. Still, if there was an open borders policy, it’s not really that unrealistic that there could be hundreds of millions in a few years.
I really hate it when something goes this off topic, though..
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March 15th, 2010 at 10:57 pm
Matt the French said:
Hey, that’s not nice. I’m not obese.
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July 23rd, 2010 at 8:13 am
DV82XL Says
“Negawatt supporters, and I have yet to see properly referenced sources for their contentions that there is a vast amount of room for improvement. In fact in most cases they are not preaching higher efficiencies, (that is doing the same with less) as they are demanding a net reduction in overall use by being frugal. This is not the same.
As to the second point, there are no efficient renewable sources, that themselves do not have a major environmental impact like hydro, and geothermal for example. Converting more nebulous sources like wind, waves and solar will never be efficient in any systemic sense because they are too damned diffuse and intermittent. To properly harness them would require vast installations that themselves would both dominate the landscape and raise the level of complexity of the grid past the point where it would remain reliable.”
While you claim that “I have yet to see properly referenced sources for their contentions” by other commentators you yourself are guilty of the same, as in the last sentence above. Mere assertion doesn’t prove anything. Similarly with your use of terms like “Negawatt”, “worthless renewal energy”, etc. Using pejorative terms to colour alternative energy sources doesn’t provide much support for your arguments.
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July 23rd, 2010 at 10:51 am
Pierre Yeap said:
The term ‘Negawatt’ was coined by Amory Lovins, a known supporter of renewable energy. In his vision, Negawatt power is the idea of creating incentives to reduce demand for electricity to ease the load at peak times or alleviate the need to build more generation plants. In theory, these negawatts can be aggregated and an arbitrage market could be created to trade these. However there is little to distiguish implementations of this scheme from simple from simple rationing via punitive tarifs. Thus my contention that it is not about higher effececies, but net redutions in consumption.
Hydroelectric power plants sited on rivers change the natural conditions of these water bodies through both short-term and long-term impacts. These manifest as changes in water quality, erosion, fluctuation in water temperature and water flow, and eutrophication. As well the migration of aquatic species, and shifts to the gross ecology of the effected water shed must be taken into account. These are not trivial. See here:
COMMENT HYDROELECTRIC DAMS: TRANSBOUNDARY ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS
There are several environmental concerns behind geothermal energy. The power plants can adversely affect land stability in the surrounding region. Hot water from geothermal sources will contain varrying amounts of dangerous elements such as mercury, arsenic, and antimony which, if disposed of into rivers, can render their water unsafe to drink. See further:
Geothermal energy: Effects on the environment
The shortcomings of wind and solar have been discussed many times on this site, with references provided. I’m not going to repeat them here.
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July 24th, 2010 at 1:57 am
Matt the French said:
Me, I can’t understand France
I’ve been there many times, and the people are brilliant. Marseille has THE best rugby culture on the planet. French energy policy is outstanding. The roads are excellent. Civil engineering is brilliant.
Labour policies are hopeless. The economy is ridiculous… I don’t see how most French people can feed themselves, given prices and incomes.
It’s almost the polar opposite of the UK… particularly when it comes to the roads.
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July 25th, 2010 at 11:59 am
DV82XL said:
Up until the advent of the Industrial Revolution Man had lived more or less in harmony with nature and had left relatively little impact on the natural environment, including the biosphere. However in a mere 200 years or so, Man’s impact on the environment has become more and more unsustainable, basically enabled by the exploitation of first coal, and then petroleum resources. Until the present nuclear energy has made very insignificant contribution to this energy mix. However this situation is unsustainable beyond the next few decades. The Sun is ultimately the fundamental source of long-term renewal energy whilst nuclear energy (discounting fusion energy in the foreseeable future) is not really sustainable for very far into the future – perhaps a few decades – until uranium runs out, see quotation below), unless fast breeder nuclear (or fusion) reactors are deployed. See quotation from Gavan McCormack in japanforum.com :-
Long-Term Nuclear Program. The dream of energy self-sufficiency has fired the imagination of successive governments and generations of national bureaucrats. Trillions of yen have been channeled into nuclear research and development programs. The lion’s share of national energy Research and Development (64 per cent) goes on a regular basis to the nuclear sector and additional vast sums, already well in excess of two trillion yen, have been appropriated to construct and run major centers such as the Rokkasho nuclear complex.[16]
Nuclear power at present makes a modest and declining contribution to world energy needs, 17 per cent in 1993 declining to 16 per cent by 2003. Just to maintain existing nuclear generation capacity globally, it would be necessary to commission about 80 new reactors over the next ten years (one every six weeks) and a further 200 over the decade that followed.[17] To double the nuclear contribution to the global energy, bringing it to about one-third of the total, a new reactor would have to be built each week from now to 2075.[18] The head of the French government’s nuclear energy division, speaking to the April 2006 Congress of the Japan Nuclear Industry Association at Yokohama, estimated that in order to raise global reliance on nuclear power from its present six per cent to 20 per cent by mid-century (ie, a modest increase) it would be necessary to construct between 1,500 and 2,000 new reactors globally.[19] Even such a mammoth undertaking, trebling current nuclear capacity, would still constitute only a modest contribution to solving global energy problems.
While it can be argued that all forms of renewal energy, including wind, solar, tidal, geothermal or even old-style hydro have their environmental impacts they are ultimately the only long-term solution to global energy requirements, and the sooner they are developed the earlier the unsustainable fuels can be phased out, before negative environmental effects become irreversible. Environmental impacts of most types of renewable energy can be mitigated to acceptable levels, and can ultimately be reversible, if necessary. The same cannot be said in the event ‘accidents’ happen to even the best designed and maintained nuclear facilities, and the likelihood of such ‘accidents’ happening will increase exponentially and become ultimately inevitable as the number of such facilities increases. This is not taking into account the problems of disposal of nuclear waste, which have by no means been solved. All nuclear waste produced to date have only been temporarily stored, not permanently disposed of safely. With the proliferation of nuclear reactors of all kinds the problem will only get worse. While uranium wastes may ultimately be reasonably disposed off at great cost in an acceptable manner, the same cannot be said of nuclear waste containing plutonium contamination. It is well known that a teaspoon of plutonium dispersed into the atmosphere (as would happen in the case of a catastrophic explosion of a fast breeder reactor, or even of the detonation of stored plutonium or plutonium waste) would kill tens of millions of human beings (perhaps all human beings as well as all animal life). Please be aware that all nuclear (uranium fuel based) reactors produce plutonium as a by-product. The environmental impact of such nuclear catastrophes will be irreversible and cannot be compared to the negative environmental impact of renewal energy facilities. Please see:-
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Gavan_McCormack/2602
It only takes ONE error to permanently render the earth potentially uninhabitable to humans and perhaps all life. AND THAT ONE ERROR/ACCIDENT WILL HAPPEN.
<The shortcomings of wind and solar have been discussed many times on this site, with references <provided. I'm not going to repeat them here.
All these impacts of renewal energy are reversible or can be mitigated. BUT it only takes ONE error at a fast breeder nuclear facility to permanently render the earth potentially uninhabitable to humans and perhaps all life.
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July 25th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
I am so impressed by cut-and-paste postings by those that cannot understand the contents.
Sufice to say that this is nothing but noise unless you can supply some proof for assertions like “It only takes ONE error to permanently render the earth potentially uninhabitable to humans and perhaps all life. AND THAT ONE ERROR/ACCIDENT WILL HAPPEN
Anyone can say anything they want; the real question is can they martial enough in the way of facts to prove what they claim. You have not met that minimum standard to be taken seriously here.
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July 25th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
As I understand it, there was 13kg of plutonium in Fat Man, 1 gram of which was converted to energy. The majority of that 13kg remained plutonium and was quite effectively dispersed into the atmosphere. Is it a miracle that there is still life on Earth?
What about the many test explosions of other plutonium bombs? How many times has the Earth been saved from plutonium poisoning by sheer dumb luck?
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July 25th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Shafe said:
Both the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were uranium bombs of relatively small size. Even then most of the survivors of the blasts died of radiation disease subsequently.
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July 25th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
Who can this person be so breathtakingly stupid?
Please Google:”Fat Man” fathead, and tell me again that Nagasaki was hit with a uranium bomb.
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July 25th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
DV82XL said:
You censure comments when they don’t come with references. When references are given (even quoted) you again resort to polemic and baseless insults. Perhaps the only evidence that will convince you will be the effects you suffer when you are confined to the same room as a kg of plutonium for a short exposure.
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July 25th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
You provided no references.
The bomb dropped on Nagasaki contained no uranium.
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=1016
A kg of Pu will not harm you unless you eat or inhale it.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter13.html
You don’t seem to be very good at this.
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July 25th, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
Pierre, your last post shows you have not done even the minimum to try and understand these issues. Why should anyone take what you say seriously when it is painfully apparent that you know very little of the subject at hand? The only insult here is being made by you to the intelligence of everyone here.
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July 25th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
If by “harmony” you mean hand to mouth, with a short average lifetime and a lot of fighting to avoid starving to death, freezing to death or otherwise dying because of nature and ultimately generally dying of infectious disease then yes…
Actually the average person’s impact was, in many ways, much higher without industrialization. It’s just there were fewer people and they lived much shorter. An example would be sewage. If your population is small enough you can all **** in the woods and its no problem. More people and designated outhouses, latrines and eventually sewage treatment becomes a necessity. Likewise, a single family living in a small cabin can cut down a surprising amount of trees to just keep warm. Central heat and indoor plumbing reduce the per-capita impact.
Pierre Yeap said:
You skipped right past the renewable biofuels: trees and whale oil.
Pierre Yeap said:
Oh PUH-LEASE. We’ve had a few meltdowns, a big explosion at a huge nuclear reactor that blew the whole damn core into the atmosphere. We’ve had major meltdowns at at least two fast breeders, a fire in a graphite reactor pile, several accidents in the Soviet Navy. There have been many thousands of nuclear explosions, hundreds in the atmosphere. Some of these tests were multi-megaton and tests have been conducted in the upper atmosphere, at ground level, at medium altitudes, under water, in shallow pits and in every other situation you can imagine.
The earth remains inhabitable.
Shafe said:
We are still alive despite the fact that:
- The United States and United Kingdom dispersed many kilograms in non-critical nuclear tests known as “plutonium dispersal tests.” These tests actually included simulated weapons miss-firings and other events to determine plutonium dispersal and contamination. Some noteworthy events included Operation Roller Coaster and Project 56
- The Soviet Union and China engaged in similar tests, although the number and scope is unknown. They may well have been larger.
- Nuclear weapons are not 100% efficient in fissioning plutonium. Early weapons only fissioned a bit more than half the plutonium. Hundreds of atmospheric tests have been conducted and all plutonium weapons tests have left some plutonium behind.
- There have been several incidents that scattered plutonium as the result of weapons being destroyed or the primary exploding. These include the 1950 crash of a B-36, The 1966 Palomares B-52 crash, which scattered plutonium across beaches in Spain, the 1968 Thule Incident, the explosion of a Redstone missile carrying a nuclear warhead on Christmas Island and others including several by the Soviet Union.
- In 1978, a Soviet RORSAT nuclear-powered satellite entered the atmosphere and scattered transuric and fission byproduct material across Northern Canada.
DESPITE ALL THIS, LIFE CONTINUES!
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July 25th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
When you say “radiation disease” are you talking about acute radiation sickness or long term issues like cancer?
Most of those who survived the initial blast and died within the later days and weeks had not only radiation sickness but burns and other injuries, so it’s hard to really separate those.
However, the vast majority of those who were in the area and lived for months or years after actually lived relatively healthy lives. There has been an increase in cancers shown in the late 1940’s and into the 1950’s, but it was not as huge as some have made it out to be. It may be that a few hundred died. I don’t mean to downplay this, but war is hell and people who are subjected to having the city bombed don’t generally have the best health.
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July 25th, 2010 at 11:27 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
You’ve either been terribly sloppy with your citations or just outright dishonest. You do not distinguish between the cited material and your own commentary when you credit the linked paper. You make it sound as though the author wrote:
When the author’s actual statement was:
You extrapolated from a “teaspoon-sized cube” sufficing to “kill 10 million people” to a teaspoon “dispersed into the atmosphere” killing “tens of millions of human beings (perhaps all human beings as well as all animal life).” How about a citation for that whopper.
Further, consider the quality of your citation. Look through the author’s own citations and see how many refer only to other opinion pieces. In his conclusion the author cites Greenpeace to support the assertion that wind power can provide more energy and jobs than nuclear. Come now.
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July 26th, 2010 at 12:01 am
Shafe said:
Not Even Wrong
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July 26th, 2010 at 1:24 am
Chuck P. said:
It could hurt you if a brick of it fell on your head….
PS. Don’t feed the trolls.
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August 1st, 2010 at 11:27 am
Chuck P. said:
The bomb dropped on Nagasaki (“Fatman”) had a fissile core of a few kg but a much more massive uranium (U238) tamper (cylindrical neutron reflector blanket) which formed an essential part of the ‘physics package’. Generally (although not technically) speaking it could be described as a uranium bomb. The Hiroshima bomb was wholly uranium.
Chuck P. said:
If this were true, why the need to store plutonium using such elaborate methods? Plutonium is dangerous not only because it is radioactive, but because it is the most poisonous material on earth. Do you disagree that the incidence of cancer world-wide is much higher today than since the commencement of nuclear tests and their deployment at Hiroshima and Nagasaki)? You don’t need to eat or inhale a kg of plutonium for it to kill you – a very few milligram would do the job nicely. Of course if it fell on your head it would also do the job if it fell from high enough
.
Chuck P. said:
Maybe not, but the point I’m trying to make is why not go for renewal energy when its negative effects are much less dangerous and harmful than nuclear reactors with all their long term and potentially catastrophic consequences all along the life-cycle production chain. Actually I’m not totally against nuclear energy, but only when fail-safe solutions have been found for all the short and long term problems associated with its deployment. In fact I believe that if nuclear energy is to be used, breeder reactors that can use available fuel for at least thousands of years should be the objective, not conventional reactors for which the fuel resources can only last a few decades at most. The risks and the pollution are not worth the reward. In the meantime we should go for a mix of renewables, especially distributed plus centralized renewables of all types. The run of ideology in this forum seems to be nuclear to the exclusion of everything else. One would think that this forum is sponsored by the nuclear industry. There is no attempt at a balanced and objective discussion at all.
Even the data used by the article itself appears selective for the sake of the thesis. While the point that is attempted to be demonstrated is that renewables are not making any significant impact on carbon emissions even in the most progressive European nations despite all the investments committed up to date, the data for carbon emissions only go up to 2005 (generally stable), while the figures for gas and coal consumption go up to 2006 or 2007. except in those countries that are not “green” i.e. France or Czech Republic, or Sweden or Romania. Since the figures for CO2 emissions are generally flat, while the figures for coal are going down and those for gas are going up, the conclusion is drawn that any reductions in CO2 emissions in all these the countries surveyed countries are due either to increased gas consumption or better to nuclear power. Actually only reductions in CO2 emissions in the 80’s or 90’s can be attributed to nuclear power since there have been practically no new nuclear plants have been constructed since the mid 80’s (other than in Romania and Czech Republic. While it is true that since the mid 90’s the reduction in emissions can be attributed to the replacement of coal by gas, it doesn’t account for all of it. Part of it can be attributed to renewables, but if the data were extended to 2010 a much more significant contribution from renewables would become apparent, since most of the renewable energy plants have come online only in the last 5 years (and most of it in the last 3 years). Some of the reduction since the mid 80’s can also be attributed to increased efficiency in usage or generation and not to nuclear.
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August 1st, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
No, it cannot be described as a uranium bomb, and it is not in any of the literature and not in the sense that you used the term up thread. You were just plain wrong due to ignorance, and this pathetic attempt to justify yourself post hoc is an insult to our intelegence.
Pierre Yeap said:
What elaborate methods? MOX is shipped and handled much like regular fabricated nuclear fuel. Pure Pu pits for weapons use are under very high security due to what they are used for, and because they are highly valuable, not because of their toxicity or radioactivity.
Pierre Yeap said:
No it is by far not the most poisonous material on earth as has been said : for example, the botulins from degraded food, or methyl-mercury, are many many times more poisonous and dangerous, and fast acting. The claim that 1 microgram of plutonium is deadly is not true; atmospheric weapons tests have unfortunately spread a few tonnes of plutonium dust over the globe (3-10 tonnes), enough to kill all 6 billion of us if it were true. Any flower pot contains thousands of plutonium atoms produced by the impact of the cosmic rays on the uranium traces present in any amount of soil. Plutonium oxide, which is the most common plutonium compound used in industry, is not soluble in water and will be rejected if ingested by accident. Fine oxide dust , if inhaled, can be deleterious to health, but so can cadmium oxide, and lead oxide, and several other materials used in industry. For all of these precautions are taken.
Pierre Yeap said:
A platform for a balanced discussion is available – that is the reason you can post here. That doesn’t mean that you can get away with making statements in support of anything without offering proof. When you can show hard numbers, from real-world installations that show that these renewable technologies are living up to their promises, we can have a balance discussion, but this is not the case anywhere, and that is the problem. We cannot bet the future on technology that cannot deliver – it’s just that simple.
Pierre Yeap said:
Show data then to prove that renewables are making a positive impact, you are doing nothing but engaging in post hoc ergo propter hoc, (the logical fallacy of believing that temporal succession implies a causal relation) in asserting that there have been reductions attributable to this source. You claim the data will show improvement, therefore: show this data.
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August 1st, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Pierre Yeap said:
Tell you what: I’ll eat a milligram of plutonium, and you eat a milligram of botulin. The stakes of the bet will be that we will each other all our stuff, so the one who lives longer gets it all.
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August 2nd, 2010 at 8:26 am
DV82XL said:
DV82XL, the master of polite and refined language strikes again, demonstrating his superior [sic] intelegence for all to see.
Even though you may be the nicer person, he has his facts right on Plutonium at least. It’s a nasty stuff, highly poisonous and very radioactive, but there are quite a few more dangerous substances out there, some of them even natural. We have lived through several hundred nuclear tests, many of them atmospheric, and with no world-ending cancer epidemic in sight. I’m not saying it’s harmless or even healthy, but it is far less dangerous than many people claim.
Also, unless you happen to inhale or inject the plutonium, most of it will pass right through you so I wouldn’t recommend taking up Matthew on his bet. A milligram of botulin will kill you outright, whereas ingesting a milligram of plutonium is not recommended but will only raise his cancer probability a little bit. Inhaling it would be fairer, but he would still hold on to your stuff for a good ten or twenty years before the cancer might get him.
Satan_Klaus
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August 6th, 2010 at 2:29 am
Satan_Klaus said:
Thank you for your enlightenment and viewpoint. Civil discourse and comments are much easier to accept than outright abuse. Nevertheless the mention of Chernobyl incident has been studiously avoided in this forum and the exclusion zone remains off bounds to humans up till today, a 30 km square zone rendered useless for humans. Large parts of Ukraine Belarus and Russia as well as other European countries remain contaminated, and agricultural products from the region surrounding the ex-NPP continue to be banned/excluded from European markets. Surely there must be a reason?
The claims that there have been thousands of nuclear tests by one commentator is surely an exaggeration.
Moreover most nuclear tests since the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty 1965 (correct me if I’m wrong) have been underground, therefore the pollution impacts subsequent to that date would be relatively negligible.
As for outliving me by 10 or 20 years, that might be possible, but it would hardly be in the prime of health. At least I would make a quick and clean and graceful exit. Botulin may be more neurotoxic, but it doesn’t stick around for tens of thousands of years, passing up and down the food chain, unless the challenger chooses burial at the bottom of a very deep mine shaft. Besides there are antitoxins against botulin. And one type is actually used in BOTOX cosmetic procedures. AND botulin seldom occurs in large quantities unless manufactured as biological weapons. They mostly come in sealed canned food that haven’t been properly sterilized and are produced in anaerobic conditions. If somebody dies from botulin poisoning, there would be an immediate alert. Being proteins they are easily denatured by heat. I haven’t heard of cases of mass poisonings or fatalities. Not so if catastrophic explosions occur in plutonium (or other nuclear) reactors. The potential fatalities could easily be in the thousands. And by admission in this forum many mishaps have occurred, almost invariably involving some human error, and since to err is human, ergo catastrophes are inevitable. Ergo mass fatalities are possible if not inevitable. That is not considering intentional ones that will occur if large quantities of radioactive fuel or waste fall into the hands of terrorists. Who can guarantee it won’t happen, even if it hasn’t happened till now?
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August 6th, 2010 at 4:05 am
Pierre_the_idiot said:
First of all Chernobyl has been mentioned, discussed and debated several times, and in several threads on this site. It has never been avoided as a topic, and making assertions like this without bothering to check if they are right does nothing to improve your credibility. You obviously make up ‘facts’ as it suits you, so do not be surprised then if you are treated with derision.
The over reaction to so-called contamination from this event has been discussed on several occasions, most recently here: http://depletedcranium.com/radioactive-hogs-on-the-loose-in-germany/
The event at the Chernobyl reactor was caused by an inherently poor design, shoddy construction coupled with a criminal lack of good judgement. There is simply no rational grounds for continuing to hold this event up as an example of the potential for an accident at any modern nuclear power plant. In fact if anything it demonstrates just how small the overall impact of a worse-case power excursion and critical loss of containment is even under the poor emergency response conditions that were in place at the time.
Therefore your chain of reasoning is demonstrably false.
You are just plain wrong. Wrong in your assumptions, wrong in your grasp of fact, and wrong in your reasoning. You also do not give any references to support your contentions. Expect no respect from any one here until you correct these errors.
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August 6th, 2010 at 4:32 am
Yours is a three part question so I will answer in three parts as well.
Botulin is quite deadly and has, in the past, been responsible for quite a number of fatalities and permanent disablements due to paralysis. But you are right that Botulin is easier to deal with then plutonium. It can be burned or otherwise destroyed while Plutonium will stick around. With a half live of 24000 years, it decays very slowly. But because of the long half live of plutonium the damage is slow and gradual as well. It is the DECAY of a radioactive substance, not the presence of it in your body that does the damage. Thus, to do significant damage, the Pu particles have to remain in your body for a long time. However, Plutonium has no biological function and thus the body will fail to absorb most of it (if ingested, not inhaled or injected) and this will lower the danger. Again, I’m not saying that it is harmless or to be taken lightly, only that it will NOT destroy humanity if released, even in quantity. Humans mess around with a lot of substances that are dangerous to us and the environment and plutonium is one of them, not the pinacle of poisons.
Second, thousands of nuclear tests HAVE been performed, even if it is in the low thousands. The US alone admits to 1,151 tests, 300 of them atmospheric. Together with the Soviet Union and the smaller countries this adds up to about 2000 tests. Most of these test shots were very small, but a few well documented ones were full-size “city destroyers” with significant fallout. These were of course performed in remote locations but the fallout that reached around the globe was insignificant enough to permit both you and me to be born and grow to adulthood. Again, I’m not saying that atmospheric testing is good for your health. Only that the health impact is very small if it is done more than a thousand or so miles away. It was a great injustice on the people who lived downwind of the test sites, but it was not more than a nuisance to those who didn’t.
To your third concern, I must say that I, too, am concerned about the size of the Tschernobyl exclusion zone. The USSR was (relatively) lucky that it was a more remote region that was affected, but the economic damage of losing such a large piece of land in, say, the Moscow region or southern Germany would be incalcuable. Today, most of the zone could be inhabited again but no one wants to move there. All the infrastructure has rusted away and all the businesses have moved away. It will remain a dead zone for decades to come.
Modern light water reactors are much safer than the design used in Tschernobyl, but in the final analysis, when taking into account human error, miscalculations, natural disasters and even intentional destruction like war, sabotage or terrorism, a catastrophic failure can not be said to be impossible.
HOWEVER, most human endeavors are fraught with danger. The industrialization of the world comes at a price, a price that we all must pay. Species go extinct, we suffer from stress and too little excercise, breathe the smog of the city… And still, we wouldn’t want to miss out on industrialization. It keeps us safe from the dangers of NOT having it, like freezing cold, smallpox and famine. Without electricity there is no industry today, and even before then we burned coal, which is not exactly healthy. If anything, Tschernobyl teaches us that the worst case scenario for a nuclear power plant is not the end of the world. It hurts, and it is horribly expensive, but life goes on.
In the end, it boils down to either abandon civilization or to accept some risks. I’m not exactly in favor of the way power is produced today, but I think we have to accept that for the live we lead we have to accept some risks. And it is not just nuclear power. Maybe somewhere in your neighborhood there is a chemical plant that may blow up like Bhopal did, or you live on the gulf cost where you can see up close what fuels your car. Or maybe you live downstream from a hydroelectrical power plant. Those are dangerous, too. And they are all, in one way or another, facilitating the life you lead.
What risks exactly we want to accept in favor of others is open to debate. I think we are taking too many risks out of greed and lack of common sense, and sometimes too little risk out of a lack of vision. You can make your own assesment of what is a safe risk to take, but with whatever you choose, there will be some risk involved. No technology is ’safe’ in the final analysis and everything we do has an impact on the environment, and we better learn to accept that.
Satan_Klaus
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August 6th, 2010 at 6:59 am
DV82XL said:
If they were not radioactive (and therefor usable as/in weapons of mass destruction) they would not need to be guarded under very high security. No security system is infallible/unbreachable.
DV82XL said:
Even if I agree with the thesis that renewables have not made much contribution to CO2 emission reduction up till 2005, “have not delivered” doesn’t logically imply “Cannot deliver”. That is the contention that I find totally unacceptable. Also even if renewables cannot fulfill all future energy requirements or completely replace fossil fuels, it doesn’t imply that only nuclear power can and should do the job to the exclusion of all else. Not even the nuclear industry has made that claim. No doubt the contribution of solar and wind or other renewables (except hydro) have not been very significant up to 2005 (the latest figures cited for CO2 emission). Nevertheless, every kilowatt of renewable power can make a contribution. If the US50-100 billion that the nuclear industry is asking the US government to provide investment guarantees for were instead deployed for renewables, there would be a very significant increase in the contribution of renewables. The same would happen if it were applied in any of the “green” European countries, probably to a greater effect than if applied to NPPs. I believe 1GW of wind turbine capacity now costs under US3,000 billion, whereas the typical nuclear NPP (plant alone, not including life cycle costs) now costs more than that. Besides the performance of NPPs under construction in most cases far exceed that, due to cost over-runs, delays, etc. In fact the history of nuclear power plant construction has been so dismal that they are basically unbankable without unreasonable government subsidies which inevitably means end users actually pay far more than the nominal electricity tariffs. Citibank has a report/analysis to that effect. In fact, going by performance, renewable energy, especially solar and wind can be ramped up far faster than nuclear power. A solar or wind farm can be commissioned within a year or two – nuclear plans often take up to 10 years (25 years in the case of Romania). The delivery infrastructure can also be implemented progressively to match plant construction. And renewables have the advantage of being localizable, and disperserd right up to individual homes and buildings. In fact by the time nuclear power can be ramped up (safely or otherwise) to make a significant new contribution there might be very little justification for it due to the projected increase and proliferation of renewable power facilities. That is probably the impetus for nuclear proponents (as in this forum) to claim that because renewables haven’t made significant contribution (up to 2005) they should be totally left out of consideration, a very self-serving argument (indefensible and illogical) indeed and usually used by incumbents who fear competition because they themselves are uncompetitive. Either the energy mix should be left to market forces, or equal and fair financial support should be given to all potential forms of energy that can contribute to the reduction of CO2 emissions (concurrent with energy security and sufficiency). A priori, renewables can reduce CO2 emissions. They are not “worthless” or “useless”. Nuclear is also useful but comes with many hidden costs and potential dangers, but should not be ruled out of the equation either. Take China, for instance. Wind power production has increased by leaps and bounds (statistics are available) over the last 2 years alone. If the rate of growth is continued the contribution of renewables will be very substantial within 10 to 15 years. The same can happen elsewhere – it’s a question of the amount of resources that are deployed or are willing to be deployed.
DV82XL said:
Please point out where I have made that implication.
The relationship between CO2 emissions and renewal energy production is indirect because it is complicated by the increase in total energy production, increase in power production from gas and reduction of coal and oil energy usage, conversion of transportation fuel usage from petrol or diesel to gas, relative number of diesel and petrol and gas (LNG) powered vehicles, the use of biofuels, etc as well as renewable energy production. As long as increases in total energy production are partly met by gas the the contribution of renewable energy to CO2 emission reduction will be empirically masked. If the increase in natural gas usage is more than the reduction of coal or oil energy production, then CO2 emissions will still increase or be flat. But without the contribution of renewable energy the increase would have been even more. The effect will only become apparent when renewable energy increasingly replaces coal and oil for existing energy production and substitutes for gas in new energy production. However where total energy production is flat or increasing, any CO2 emission reduction must be attributable to renewable or efficiency improvements in those countries where no new nuclear plants have been commissioned, and energy production from gas is at the same time not increasing sufficiently to replace the reduction in energy production from coal, meaning renewables are making up for some of that reduction, since overall CO2 is decreasing. This appears to be the case for Germany. Of course the import of electricity will also have to be taken into account. On the whole it is difficult to validate the conclusion that the contribution of renewals to CO2 reduction is “worthless” without co-relating to total energy production and other factors such as oil consumption, etc.
(Perhaps the above could have been expressed more succinctly and elegantly.)
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August 6th, 2010 at 7:24 am
Pierre_the_idiot said:
God, I should hope so!
Er … no. Not by a long shot.
Perhaps this is the source of your deep confusion. You apparently think that a modest size nuclear power plant costs $3 trillion, an amount whose size on the order of the entire federal budget of the US.
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August 6th, 2010 at 7:25 am
Pierre_the_idiot said:
The failure of wind and solar are not in their CO2 contributions, or lack thereof, but their inability to produce reliable, dispatchable power. When they are put on the grid they have to be backed up 100% with spinning reserve from other more traditional generators, and where hydro is not available now for that task, it means gas or coal combustion. Because of that, wind and solar are stupid little toys and they will forever remain toys. Storage and distributed generation is not the answer ether. The penetration and the amount of extra capacity each site would require is higher that the available resource in almost all cases, and that is assuming the storage and distribution technology is available, which it is not.
Other renewable modes like tidal and wave power are worse. In practice, only relatively small amounts of energy are available from these, and extracting it will have devastating effects on the ocean ecosystem. Good sites for tidal power are all in extraordinarily rich and ecologically fragile straits and estuaries that are critically important spawning grounds for marine life. Strong tides are what make these waters so productive: their turbulence stirs up nutrients vital for life. Tides are indispensable for life in shallow seas. Without them, ocean life would come to a halt. Wave power risks beaches, fishing grounds, marine life migration lanes, and surface transportation corridors. Extraction of their energy may seem attractive, but in reality there is very little energy to be had – and what there is comes at high ecological/economic cost.
None of these will never power an advanced civilization. They are a waste of our economic resources, our attention and our time. If you need to see more proof, just look through this site, we have been over these arguments again and again.
Pierre_the_idiot said:
You have been doing little but making the implication that renewables are making a positive impact; it is the core of your own argument, and you are doing it again in the comment above.
Pierre_the_idiot, indeed
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August 6th, 2010 at 7:28 am
Peter,
Congratulations, you’ve managed to collect all of the usual anti-nuclear myths in one place.
I have neither the time nor energy to refute them yet again point by point.
I will only point out that Denmark who has come as close as anyone to following the pro-renewables path you lay out above emits seven times as much CO2 per kWhr of electricity generated compared to France.
Which nation has chosen a more effective means of reducing CO2 emissions?
Denmark: 650 g CO2 per kilowatt hour
France: 90g CO2 per kilowatt hour
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August 6th, 2010 at 10:05 am
DV82XL said:
I would like to challenge that assumption.
When you put an artificial structure into the ocean, you will destroy some marine life in the short term. But what you have created is basically an artificial reef, a biological niche that is generally considered more ‘valuable’ than plain ocean floor. In the past, this has regularly happened to the supports of oil platforms, which are teeming with life (unless they blow up). Now when you go out of your way to put something like that right into an ocean current or active tidal area, you will attract even more life. Most of these creatures eat by filtering seawater. What they need is a place to hold on to, that is exposed to the flow. Most marine life will love tidal plants – and that is the reason why those things won’t work: They will be loved to death and clogged up. And maintenance, even the simple act of cleaning the equipment, is really expensive if it’s underwater.
Changing something out of its natural state in not necessarily bad for animal life. This is something many of the radical environment faction don’t understand, I’m surprised that you don’t either.
Satan_Klaus
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August 6th, 2010 at 11:40 am
Satan_Klaus said:
Actually it is not just an assumption.
While what you say is true that life may not be destroyed by these installations, the ecology will change in ways that have other impacts. For example most areas that would be ideal for tidal power are already being exploited economically by other industries, fisheries for example, among others, or are the access to major harbours, or the mechanism by which riverine silt is transported out to sea. Disturbing the tides in these areas can have major consequences far beyond the value of any power that can be extracted. Nor is the impact just local. Ocean hydrology especially in littoral zones is poorly understood, and some models show that a major project on the Bay of Fundie, for example, could have impacts on the shoreline as far south as Cap Cod.
Wave farms can result in the displacement of commercial and recreational fishermen from productive fishing grounds, can change the pattern of beach sand, and may represent hazards to safe navigation. These may be or not be issues in every location, however the maze of regulatory gymnastics that is be required because of the possibility, has made money very scarce for such projects. This is not helped by the fact that models of the wave/shore system are incomplete.
So in the end prior use will probably be the determining factor with this technology, and since the shores are normally populated by white people, simply flooding them out, as is done to the natives, for hydro projects in Northern Canada, isn’t likely to be a solution.
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August 6th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Satan_Klaus said:
That’s exactly my point.
Satan_Klaus said:
I am not against industrialization or technology. However, there are approximately 400 NPPs today (some are in the process of decomissioning ) accounting for about 6% of of total power production. To replace all fossil fuels at present capacity (no growth) it would require at least 6,000 to 7,000 new NPP’s of present average power, i.e. 18 to 20 times the current total number of plants. With that number the likelihood of a plant being sited close to a major urban center will increase considerably, and the next nuclear catastrophe will have that much more chance of being even more devastating than any in the past. To achieve that number of NPPs by 2050, there would have to be about 4 nuclear plants completed every week from now until 2050, assuming a lead time of 5 years. I don’t see that kind of investment in the pipeline – average USD 600 billion per year world wide starting today. For the US (and now China) which consumes 25% of the world’s energy that is USD150 billion per year. I don’t see even 5% of that in the near future. Then again by 2050 total energy demand could be double present values at 2.5 to 3.0% growth per year.
Satan_Klaus said:
Again, exactly my point – we have reached a stage of technological development where we can pick the most environmentally benign technologies to satisfy or fulfil our needs. And I don’t think nuclear comes at the head of that list. We can still use it, but there’s no need to make it our exclusive or even main source of energy. And only in good time, when all the potential dangers and drawbacks have been minimized to an acceptable level. The much vaunted “latest” generation NPP being built in Finland and France by Areva are currently running behind schedule and grossly exceeding their budgeted costs and undergoing constant revisions in basic design and safety features, improvising even as they are being constructed – a far from perfect design, and yet to be proven in performance.
Satan_Klaus said:
Yes, greed and technological hubris plays a big part in the choices that have been made in the past. That is what we have to eliminate.
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August 6th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
BMS said:
Sorry, I meant USD3,000 million, or USD 3 billion.
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August 6th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Satan_Klaus said:
Pierre_the _idiot said:
Satan_Klaus is not correct in his implication that the failure of a modern reactor can have the same impact as Чорнобиль even under the worst case scenario. That is because, unlike the RBMK reactor design, modern light and heavy water reactors have containment, the effectiveness of which was proved at Three-Mile Island. Also the very construction of these modern reactors precludes a catastrophic melt-down under most conditions because of the void coefficients built into the design.
Furthermore the scope of the Чорнобиль accident, and the reaction of the Ukrainian has been blown out of proportion for political ends, and much of what is going on there is not supportable by the science. For pity sake, downtown Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each which received a greater radioactive hit than the Exclusion Zone, were repopulated sooner.
Pierre_the _idiot said:
No we have not. The belief that renewable technologies can pick up the slack from combustion technologies is simply not supportable by fact. Imagining it can does not make it so. The fact is that more and more power is being generated by coal and gas every day, and the numbers, that is the amount of power needed to replace them cannot possibly be made up by renewable energy and even the industry itself admits to this. Nuclear energy is the only technology that can even hope to produce the amount of electricity needed to run a modern society.
Pierre_the _idiot said:
The only hubris in play here is the breathtakingly arrogant belief that the West is still in a position to call the shots on this matter anymore. Asia is committing to nuclear power, and there is not a damned thing the West can do about it. We ether follow, or get left in their dust.
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August 6th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
DV82XL said:
I understand that it should be impossible to blow up a water moderated reactor by accident, but that is why I included miscalculations, natural disasters and willful destruction. If someone puts enough thought and C4 into a nuclear plant, he WILL get it to blow up. The point I wanted to make was that Tchernobyl was a demonstration of the worst case. No matter what happens, it can’t get worse than this. And it was bad, but it certainly was not the end of the world.
Pierre_the _idiot said:
Multiplying the number of NPPs by twenty will multiply the likelihood of an accident by twenty, it won’t increase the severity of the accident.
Pierre_the _idiot said:
We have to keep two things separate, and that goes for both sides of the argument. On the one hand we have what is currently happening or what is financed and/or has political support, and on the other hand what is possible, only limited by current understanding of the technology.
Nuclear power is a proven technology and building this number of power plants should be possible with a concerted effort. It won’t be cheap, though, and it is unlikely to have political support, at least in Europe.
Going all renewables would be an experiment, but it seems feasible, albeit at a much higher price. We might have to pay ten times the price we pay for our power today, but I believe it could be done…but I don’t see it happening. It’s just too expensive.
So there is the ‘possible’ on one hand and the ‘likely’ on the other. I think both scenarios, all nuclear and all renewable are possible in this absolute sense, but both are highly unlikely.
Pierre_the _idiot said:
Again, this is the realm of the ‘likely’. And yes, Asia is building NPPs at a rapid pace. They now have the money to afford the relatively high initial capital expense of nuclear power. They also want to be independent of foreign resources.
Interestingly, China is also building quite a number of wind power plants. Usually, the technocrats in Beijing – unburdened by the opinions of their people – make very sound, rational decisions. So analyzing this might shed some light on the economy of wind power. Is this just a testbed for export turbines? Is wind actually economical for them? Or are the Chinese afraid of being ‘left in the dust’ and simply ‘do as the west does’? I don’t have a pre-made answer for that and would be interested what people have to say to that.
Satan_Klaus
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August 6th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Satan_Klaus said:
You need to take a closer look at modern reactor technology before making assertions like that. I don’t think you have a clear idea of how they are designed and built. Even a wilful attempt to blow one up would fail, short of having a professional demolition team come in with drills to plant charges. The possibility of any man-made attempt , or in fact, a natural ‘act of God’ doing in one of these plants such that there would be a significant release of radiation or radioactive material is vanishingly small.
I understand your point, however any comparison to Чорнобиль is just not applicable when it comes to modern NPPs – and I hope that you will excuse me if I feel obliged to drive this point home for the benefit of anyone else reading this.
Satan_Klaus said:
The increasing penetration of wind power has exacerbated the problems of delivering reliable power to users. “Because wind energy is unstable, it is a pollutant and affects the safety of the power grid,” said Hu Xueha, the deputy chief engineer of China’s Power Grid Research Institute. Furthermore, the transmission capacity of the grid hasn’t kept up with the growth of China’s wind farms. According to recent data from the China Power Union, only 72% (8.94 GW) of China’s total wind power capacity was connected to the grid.
Ref: Great Leap Forward for China’s Wind Energy
In addition, increasing China’s wind power capacity means increasing coal use as well, to provide power when the wind isn’t available. “China will need to add a substantial amount of coal-fired power capacity by 2020 in line with its expanding economy, and the idea is to bring some of the capacity earlier than necessary in order to facilitate wind-power generation,” according to Shi Pengfei, vice president of the Chinese Wind Power Association.
Ref: China’s Wind Farms Come With a Catch: Coal Plants
Shi is also concerned about the high cost of wind power, which makes the industry dependent on the government’s willingness to subsidize renewable power. “It isn’t that wind power is showing signs of over-heating. It has already overheated.
Ref: Wind power growth in China’s deserts ignored financial risks
The National People’s Congress permanent committee passed a law that requires the Chinese energy companies to purchase all the electricity produced by the renewable energy sector.
Ref: Alternative energy news
That is what they have to say, which looks suspiciously like what is going down here with wind. Winds greatest asset it seems, is its capacity to mesmerise politicians of every stripe. Even Chinese ‘technocrats in Beijing – unburdened by the opinions of their people,’ are sucked in it seems, and yet the promised power never quite seems to materialize. Yet somehow more fossil-fuel needs to be burned when it is found that wind is writting checks with its mouth that can’t be cashed.
Does anyone else see a pattern here?
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December 2nd, 2010 at 11:00 am
Thank you so much, this was very interesting. I was actually born in Spain (I’m not telling you when though!) but moved around europe and lastly settled in Britain when I was 7. I dont remember much of the few years I was in spain, but the delicious smell of spanish food always seems to ring a bell in me or something. It’s weird how I dont remember anything except the smells,isn’t it! I actually found a internet site dedicated to spanish recipes, which gave me great delight and thought I ought to share with your readers. Anyway, thank you again. I’ll get my husband to add your feed to my rss thing…
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