Comments by "" (@rstevewarmorycom) on "TED"
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Okoye Ahmose It DOES happen today, it's ALWAYS happening, but 1) it happens and has always happened VERY VERY SLOWLY, taking tens of thousands of years, and 2) we didn't used to move around much, people who move around a lot over many generations defeat the local trend and average out any directions of change so that nothing happens, and 3) sunblock and folic acid and shelter and clothing change sun exposures. Also, the blue eye and blond hair genes originated by mutation around the Black Sea 25,000 years ago. They became advantageous BECAUSE of the lower sunlight at those latitudes, they enabled more vitamin D to be produced. The sun didn't "change" skin, the skin is always mutating in all directions, but this mutation became extremely advantageous for reproduction because it prevented Rickets, so people with it were more able to reproduce successfully than people with darker skin in higher latitudes, and slowly came to dominate the population.
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Christopher Willis As a "future nuclear engineer" I think you have inevitable blinders on. I'm a physicist, when I got out of school the nuclear industry approached me about running one of their reactors. I declined. All my fellow physics graduates declined. We saw the writing on the wall even then, and that was the '80's.
The IPCC is desperate to save the world. That's nice, but these guys are NOT engineers, they don't seem to realize that it would take 10 times the current cement production of the USA to build the 10,000 reactors they would like, and that we would never beat climate change that way, it would take too long. Reactors take too long to build and commission and the process cannot be short-cutted without dangers. And we don't have a tenth the educated talent to run them. It would take over a generation to produce that many nuclear competent scientists, and the high salaries of said experts will bankrupt the process of trying to produce cheap competitive power.
Wind and solar are cheaper than any nuclear so far conceived, and are ready to be expanded on a war-time-like footing right now, and today!
While nuclear is fascinating, I think you may be committing your career to a dead horse.
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JombieMann It doesn't much matter, that amount from solar and wind is all that we will have. The quickest cheapest way to add to it at that point is STILL solar and wind. So they had better get to agitating for it.
You "not thinking" that solar and wind will ever make up a large proportion of generating capacity is just you "not thinking". The numbers work, I'm a physicist, I have napkined this problem many times.
And no, it's NOT too expensive and unpredictable. It's CHEAPER than nuclear and anything else PER WATT, and that's what we need to measure. And solar and wind are distributed, the wind and sun don't fail everywhere at once, if the equipment failed it can be replaced in a day, and unlike nuclear we don't need whole backup plants for when they go down unexpectedly for weeks or months, which THEY DO!!
Wind and solar are ALREADY making up 50% of the power in Germany. And they are continuing to build!
You are being overly PESSIMISTIC, and for no good reason. You have some sort of layman's "impression" that solar and wind are "weak" or "unreliable", when NONE of the data shows that. Just because they don't involve centralized powerful machines throbbing and endangering their workers and all nearby, you assume that something that runs quietly could never do the job because, in effect: "It doesn't make enough noise", or some such bullshit. Typical science illiterate.
Go buy a $100 panel that makes like 100 Watts. Put it on your roof or carport, or your RV. See how much you can run off it, then buy a few more, and a few more, and soon you have a roof full of them and they are making 3000 Watts for you, and you put a few batteries in your garage and that runs most of your stuff? Now, what were you saying? This sort of math sneaks up on you, but it is inexorable. You and 100 of your neighbors invest in a half MegaWatt wind turbine, just a small one. You can each get 5000 Watts when the wind blows. You hook that to your batteries in your garage with a $200 inverter. It meets all your needs and pays for itself in eight MONTHS!! Inexorable.
It's hard to admit and realize that we have been cheated for power by big players for a hundred years, but that IS what happened. Nobody knew how to do it but them, so we assumed it was hard. It isn't. This always happens with new technology, those in the know rip everybody else off for a while, till the competition develops. Solar and wind IS the competition, and now they are eating the big players' lunch!
And now with the new technology and education about electricity, we can do it ourselves and get rid of the big players.
The NIMBYs and BANANAs (not in my back yard & build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) will simply find the power turned off till they comply with the rest of us. When they find they can't get it any other way they will freak out and beg to join up.
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JombieMann Everything you just said is a distortion of the truth being promoted by fossil fuel interests. I'm a physicist and I have bothered to do the calculation. If we cover every roof in the US with photovoltaic panels, we can meet 90% of our current energy usage in homes and businesses. Manufacturing takes a bit more, but not that much. Wind turbines in the midwest now sell power at under 3.5 cents/kW-hr. That IS cheaper than power from coal. We could ALSO meet all our needs with only wind power, it is that abundant. Both of these pay for themselves in under a year and provide energy for 40 years. The very small amount of power we need at night can be more than adequately supplied by a rack of storage batteries in each garage, or stored on board your electric car batteries. Your notion of "hundreds of square miles" is totally erroneous. Nuclear would not work because we would need to build over 10,000 nuclear plants to meet our needs, and we don't even have enough cement for the concrete to do so. It would require 5-10 times our current production of cement. Energy companies now installing wind and solar have found that instead of making the grid less stable it makes it MORE stable, because there are no massive breakdowns in such highly distributed equipment. In other words, the so-called "base load problem" is a fossil fuel company myth. The costs of power from renewables FIGURES IN the costs of building, in fact that is MOST of the cost, since they consume no fuel at costs. There are solar farms now producing power at 5.6 cents/kW-hr, which is below that of methane-fired plants. Only laymen and amateurs at this make the mistake of thinking they need "great big plants" to supply our needs. The thorium reactor in the '50's was a money-pit and the govt ditched it as too expensive. NOBODY has ever made a nuclear plant that produced truly cheap power, the unforeseen cost overruns eat them alive, which is why none of the big money now is even thinking of nuclear, they are all buying solar and wind as fast as they can.
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nulI No, you have wind, which is almost a perfect complement, since it blows more at night and lower sun conditions. Nuclear is relatively safe, that's not my objection. It's that it is always much more expensive per Watt generated, than are renewables, which are NOW cheaper and becoming ever yet cheaper by the year and the expansion of their production. Nuclear will not ever keep up with that. Never. All the studies on final costs of nuclear reactors to date show they were horribly expensive by the Watt, when all costs and downage were factored in. Solar and wind do not GO down spectacularly, a few panels might test bad and have to be replaced or their wiring fixed, one in a hundred turbines might need service, but none of these amount to a significant percentage of power production. They are predictable, and so need less backing up than major sized plants of any ilk.
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Gavin Rae You seem to think physicists are "book worms" or ivory tower isolates who don't deal with the real world. I'm a retired physicist-engineer, I've designed real things you have actually probably used.
I grew up in the rural midwest, graduated high school with an enormous score on the ACT (yes, genius level) and ETS tests and numerous other honors, including Latin and Greek, and worked 3.5 years as an EMT in a small midwestern hospital where I had to learn to do practically anything and DID. I became a hog farmer in Missouri and raised corn and soy beans, and I have rebuilt a large number of farm and commercial engines and equipment, I weld and have used a complete machine shop.
And THEN I went back to school to finish my degrees!! I have designed and built two working solar-heated homes in Missouri, winters of -25F to 105F. I also designed the software that troubleshoots the Montana Power Company half million volt twin three phase line across Montana to Coalstrip. I've TAUGHT electronics to technicians. So you imagine there's something I don't know how to do? You would be an idiot to chance it!! I have good REASON for my pride and self-confidence, AND my ego is FULLY justified in my self-aggrandisement!!
There is nothing wrong with what the TED guy said, except he neglected to tell the whole story. Solar and Wind are now cheaper, and shall continue to be ever more so. That's cheaper PER WATT amortized over the life of the equipment!!
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David McFarland Something being "safer" can mean that it very seldom goes bad or does harm, but that doesn't consider that one time we lose a city to radiation. I care about people and their future. The simple existence of any centralized corporately owned access to energy is anti-democratic, makes people less free and independent agents of their own destiny, and binds them to slave for the profit of a rich elite. The rich want the rest of us to have to buy power solely from them, and finally renewables are a way to eliminate their greed for money and control. All profit is inherently corrupt, because the safeguards that would be there with strict government control and ownership by the people is absent and the motivation is NOT for the good of all. Trusting them with nukes is just one step too far. Restrictions on nuclear are THERE FOR A REASON, called Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima!! Latest figures on the new PV plant in Dubai is they are coming in at 5.6 cents per kW-hr. The same can be done here. That is between 4 and 7 cents less than ANY nuclear anyone has ever seen, and nuclear gets more expensive by the say as renewable costs continue to drop like a rock. Wind is 3.2 cents per kW-hr in Texas, beating out even coal! It's well worth it to see the richies go have to suck on it!! They half destroyed the world so far, and now they want the other half. Well we're going to put them out of business!!!
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We exist. That is obvious. The evidence is that we can SEE it. That someone had to make us is not something that is seen or witnessed, so there is NO evidence for that AT ALL.. We exist by being aware because being aware is the only way existence is possible. What would it even mean to pretend something could exist without an awareness witnessing it? In what sense would its existence BE REAL? It wouldn't. And non-existence can't exist because it is non-existence, what we call impossible. Therefore only existence is possible, and only by means of and within an awareness. Atoms, yes, big-bang, okay maybe, chemistry, sure, physics and energy, by all means, Darwin, of course. But it all happens BY MEANS of awareness and exists AS A PART of the existence of that awareness, because nothing else is possible. Non-existence, because it IS non-existence, is impossible. We exist because we can't do anything else or we wouldn't be WE. If that's too anthropic for you, too bad. It happens to be true because nothing else can be.
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***** Yes, but embodied energy means we waste most of what we use that for, so lets mandate standardized re-usable containers, and mandate the re-sale of all items, and not permit their disposal and require the person who doesn't want them to offer them to others in a common space, like a recycle yard. This HAS to be govt mandated, we're headed for 3 more degrees C this century, and twice that the next. Whether people know it yet or not, this IS indeed an emergency situation. This is NOT a matter of personal choice as to lifestyle, This is what we MUST do. Aeronautical experts have already said that the high prices of air travel being more than most now are willing to spend is not the fault of the airlines, but the problem of the cost of fuel and equipment. They also say that this will be the last generation for a while for the average person to be able to fly on jets. Better go with Elon Musk's ideas for transport. I don't care whether people "would like" a vacation in the south of France or Tuscany. They will find that it is soon out of range for most of them. Prices will see to that as we are forced to put more tariffs on carbon fuels. We don't have to go vegetarian, we can eat fish and poultry, those are not much less efficient at converting grain than we are. But your meat consumption WILL fall, prices will see to that. Cars will also have to go, they consume way too much, as MacKay showed you. Instead of 10,000 kWs a two or three wheeled ultralight <100kg battery vehicle with a thin aerodynamic weather shell can do 30-40 mph on less than 600 or 800 Watts, have a range of 50 miles, and it can be charged from home with a few solar panels in a few hours. If mass produced as a hobby kit, each family can own several. Gives a new meaning to "I can't drive 65!!", don't it? That sort of thing can be done right away and in only a few years we have the monkey off our backs. Then, if we get PRISM or another scheme working, or fusion, then we can do more, but humans really need to grow up about this stuff, and this is a way to achieve that. They have to learn how to build vehicles and generate power, they will feel and be more independent, and they free themselves of some huge monkeys on their backs that have been strangling this economy, If the govt put us on a war-time footing for the production of solar panels and wind turbines, we might not have to suffer hardly at all, but we would still have to learn to live a slightly different and more conscious way.
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***** There is that, but two things: We need to decide with something potentially dangerous, and that's a democracy sort of thing, even renewables have that, it just doesn't have to be as careful because those aren't dangerous, AND, it isn't THOSE costs I was worried about, more like nuclear transport, security, mining, waste management and cleanup of decommissioned reactors, as well as the day to day costs of the expertise required to run them safely, and then there are govt subsidies and liability insurance costs born by government.. Add those all together and you wind up with a much higher cost than the cost on your energy bill, and much higher than renewables. The Chinese changed several of their reactor plans and are now increasing renwables much faster than coal and nuclear put together. Part of this is due to being unable to breathe in Beijing and several other industrial cities. The rest of it is falling costs for wind and solar. Russia is peculiar, there are lots of entrenched oil interests in the former Politburo families that are now the Russian Mafia, and that, just like the actions of our rich to protect their investments, is probably behind their failure, but Russia is nearly a 3rd world economy lately anyway. It continues to amaze analysts how the Russians keep their space agency going, and it is believed that without American help they couldn't. The Saudis are now building Mazdar, the solar city, and they are experimenting with several giant solar thermal plants that are floating islands. They haven't gone solar big time yet, I think they are worried about frightening the west into believing they are running dry, and probably won't till they actually start to run dry on oil, which analysts say is any time now, some Saudis have privately said that their oil reserves are mostly salt water, saline intrusion.
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***** It's not a matter of being some kind of renewables authoritarian, but about saving the planet and humankind. If I'm authoritarian about that, so what? Carbon has to be stopped, and I'll accept anything that works, but things that are more expensive will be slower to expand because we can't afford them as well. As for fossil getting less subsidy than renewables, maybe that is true, but that is only because now that they have the subsidy they produce more of it because they bought their equipment base with the subsidies and they've stolen the market. If renewables had received as much total subsidy historically to bring them to a parity of subsidy over time, then I'm sure there would be even more solar, and less subsidy per kWhr for renewables as well. Since the subsidy pays for the equipment investment, if renewables had the same degree of investment, such as the huge grid and highway system enjoyed by coal and oil, then I'm sure it would have spread all over. This stuff is hard to gauge, but it seems true. And people seldom think of it that way. The whole society is structured around fossil and we're so used to it we think it's normal, so ask yourself what would a society built around renewables look like? High speed trains, or capsules, electric velomobile and other ultralight electric bicycle and tricycle lanes as superhighways? Much less grid and more localized power generation from wind and solar? More widely spaced homes and people growing most of their own food by backyard permaculture and vertical gardening in agrarian cul-de-sacs serviced bicycle lanes and by delivery drones and helicopter EMS? Transport of goods by tubes to each neighborhood? No more strip mines for coal or mountaintop removal, recycling all materials? Neighborhood aluminum re-casting using solar furnaces? Local reuse of benign reformable plastics like HDPE? Huge solar and windpowered clothes dryers serving the whole block? All shopping done by computer? Neighborhood solar and wind projects? Things could be quite different.
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***** Amory Lovins is FAR more optimistic than I am about it, he thinks the free market can do all this, and I doubt that very much. I think finally he will run into the last major bank of entrenched investors and they won't budge because it means they won't be rich anymore. And it won't matter if the sheeple vote guys out of office, because the climate will finally frighten everyone into doing the right thing, just maybe too late to even HAVE a next century. Long about the latter part of this century when the great American breadbasket becomes a dust bowl for the third year straight people will start clamoring for their elected guys to "DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!", and then the experts will tell them what they should have done, and they may try to do it all waaay too late. You see, the problem is, that even if we stopped emitting carbon right now, totally, the warming would continue for a century or more, and that might be enough to destroy most of the food crops of the world. You can't just move all food production north, and the equatorial nations will be one big refugee camp, starving and loading guns. Amory deals with the corporate youngsters and those whose bread comes from keeping up with the times, but he has yet to make inroads among the filthy rich, the ones who already "got theirs" and want to keep collecting on old investments and enjoying expensive cars and mansions and vacations till they croak. So for now it actually SEEMS like his way can be successful, so let's just wait and see, shall we? I won't be around, so all I can do is warn you and leave.
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***** No, it doesn't quite work that way, the state changes forbid it. Also, cooling by the refrigeration required is very energy intensive. And that requires lots of waste heat that cannot be concentrated enough to continue the process without even more energy. It gets crazy trying to cogenerate that way. The best form is vacuum distillation, and even it requires lots of power per Liter. After that comes RO, and that takes slightly more. I don't know why you keep pretending Lovins wants this "energy poverty" like you imagine I do. He's a big champion of keeping the same moronic standard of living and brute forcing it with lots of wind and solar, and he likes some nuclear too. He's convinced capitalism can do it all, and I'm not. He's a very bright guy, but not of the same tack as me. I don't even think my approach is "energy poverty", just a more ordered society where we do the same things, but very efficiently using renewables. And the scarcity you fear is NOT artificial, it's going to be VERY real fairly shortly.
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I can tell you don't really know a thing about solar. Any home can be made to heat and cool itself. All it takes is more south-facing glass, and 4" exterior superinsulation. Combine that with ventilation into a pipe system under the yard or an insulation skirt on the ground around its perimeter. For homes with few windows on the south, use solar walls or Trombe walls, masonry with glass over it to absorb heat. If you once upgrade the houses you will never need power plants or to replace them every thirty years. I don't know where you get the notion that wind is "inefficient". Efficiency is irrelevant, there are no fuel costs. Only the cost of installation is important, and if you amortize that over its life it pays off its cost in two years AND it's CO2 cost to make it in LESS time than that, and they last thirty+ years, more with careful rebuilding. Solar photovoltaic is "inefficient" in converting light to electrical energy, but since it is free that is also irrelevant. News for you, we won't have fusion, probably not till end of century, well too late to do anything about climate change and vanishing oil. The calculations for making a home solar are trivial physics, I'm a physicist. All you have to do is count BTUs supplied and lost through various interfaces per square area. And tall residential buildings are even easier to make solar, because they have a lot of open south wall and insulating them costs much less per contained volume. It is not only possible, it's trivial, and not only that, we will HAVE NO CHOICE!
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captain swagworth I've read all their stuff, and it all sounds boyishly over-optimistic, just like all that kind of stuff always reads. The reason they ARE poorly funded is because it is HORRIBLY expensive, and also we don't know for sure we can even do it. The time frame is still totally wrong to solve our climate or energy problems. Even if ITER works and the DEMO, it will take 50-75 YEARS to build the number of these that we would need, and the cost could be far better spent on solar and wind, and MUCH more effectively. You're a physicist, that's nice, I'm a OLD physicist, with a lot more experience. All homes and their heating systems amortize out at about 25-30 years, meaning they require a capitol outlay or replacement every generation. If we begin retrofitting homes for passive solar instead, and installing the wind and PV now, progressively, we will be done before the time frame to even BEGIN any major fusion plants. Fusion might be nice, but it's uncertain,. too late, and probably not even needed to get us the kind of world we want in the short run. In the long run, it's a grand scheme, but for now, only a scheme. I would definitely better fund it, but only if we were spending what we should on wind and solar, in case what I said turns out to be true.
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Coptah Actually there is. If you stop listening to rah-rah nuclear proponent liars who don't cover the arguments or actual data, but who only cherry-pick factoids and glib tid-bits and if you stop watching websites that promote their side without any reference to people who have contradicted them, then you can find the information among the pretenders and figure it out.
You had to learn who to trust regarding Evolution, you don't just believe the yell-loudest creationist lie sites, do you?
Well, you have to do this with climate and nuclear and renewables and a whole host of issues, because there are a lot of liars out there with vested interests in deceiving you.
You first of all ignore proponents. You know they deal in half truths and pump up support with deception. You find the information from people making things work. You go to universities and respected scientific sources. You look for peer-reviewed research papers.
You ask the obvious question: Why don't we do this now, why doesn't anyone want to fund this? There are REASONS why they don't fund things, usually it is because after the big money people paid a lot of money to experts to tell them the truth, they have found that the liars were lying, and it won't really go as easily as they say it will, and it will cost them their shirt and pants!!
We can do this with "free energy" bullshitters too, ask them why they don't have a well-recognized product on the market that people are pleased with? Diagnosing bullshit artists is as simple as realizing obvious realities many times.
After you see someone try to tell you how molten salt reactors, or some such bull that they don't have working yet, will make all our dreams come true and save the planet, go look for counter-evidence. Liars always lie 20 times louder than reputable sources, so you will find vast numbers of rah-rah clones of their websites and lectures, put up by "true believers" who have been duped, so go look for the very few who are questioning that, and ask them why. They are usually MUCH quieter people.
See if they are reputable, do they have university chairs, are they published in peer-reviewed journals? What do they say, what arguments do they address and have the rah-rah folks ever mentioned those things? If not then you have dishonest deceivers on your hands among the rah-rah-ers and you shouldn't believe them.
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