Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

wait, that's not even the one i remembered reading about. this is the one:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/solving-solars-biggest-problem-didnt-take-technology-development/263756/

The other thing about nuclear is that our current climate change problems stem from the unintended and, for a long time, unexpected consequences of our fossil fuel use.

Nuclear fuel use already has two massive environmental problems assoviated with it that we DO know about (accidents, and the fact that nobody knows what to do with such long-lasting and toxic waste), so it seems a poor alternative for that reason alone.

pparently a solar cel currently uses more resources in its creation than it puts back over its lifetime

lol @ this ridiculous calculation

i think that calculation is way antiquated at this point

solar is kinda intuitive to me as a source of energy bc it's the fucking sun. that shit is huge.

it's the main reason why we have global warming iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jpVtYQIols

by "using more resources" I mean the entire cost of production -- energy, raw materials, extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, and cleanup/disposal of the toxic byproducts. In the same way consumers don't pay for the hidden costs for fossil fuels, buyers of solar currently don't pay similar costs, especially if these are cels produced in china where environmental standards are likely not as strict.

yeah sorry there's just no way that's true

like, the number of variables/assumptions in that purported calculation is bonkers - what unit are we converting all these "resources" to? Dollars? kWh? MMBtu?

for ex.

pick any unit you like as long as both sides are in the same unit. if the idea that assigning a precise cost to something is intractable therefore it shouldn't be attempted, then you might as well throw out carbon release as a cost for fossil fuels.

I just picked one variable of many. you're emphasizing hidden costs, are we gonna account for hidden benefits (avoided energy costs - which are pretty tricky to calculate on their own fwiw, avoided CO2 emissions, benefits of whatever the solar power is being used for, etc.) this is not like a simple apples to apples thing, and I suspect whoever came up with the original soundbyte about this just maybe had ulterior motives.

for some applications, like places with a lot of sun, but no infrastructure, solar's clearly going to win in an apples-to-apples race, but in terms of sustainable energy I don't think it's out of the realm of credibility that solar isn't yet where it needs to be on the resource usage/output balance sheet.

If you just needed one variable, this one seems pretty worrisome on its own:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-05/five-rare-earths-crucial-for-clean-energy-seen-in-short-supply.html

so if a new rare earth mine is dug to build a solar panel that prevents a mountain in Virginia from being fracked how do you quantify that

me, personally? i'd take the fracking issue as independent of the environmental costs of mining because ideally neither should happen, and neither are sustainable. if you don't take the mining costs into consideration, then you couldn't justify investing in some technological advance in solar tech that would minimize or eliminate the need for these costly metals. at a minimum, I'd say you'd saved however many gallons of fuel used by the construction equipment, electricity used in operation, etc...

x-post
I think costs per energy unit should be computed based only on their intrinsic costs. Then the replacement values of one source over the other can be argued. For example, solar works out to be 10% more expensive than coal, *but* it saves Virginia from being fracked to hell so it's a better option.

yeah if you could bake in costs of fracking into natural gas etc... it'd be much easier to make a comparison. there was something interesting in that nuclear article posted upthread about insurance costs for nuclear making it prohibitive in germany. the factoring in of hidden costs seems like a great job for actuaries.

me, personally? i'd take the fracking issue as independent of the environmental costs of mining because ideally neither should happen, and neither are sustainable. if you don't take the mining costs into consideration, then you couldn't justify investing in some technological advance in solar tech that would minimize or eliminate the need for these costly metals. at a minimum, I'd say you'd saved however many gallons of fuel used by the construction equipment, electricity used in operation, etc...

― Philip Nunez, Monday, November 12, 2012 7:01 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wait what? How are you going to build solar tech without mining...anything?

Isn't the amount of time it takes to get a nuclear reactor up, from application t groundbreaking to supplying electricity, something like 20 years?

IE DARNED GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/0214240/tapping-shale-reserves-us-would-become-worlds-top-oil-producer-by-2017

When I heard that report testerday all I could think was that handing US oil companies and the US population a huge increase in oil reserves is like giving blasting caps to a teething baby.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/oilclimategrafv5.jpg

multiple xps:

☻ Other countries like China will follow the French model of certifying one or two reactor designs and mass producing them. The U.S. model in the 70s-80s had regulations incrementally changing over the design and construction phases so most reactors one-off variations with bespoke prices. The "precertified" Gen III reactor designs were made to counter this, but I think they'll mostly be made in China.

☻ Some studies have found that wind power has little effect on carbon emissions. The problems at the moment include the huge upfront emissions from the concrete in footings, and the fact output variability requires complementary "peaking" natural gas plants to shift, rather inefficiently, from stand-by to full-power on a minute to minute basis. This is less of a problem for offshore windfarms.Like most renewable energy, the huge need right now is for utility scale energy storage/battery technology, as the generating technology is pretty efficient.

☻ There's not enough indium or tellurium in the world to wire up the planet with the current CIGS or CdTe solar PV. Utility scale (ie cost effective) solar is IMO largely going to be solar thermal with heliostat mirrors, situated in the Mojave & Sahara. You can also heat up molten sodium (etc.) for fairly efficient power storage with these.

☻ Bill Gates isn't funding the travelling wave reactor design through his philanthropic foundation - its through his investment in Intellectual Ventures and thence TerraPower, which is a top 5 patent holder. I've pretty high hopes for this, as it actually does seem to solve many issues with long-term U235 supplies and the complex mechanics of reactor fueling and waste disposal. Think of these as just large static tubes of unenriched or depleted uranium with big heat exchangers, simmering a hundred feet underground for 50+ years on a single fuel load, when the reaction wave has hit the far end you just fill up the reactor cavity with concrete and forget it (the waste products have shorter half-lives than the current light water reactor fuel cycle). You could situate these pretty much anywhere with with nearby surface water as a heat sink, and low earthquake risk. Its not clear (to outside observers like myself) whether there are external reaction moderators, or if they'll just be engineered so that even in the event of failure of the thermal offtak system the system will simply conduct all waste heat to surrounding bedrock. I for one really hope that the pilot plant (probably Russia or China) works as advertised, as the travelling wave reactor design seems to solve quite a few of the outstanding issues with nuclear.

Correction: Intellectual Ventures is the top-5 patent holder, TerraPower is its spin-off to develop the TWR.

what's the time scale of how long you need to sequester the waste products under the new designs? if it's like 10 years, that would tip me over to the pro-nuke side, but if it's gone from 2 million to 1 million years, i'd still feel like they're falling into a local maxima trap.

This looks interesting

The team used the nanomaterial to build a prototype thermoelectric generator that they hope can eventually produce milliwatts of power.

Making milliwatts from nanotech is cool, but irrelevant to the Big Show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSi5zWZS0E

^^^^^Obama addressing a climate change question in today's press conference.

i wouldn't be so quick to write off the promise of more efficient solar cells based on carbon nano structures

obama fairly depressing there, admitting it exists, and vowing not to do anything unpopular about it.

Yeah, that was my takeaway. He had very detailed plans in response to so many other questions in that press conference and all he could come up with for climate change is "I'm gonna talk to some people and see what we can do, let me get back to you on that".

"We need to educate the public about the gravity of the situation. I was too busy with other things for four years, and might get to it in the next four."

Slate Staffer Will Oremus:

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Picture-111.png
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he looks so tired and beaten down. can't he get biden to pinch hit a few of these?

Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters:

[S]hockingly, Sandy is probably not even the deadliest or most expensive weather disaster this year in the United States—Sandy’s damages of perhaps $50 billion will likely be overshadowed by the huge costs of the great drought of 2012. While it will be several months before the costs of America’s worst drought since 1954 are known, the 2012 drought is expected to cut America’s GDP by 0.5–1 percentage points, said Deutsche Bank Securities this week. …

While Sandy’s death toll of 113 in the U.S. is the second highest death toll from a U.S. hurricane since 1972, it is likely to be exceeded by the death toll from the heat waves that accompanied this year’s drought. The heat waves associated with the U.S. droughts of 1980 and 1988 had death tolls of 10,000 and 7,500 respectively, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, and the heat wave associated with the $12 billion 2011 Texas drought killed 95 Americans.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/171305/my-son-age-25-has-never-been-around-cooler-average-month

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/science/earth/as-coasts-rebuild-and-us-pays-again-critics-stop-to-ask-why.html

People here have formed strong emotional attachments to their island. “There’s a lot of wildlife and a lot of bird life, and it’s just a great place to relax,” said Jay Minus, a lawyer in Mobile who owns two homes on the western end. “You can sit on the porch and watch the dolphins swim past your house.”

Seriously. The National Flood Insurance Program needs to be self-funding ($19 billion in debt, only $3 billion in revenue), and encourages stupefyingly dumb investment. I don't have a problem with there being a property insurer of last resort, but in states that have them they are also the most expensive insurers.

if you ever want to get reaaaaally depressed, talk to people about whether or not it makes sense to even think about taking climate change into account when building near the coast. i remember in grad school, a couple years after katrina, i made an off-handed remark to someone who was focusing on NOLA that maybe it didn't make sense to rebuild there when it was below sea level and would be seeing storms of greater frequency and strength for at least the next 1000 years. he didn't just disagree with me, he was offended. it didn't matter that rebuilding there isn't just a terrible financial idea, but also likely to result in numerous unnecessary deaths.

i always get a major ironic lol when anti-government people fight tooth and nail against doing anything to mitigate climate change. not sure they realize that the government is likely to be forced to play a much larger role in a future of draughts, wildfires, infectious diseases and wave after wave of pummeling storms.

Actually I take that back, a future of draughts sounds ok

I would favor a sierra nevada draught

As long as you have a good house-sweater, draughts are no problem. We just need to raise enough money to buy a house-sweater for everyone in the world = climate change solved.

I'm currently residing in NOLA, and it will shrink after the next couple of floods but will continue to exist - the non-sprawl parts are all above current sea-level, and its actually a necessary city. There isn't a better place for transferring Mississippi barge traffic to blue sea vessels, and water transport will become more important as fossil fuel costs rise. With those docks comes the need for a perhaps 300k population city. It doesn't need to be a 1.2 million metropolitan area.

Aside, Paolo Bacigalupi is my second favorite current SF author, and one of few to really embrace the ideas of climate change and resource scarcity that are making us eggheads nervous. The last one The Drowned Cities is a much better alternative to say Hunger Games.

I'm currently residing in NOLA, and it will shrink after the next couple of floods but will continue to exist - the non-sprawl parts are all above current sea-level, and its actually a necessary city.

i'm not sure that it will continue to exist. NYT put together a nice interactive graphic yesterday that showed all the major cities with various levels of sea rise. For New Orleans, they show that 5 ft of sea level rise would permanently flood 88% of the city:

http://i49.tinypic.com/2dkbn2a.png

of course, we have a ways to go before 5 ft sea level rise (100+ years). but in the intervening years, i guess it's a question of whether it's worth it to build a bunch of levees and build and rebuild after numerous catastrophic flood events. i suppose you're right, that it is such a strategically located city that it makes sense to repeatedly rebuild. these are they types of gutwrenching decisions that will be plaguing city planners until long after i'm dead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIZTMVNBjc4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1se9xbRRZL8