The Energy Thread

I also strongly believe that in a few years' time, humanity will have the opportunity to choose the way of greed or the way of universality, and the fate of the planet rests on that decision - not just in a climatic sense but in a holistic sense

some pretty millennial thinking there bro

there's a revolution on and you're invited

revolution + on + on

hope that's true over there. In the U.S. the revolution generally looks a lot like this:

http://i56.tinypic.com/ng8pp5.jpg

http://i53.tinypic.com/viej9k.jpg

"The Facebook group 'STOP GLOBAL WARMING NOW' has over 150,000 likes? Great Scott. I need a minute to think. THINK. Let's see. OK. Cancel my 2:00, get me Wen Jiabao on the phone ASAP - TODAY WE STOP GLOBAL WARMING"

http://i53.tinypic.com/viej9k.jpg

"listen to me god DAMMIT! to HELL with industry! this facebook group has over 150,000 goddamn LIKES. That is a MANDATE."

sorry, i'm just joshing around. I like the idea of the president barking orders like Patton.

lol :-/

^

kinda lol, mostly despair

^my epitaph^

Anyway, my main (sorta) point is that it's going to take people on the streets to do anything, imo. There was a decent Harper's essay a few weeks ago that argued that as lol rong as the tea party was/is about everything, they're out there on the streets, making themselves known, creating a persistent presence, so props to them for that. There was no comparable presence on the left, not with that persistence.

And (this would be more debatable obviously, but imo) that necessity to have a physical presence on the streets runs counter to the digitilization of "today's youth" (god i'm starting to feel like an oldtimer). There are examples of social networking/etc being used to successfully advance political protest, but I don't see it happening in the United States (please prove me wrong someone?). In the last year of lol grad school I helped a professor work on a book that was focused on taking advantage of the social networking, and particularly the ease with which young people utilize it, for progressive issues. And the more I researched the issue, the more my gut was telling me NO NO NO NO NO. it's not going to work. not in time.

Anyway, I want to be wrong on all of this more than anything else in the world.

no i think you're right

sorry

no, you're right. enormous fucking truth bomb. at least europe is learning how to get out there, every week. soon it'll be every day. americans need to mobilise too, or else I fear for you (and by extension everyone else)

have this image of an obese, bespectacled old man sitting on the world until it chokes. what needs to happen is that everyone decides not to work for that man

a real american does not wear spectacles

that 'suck it up' dude is who I was thinking of when I imagined it

http://www.charlesmunger.com/images/pic.jpg

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7465

uhh guys

Yep. No one ever could have known - except matt Simmons + others, several years ago, who tried to warn everyone...

Will the NYT even mention it, except maybe in an awful bloggins by andy revkin, or a story focused on recent oil prices that mentions the leak as something doomsayers are worried about? Probably not!

reading that news made me have my first cold sweat over peak oil. like before it was like you said, yeah, doomsday speculation. but to see uh, people close with the issue at hand claim this - pretty chilling.

I guess it's compounded by the fact that I have to fly back to the US this summer, and tickets are roughly 50-80% more expensive than the same time last year, no doubt due to the rising cost of jet fuel... and you think of how dependent our society is on fuel, and you just wonder for how much longer can we keep this up.

I'm on a train typing with my clumsy fingers so I'll make this short, but I think there is a strong likelihood that when the global economy "recovers", oil prices will once again shoot through the roof (they're already way above what was thought of as a crisis level by GWBush after Katrina, which prompted him to release much of the US strategic reserve in order to stabilize prices - at the time I think they were in the $70s range, now they're in the $90s).

The only reason they dropped from the levels they were at in 2007-2008 (100-140s) is the Great Recession. Supply didn't increase, demand dropped. As demand starts to increase, we're quickly running against hat supply limit again, driving up oil prices and food prices synonymously, since US presidential hopefuls and the corn industry thought it was a great idea to tie the food and oil markets together through corn ethanol. Whoops!

The bleak (but not bleakest) scenario is a series of price spikes coming in tandem with new recessions, each time the new spike oil price and demand getting a little lower, each recession cutting even deeper.

:/

heh, I have a friend of a friend who allegedly is a doomsday nutjob now after watching a documentary on peak oil while high. I feel like if I had that news while high today it would have sent me over the edge.

that bleak scenario doesn't seem that bad - the US dies a slow death. my mind fast forwarded to the mad max + clockwork orange scenario where droogs be in my house, raping my dog.

I dunno it's pretty easy to see that if uh people can't afford food anymore in the states + easy access to guns = some heavy shit

regarding the wikileak about saudi production,this article rightfully points out that it wasn't news to the peak oil crowd,who have been trying to get anyone to pay attention to the issue for years now.

here's the important part:

Were the Wikileaks revelations a game changer in the world of oil? Hardly. All the basic, but horribly muddled, information in the cables was already public. And, the flat trend of oil production for the last several years has been plain for all to see. Still, governments and societies largely prattle on as if nothing is wrong. Well, perhaps one thing did change. U.S. government officials are now known to have spoken the words "peak oil," albeit in secret cables. At last the feckless corporate media has reason to ask them why. But will they?

it's amazing that we still live in a world where the statement 'there is a finite supply of certain natural resources' is treated like a politicized argument instead of, ya know, an incredibly basic fact

Fracking
Fracking
Fracking
Fracking
Fracking

we are fucking ourselves

Among The Times’s findings:

¶More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.

¶At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.

¶Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.

Results came from field surveys conducted by state and federal regulators, year-end reports filed by drilling companies and state-ordered tests of some public treatment plants. Most of the tests measured drilling wastewater for radium or for “gross alpha” radiation, which typically comes from radium, uranium and other elements.

Industry officials say they are not concerned.

Was sad to see "Gasland" lose the best documentary award last night as frack drilling is a pretty fucking U & K issue right now.

read these two fucking paragraphs

A confidential industry study from 1990, conducted for the American Petroleum Institute, concluded that “using conservative assumptions,” radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who eat fish from those waters regularly.

The industry study focused on drilling industry wastewater being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico, where it would be far more diluted than in rivers. It also used estimates of radium levels far below those found in Pennsylvania’s drilling waste, according to the study’s lead author, Anne F. Meinhold, an environmental risk expert now at NASA.

Regulators have theorized that passing drilling waste through the plants is safe because most toxic material will settle during the treatment process into a sludge that can be trucked to a landfill, and whatever toxic material remains in the wastewater will be diluted when mixed into rivers.

last 3 paragraphs of the article are so infuriating...i just want to die

feels like fucking sodom where you can't even find 10 good people in the entire city. what is wrong with everyone. (been drinking, warning)

basically, the energy industry is looking for more ways to ruin western pennsylvania

>:[

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0fAsFQsFAs

basically, the energy industry is looking for more ways to ruin western pennsylvania most of the country

I'm kind of involved (very remotely, in a supporting, non-productiony capacity) in CSG in aus and I've recently had to contact potential local suppliers to us in these remote areas, they're all v v keen for the business, even tho yes there has def been carcinogenic gases found around the place amongst other issues. It's going to be an interesting few months ahead..will post itt with any updates/backlash encountered.

please do thx
also holy shit re that nyt article

Fracking-assisted earthquakes in Arkansas

GUY, Ark. — Everybody around here is getting used to the earthquakes, and that does not sit well with Dirk DeTurck.

Dirk DeTurck pointed to drilling equipment from his home. “I think people are getting comfortable” with earthquakes, he said.

He sent out 600 fliers and made, well, had to be around 100 phone calls, trying to attract people to his meeting on earthquake preparedness. And yet on a recent Tuesday night, he stood in the local school cafeteria and looked out at only a dozen or so people, including two women from the local extension homemakers club who had scheduled their own meeting on the topic a couple of weeks later.

“I think people are getting comfortable,” said Mr. DeTurck, a former Navy mechanic. “I mean, they have in California. They’ve become real comfortable with the shaking.”

Whether they have become comfortable is debatable, but the people of Guy, a town of 563 about an hour north of Little Rock, have had to learn to live with earthquakes.

Since the early fall, there have been thousands, none of them very large — a fraction have been felt, and the only documented damage is a cracked window in the snack bar at Woolly Hollow State Park. But in their sheer numbers, they have been relentless, creating a phenomenon that has come to be called the Guy earthquake swarm.

This was followed by the Guy media swarm, with reporters pouring in through the surrounding orchards and cow pastures to ask residents what the quakes feel like.

Mr. DeTurck and many others described a boom followed by a quick, alarming shift, a sensation one man compared to watching the camera dive off a cliff in an Imax movie. Some say they have felt dozens, others only four or five, and still others say they have only heard them.

They do, however, have similar suspicions about the cause.

ZS, and anyone else interested. I just got a mail advertising a large number of fully funded Phd studendships in "Energy Demand" based at the UCL and Loughborough. Let me know if you'd like me to forward.

Thanks for thinking of me, Ed! :)

I'm stuck in the United States (and more specifically, Maryland) for the next few years because my fiancee goes to grad school here, but I've recently been thinking about switching back into the university-world to grab a Ph.D. I'll keep the program you mentioned in mind.

It's intriguing to me that I keep seeing one or two (though usually one) small, stand-alone wind-power generators in random places, like you do with cellphone towers. In strip-malls, near buildings, that kind of thing. Does anyone know the production abilities of just one little windmill? Is it like having a small patch of solar panels or something? I mean, these are big windmills, but not quite to my eye like those towering ones you see off the highway.

my company's did some small wind projects awhile ago (altho nothing on the single-turbine scale). how much power they generate varies pretty widely depending on - duh - the wind, but max capacity is probably around 50 kW or so for smaller domestic applications.

done

guys: thorium nuke power

tell me about it. wiki makes it sound like a magic bullet, so there's gotta be a catch somewhere, right?

never heard of it

http://news.change.org/stories/thorium-nuclear-energys-clean-little-secret

Let's review some of the key benefits of thorium. It's abundant (because we've never used any of it); it doesn't require the costly and time-intensive refining process important for uranium, and the waste it produces becomes inert in one hundred years as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years. It's nearly impossible for terrorists to manipulate for weapons production. There's more: the annual fuel cost for a one gigawatt thorium reactor is approximately six hundred times lower than that of a uranium reactor, which requires 250 times more of the raw element.

Thorium as a nuclear fuel
Thorium, as well as uranium and plutonium, can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. A thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle including much greater abundance on Earth, superior physical and nuclear properties of the fuel, enhanced proliferation resistance, and reduced nuclear waste production. Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), has worked on developing the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors. Rubbia states that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.[14] One of the early pioneers of the technology was U.S. physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who helped develop a working nuclear plant using liquid fuel in the 1960s.

Some countries are now investing in research to build thorium-based nuclear reactors. In May 2010, researchers from Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, received a three-year Energy Independence Partnership Grant to collaborate on the development of a self-sustainable fuel cycle for light water reactors.[15] According to the Israeli nuclear engineer, Eugene Shwageraus, their goal is a self-sustaining reactor, "meaning one that will produce and consume about the same amounts of fuel," which is not possible with uranium. He states, "the better choice is thorium, whose nuclear properties offer considerable flexibility in the reactor core design." Some experts believe that the energy stored in the earth's thorium reserves is greater than what is available from all other fossil and nuclear fuels combined.[15]

[edit]Key benefits
According to Australian science writer Tim Dean, "thorium promises what uranium never delivered: abundant, safe and clean energy - and a way to burn up old radioactive waste."[16] With a thorium nuclear reactor, Dean stresses a number of added benefits: there is no possibility of a meltdown, it generates power inexpensively, it does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles.[16] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, of the British Telegraph daily, suggests that "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium," and could put "an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years."[14]

The Thorium Energy Alliance (TEA), an educational advocacy organization, emphasizes that "there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years." [17] Reducing coal as an energy source, according to science expert Lester R. Brown of The Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC, would significantly reduce medical costs from breathing coal pollutants. Brown estimates that coal-related deaths and diseases are currently costing the U.S. up to $160 billion annually."[18]

what's the catch

that's what i want to know!

sounds like it wasn't pursued back in the day because it ~didn't~ have a weaponizable byproduct, whereas nowadays that's actually a good thing

I am certainly no expert but this popped up a few weeks ago and I did some reading. First off it needs some uranium mixed in with the thorium to get fission to ago and whilst most of the fission products are low half life materials (90%+) you still get some nasty long half life in there. Secondly, on the proliferation angle, although it would be hard for material to be used in a fission or fusion bomb there's still something you can use for a dirty bomb. Thirdly, I can't see anything in the technology that makes it inherently safe from meltdown or release of radioactive material in a reactor containment failure.