Comment Re:How long has ITER been promising fusion power? (Score 1) 44
If petroleum gets cheap then they can shift overnight to burning oil than natural gas or coal.
That is complete BS.
If petroleum gets cheap then they can shift overnight to burning oil than natural gas or coal.
That is complete BS.
Then it appears you did not follow the links I provided.
You mean I didn't read your propaganda? We can call nuclear power safe once Chernobyl has been re inhabited and there haven't been any more similar events. Or worse, since there is really no reason to think Chernobyl is the limit for how much damage can be done. And then there is the challenge of waste from existing plants that needs to be permanently stored in a manner that will protect future generations.
We can't keep waiting for some leap in solar power technology to change the equation
We aren't. We are building solar a lot faster than we can ever build a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power is a fantasy sideshow in march to replace fossil fuels.
Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have
Experience has proved that isn't true.
Per capita is greenwashing.
No, its assigning emissions to people rather than based on national borders. Whether those people are Chinese or Americans is irrelevant. Beyond that, the problem is not just current emissions, its past emissions. If you look at the current carbon in the atmosphere I think you would find the US economy has produced more of it than China's. And, as always, deciding whose emissions those are is a political act. Is the United States responsible for all the emission for the oil and natural gas it exports? Is it responsible for the emissions used to create products it imports?
My personal hypothesis is if we reallocated the CO2 from goods destined for export, China wouldn't look as bad
Your hypothesis is correct. There have been actual numbers crunched (I don't remember the source) that show the US as a net importer of emissions while China is a net exporter.
Now apply that to personal carbon footprints. Who is responsible for the emissions from you driving to work? You or your employer? I think the natural way to assign those are based on who gets the wealth and other benefits created. So if Bill Gates hires a gardener for one of his mansions, the emissions associated with that gardener's work are attributable to Bill Gates.
Which makes "per capita" not very meaningful because a very large percentage of any country's emissions would be attributed to a small wealthy elite.
Yes, China and the US together are half the problem. On a per Capita basis they are about equal.
Not even close. The United States has by far the higher per capita emissions no matter how you assign them.
India and China account for over 40% of emissions
That depends on how you account for emissions. As the discussion here makes clear determining who "owns" emissions is not easy. Are the oil producers responsible or their customers?
The United States is the largest oil producer in the world and one of the largest producers of LNG. On the other hand, we buy a lot of stuff from China that is produced with coal power. The United States imports a lot of emissions, while China exports a lot of its emissions.
Bill Gates pays someone to offset the emissions from his private jet so those emissions are actually "owned" by someone else.
Regardless of who "owns" the emissions, the climate effects are the same of course,
Well here's the thing.....we have observed that brains are the part of a human where intelligent data processing happens.
There is actually lots or evidence that is not true.
Can you explain, in a non-religious way, why biological brains would be capable of intelligence whereas electronic brains would not?
Can you explain in a non-scientific way why electronic brains would be capable of intelligence whereas biological brains would not?
Let me suggest that "intelligence" is a human invention that is completely non-scientific to begin with. Objectively, intelligence is just whatever IQ tests measure. AI is simply making whatever IQ tests measure less and less important. So perhaps the question is can we create an AI that has compassion, love and faith and is physically attractive.
We don't judge an entire industry on the basis of individual failures
We do when the individual failures add up. The reality is investors decided the risks of investment in nuclear power were not worth the value created.
The problem is that every instance of removing nuclear fission from the electrical grid has resulted in higher energy prices, lowered reliability, and in general a lowered standard of living.
Which is one way the cost of individual failures add up. A lot of nuclear power plants removed themselves from the electrical grid. Which is why people stopped investing in them.
There's over 400 civil nuclear power reactors in operation today.
All of them built with enormous government subsidies. Which is why there is this full court press PR campaign for nuclear power, they need to get public subsidies to attract any new investments.
If you have better solutions then that's great.
We have a giant natural nuclear reactor called the Sun. We have proven technologies for using it to produce electricity that are cheap and reliable.
Then in the 1980s some idiots in high places thought nuclear fission was too dangerous
And then Chernobyl proved them right,
But what really happened was that nuclear power was not really commercially viable. The industry was relying on government subsidies and was costing far more than the hyperbolic claim of power "too cheap to meter." Plants were far more expensive to build, had huge construction lag times and many turned out to be unreliable. By the time you added all the costs no commercial companies were willing to continue to bet on them with the huge investments required.
Then Fukushima proved them right again.
More importantly, we have realistic immediate solutions rather than nuclear power which has become a pie-in-the-sky option being hyped by investors like Bill Gates.
Exactly. So what does this mean?
The government's Clean Power 2030 action plan sets a target capacity of up to 27 gigawatts of batteries by 2030, a sixfold increase from the 4.5 gigawatts installed today.
The total amount of power a battery can provide depends on the rate at which it provides power. In other words, 200mw for 2 hours is not the equivalent of 100mw for 4 hours. The battery will be able to provide 100mw for more than 4 hours.
When anyone uses MW as a measure of battery capacity they likely don't know what they are talking about. Unless they are a grid operator talking about the rate the battery can provide power to the grid at a moment in time. Battery storage is always measured as a combination of rate and time that rate can be sustained. ie. MWH..
Peer review is everything.
No, it isn't. There is plenty of crappy research that has been peer reviewed. The peer review process is pretty much broken. The more accurate statement is that absent peer review, you should assume its crappy research and ignore it.
If you do something right once, someone will ask you to do it again.