--- Nuclear isn't renewable (but could be used in the mid-term)
--- despite obvious dangers
Breeder reactors make nukes practically renewable. You start with one uranium isotope, and end up with other uranium isotopes and plutonium, and then use both of those; and so on. Instead of producing waste, you initially produce more fuel than you started with. While the intermediate fuels are the most toxic & radioactive stuff we know, in the end there's potentially very little bad stuff left. For the cheery view about all this see argee.net
You can't go on forever that way (eventually you need to start from the beginning with new fuel) and of course the nuke optimists in the 1950's said traditional nuclear energy would be too cheap to meter, so heaven knows how wrong they may be now. Current breeder reactors are cooled with molten sodium, a metal that burns in air, and there have been fires of molten sodium. Yum yum.
> Coal isn't renewable. It has an EROEI ratio much lower than oil
Yeah. 54% of USA's coal is lignite, which has half of the energy of the "good" coal (anthracite best, bituminous next best, lignite is half mud).
> Clean or not, we'll have no choice but to revert to coal when
> the lights/heat go out.
I agree. Especially when you consider coal can be used to create gas and a substitute for gasoline, I think coal stocks are going to soar.
> Natural gas isn't renewable and will be entering rapid
> decline over the next few decades
Yes! In some ways that scares me more than peak oil. Those wells can go from peak to NOTHING in very few (less than 10) years. What's going to happen to existing gas fired plants?
> Solar has had some recent improvements, but we simply don't
> have enough time/resources/land area to scale it
Yes.
> Giant wind farms seem to be our best bet, but we still run
> into the same scalability/time/energy problems.
From what I understand, the problem is in year 1 of peak, the oil production might be 2% less than the year before. But in that year we'd need to conserve MORE than 2%, because we need to simultaneously spend energy to build windmills and breeder reactors or whatever. Then the next year we're 2% MORE short; and by then the economy is slower, but we need to conserve another 2% plus the additional amount to fund building more solar or wind or whatever. And after that 2% MORE. And while all that's going on, suddenly natural gas disappears.
And that's optimistic: Alaska is depleting at 6% a year.
> We need some serious imagination and a hell of a lot of
> courage
But before even that we need a wake-up call, and leaders who will respond the right way. There's tons of ideas for energy -- crazy stuff like tapping the energy inside the earth, h3 mines on the moon, guiding solar energy from space into giant collectors. Most of that will probably turn out to be nuts, and even if it works it could take 30 years or 50 years.
But our culture is on the doorstep of such amazing achievement -- in our understandings of physics and engineering. In the hands of the right leaders, this could practically be fun: a chance to rally the altrusism and creativity that is also part of the human beast. In the hands of our present idiots, we could be doomed to poverty, chaos, cold, hunger, & war.
- tilyou1 @ yahoo.com |
