SteaminDemon

I would like to chime in here. A whole lot of misleading, uninformed information is being spewed around these days. Things like "our environment cant afford to build any more coal power plants", "Power plant pollutants are ever increasing", "particulate emissions are the highest since" and blah blah blah, that has been going on lately. I will lay some facts down for you.

Zraver, I had to quote you because you are very uninformed about the progress that has already been made. Or you just choose to ignore it. I do not know for sure, but for now I guess I will see it as uninformed. Your uninformed proposal would be very disastrous for Americans. You would take progress that has been made, and progress that is being made and throw it out the window, cost tax payers trillions, eliminate millions of jobs along with all kinds of numerous other effects, while accomplishing nothing.

Emissions of most pollutants were at their peak around 1970. Since then from EPA data the air quality in the US has improved by 30 percent. The improvement has happened even though the GDP has nearly doubled, population increased 30% and the use of fossil fuels increased substantially. Lets take coal for instance, since 1970 coal used by power producers almost tripled from 320 Million tons in 70 to 900 million tons in 2000. But wait, the air has become dramatically cleaner.

Some more facts from the EPA in average air quality from just 89-98

CO Emissions down 39%
SO2 Emissions down 39%
Particulate emissions down 25%
NOx Emissions down 14%
That is just in 9 years.

People are complaining about the old coal fired boilers and people mislabel them as gross polluters. The requirements imposed by the Clean Air Act, the results of a majority of these older coal plants are emissions lower than what is mandated by law.

Upon evaluating plant emissions for particulate matter and SO2 get this and it is really impressive. Particulate Emissions have been reduced 94% and the reduction in SO2 are 70% .

So there are the facts. There is no way around them, no way in BSing or any of that. For those that would like to ignore them, that's fine, just please don't spew any more misinformation. For those that would like to embrace them, good on you.

I sure would like to see the progress above continue, instead of coming up with ridiculous carbon tax, cap and trade and any other BS they can come up with. Imposing those types of things would only hamper progress. The clean air act has sparked progress as you can see and we should leave it at that, continuation of progress.

dale, thank you for the below quote

Dalem Said:
"All of these things people did out of their own free will with no government mandate. That's progress. Government mandates will just rush us into problems after problems."
Very well said. At least someone here can embrace the facts.

On a smaller scale other than power plants, many places are reaping the benefits of coal, saving substantial amounts of money. School's, hospitals, homes, etc.

dalem

No probs. I don't remember which thread that might've been in though.

-dale

citanon

In the long term, there are only two realistic non-polluting alternatives to coal and oil:

1. Nuclear breeder reactors.
2. Solar power.

And if all our fantasies come true, maybe fusion power in 50 years.

Inst

Is it really viable to replace the entire power supply with solar power? How much would it cost to build the infrastructure?

SteaminDemon

1) Nuclear Waste
2) The process that goes into making solar panels and disposing of them are a cause of pollution.

Everything we do creates some sort of pollution.

SteaminDemon

As to replacing the entire power supply with solar. You are talking about quadrillions of dollars, possibly more. The ammount of space required alone would be crazy and you would never be able to meet the demand.

If you think about it, just quickly. If you say, tear down Mr. Power plant and put solar panels around where the Mr. power plant was, you would produce no where near the ammount of power that Mr. Power plant produced. Then you would piss off Mrs. Power plant that can't hold the load anymore and would then just say to hell with it and leave everyone in the dark.

Who knows, Mrs power plant just might blow up so she can be with Mr. Power Plant. First time I have ever put something into perspective like that....twas fun.

brokensickle

Blog: Science Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008 12:55 PM
________________________________________
________________________________________

World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.





Ivan

__________________
"Evil opposes freedom and uses those who pervert it as pawns to destroy it."

citanon

Breeder reactors are more energy efficient because they use up essentially all of the extractable unstable isotopes through repeated cycles of fission. Therefore they produce minimal long-term radioactive waste compared to reactors currently in use. It's the security of the nuclear weapons grade intermediates that you need to worry about.

For truly economical solar panels (as opposed to everything that currently exists on the market or even in the pipeline), I doubt that manufacturing or disposal would be more of a concern than, say, the production of paint or the printing of magazines. This is because, to become economical, future solar panels will have to utilize similar chemistries and similar manufacturing processes.

citanon

No one is talking about tearing down power plants and replacing them one to one with solar farms. Lots of people are pointing out that there is a crazy amount of barren land out in the mid west (mid west people might disagree but there aren't too many of those anyways ).

If it's done at all, the solar power will be converted to a chemical fuel which will then supply the power plants.

It won't cost a quadrillion dollars but definitely would not be cheap.

So, assuming solar energy achieves cost parity with fossil fuel power generation in the US. What is the total replacement cost of all fossil fuel power plants in the US? Any idea?

citanon

Okay, so there about 3000 power plants in the US at maybe half a billion dollars each. So that's about 1.5 Trillion dollars amortized over 50 years or so life of a power plant, excluding evolutionary upgrades to the electric grid and cost of conversion of existing fossil fuel transportation networks. If we add in all those costs we probably come in under 5 Trillion over 50 years, which is about 100 billion dollars per year, which is not too far off the normal pace of energy infrastructure investments.

So, actually I've just said essentially nothing: if we can bring the cost of solar energy to a competitive price point, we can essentially slowly replace our energy supply over time at the nominal rate of infrastructure investment.

The competitive per square foot price point for 20% efficient solar panels is about equal to the cost of a square foot of paint. So that's a pretty big challenge for solar power technology development.

dalem

First prove to me that it is necessary to switch our coal power production to something else.

-dale

SteaminDemon

LMFBR's will not be used in the US. For safety reasons they will stick with the PWR design. The safety over the increase in efficiency is worth it in safety terms, as that is their number one goal. There is on going research when it comes to Power plants, both nuclear and non nuclear. As I have said in the past, I am opposed to cap and trade, and carbon tax crap (carbon tax being the worse of the two). It will do nothing but hinder the further innovation and production of HEEC's (high efficiency environmental controls).

I always thought that McCain would have a more realistic view on the environment. It's supposed to be the straight talk express, but he fails to realize that we have made tremendous progress already, and are continuing on with it also. His plan of cap and trade will hurt further progress and cost tax payers more, as it will be just another "fee". We have enough of those "Fee's" already.

Many people ignore the progress and make it seem like we have accomplished nothing, and are not doing anything about the environment. The facts show we have, plain and simple.

People need to stop using the "suppose we are wrong and there is no such thing as climate change and we adapt green technologies all we've done is given our children a cleaner world, suppose we are right about climate change and do nothing, then what have we done for our kids"

They still have yet to prove it, they still fail to realize that we have been doing something and have made substantial progress already. We are not "doing nothing", and we have already done a lot for our kids. The US has been getting cleaner. So why should Americans have to pay for other countries that choose not to use HEEC's? That is BS.

Wooglin

Since this seems to be the current GW thread I thought I'd just post this here. A lengthy article about the recent conference on climate change in NYC. There's much more than the title suggests. Well worth reading.

link here

gunnut

Here's the original link:

.: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works :: Minority Page :.

__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

SteaminDemon

Thank you Wooglin and gun nut for the link. I do like how they told them to stop using the word Consensus. I do hope McCain read the report, as he believes that the majority of scientists think that man made global warming is a fact, which is totally wrong.