Best Source of Energy

Off-topic talk on music, art, literature, games and forum games.

What energy source(s) should humanity invest in?

Coal
2
4%
Oil
1
2%
Natural Gas
3
7%
Biofuel
4
9%
Solar
7
15%
Wind
5
11%
Hydro
9
20%
Nuclear
13
28%
Other
2
4%
 
Total votes: 46

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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Best Source of Energy

Post by brimstoneSalad »

miniboes wrote:Catching the Sun
I watched it. It's just fluff and bad reenactment for the most part.

It does paint an interesting picture of why Democrats really support solar, though. It requires a lot of subsidies, but it provides a substantial number of low skill jobs (of course, dangerous ones where you might fall off a roof).
Nuclear provides a much smaller number of highly skilled jobs, and doesn't do much to lift people out of poverty in the way they advertise that solar jobs would.

Basic income is really a much better idea than paying people to go up on roofs and install solar panels, though. Solar won't solve poverty. What do all of those people do once all of the roofs have solar on them? It wouldn't take that long.

It's also not a solution to the world's energy problems. Solar is only really good for home power when the sun is shining, you still need a grid (as explained in Pandora's promise). And solar panels take a ridiculous amount of energy to manufacture.
The nice thing is that they can be manufactured in China by nuclear power, because the Chinese government is not anti-science.
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miniboes
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Re: Best Source of Energy

Post by miniboes »

That's true from an epidemiological perspective. There are too many variables to get a signal from the noise.
However, ANY increase in radiation necessarily increases cancer risk. We know this, because we know the mechanisms. The thing is that it's just such a small increase that it's not something you could actually observe in a population (other variables like smoking, diet, and air pollution are so huge you can't properly control for them, and the cancer from background radiation disappears like a drop in an ocean: you'd probably need billions of people with perfect controls to see a difference).

This said: the same is true for bananas. They should increase your risk of cancer.

It's important to know the difference between what can be seen or measured in a population, and what mechanistic evidence suggests should exist but may not be visible due to too many variables to control for properly and the obscuring statistical nature of the effects in a small population study.
Aha, thanks. So it is linked to cancer, but it's just not really an issue? From the measurements seen in the documentary, it also doesn't seem like nuclear plants actually increase the background radiation: the levels of radiation barely vary from place to place, and Fukushima and Chernobyl do not even show high readings.
brimstoneSalad wrote:
miniboes wrote:Catching the Sun
I watched it. It's just fluff and bad reenactment for the most part.

It does paint an interesting picture of why Democrats really support solar, though. It requires a lot of subsidies, but it provides a substantial number of low skill jobs (of course, dangerous ones where you might fall off a roof).
Nuclear provides a much smaller number of highly skilled jobs, and doesn't do much to lift people out of poverty in the way they advertise that solar jobs would.
That's an interesting theory. That might very well be true for the Democrats. I think green parties in the NL and elsewhere in Europe genuinely believe wind- and solar energy are the best source of energy. I'll skip on this documentary then.
Basic income is really a much better idea than paying people to go up on roofs and install solar panels, though. Solar won't solve poverty. What do all of those people do once all of the roofs have solar on them? It wouldn't take that long.
I agree. Especially with the mass loss of jobs that I predict will come from autonomous vehicles and other forms of AI labor, I think a base income makes much more sense than trying to artificially create jobs.
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EquALLity
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Re: Best Source of Energy

Post by EquALLity »

brimstoneSalad wrote:It's also an issue that is very easily overcome by cooling towers, which are a common fixture in nuclear power plants.
How does that work?
brimstoneSalad wrote:What are the writers and editors names? What's the book called?
Here's a link to it on Amazon (not really a text-book, more like a review book for Regents that you write in): http://www.amazon.com/Prentice-Brief-Re ... 0328870501
brimstoneSalad wrote:Can you complain to your school board about it?
Well, these are just books my teacher found for us. They're not like standard books from every science class.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Awesome! It's been up for two years, so apparently it is if nobody has bothered to take it down.
Watch it and share with your teachers and friends if you can.
Ok, I'll watch it this weekend. :)

I don't think many of my friends will want to watch it though, hahaha. I could send it to my science teacher... She might think it's like big-nuclear propaganda or something though. :P
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Re: Best Source of Energy

Post by EquALLity »

Also, I'm not against nuclear energy, but what exactly is wrong with implementing sustainable energy? Is it going to take longer, or something?
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Re: Best Source of Energy

Post by brimstoneSalad »

There are a number of videos on how cooling towers work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9-cVGrR9OE
That seems to cover pretty much everything.
EquALLity wrote:Also, I'm not against nuclear energy, but what exactly is wrong with implementing sustainable energy? Is it going to take longer, or something?
Nuclear is sustainable, and it's the only power source capable of replacing coal and gas in industry right now. The main issue is the cost of the power, and the fact that solar is highly decentralized and only produces energy part of the day (and only usefully in places with substantial sun exposure).

If we covered all of our roofs in solar panels we could take quite a bit out of electric needs during the day in the summer, and that's nice, but nuclear is capable of completely replacing all grid power in a very short time frame.
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Re: Best Source of Energy

Post by EquALLity »

brimstoneSalad wrote:There are a number of videos on how cooling towers work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9-cVGrR9OE
That seems to cover pretty much everything.
Wow, I actually thought those huge towers emitting steam were the power plants. I guess that shows how commonplace they are in nuclear plants. So that's not really a problem with nuclear energy.

And of course, even if some plants don't use it, that's just a problem with a way those specific plants operate. It doesn't mean that nuclear energy itself is a problem.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Nuclear is sustainable, and it's the only power source capable of replacing coal and gas in industry right now.
You said it was unsustainable before.
Well, it's actually unsustainable. You may be misunderstanding the meaning of sustainable here. ;)
We have a limited amount of nuclear fuel. It would get us past the next few hundred years, though, which is enough time to transition to fusion.
brimstoneSalad wrote:The main issue is the cost of the power
Solar costs more money than nuclear energy?
Well, it still costs less than fossil fuels in the long run, right?
brimstoneSalad wrote:and the fact that solar is highly decentralized and only produces energy part of the day (and only usefully in places with substantial sun exposure).
I'm reading that it produces energy all of the time, but that it's most efficient during daytime. It still works at night, though. And people don't really need electricity at night anyway. It might be necessary for factories at night, though, so I can see why nuclear isn't really replaceable in certain situations.

Again, I'm not arguing against nuclear energy; I'm just trying to understand why you think there's something wrong with solar energy.
brimstoneSalad wrote:nuclear is capable of completely replacing all grid power in a very short time frame.
Why is nuclear energy capable of this in a way solar isn't?
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Best Source of Energy

Post by brimstoneSalad »

EquALLity wrote: You said it was unsustainable before.
It depends on how you define sustainable, and what you count as fuel. Better estimates show it could last longer than the lifetime of the Earth, which for all practical purposes makes it sustainable, even though it's technically limited (the limit is so absurdly high it will never run out if we use breeder reactors and all available fissile fuels). Before I was not counting all fuels and breeding in the way that better estimates have.

In some sense, solar power is also unsustainable because the sun has limited fuel and will burn out.

So, it's both sustainable and unsustainable, depending on how you look at it: but so is solar.
It's probably more useful and communicates better to call it sustainable, and then if somebody criticizes that, point out that solar is not sustainable either if held to such standards that would call fission unsustainable.
EquALLity wrote: Solar costs more money than nuclear energy?
Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Energy_Information_Administration
EquALLity wrote: Well, it still costs less than fossil fuels in the long run, right?
No, fossil fuels are very cheap in terms of dollars. The environment and our health pay the cost instead.
EquALLity wrote: I'm reading that it produces energy all of the time, but that it's most efficient during daytime.
I have no idea where you read that, maybe you misunderstood? I've never even seen solar propaganda say that.

That could only be true in the sense that the oven "cooks" all of the time, even when it's off, because room temperature is not absolute zero.

Solar panels do not produce useful energy over the night, in the early morning, or in the evening. They also barely create useful energy when there is cloud cover (some 50% loss).

This seems useful: http://www.vernier.com/innovate/the-effect-of-sky-conditions-on-solar-panel-power-output/
EquALLity wrote: And people don't really need electricity at night anyway.
No, residential energy use starts to peak after the sun sets.

I would not assume this site is reliable, but this is a decent image showing that:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/con ... owered.png
Image

Residential energy is used in the evening, primarily. Houses with PV installed typically want to sell their energy back to the grid.
EquALLity wrote: It might be necessary for factories at night, though, so I can see why nuclear isn't really replaceable in certain situations.
Factories can just be run in the day, that's perfectly fine, the issue is that they draw so much power that it isn't practical to use solar.

You can't realistically run a cement plant, for example, on solar power. These plants are reliant on coal to produce the huge amount of heat required to process cement.

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11911

It's a small part of the pie, but you can't do very much about industrial power usage with solar.

The nice thing about residential usage is that there's actually a place to put the panels that maps pretty well to the energy consumption (you need to produce energy where you consume it, you can't pipe it across the country).
I'm not against residential use for solar, but we have to recognize that the utility is limited due to the time of day power is consumed.

If we started to build houses with more thermal mass, we may be able to offload the majority of the energy use to points of peak production by doing climate control during the day somehow. Automated systems for cooking or heating water during the day might help too.
Solar water heating is excellent, and you can store that hot water in an insulated container for use in the evening and morning when people shower.
This is a serious infrastructure issue, though. It's also of more limited utility when it comes to cooling due to inefficiency of heat pumps with a greater temperature gradient.
EquALLity wrote: Again, I'm not arguing against nuclear energy; I'm just trying to understand why you think there's something wrong with solar energy.
It's fine for certain purposes, but it's not a replacement for fossil fuels in the way nuclear is.
EquALLity wrote: Why is nuclear energy capable of this in a way solar isn't?
Solar is more expensive and unreliable. When you halve your energy production (or worse) on a cloudy day, that's not good for business. It means you need to have double the capacity if you want to replace fossil fuels, which is going to double the price of energy (which is already more expensive than fossil fuels). Wind is even less reliable than solar, since you can't rely on it being (usually) at least 50% output on still day -- more turbines doesn't equal more power on a still day, zero is still zero if there's no wind.

It's also a problem for some industries to shut down during the night, which means larger infrastructure investment and a waste of infrastructure that is sitting idle most of the time. Not all factories can just turn on and off based on supply of energy.
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Re: Best Source of Energy

Post by EquALLity »

^I'm going to respond to that soon.

Today in science class, we were doing notes, and my science teacher had a slide in her powerpoint on nuclear energy.
It listed positive and 'negative' aspects of nuclear energy.

The first 'negative' aspect was the thermal pollution, so I mentioned the cooling towers. According to her, they cool up some of the water, but not all of it, so it's still a problem? :?
That sounds like bullshit.

The second was the disposal issue. She said that we haven't found a way to safely store it, which also sounds like BS, but I don't really know much about that. She said something about how nuclear waste was being stored somewhere and the 'concrete broke'? So it leaked I guess?

Then she said that nuclear energy isn't clean energy. :roll:
It's pretty bizarre how anti-science my science teacher is. :P

I think I'm going to email her the documentary after I watch it later.
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miniboes
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Re: Best Source of Energy

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I didn't expect wind power to be cheaper than Nuclear. The main problem with it is that it's unreliable, right? What are other important arguments for using nuclear over wind in most areas?
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Re: Best Source of Energy

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miniboes wrote:I didn't expect wind power to be cheaper than Nuclear. The main problem with it is that it's unreliable, right? What are other important arguments for using nuclear over wind in most areas?
Aside from the general unreliability, wind doesn't work everywhere, not all areas are reliably windy enough. You can't just put a wind farm where power is needed.
It's also noisy, and it results in mass killing of birds, as they're chopped apart by the blades. Not sure how serious the latter issue is. Vertical wind turbines solve these issues, but I'm not familiar with the practicality arguments around those; they're probably less efficient.
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