[Gllug] [OT] Technobabble

[Nix]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, dylan at dylan.me.uk prattled cheerily:
> On Thursday 17 Nov 2005 14:57, Nix wrote:
>> Everybody with a functioning brain who wants the lights to stay on is
>> actively promoting a return to nuclear energy. Other techniques don't
>> scale, or rely on very limited nonrenewable resources, or are more
>> environmentally damaging, or much more costly, or they can't generate
>> power on demand and thus run far below capacity much of the time, or,
>> often, all of those at once.
> 
> All or some of that is only true when the technologies are mis-applied:

My point was that most of them won't scale to anything like providing
the level and consistency of power to which we've become applied.
Unless we want to watch every watt, most of them aren't good enough,
even in combination.

>> - Solar: doesn't scale, making the panels is very environmentally
>> damaging, they don't last long, clearing enough land to generate much
>> power is environmentally damaging, they cost a lot, and can't
>> generate power on demand.
> 
> Indeed, but a little consideration suggests that there is no need to 
> clear land for extensive "solar farms." There is already a huge and 
> growing surface area which can carry solar panels: rooftops. Solar may 
> not be the most efficient way of generating electricity, but there are 
> other uses. (Pre-)heating water for central heating or washing, for 
> example. Such technology doesn't have to scale beyond the local 
> community since it is necessarily *local*.

Well, alas most of those applications fail on a little more
consideration. e.g. preheating water for central heating. Unless you
plan to absorb energy in the summer and store it for *half a year*, or
you live in a warm part of the world, solar absorption from a rooftop
for one day won't come close to providing enough heat for (e.g.) a
winter evening. After all, in winter the days are short! So, again,
solar power is providing lots of energy when you don't need it and
little when you do... this is what I meant by `can't generate power on
demand'.

>> - Coal, oil: doesn't scale, environmentally damaging, relies on
>> nonrenewable resources. (Plus oil is so terribly useful for other
>> things that it's a damn crime to burn it.)
> 
> No argument there, except that almost all oil derived products and 
> materials have analogs derived from plant sources (albeit they are more 
> expensive at the moment due to the recovery of development costs and 
> the economies of scale.) In addition, there is the transportation of 
> the fuel (including gas) since we are now a net importer of fossil 
> fuels.

Yes. (Gas and oil are quite cheap to transport *if* you have pipelines
everywhere. The mere existence of oil tankers should make it clear
that we don't.)

>> - Hydro: making them is environmentally damaging (both the flooding
>> and concurrent habitat destruction, and the rotting vegetation in the
>> newly formed lakes), they don't scale, they cost a lot.
> 
> This is at least partly a result of the way the energy is harnessed. 
> With modern equipment, a "traditional" waterwheel can easily generate a 
> fair whack of power. Again, a centralized hydro-plant is inefficient, 
> but smaller, localized installations would negate many of the problems.

A centralized hydro plant is inefficient? Only if you completely
ignore the environmental cost of building the things. A thousand small
hydro plants have a much higher net environmental cost than one with
a thousand times the capacity, not least because the dam doesn't have
to be anywhere near as much as a thousand times as large.

I'm sceptical of much of the micropower movement, because huge turbines
and so on really *do* provide economies of scale; a power station is
radically more efficient than a local petrol-driven electric generator,
and your local generator has no emissions controls to speak of either.

>> - Wind: doesn't scale, quite costly, can't generate power on
>> demand. Plus getting planning permission is hellish because everybody
>> NIMBYs against them almost as hard as they do against the local nuke
>> plant and the military force rejection of a *very* large proportion
>> because they interfere with radar something chronic. Wind-out-at-sea
>> eliminates the NIMBY problem but the other ones are still there, you
>> annoy seabirds, and storms can smash them.
> 
> Yet again, it's a matter of scale. A small wind installation can easily 
> suppliment the power requirements of a development.

There's that nasty word `supplement' again.

>                                                     And the turbines 
> don't have to be whacking great windmills. Torroidal and cylindrical 
> systems can be installed in tall buildings to harness the natural air  
> flows and provide the energy to power a proportion of the building's 
> requirements.

Yeah, but you have to provide the interior spaces for such things, and
even if you were going to have airwells anyway (say it's a very large
building), they stop you using the airwells as lightwells too, and the
things are quite thoroughly annoying. I used to work in a building which
had something like this in it (a prototype development, I never knew the
details, I think it was a mass of wind-pushed turbine blades or
something like that), and in the end they turned it off because everyone
complained about the noise it made. It was quiet when it was installed
but I guess the bearings couldn't stand up to UK weather... oops.

(This may be a consequence of its *being* a prototype, of course!)

>> - Nuclear fission: a nasty, but comparatively small-scale, waste
>> disposal problem; fairly nasty fuel, very nasty waste products,
[...]
> Yes, the modern reactor designs are orders of magnitude safer and 
> significantly more efficient and cleaner. I find it hard to rationalise 
> a "comparatively small-scale, waste disposal problem" though. They have 

A few tonnes of nasty stuff per reactor per year of actual fuel
residues. That's small-scale no matter how nasty it is. Vitrify it, drop
it in a deep oceanic trench, let subduction reclaim it, problem solved.
Subduction can eat a few gigatonnes of waste without noticing.

(Problems: vitrifying it in the first place and transporting it to the
subduction zone...)

> a low impact wrt emissions, but the mining and processing of the fuel 
> is seriously damaging

Yeah, mining always is :( alas this is hard to fix. However the actual
amount required is really rather low: much of the current stuff mined
is wasted or disappears into `strategic stockpiles' or is snaffled by
governments for unclear uses certainly entirely unconnected with the
military oh yes.

>                       (maybe we don't worry about that since the U235 
> doesn't occur in useful extractable amounts anywhere close by.) All in 
> all, though, they are probably a "least worst" option at the moment.

Yeah, they're not a panacea. But they work and don't stop working merely
because the weather's changed, unlike wind plants (15% capacity
utilization) or solar cells (35% capacity utilization).

>> Even if a really unsafe design is used it's environmentally friendly;
>> nature doesn't care about a bit of radiation (or a lot!) and a nice
>> big contaminated area can go back to nature in a *big* way (look at
>> the wildlife haven around Chernobyl now).
> 
> Would we look at it that way if Harwell had suffered a similar fate?

Well, *I* don't live near Harwell. ;P

(also, given that it was the UK's first experimental reactor, a disaster
there would naturally have had a serious negative effect. Thankfully we
didn't.)

>> - Nuclear fusion: not here yet, expensive even when it gets here;
[...]
> 
> Seriously, I don't expect to see a functioning "proof of concept" plant 
> in my lifetime.

As one of the historical interludes in Charlie Stross's _Accelerando_
(strongly recommended) puts it:

     The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are:
     the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main
     Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New
     with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants
     that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners
     through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia
     about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen
     disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all
     peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers,
     and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to
     experience embarrassment.

     Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away.

>> All power generation methods suck, but I'd like the lights to stay on
>> for the long term, and the only thing which can do that is nuclear
>> power. 
> 
> There are several alternatives, if only we could get away from the large 
> scale generation and distribution model. As well as making currently 
> "fringe" technologies viable, a more localised and distributed system 
> would be much more robust against failure and disruption.

Yeah, but you lose lots of efficiency: the trick is to find something
where you lose less efficiency by building small than you gain by not
having to transmit the power. This is more compelling in the US with its
low transmission voltages than it is in the EU...


(And, er, what does this have to do with Linux again?)

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